The Silenced Tale, стр. 113

Ah, damn my wife and her compassion, anyway. She is too close to the monster, and before I can say much more than, “Pip, move back—” the Viceroy’s got one hand clamped hard on Pip’s wrist.

She screams like she’s being scalded and tries to jerk away, but her boot slips in the puddle of his blood and she lands hard on her arse. Bevel grabs her by her shoulders, and a hard stomp from Kintyre’s foot snaps the Viceroy’s wrist instantly. The villain grunts, and curls in on himself.

We are not fast enough. The magical, watercolor ivy has leapt off of Pip’s flesh in tangible, glowing vines, and is curling around the Viceroy, lifting him from the ground. Like its real-life counterpart climbs a trellis, this magical ivy curls up his body, straightening him, supporting him. Pip, limp and panting in Bevel’s arms, can only watch in horror as the ivy growing at a rapid, unnatural pace from her own flesh pierces and digs under the Viceroy’s.

“No, no, no, no,” Pip moans. I can see her growing weaker by the moment. Something cracks and snaps, and the Viceroy’s wrist straightens and pops back into place. He flexes his fingers, grinning as his yellow eyes take on a greenish hue.

Desperate to sever them, I slash Smoke through the vines. They part like fog around the blade, unharmed, and coalesce again like nothing happened. Kintyre copies my actions, but his magical sword is no more effective than mine.

“Ah, that’s better,” the Viceroy sneers as the cuts on his face seal up slowly, red gashes becoming pink scars, white tissue shriveling up and flaking away in a matter of seconds. “Stand, woman. Come to me.”

Pip does stand, but it is under her own power. Bevel helps her to her feet, tucks an arm around her waist to keep up her upright. “This isn’t going to end the way you think it will,” Pip gasps. “You’re the villain. You can’t win.”

“Can’t I?” the Viceroy spits back at her. “What was it that you said earlier? You all have heirs, don’t you? That makes you disposable, in the narrative. The horrible father that pushes the hero out the door, wasn’t it, Forsyth Turn? Or perhaps the tragedy that the young protagonist needs to avenge?”

Kintyre turns to look at me, poleaxed. “How does he know all that?”

The Viceroy scoffs. “Kintyre Turn, do you think that I cannot read?”

“The runes of Hain differ from the alphabet here, though,” I say.

“Juan was an excellent teacher,” the Viceroy sneers. He makes a motion quite like a shrug, and it sets the vines rolling and dancing happily around his frame.

“And what did you read, then?” Kintyre asks, stalling as his eyes dart over the writhing foliage, looking for a gap in the arboreal armor.

“Why, only the very best academic material,” the Viceroy says. “From the very cleverest of scholars this Overrealm has on offer.”

Pip understands what he means a moment before I do, and she lets out a choked cry of horror. “I put it on the Internet,” she hisses. “The full text of my dissertation.”

“What?” Bevel asks.

“Her thesis,” I answer grimly. “Pip’s entire treatise on how the stories in Elgar Reed’s world work.”

“Hundreds of pages, too,” the Viceroy says. “So long-winded, my dear. Took me simply ages to work my way through it.”

Pip’s mouth is working, gawping like a fish, but she says nothing. Fear prickles the underside of my skin, and I don’t know what to say. I don’t know what to do. Our one advantage, and the villain has been cheating with it the whole time.

“Do you understand now?” the Viceroy says, raising his arms and summoning another wind to lift him off his slowly healing legs. “I know everything you know. You taught it to me. You have been stymied at every turn because I knew before you did that you would make it.”

He turns a grin toward Kintyre. “And now, I think, it is time to do that one thing that Our Glorious Creator would never do, would never have Written. You say I have doomed myself by killing him? Fine—but now he is not here to undo my actions, either.”

The Viceroy raises his arm, and the ivy around it swirls and spins tightly into a cone—no, a lance! The grin on his face splits wider, and the Viceroy giggles in delight as the wind around him picks up to cyclone speeds. I am thrown sideways, struggling to stay upright where I slip in the slick blood puddled on the ground, and Kintyre raises his arm to keep the wind out of his face, out of his eyes, to keep the Viceroy in his view.

“Kin!” Bevel bawls over the rattling hiss of the wind.

I slam against one of the nearby piles of rubble, Smoke flying from my hand, a sharp crack reverberating in my side as one of my ribs snaps. Pain, burning and sudden, paints the edges of my vision black, sets stars dancing in the middle. I suck in a breath to scream and something in my chest clicks. I cough, but no blood comes up—there’s a mercy!—and struggle to my knees, struggle to breathe around the pain and the way the air seems to be snatched away from my lips by the Viceroy’s building tornado.

“Die!” the Viceroy shrills. “Here is your Final Chapter, Kintyre Turn! The End!”

Kintyre, spun about by the whipping wind, his hair blowing in his eyes, cannot seem to get his bearings. He swings Foesmiter wide and high, but he is too slow.

Too, oh Writer, too—

The Viceroy’s ivy lance slams into Kintyre’s gut.

“No!” Bevel screams, and leaps into the wind to shove Kintyre away. It seems like only a second later, a microsecond, but the damage is done already. I don’t know how deep the wound is. I don’t know how . . . how . . .

I struggle to my feet, hands clutched over my side, breathless and . . . my heart has stopped, I’m