Call of the Hero

by Robert J. Crane

  “I respect your strength, friends,” Malpravus said, his sword-hands remaining in guard position at either side. “I always have, which is why I have ever sought to make you my allies and keep you so. Every move I made was with an eye to drawing you closer to me.”

  “Let me be brutally honest,” Cyrus said, “the only reason I want to be close to you is so that I can run my sword through your heart.”

  “I'm not sure that exists,” Vaste said, and he swung Letum at Malpravus's head from behind.

  Perfect distraction, Cyrus thought, watching Malpravus spin to deal with the troll suddenly at his back. Malpravus twisted, twitched, as Cyrus, Vara and Alaric roared in at him on all sides–

  And new arms sprouted from the necromancer's torso and back, joining the fight. He countered Cyrus with one arm, Vara with another, caught Alaric with the one newly sprouted from his chest–

  The fourth, extending out of his back, slammed home into the center of Vaste's chest, burying itself up to the nub in the heart of the troll.

  “NO!” Birissa shouted, sweeping down a slew of guards like fresh-cut wheat, striking them out of her way and clearing a path around her a good ten feet in diameter with one furious swing.

  “I regret that it has come to this,” Malpravus said, pulling the blade delicately from the troll's chest. “We should have been friends, not—”

  “TO THE HELLS WITH YOU!” Cyrus shouted, leaping at him. Malpravus blocked his attack, godly speed no advantage at all against the necromancer. Malpravus moved as though he had a godly weapon of his own close at hand – up his arse, maybe, Cyrus thought, gritting his teeth and striking against the sorcerer's arm, battering at him with the blows, hoping to chip away skin, metal, whatever there was to strike.

  Vara was doing similarly on the other side, Alaric raging at the forward arm, but a little more carefully, perhaps.

  “I...I...” Vaste said, and he lay upon the steps, blood rushing out of him in great green bursts with each beat of his heart. His hand glowed white and the tide stemmed but a little.

  “It is unfortunate that we find ourselves here,” Malpravus said, eyes narrow as he easily blocked every attack that came his way. Cyrus spared only a glance to see that the guards were fallen, that Birissa had left the last of them to Hiressam and was now at Vaste's side. “I did not wish this.”

  “I agree,” Alaric said, cool in the fury of battle, sword moving with all speed. “But it was you at every turn who made these choices, Malpravus. You who drove us to conflict, again and again, with your reckless disregard for decency. You have ever forced us into conflict with our own principles, for your only principle is power, and ours is to defeat those who would use theirs for ill. We may have mouthed the platitudes of friendship together, but it was unknowing and we were always at clandestine war, for our principles are irreconcilable. Sanctuary will always stand between you and what you want.”

  “I think not,” Malpravus said, eyes like thin slits, malice just pouring out even as his sword-arms became frenzied, the fourth taking up with Birissa as she entered the fight, and he stood like some sort of legendary dervish, defeating the swordplay of the four of them without looking as though he were in any peril at all. “Standing between me and what I want is a fatal position to hold, Alaric.”

  “I have always been ready to give my life for what I believe, Malpravus,” Alaric said, withdrawing his sword from the clash and taking a step back. “Can you say the same?”

  Malpravus let out a heavy breath. “Look at you, you high-minded fools. You always were full of yourself, Alaric. So focused on your 'principles'. You think yourself beyond the reach of this world—”

  “I believe you are speaking for yourself,” Alaric said. “I have felt the touch of this world many times in my life, and it has taken a heavy toll on me.”

  Malpravus looked sideways at Cyrus. “What about you, dear boy? You were but a child when we met. Now this city is like a statue garden in your honor. You have the power of the crowds, the power of the people.”

  “And I'm going to use it like a sword to impale you,” Cyrus said, still laboring to impale him with his actual sword.

  Malpravus cackled. “I'm sure that will go...just as well as what you're doing here.” He blinked, eyes going red and dark as he did so. “The people may think you a god, but you and I – we know the truth. You're a man, and frail as a man can be. You will all be brought low, for humility always strikes those who think themselves high—”

  “You have...no sense of irony...” Vaste muttered. His hand was still glowing white, the blood still coming in spurts.

  “I have nothing to lose that I value but my power,” Malpravus said, turning his attention back to Cyrus. “That is your disappointment, your weakness. I will bring you low because you can be brought low. I will humble you because you have gotten proud, Cyrus. Too proud. You think you can use the people of this city as a weapon against me? You don't know what a weapon is...you don't know what power is...”

  He brought a hand around, the one Alaric had just disengaged with, and it glowed bright, as it had with Curatio before—

  “But I will show you,” Malpravus said, “though I doubt you'll survive to have it sink in–”

  A red blast coruscated from his limb and struck Cyrus, sending him flying through the air. He crashed through a wall, the room spinning around him, then disappearing as he broke free after a hard hit, block and stone yielding under armor and sword—

  Cyrus found himself flying, the city of Reikonos beneath him, then above him as he twisted and turned and flipped through open space, the ground getting closer and closer as he realized—

  Malpravus hurled me through the wall of the Citadel, he thought dimly, head almost floating from the concussive strength of the blow. Down there was the square, the buildings and houses getting bigger as he sailed over them as if in flight, the ground growing closer and closer as he continued, rooftops coming nearer with every passing second until—

  Chapter 3

  Alaric

  “Cyrus!” Vara's shout was nearly a scream, and it tore through the chamber like the warrior in black had through the wall, a ripping sound as he'd collided and gone through, disappearing in a blast of dust that heralded the passage of the greatest warrior in Arkaria.

  “Another sacrifice to your hubris,” Malpravus said, locking his glowing red-and-black eyes on Alaric. “How many will you lead into death for your own sake, Alaric?”

  “I have led no one into death for my own sake in all the days I've known you, Malpravus,” Alaric said, sword at his side. “I have led men and women into death for honor, for decency, and to fight against the tyranny of bastards like you.”

  “But you don't see it, do you?” Malpravus asked. “That is all for you. For your peculiar ideas of honor. For your strange obsession with freedom. Freedom!” He spat. “A less natural condition for man I cannot imagine. What do you see people do with this freedom? Throw their lives away, that's what. Spend their limited days chasing foolishness. Surrendering themselves to all the pleasures of life, ending up with nothing to show for it at their end. And you – you're the worst of them, leading these mad crusades, slaughtering countless in your quest to fix the world, always so afraid to do what it actually takes.” Here, his eyes sparkled like a ruby catching a beam of light in the dark. “Power, Alaric. You must gather it – and use it.”

  “Yes,” Alaric said, taking a slow breath. “I suppose you would think that way. You were always limited in your abilities, Malpravus, most of all the ability to see. You have such a blind spot when it comes to power, though, always focused on spells and magic and ancient and arcane ways. You missed the truth of power that always sat in front of your nose.”

  Malpravus cocked his skeletal head, arms moving in a whirl as he easily fended off Vara’s and Birissa's attacks, both women steadily flagging in their ferocity as their strength faded. “Oh? Pray tell, Alaric. What lesson have you learned of power?”

  “That it is
irrelevant how much power you, yourself, gather,” Alaric said, turning slightly sideways and taking a step back toward Vara, sword still at his side. “If you have friends you trust who have it.”

  Malpravus's brow wrinkled, deep lines setting in the navy skin. “That is utter foolishness. Why would you trust anyone but yourself to wield—”

  A spell-blast of ruby light swallowed the necromancer, drawing an unearthly scream from him as Malpravus flew across the dais, smacking into the throne and rolling, his new arms retracting back into his cloak as though they'd never even been there.

  “Trust is an earned thing,” Curatio said, the elf's face suffused with fury as he stepped back onto the dais, Praelior in one hand and his mace in the other. “So is power. And if I might say – I've had considerably more time to accumulate than you, skeleton.”

  “Of course,” Malpravus said, rising up once more, floating, his feet, if they were beneath his cloak, not touching the ground. “I should have known a single spell could hardly dispense with you, Curatio.”

  “Yes,” Curatio said. “You should have known.”

  Then the battle was joined, the necromancer blasting away with his spell-magic, Curatio answering back with his own. The power unleashed was but a fraction of what either might have commanded without the strange hobbling of magic that had taken place while they were gone, but it was fierce and frightening nonetheless, and Alaric took hold of Vara's arm and yanked her back as a stray bolt of glowing red lightning crackled past them both, gouging a black scar in the floor.

  “Cyrus,” Vara said, looking past the roiling torrent of magic, now the size of a table, meeting and pooling in the middle of the room between Malpravus and Curatio. “Alaric, he–”

  “I am as worried as you,” Alaric said, “but there is little we can do about him at the moment. We have a rather more pressing concern at present.”

  “Malpravus is not simply going to lie down and die,” Vara shouted over the growing maelstrom.

  “No,” Alaric said. “And I do not believe Curatio has the capacity to defeat him. At least, not in these conditions.”

  Vara jerked her head around. “You think he's going to lose?”

  Alaric watched the healer for a moment, the beads of sweat breaking across his forehead. “Yes. But slowly, at first, then very quickly, unless I miss my guess. Malpravus has been feeding on some source of power for the last thousand years, probably the ones beneath this very tower. He has great reserves to draw upon. Curatio has less, his eternal life only, in fact, and he has not yet fully adjusted to the drain of magic in this new world.” He looked around. “We need to escape before this turns sour. A fighting retreat down the stairs perhaps—”

  “I don't think that's a good idea,” Dugras appeared at their side, as though out of nowhere, though he surely had skittered around beneath their notice. He pointed to the entry to the chamber, and guards were already swarming back in. They seemed to take little notice of the magical fury building in the room's center, and even less still of Malpravus standing in the place of the Lord Protector. They were ignoring him in favor of the intruders, all their attention on Birissa, Hiressam, Vaste – who was now barely upright, clinging to Birissa – and Curatio, who they were slowly beginning to encircle.

  “It seems that the tower guards know who their master is,” Alaric said, readying Aterum. “Well. I am open to alternative exits, Dugras.”

  “Good,” Dugras said, fiddling with his pistol. He flipped a lever on it and it broke, cleanly, the six barrels open and the strange...bullets, did they call them? They were sitting there, blocking each barrel, visible to the sight in a way they weren't when the pistol was closed. The dwarf pulled one of the bullets, tossing it over his shoulder, and then fetched another out of his belt, this one with a strange red paint mark on the side. “Watch this.”

  He leveled the weapon, kneeling beneath the magic conflagration in the middle of the room, and shot. It streaked out of the gun with a phosphorescent trail, zipping beneath the magic whirling and coruscating there, past all that and out the hole that Cyrus had made when he'd crashed through the wall—

  Just outside, the bullet exploded with a thundering crack in a blast of color, green and white and sparkling brightly. Alaric nearly had to look away though the explosion was partially shielded from his view by the remainder of the chamber wall. He blinked the blinding light out of his eye and shook his head.

  “What was that?” Vara asked, shaking her own, blinking furiously.

  “You'll see,” Dugras said. “We should start making our way over to the hole in the wall, though.”

  “I'm sorry, perhaps I don't understand – how are we to exit out the hole in the wall?” Vara asked. “Without magic functioning, our Falcon's Essence spell will do little to keep us from smearing upon the cobblestones below.”

  “You'll see,” Dugras said, and grabbed her by the wrist, pulling her along. “But we need to hurry.”

  Vara traded a look with Alaric, a wide-eyed, questioning one. “Lead on, brother,” Alaric said, causing the elven paladin to roll her eyes, but ultimately accede. She let the dwarf lead her, and together they circled around the back of Curatio as the healer continued his battle with Malpravus.

  “You cannot defeat me, Curatio,” Malpravus said, calmly, from beside his throne. “Can you feel the magic fade in your heart? This curious blight upon our power has taken its toll on you. But I have flourished in these times, in spite of these impediments.”

  “You don't look as though you've flourished,” Curatio said, straining under the assault. Alaric could see the magic twisting in the air, how Malpravus's control over it was beginning to assert itself, tendrils of dark red overwhelming Curatio's light blue. The orb of magic where their two spells met was almost entirely crimson now, Curatio's slowly being corrupted. “Why, you're as bony as ever.”

  “Yet my power is...meaty,” Malpravus said with a cool smile. “It sustains me.”

  “Why did he say 'meaty' in relation to his power?” Vaste asked, dragged along by Birissa, even paler that when the fight had begun. “I don't want to imagine anything meaty about Malpravus. It's just wrong.”

  “Why would your mind even go there?” Birissa asked, pulling him to the hole in the wall. Whether she'd caught the conversation between Dugras, Vara and Alaric, she seemed to be following the cue.

  “It moves quicker than I can control it,” Vaste said. “It's my curse, this wit.” He groaned. “Oh, how this hurts. I need to start wearing armor.”

  “That will only motivate people to start attacking your face,” Vara said absently, watching the magical battle. “Oh, wait. Your face already provides ample motive for that.”

  “If we weren't about two feet from death, and you weren't already suffering a tragic loss,” Vaste said, “I would blister you with a repartee so witty that you'd need your armor. As it is...” He sagged, pain just spreading across his face. “I don't think I have the energy.”

  “That makes...two of us,” Curatio said, and he'd retreated so that he was now only feet from them, steadily driven back, the magical, coruscating ball of power only inches from his hand. It was a pure, glowing red, and he was staving it off only barely.

  “I never thought it would end like this,” Vaste said, watching the ball grow closer and closer, Curatio fading by the moment, driven back by Malpravus's power. Blood leaked from his chest, still, and his legs seemed unable to bear his weight.

  “End?” Dugras was smiling. “Not today, friends.”

  Alaric looked down at the dwarf curiously. “I admire your optimism, my new brother.”

  “Oh, no.” Dugras shook his head. “I'm not an optimist. I'm a realist.” His smile grew a little wider, and he looked at the hole in the wall. “And also...”

  Something immense and whirling moved outside the hole, rising from below. It spun madly, like a sling in the hand of a man possessed, anchored to a central shaft like the mast of a ship—

  Because...it was a ship.
<
br />   And it possessed several masts, every single one of them twirling madly, blades of some stripe whirling madly and driving it up, up to them until the deck was level with their floor of the tower. Men moved upon the ship, men who looked similar to Dugras in the eyes and skin tone, but taller, bustling about on the deck. One of them slid a wide plank off the edge and it struck the floor of the tower just a foot from where Dugras stood.

  “Come on!” Dugras shouted, and he was moving, up the plank and onto the deck in seconds, Birissa dragging Vaste a few steps behind him.

  At the top he was greeted by woman with jet-black hair, a knee-length brown coat, and a gaze that bordered on flaming, her almond eyes fierce as they scanned Dugras. She called something to him in a tongue that Alaric didn't understand, and Dugras answered. Vara crested onto the deck and the woman nodded, jerking her head to indicate Vara should get on board, and swiftly. Vaste and Birissa followed behind, and Alaric was left with Hiressam at the base of the plank that connected ship to tower.

  “Get aboard, brother,” Alaric said, shifting his attention to Curatio, who was faltering, only a dozen or so paces ahead, Malpravus's blazing spellcraft having almost reached the healer's hand, which was shaking.

  “You're not staying behind, are you?” Hiressam asked, his sword still before him in a guard though there was no one to fight in close range.

  “No,” Alaric said. “I'm going to help get Curatio out of here, but I need to be sure everyone else is safe, first, so...” He gave the elf a wink. “If you would, please...ease my mind by getting out of here.”

  Hiressam nodded, once, and ran up the gangplank, looking back only once before he reached the top.

  Alaric turned his attention back to the battle. By his guess, Curatio had seconds remaining before the coruscating red energy consumed his hand, resulting in...well, nothing good. Aterum clutched tightly in hand, Alaric stepped up behind the healer. “We have an exit,” he said, over the thundering sound of magic pooling in a strange battle between the hands of these two fearsome spellcasters.