Scythe (Arc of a Scythe #1)(100)

There was only one Tonist left alive in the chapel. He was a balding man, wearing a frock that was slightly different from the dead around him. Goddard held him with one hand and wielded his sword in the other. Then Goddard turned to see Rowan and smiled.

“Ah, Rowan! Just in time,” he said cheerily. “I’ve saved the curate for you.”

The Tonist curate showed defiance rather than fear. “What you’ve done here today will only help our cause,” he said. “Martyrs testify far more effectively than the living.”

“Martyrs to what?” Goddard sneered and tapped his blade against the huge tuning fork. “To this thing? I’d laugh if I wasn’t so disgusted.”

Rowan strode closer, ignoring the carnage around him, focusing in on Goddard. “Let him go,” Rowan said.

“Why? Do you prefer a moving target?”

“I prefer no target.”

Finally Goddard understood. He grinned, as if Rowan had just said something charming and quaint. “Does our young man express a wee bit of disapproval?”

“Volta’s dead,” Rowan told him.

Goddard’s gleeful expression faded, but only a bit. “He was attacked by the Tonists? They’ll pay dearly for it!”

“It wasn’t them.” Rowan didn’t even try to hide the animosity in his voice. “He gleaned himself.”

This gave Goddard pause. The curate struggled in his grip, and Goddard slammed him against the stone basin hard enough to knock him out, then let the man fall to the ground.

“Volta was the weakest of us,” Goddard said. “I’m not entirely surprised. Once you’re ordained, I will happily have you take his place.”

“I won’t do that.”

Goddard took a moment to gauge Rowan. To read him. It felt like a violation. Goddard was in his head—even deeper; in his soul—and Rowan didn’t know how to cast him out.

“I know you and Alessandro were close, but he was nothing like you, Rowan, believe me. He never had the hunger. But you do. I’ve seen it in your eyes. I’ve seen how you are when you train. Living in the moment. Every kill perfect.”

Rowan found he couldn’t look away from Goddard, who had put down his sword and now held his hands out as if his were the inviting embrace of a savior. The diamonds in his robe twinkled in the faraway firelight, so bedazzling.

“We could have been called reapers,” Goddard said, “but our founders saw fit to call us scythes—because we are the weapons in mankind’s immortal hand. You are a fine weapon, Rowan, sharp, and precise. And when you strike, you are glorious to behold.”

“Stop it! That’s not true!”

“You know it is. You were born for this, Rowan. Don’t throw it away.”

The curate began to groan, beginning to regain consciousness. Goddard hauled him to his feet. “Glean him, Rowan. Don’t fight it. Glean him now. And enjoy it.”

Rowan tightened the grip on his blade as he looked into the curate’s bleary, half-conscious eyes. Even as he tried to stand his ground, Rowan couldn’t deny the power of the undertow. “You’re a monster!” he shouted. “The worst kind, because you don’t just kill, you turn others into killers like yourself.”

“You just lack perspective. The predator is always a monster to the prey. To the gazelle the lion is a demon. To a mouse, the eagle is evil incarnate.” He took a step closer, the curate still held tightly in his grip.

“Will you be the eagle or the mouse, Rowan? Will you soar or will you scurry away? For those are the only two choices today.”

Rowan’s head was swimming. The smell of blood and the smoke pouring in through the shattered windows made him dizzy and muddled his thoughts. The curate looked no different than the strangers he practiced on every day—and for a moment, he felt himself out on the lawn in the middle of a killcraft exercise. Rowan unsheathed his sword and stalked forward, feeling the hunger, living in the moment, just as Goddard had said, and allowing himself to feel that hunger was freeing in a way Rowan couldn’t describe. For many months he had trained for this, and now he finally understood why Goddard always let the last one go before Rowan could strike, stopping him one blow short of completion.

It was to prepare him for today.

Today he would finally have that completion, and every day henceforth, when he went out to glean, he would not stay his hand or his blade or his bullet until there was no one left to glean.

Before he could think it through, before his mind could tell him to stop, he launched himself toward the curate, and thrust his blade forward with all of his force, finally achieving that exquisite completion.

The man gasped and stumbled aside, the blade having missed him completely.

Instead, Rowan’s blade hit its true mark, and ran Scythe Goddard through, all the way to the hilt.

Rowan was close to Goddard now. Inches from his face, looking into his wide, shocked eyes.

“I am what you made me,” he told Goddard. “And you’re right: I enjoyed that. I enjoyed that more than anything I’ve ever done in my life.” ?Then with his free hand, Rowan reached down and yanked the ring off Goddard’s finger. “You don’t deserve to wear this. You never did.”

Goddard opened his mouth to speak—perhaps to deliver an eloquent death soliloquy—but Rowan didn’t want to hear anything from him anymore, so he stepped back, withdrew his sword from Goddard’s gut, and swung it in a broad, sweeping arc that took off Goddard’s head in a single blow. It tumbled and landed in the basin of dirty water, as if that were what the basin was there for.