by David Guymer
No.
Sooner.
She had been dead the moment she had decided to attack Andira Runehand.
Three more came at her.
Reining in her poleaxe, Andira took it two-handed and gripped it tight. Rune power infused her body and enveloped her. It spilled outwards into a bubble just as the bigger of the three, a bearded man with an axe in each hand, struck. Both axes swept down together, meeting the arcane barrier an inch before they could test her armor. One axe went spinning as though the wielder’s hand had been cuffed by a giant. The other exploded. Its owner reeled back as though shot in the shoulder, landed on his face and refused to rise.
The other two leapt over him, confident in their weapon skill and their numbers.
Andira gave ground.
Hamma was often criticizing her for failing to practice as she should. She relied too much on the power of her rune, he would say. Trusted too much to destiny.
The first of the two raised her shield. Andira’s poleaxe tore it roughly in half and ripped it from the woman’s arm. The blade’s serrations caught on the tattered hide and dragged the fighter to the ground with a yell. The last man took advantage, striking high while her weapon was trapped low. Andira ducked her head back and brought up her open hand to meet it.
The sword hit the rune drawn into her as though striking marble.
Andira screamed in vicious pain as the blade scored her palm. Blood ran down her wrist and into her vambrace. The force of the impact drove her to her knees. The rune itself was not indestructible, not by a long way, but it was far beyond the power of some yokel brigand to unmake. Through gritted teeth she channeled its magic and pushed back, sending the swordsman flying. His limbs paddled madly until his flight ended abruptly against the side of the great tree.
Andira felt faint for a moment as the strength drained from her limbs. Her hand throbbed like dying flesh. She hissed, smothering it into a fist until the ache passed. The rune in her hand was powerful, and not it her only source of strength, but her magic was not inexhaustible. She had used so much of it tracking the demon king Baelziffar, and now the Greyfox. Drawing on it was starting to feel like pushing against an already tired muscle.
Pilgrim-soldiers belted out songs and shouted prayers. While she had fought, the battle had moved on from her, the bandits pushing her warband slowly back from the foot of the tree. Numbers and blistering hot belief in Andira kept them steady, but the bandits were bigger and heavier than they were, better armed, better fed, and they died hard. Bowmen dueled from thirty yards apart, her lightly armored followers dropping over the open grass like cut flowers.
“Fight on!” Sir Brodun bellowed, whirling his bloody sword through a figure-of-eight above his head, his hoarse voice cracking like old leather. “For the Runehand!”
Andira looked up to the south-facing platforms. They bristled with archers, roughly cut wooden handrails and vegetable pots sheltering them like a parapet. Ragged volleys of fire scythed her warriors down.
It had to go.
Taking a deep breath, Andira rooted herself, drawing her focus inwards. She felt the power in her hand swell as she she traced the crossed interior of the rune to activate its offensive powers and reached out as if to grasp the tree from afar.
They had been ready for a fight.
She was confident they were not ready for this.
She made a fist.
Dead wood crunched around the base of the trunk. The brigands sheltering inside screamed as their supposed castle turned to splinters. And then the tree began to list. It had been dead since the Third Darkness, but even now it was stubborn. It came down with a tremendous lack of urgency, men and women grabbing after railings or flinging themselves from the walkways as it went. Its gnarled body thudded into the canopy of its nearest neighbor with sufficient force to knock the pilgrims closest to it from their feet, shredding leaves and branches and sending a cascade of both down over the dazed fighters’ heads.
“Runehand!” the pilgrims shouted in religious joy. “Runehand!”
Fighting back tears of agony, Andira let the hand drop at her side. It felt like she was holding onto a hot coal. She had to let go of her poleaxe and manually uncurl the fingers one by one
“Fight on!” Sir Brodun roared. “They’re on the run! Keep on fighting! Keep on f–” There was a hiss, a thud, and the knight’s eyes grew wide. He stuttered as though the word was stuck in his mouth. “F-f-f…”
He looked down at the arrow sprouting from his breastplate. His lip twitched with disdain even as his knees wobbled groundward.
“F-f-f…”
Chapter Fifteen
Greyfox
The Whispering Forest, South Kell
“Damn,” Greyfox swore, watching the arrow smack home in the gray-haired old knight’s chest, fully six yards from its intended mark. “Missed.” The tremors from the felling of her tree were still running through her vantage. It had not quite sunk in just yet. She had had other homes, but this one had been good to her. She peered down through the tangle of branches. Her warriors were crawling out from under heaps of dead wood, stuck up neighboring trees into which they had thrown themselves, or else standing about dumbstruck. The blue knight had done that. She had done it with a gesture. Greyfox’s lips parted. She definitely needed to shoot her first. And then cut off her hand. “Don’t fret now, it’s all right,” she murmured, running her fingers along her bow stave’s intricate carvings and laying a light kiss on the string. “It wasn’t your fault.”
As the old knight she had accidentally hit puffed and snarled and stumbled to his knees, the blue knight turned towards her. The woman looked up, an expression of utter fury on her face.
Feeling no safety from that fury whatsoever in her treetop vantage, Greyfox stepped off the branch and fell. At the end of the twenty-foot drop she landed on all fours like a cat, and then rolled. She slid to her knees. Her bow came up. She nocked an arrow, pulled it taut. She did not pause to aim. At this distance she could shoot a fly between the eyes, and her mother’s bow would not allow her to miss twice.
She loosed.
The blue knight made a swatting gesture and the arrow careened off target like a sycamore seed in a hurricane. Greyfox skipped another few steps forward, readied another arrow and loosed it. The woman snarled and dismissed it as she had the first. Greyfox grinned, advancing as she launched arrow after arrow. The blue knight deflected them all, pain furrowing deeper and deeper into her features until at last she staggered, sinking to her knees with her brilliantly glowing hand clutched to her breast. Her face was stricken, her short blonde hair stuck to it with sweat. Her chest heaved under a great mass of shining plate.
Greyfox prepared another arrow.
“So, you’re not all-powerful,” she said. “That’s a relief.”
A wild yell from her right made her look around.
A large, scrawny boy, weasel-thin and whipcord strong, ran at her from the scrum of fighters in the clearing and tackled her to the ground. They rolled together, the boy grappling for her arms, but she was lighter than he had been expecting and stronger than she looked. She punched, scratched and wriggled free, rolling apart and springing to her feet.
The boy whipped out a long knife. Greyfox bent back. The blade whisked across her. He stepped in, wise to her now and eager to make hay of his greater size. His knife traced a series of elf-shaped silhouettes in the air, Greyfox giggling as she wove through them like a circus tumbler through burning hoops.
“And who do you think you are, boy, to challenge the Bandit Queen of Kell?”
The boy snarled at her and lunged.
“I’m sorry, I didn’t catch that.”
She dropped under his swing and rolled, gathered up her bow where it had fallen. He stabbed for her, his arm reaching. She rolled across it, drawing an arrow from her quiver and stabbing it up into his armpit
. The boy shrieked and crumpled on the spot. Greyfox pulled the arrow out and set it to her bowstring, swinging her aim back towards the blue knight.
“I am the Greyfox. Perhaps you have heard of–”
The blue knight’s poleaxe smashed her bow to smithereens. Greyfox screamed as she was thrown back, showered in her mother’s splinters.
“My name is Andira Runehand. Perhaps you have heard of me.” The blue knight came on, haloed in golden lines, blonde hair bristling from her crown, the rune in her hand glowing with a ferocity that scorched its pattern into the backs of the elf’s eyes. “I am the Savior of Terrinoth.” Greyfox threw herself clear as the poleaxe pulverized the ground she had been standing on. “I am Fortuna’s Champion.” Dragging the heavy weapon from the ground, the blue knight looped it overhead, building power, before chopping diagonally across Greyfox’s knees. The elf leapt over it, shouldering what was left of her bow while still in midair and drawing a narrow sword as her toes touched back to the ground.
“You look tired,” she hissed.
The woman’s face was grim. “I am the Ruin of Evil.”
Greyfox laughed, although in truth she had already come to the decision that this woman was rapidly proving more trouble than she was worth.
“No wonder you are tired.”
Putting two fingers in her mouth, she whistled.
Andira gripped her poleaxe. “Is that some kind of spell?”
“I’d look behind me if I were you.”
A look of mocking pity shifted the tiredness on the knight’s face.
It lasted about a second.
In the next, her face was flat to the ground and Starchaser was trampling over her armored back.
The dappled gray courser whinnied, the stolen Daqan banners hand-stitched into its caparison fluttering like long skirts. The horse had been a twelfth birthday present from Baroness Harriet of Frest to Lady Grace of Kellar. That had been Starchaser’s own story anyway. And horses, as everyone knew, were pompous scoundrels and liars.
Greyfox made a tutting sound as she sprang lightly into the horse’s saddle. “I’m sorry. Looking back, that probably wasn’t enough warning. I’m beside myself.” Fishing in one of the pockets sewn into her trousers she pulled out a large bronze coin. Baron Fredric’s face had been struck out and the letters GREYFOX scratched crazily around the edge. She tossed it to the flattened knight who didn’t move. “For your troubles,” she said, looking over her shoulder at the peasant mob rushing towards them and urged the horse into a gallop.
Chapter Sixteen
Andira Runehand
The Whispering Forest, South Kell
Andira groaned.
She had no idea how long she had been unconscious. Every muscle in her body ached and her head was ringing. It felt as though she had been wrapped up and rocked to sleep by an ogre. Pain exploded from her runehand as she positioned it underneath her body and pushed herself up. Magic was still crawling from the rune and into her arm without her bidding it. She could feel it knitting together broken ribs, smoothing out great horseshoe bruises as though with a rolling pin made of broken glass. With a final heave she got herself upright. The memory of being bested by a glorified thief returned to her like the taste of something foul.
Scowling to herself, she looked around.
The dell seemed to have been largely cleared, although pockets of fighting persisted around the stump of the stricken tree. She squinted. The figures involved were stick-men, woozy and unclear, and it was hard for her to tell who was fighting, or indeed winning. She shook her head, to no great avail.
She needed proper rest. She could not remember when she had last allowed herself to stop. The rune could substitute for sleep to an extent. It allowed her to forget, sometimes, that the her body still had human needs.
A coin lay face-side down on the ground beside her.
She picked it up and turned it over. Saw the name scratched over the baron’s likeness.
“You look dreadful, my lady.” Sir Brodun stumbled towards her. The silver-feathered fletching of the Greyfox’s arrow stood six inches proud of his breastplate. He lowered himself as though kneeling was entirely by his own free choice, sticking his sword into the ground and leaning against the crossguard. His breath came in wheezes. “If you’ll permit me to say so.”
“Hamma,” she said, pocketing the Greyfox’s coin and starting towards him.
He shook his head as she raised her hand to his wound. “No. You’re already too weak. Weaker than you were after you broke Baelziffar’s rule over Sudanya.” He grinned, his teeth smeared red. “Weaker even than after your fight with me. Don’t waste your strength.”
“I can heal you. It is my strength to waste.”
The knight snorted. It seemed to shiver through him. “You think I’d let this finish me. A little girl’s arrow? After the things we’ve been through? I’ll still be here when you drag her back to me.”
Hamma had been with her from the beginning. A father. A mentor. A paladin. Her earliest memory was him screaming as she branded him.
Reluctantly, she withdrew her hand from his chest.
She made to say something, but no words seemed right.
“Go,” he hissed. “I don’t take an arrow for just anybody.”
“She will not escape. I promise you.”
Hamma reached out and took her arm. His grip had the strength of sudden desperation and the look in his eyes was fierce. “When the quest is finished. When it’s finally finished. See that my weapons go back to my children. They are all that I have… that I…” His eyes became cloudy. “I…”
Andira stood as her champion slid down the upright of his sword and slumped, unconscious, at her feet.
Her quest was to save Terrinoth from evil.
It would never be finished.
“I will,” she lied.
Chapter Seventeen
Ne’krul
The Borderlands
The warrior-grotesque, Mikran Izt’har, dragged the sacrifice to the river’s edge by his ankle. He was a creature of bone spurs and poisonous purple-gray flesh, a sculpture of iron hard musculature and jagged bone crafted from the blood-tattered remnants of a human host. He was one man, but the harsh gaze of the Ynfernael had rendered him inhumanly strong and tall. The sacrifice, a Ru tribesman of no name, fought impotently as Mikran Izt’har bent down and, with one arm only, lifted him off the ground.
“Jan’na a uethy’yre kisthe’hye ke,” said Ne’Krul, the syllables flowing over her tongue like a hot liquid. The shadows that slunk and coiled always about her emaciated frame trembled, responding to the power and command inherent in the language of demons. “Is’v’aan perys ke jedra.”
The sacrifice kicked furiously at Mikran Izt’har’s hard carapace.
He knew what was coming. He was the last.
The grotesque bore him towards a wooden post. Mist wreathed its base. The top had been roughly hewn to make a spike.
Ne’Krul extended a bird-like talon.
“Veth’a ak T’mara T’rusheen ak’vala.”
Mikran Izt’har halted before the post. Taking the sacrifice by the shoulders, he raised the squirming man up high. The tribesman screamed and kicked to no avail, and then gave a final blasting shriek loud enough to pierce the iron walls of the Ynfernael below as the grotesque rammed him onto the stake. It was a moment of absolute, transcendent pain. One that was all too brief before the man’s head lolled and he became still. Blood leaked down the wooden post towards the desecrated ground.
“Eneshr’aa Baelziffar. Baelziffar. Enethr’aa.”
Ne’Krul closed her eyes, seeing instead through the red veil of her eyelids as the spilled magicks of pain and violent death worked another fraction of an inch into the walls between barriers. With her outstretched talons she traced a mark in the air. It was not one of the dragons’ run
es, but of the older, more visceral magic of demonkind. The dragon, Mennara, had created the world and arrogantly named it for herself, but before the coming of the world there had been the Ynfernael.
The air sizzled with her mark before it darkened into shadow and faded. She breathed in the plundered strength of her sacrifice, bit her lip with fish-like teeth, and shivered. She already felt swollen. Sick with strength. As though she could break the world with an accidental word and drown it all in blood.
The power of the Ynfernael was indeed great.
Her great challenge lay in not wielding it.
Soon, the shadow whispered.
At its unspoken urging, she looked up.
Before her ran the Lothan.
Always it had been the western frontier of the fractious Uthuk empire, the horizon to which the dreams and ambitions of the tribespeople turned and across which their vengeance would, in time, ultimately spill. It had always been her dream. For generations the Blood Coven of Kaylor Morbis had sought a successor to Llovar, one with the will to travel the Ynfernael, the guile to uncover the hidden fastness of the Black Citadel, and the strength to unite the warring tribes. Powerful witches like Kethra A’laak, Malahyndri of Yrg, and even Q’aro Fenn herself, the bone witch, lieutenant of Llovar in ancient times, had Ynfernael patrons and designs of their own, but of them all only Ne’Krul was here now.
At some unspoken signal a great roar went up.
Ne’Krul turned.
A forest of sacrificial dead studded the river’s bank, a hundred bodies deep and vanishing into mist well before the ranks of stakes came to their end. Exulting in their shadow, a heaving sea of bodies and mutated limbs turned the grassy steppes of the Ru the pallid purple-gray of Uthuk flesh. Warriors with the might and blessing of Mikran Izt’har were one in a thousand, but it was a host hundreds and hundreds of thousands strong that had gathered on the far western plains. And this, she knew, was but a drop in the great sea of grass compared to that which would flood from the Charg’r once her sisters had been bent to her will.