Page 80 of Beyond Those Gilded Walls

Despite the relief I felt, my panic was also growing as Eadric continued to stare at us, a slow grin emerging on his face. If we failed again, it would not just be Tallon and me that died, but the others as well. Out of my periphery, I watched Tallon, searching for a sign that Eadric’s mystery benefactor had appeared, but he remained relaxed, staring back at his former employer.

The crowd’s murmurs started back up, with some of his constituents looking back at Eadric with concern as they, too, waited for his response.

Emboldened by the implication of his cowardice, Eadric rolled his shoulders back and began toward the stage. It was a slow walk, one that attempted to speak of unhurried rage, but to those who cared to look closer, his hands were trembling and sweat beaded on his forehead. His eyes kept darting to the walls with each step.

“You betrayed me,” he called as he meandered past the quarter-way point. “You betray me, you try to steal from me, your whore tries to kill me with your putrid magic, and yet you still have the nerve to stand here in front of me. At the ball I conduct in your honor.”

“You broke the bargain, my prince.” Silence fell as I spoke rather than Tallon. “You stabbed him, and you broke the control you had over his magic. You have nothing now.”

“We’ll see about that,” he sneered, nearing the halfway length. As if on cue, a deep rumbling emanated from the stone, rattling the glassware. A vase skittered and fell off a nearby table, shattering upon the floor. Darkness seeped out of the cracks in the walls and the taste of ash burst across my tongue so thickly I couldn’t hide the gag.

“Soulshades,” I told Tallon as he looked at me in concern. “He’s called more Soulshades.”

His eyes narrowed back on Eadric, though he responded to me beneath his breath. “There is no god here; we can stop him and we can kill him.”

I spat, trying to rid my mouth of the acrid taste of smoke.

Along the wall, someone screamed as the Soulshades began to tear through the wall, just as they had in the cellar when they attacked me. Voices erupted as people pushed and crowded toward the middle of the room.

“Your Soulshades are no threat to us,” Tallon called. He waved a lazy hand at me. “She destroyed them all already. You can call as many as you like—it won’t protect you.”

Eadric’s eyes widened then narrowed as he processed the new information. “It matters little. She can destroy as many as she likes, and I will simply keep calling more.”

“What god did you bargain with, Eadric?” Tallon mused, still intensely casual in his stance. “To make it so you could violate the Beyond and Kalyx’s realm?”

“Perhaps I bargained with Kalyx himself.”

At that, Tallon tipped his head back and laughed. The sound was so genuine and carefree that even the Soulshades halted in their slow journeys out of the stone. “Truly, you must think me stupid. Kalyx would never bargain with you, not after you worked so hard to keep him out of this castle and to prevent him from getting me out of my bargain with Gavriel.”

Eadric’s face reddened. A tension-filled moment passed as we all waited for his response. He raised a jewel-laden hand and pointed at us. “Kill them.”

My heart raced as the Soulshades lunged, but it wasn’t us they lunged at. I cried out in warning, lurching forward as the Soulshades instead lunged towards the revelers, entering their bodies and making them jerk before falling utterly still. A moment of silence, so tense I might have been able to cut through it with my dagger, and then chaos erupted. People screamed, rushing toward the doors, but no one ever made it to the red-veiled sentries; the Soulshades pouring out of the walls possessed them before they could. One who did make it shoved Maricara to the floor, only to find the doors would not open regardless.

Eadric had sealed us all in here.

My blood chilled. Perhaps we’d underestimated him. I did not want to kill all these people—the ones possessed by the Soulshades and the ones who’d done nothing but cower—but if I had to in order to get the treatment and escape this place, I would. I would kill whoever stood in my path.

“This is my castle,” Eadric called over the shouting as he spread his arms wide. “It, and everyone in it, is undermy rule.”

Rage like I’d never seen before flitted across Tallon’s face. He drew a bloodstone dagger from his back, larger than the one he’d strapped on my thigh. “You are a mockery of a ruler. And I will take great pleasure in killing you.”

“You can certainly try,herald.”

I barely had time to draw my own dagger before the Soulshades were upon us.

“Kill them, Odyssa,” Tallon shouted as he stabbed the first one to reach us. “They cannot be saved now.”

“You saved me,” I reminded him. My heart pounded as I dodged the grasp of the first Soulshade to reach me. Slashing with my knife, I aimed for non-lethal strikes still.

“That Soulshade…” he grunted as he killed another, “was not under Eadric’s direct command.” He shoved off a couple that had surrounded him, dispatching them both. “If you want to save these people, do what you did in the hall.”

I gritted my teeth and tried to find that well of power inside me. I chased the feeling I’d had in the hall when I’d banished the others but nothing came. Only a flicker, a recognition of my request and a response that it could not oblige. “I can’t, Tallon.”

He glanced at me out of the side of his vision as we continued engaging with the possessed. The ones I’d merely injured before had returned, and given my lack of magic, I swallowed thickly as I aimed for their throats and their hearts. I was willing to kill to get the treatment and escape, and now, I would.

Bodies fell to the red-bladed knives we wielded, but still more and more possessed appeared. I could hear nothing over the thundering of my blood in my ears, could taste nothing but the acrid smoke, could feel only my blood-slicked grip on the dagger’s handle.

“You can end this,” Eadric called, breaking through the roaring in my ears. He examined his nails. “Bend the knee and swear your fealty to me and this can stop.”

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