by Ian Irvine
Only now did Rufuss realise what she was doing. “No!” he screeched. “Please, not that!”
“I once told you that you’d beg,” said Tali.
As he swung the sword at her, she extended her arm towards him, squeezed hard, and the master pearl crumbled like an eggshell. Fire flared all around her hand and fingers, then leapt towards Rufuss. His sword splintered into thousands of tiny, red-hot shards that peppered his face and chest but were concentrated on his middle.
He stood there, open-mouthed, as his middle was enveloped, then concealed, by a cloud of steam. Behind him Grandys, the platform and Yulia’s swathed corpse turned red. The steam thinned and there was a hole in Rufuss’s middle that Tali could have dived through. He looked down in bewilderment, tried to get to her and even took a step forward, but toppled, smashed his head on the cliff and landed beside her, dead.
Tali crawled out of the way. Her hand was crimson and blistered. She plunged it deep into the wet moss.
Grandys was still struggling to complete Bloodspell, the words coming slowly and hesitantly. Rix turned back to Syrten.
Two Heroes down. Three to go. And Syrten was the toughest.
He had dropped the war hammer and was staring at Yulia’s body. Her white shroud was drenched in the middle with Rufuss’s blood and there was blood all over her face. He turned away from Rix, ran and crouched beside her.
“Yulia was everything to him,” Lirriam said absently. “They stowed away on the First Fleet together when they were boy and girl, and they’ve seldom been parted since, even in the eternity of the Abysm. The pain is unbearable and there’s only one way to stop it.”
She bent over Syrten, put a hand on his head and spoke a word of command. He jerked, looked around and picked up his war hammer. His first blow killed Rix’s leading guard. His second sent the next guard tumbling over the side, his third killed the third guard and his fourth grazed Radl’s head hard enough to knock her unconscious. He turned towards Rix, a dumb, grief-stricken killing machine.
Was that what Lirriam had meant—that only blood could relieve Syrten’s grief. No, it didn’t fit what Rix knew of her, or Syrten.
Rix cut him on the shoulder, between the cracks of his armour, and blood flowed freely. Aha, Rix thought. He struck again in the same place and thrust the point in as far as it would go.
Syrten went to raise the war hammer but it fell from his fingers. Rix’s thrust must have cut a tendon. He attacked the other shoulder, parrying Syrten’s sword blows and aiming his own precisely at the joins in the opal armour. He caught Syrten on the right hip, a driving blow that pierced the join and struck bone.
Syrten stumbled, his guard dropped, and Rix attacked the most vulnerable part of all. He drove his sword in through Syrten’s open mouth, all the way to the spine.
Syrten’s teeth snapped closed on the blade, which broke off, but it had done its work. He was dead before he hit the ground. But then, he had lost the will to live hours ago. Before Yulia’s death he would not have been so easily beaten.
Grandys let out a roar and leapt at Rix, swinging Maloch. Had Bloodspell been cast? The crucible wasn’t smoking—he must have abandoned it before the spell was complete. Rix hurled his sword hilt, missed and backpedalled, looking for a weapon. The war hammer was only yards away but only a golem like Syrten could have wielded it.
Grandys backed Rix into a corner and raised Maloch.
“You’ve fought bravely,” he said. “No man has given me as much trouble as you, and I salute you for it. But your fate was sealed the moment you took the bait.”
“I knew you needed me here for the endgame,” said Rix. “But the matter of my fate is yet to be settled.”
“It’s about to be.”
In the background, Tali was on the verge of collapse. She had done all she could.
“Just you and me now,” said Grandys. “It’s the way it was meant to be.”
“And me,” said Glynnie, darting around the mossy rocks, carrying a handful of her throwing knives.
“Stay back!” Rix yelled.
Lirriam raised a hand towards Glynnie, smiling as if she could not take any maidservant seriously, but Glynnie was quicker. Her knife went straight through the muscle of Lirriam’s upper right arm, to the hilt, beside the bone. Lirriam gasped and lowered her arm.
Glynnie hurled a second knife at Grandys, followed by a third. Maloch knocked them both aside. Rix dived for Syrten’s sword and rose with it in his hand. It was heavier than he was used to but he struck three furious blows at Grandys, one after another.
He almost pierced Grandys’ guard with the third blow. Grandys turned at the last second and Syrten’s blade snapped against Maloch. Grandys turned on him and Rix knew he was going to die.
“Remember this, Grandys?” shrieked Glynnie. “Remember how I beat you up and made a laughing stock of you?”
She was holding up the nose-shaped piece of opal armour she had broken off Grandys’ face months back, when he had been about to drown Rix in the cistern. She put it up to her own small nose, mocking him. It covered half her face.
He let out a bellow of rage. She hurled another knife at him. It missed. Then another, which he caught in his left hand. Glynnie threw her last knife hard and low. It struck him in the left thigh at a spot where the armour had broken off, and went in to the hilt.
He grunted, faltered, then raised the knife he had previously caught. She backpedalled, overbalanced and fell backwards against the small tree on the brink. Rix heard its roots creak and one of them pulled out of the crack. Grandys laughed, then hurled his knife. It buried itself in her right shoulder, pinning her to the trunk.
“Don’t move!” cried Rix. “Don’t move or you’ll go over.”
Another root snapped. The tree began to tilt backwards. Rix ran towards her.
Grandys pulled the knife out of his thigh and hurled it into Rix’s back.
CHAPTER 83
Rix staggered and fell. He reached around and, with an effort, yanked the knife out from between his lower left ribs. It had gone in more than an inch but had it done serious damage? He could not tell. It was so sharp that he had barely felt it, though the wound was throbbing now and warm blood was ebbing down his back.
He looked from Grandys to Glynnie, weighing the danger. The tree she was pinned to had stopped moving—it wasn’t going to topple over the edge right away. Grandys’ thigh was bleeding freely though he did not appear to be badly injured. He still had Maloch and he still had king-magery, and if Rix tried to save Glynnie, Grandys was liable to send them both over the side.
Rix couldn’t duel Maloch with a knife. He thrust it into his belt and was moving backwards in an arc, trying to reach one of the dead men’s swords, when his right hand struck a rocky pedestal and he felt a curved blade that was oddly warm. It was the talon blade, and he had actually felt it! It must have roused his dead hand—the hand with which he had originally painted the wyverin.
Considering how often he had painted and sketched the creature, and how many times he’d dreamed about it, the talon blade had to be an omen, and on balance it was a better omen for him than for Grandys. And Rix had been a far better fighter with his right hand than he was with the left…
As he lifted the weapon by its toe-bone handle, he felt a surge of strength and confidence that almost made up for the slowly ebbing wound in his back. Almost.
“Don’t move,” he said to Glynnie. “Try not to breathe until I’ve finished Grandys.”
“You’re a treat, Rixium,” said Grandys. “How you make me laugh. I’m going to miss you.”
The grin froze on his face when he saw the talon-blade in Rix’s right hand. Grandys swallowed, licked his lips and took hold of Maloch with both hands, as if uncertain of its loyalty… or, perhaps, his own strength. Rix glanced at Lirriam, who was sheltering from the rain under a triangular ledge. She was bandaging her upper arm, her eyes fixed on Grandys, and Rix did not think she would intervene, though you could never be sure with the Heroes.
Rix was very good with his right hand—at the time it had been amputated he had never been beaten. He thrust. Again Grandys parried, though more slowly than before; he barely turned Rix’s point in time. His wounds must be taking their toll, and perhaps the Three Spells had aged him on the inside as well as the outside.
“Maloch isn’t serving you as well as it used to,” said Rix.
“Is this the challenge Urtiga foretold?” said Grandys, evidently trying to unsettle him with bluster. “It can’t be—you’re not the true master.”
“I never said I was,” said Rix. There was no point pretending now. “Well, not seriously. When I had Maloch, it always felt alien to me.”
“Then—who—is?” Grandys ground out.
“Lyf, of course,” Rix lied. He had no idea about the sword’s true master.
“He’s not! I’ve cut Lyf many times with Maloch, and each time it drank his blood eagerly.”
As it had when Rix had wielded it against Lyf’s wrythen in his caverns, he recalled, at the very beginning of this adventure. No, definitely not Lyf. Then who?
They fought across the platform and back, across and back again. Rix struck Grandys three times, and Grandys wounded him once, a painful cut across the upper chest, though not one that slowed Rix measurably. Not as much as the knife wound in his back, which was still oozing blood and sending piercing stabs of pain through him with every movement.
Grandys was also tiring. He wasn’t moving his feet nearly as much as before; his legs were weakening, which would hinder his ability to evade Rix’s blows, and strike his own.
Yet the longer they fought, the more certain Rix became that Maloch’s protective magery gave Grandys an unbeatable edge. Rix had penetrated his guard a dozen times with blows that would have killed any lesser man, and each time Maloch had turned Rix’s blade; he either missed or only caused a flesh wound.
His knees were beginning to wobble now. He was stumbling with weariness, starting to give Grandys chances, and the brute only needed one. If he ever got through Rix’s defences, Maloch’s attacking magery would drive the point deep, and the trap he had been trying to avoid for the past month would close on him forever.
As he had that thought, Lirriam stepped forward, Incarnate throbbing on her bosom. She wore an enigmatic smile, but who was it directed at? She held up her right hand to Rix. He stopped reluctantly, for he wasn’t sure he would be able to get going again. He leaned a shoulder against the black cliff, panting.
“He’s mine to kill,” Grandys gasped. “Don’t interfere.”
“You broke the pact.” Lirriam rubbed her lopsided jaw. “I told you that you’d pay for it.”
Grandys was so shocked that his arm fell. Maloch’s tip hit the ground with a clang and a shower of sparks, and slipped from his hand.
He snatched it up as if unsure of its loyalty. “Each for all,” Grandys said desperately. “All for each—forever!”
“That applied when we were the Five Heroes, but there’s only you and me left, Grandys, and soon there’ll only be one.”
“Why are you doing this?”
“You attacked one of your own. You broke my jaw.”
“It was a moment of madness—you provoked me unbearably. And I apologised.”
“Never in the history of the Five Heroes had one of us laid a violent hand on another,” said Lirriam. “It was always we Five against the world.”
“It—still—is.”
“There is no Five—only me and you.”
“We can rebuild.”
“No.”
“Why—not?”
“Because in our age-long opal dreaming, something broke in you, Grandys. It wasn’t about us Five any more, it was about you, and we were only there to support whatever you wanted. It showed the true character you’d been hiding all this time—and it forced me to question the very meaning of my life.” She paused. “And I wondered…”
“What?” said Grandys, unsteadily.
“I wondered what other crimes you might have committed… in the past.”
He stopped dead. “Urtiga? That’s what this is about?”
“Yes, Urtiga. For the past month you’ve been agonising about Rix being the sword’s true master—which was patently absurd, since he’s not even part-Herovian—yet you never asked yourself if it could be me.”
“You?” His voice was thick with derision. “How could the sword’s true master be a woman?”
Lirriam’s face lit up, as if she had been waiting for this moment for a long time. “It first belonged to Urtiga, and Urtiga’s death…”
“What about it?” Grandys said roughly.
Rix looked from Lirriam to Grandys, back to Lirriam. What was she so happy about? And why did Grandys suddenly seem mortally afraid?
“Urtiga’s death,” Lirriam repeated, “left me as the last of our line.”
Grandys let out a gasp; he could not suppress it in time. “You—a blood relative?”
“We were second cousins…”
He went the colour of chalk. He knew what this meant, and so did Rix. Under Herovian law, once Lirriam identified the killer she had to avenge her cousin’s murder.
“And all these years—you never let on?” Grandys whispered.
“When she died I was just a girl of eighteen. Had I admitted I was her kin, I would have been dead within the hour. Besides, I nurse my grievances, Grandys. Until the moment suits me—and the price is right.”
“You’re planning to take Maloch and kill me?” He laughed. “Then begin!”
Lirriam took another step. “Remember Urtiga’s last words, Grandys? ‘While you dominate Maloch, the enchantment will take on your foul character, and even advance your fell purpose… but one day the sword’s true master will challenge you, and you will make your fatal mistake.’ ”
As if attempting an experiment she did not expect to work, Lirriam reached out towards Maloch, her fingers spread, and strained until the sinews in her neck stood out. Maloch rose a few inches, rattling in its sheath and making a low-pitched hum.
Grandys forced it down and held it in place, though it was still clattering about; it was fighting him!
Lirriam favoured him with a chilling smile. He stared at her, open-mouthed, and Rix saw the moment when he could no longer evade the truth.
She reached out again, pushing harder this time. “Maloch?” she whispered. “Rise!”
Again Grandys thrust Maloch down, his arm muscles knotting under the strain.
As she reached towards the sword a third time, the hum rose in pitch and Maloch jerked so powerfully that it forced Grandys’ whole arm up; with all his strength he could not hold it in place. Red light pulsed from the blade.
He gestured towards the canister to draw on king-magery. “Maloch, return to your sheath.”
A trace of yellow fire flared out from the hilt and tip of the sword. The metal let out a deep thrumming sound and the blade dropped until it touched the slot of the sheath, though it did not go in.
“Why isn’t it working?” he said.
“Up,” Lirriam said in a husky whisper.
Thrumming and radiating crimson light, the sword rose until it was above Grandys’ head. He threw all his weight behind it, attempting to swing it at Lirriam’s face. The sword did not budge and his hand was bent back almost to his wrist. He let out a gasp and clamped his other hand around the hilt.
“Down!” Lirriam said.
Maloch flared red and shot towards its sheath. Grandys could not hold it and it plunged in to the hilt, cutting off the light. The hum rose to a shrill pitch.
Lirriam
allowed herself a weary smile. “Getting the hang of this, Grandys.”
His face went the colour of a blood bucket. “Maloch,” he said, desperately trying to draw on king-magery again, “I command you to ignore Lirriam. Rise to my hand.”
Maloch rose a foot in the air. “Down!” said Lirriam, her teeth bared.
The sword dipped, then dropped in a series of jerks, each accompanied by a pulse of crimson light and a whining note, back into its sheath.
Grandys cast a desperate glance at the canister of king-magery. “What’s wrong with it?”
“You haven’t taken the cap off,” said Lirriam sweetly. “No magery can pass through platina, Grandys.”
He looked at her suspiciously, then wrenched the cap off.
“Maloch, using all the power of king-magery I command you,” Grandys said for a third time. “You will obey me, and me alone.”
The sword shuddered, then jerked forward and back in the sheath so violently that the straps tore away and the sheath fell to the rocky platform. Maloch slid out. Lirriam held up Incarnate and spoke a mighty word. Rix’s right hand burned; blood beaded the scar around his wrist but was reabsorbed.
A crimson beam lanced from the stone and struck Maloch, mid-blade. The worn inscription etched down the blade, that notorious quote from the Immortal Text—Heroes must fight to preserve the race—shone out brightly, then faded.
“What have you done?” Grandys croaked.
He picked the sword up. Maloch twisted in his grip until it was pointing at Lirriam’s heart. No, at Incarnate. It jerked so hard that Grandys was dragged several steps. The sword was trying to get at Incarnate.
Lirriam called another crimson bolt from the stone, and a third. They struck the blade in the same place as the first. The titane blade shrilled as if something was trying to get out.
Grandys drew on king-magery again. “I command you to obey only me!” he screamed.
The sound rose to a whine, a howl, then the enchantment broke with a banshee shriek and a burst of brilliant, searing light. Grandys staggered around, his face and arms covered in blisters, staring at Maloch. His face crumpled; clearly he knew, as Rix did, that with the enchantment gone Maloch was a sword like any other.