Dark Vengeance

by Ed Greenwood

  “Unfortunately, yes,” the old lord sighed, ducking away suddenly to spin and bring his blade around at Jalandral’s back.

  The High Lord of Talonnorn turned and struck it aside just in time, the Raskshaula spellblade sliding past his ribs so closely that his strongest, innermost shielding spell boiled away under its slicing, magically augmented steel.

  Jalandral hastily backed away, almost as far as the steps leading up to his throne, and heard the eager murmurings of the crowd. They were hungry for his blood . . .

  He’d won himself time to call forth another shielding spell from the Evendoom spellblade. Raskshaula, Olone spew on him, was standing politely waiting for him to resume battle, blade grounded.

  Well, to Olone with bygone courtesy and all the decadent posturing that went with it, too!

  “Let justice, right, and the favor of Olone prevail!” he cried loudly, and charged.

  “Oh, yes!” Lord Raskshaula called back, in precise mimicry of Jalandral’s ringing voice. “Let justice, right, and the favor of Olone prevail!”

  Their blades crashed together with all the clanging, ringing force Jalandral could manage, as he put all his strength behind the sweeping blow, seeking to smash his foe’s sword right out of numbed old hands.

  It was like hacking a stone pillar.

  His own hands were numbed, the shrieking protest of his own spellblade half deafened him . . . and he heard scattered laughter in the throne room.

  Lord Morluar Raskshaula was standing with blade grounded again, patiently awaiting him.

  Jalandral reeled upright again, fresh fury like a bubbling flame in his ears. This motherless old Olone-forsaken lord was going down, yes he was, and—

  Jalandral swallowed and backed away again, feeling the riser of the bottom-most throne step, cold and hard, right behind his heel.

  Why was he so angry?

  He, who for years had mocked and preened and laughed at—at everything in Talonnorn, his father, the malicious Evendoom crones, the idiotic rival Houses, the coldly sneering Consecrated of the temple . . . what had happened to him?

  He frowned at Raskshaula.

  “You’re doing this, aren’t you? You’re working on my spells somehow, to drive me into a rage . . .”

  The old lord bowed.

  “Yes,” he admitted calmly. “I am.”

  “I thought this was a duel!”

  “It is. And I’m showing you just as much fairness and honor as you are wont to show other Talonar in your dealings with them, young Evendoom.”

  “Ah. So your principles, Raskshaula, are just as false and twisted as those of all the rest of us.”

  “Not at all. I am fighting for Talonnorn. And for the sake of my city, I will do anything, Jalandral. Anything. I’m throwing my life away, remember?”

  “So you are,” Jalandral drawled, with an air of amused calm he did not feel, as he fought to find his usual sardonic mood and settle into it. “So you are . . .”

  He strode forward, spellblade gleaming as he hefted it.

  Lord Raskshaula stood his ground.

  Steel met steel, and they fenced, blades singing, clashing, and rebounding again, the two of them leaping, twisting, and dancing about faster and faster.

  If I am younger, stronger, and have the greater reach, Jalandral thought savagely, then so be it.

  Live by the sword, old fool, and die by it!

  Yet when Jalandral found himself breathing hard and arm-weary, Morluar Raskshaula was still smiling calmly, unruffled and apparently rather less than tired.

  Jalandral felt the rage rising in him again, dark and warm. He backed away once more, threw back his head, and drew in a deep, slow breath—knowing by now that the old lord would courteously wait for him to do so—and . . . found calm.

  Again.

  Yet when he then strode back into that deadly fray of steel on steel, Jalandral found anger rising again inside him. Olone damn Raskshaula!

  This time, instead of stepping back, he caught the old lord’s spellblade on his, leaned forward until the two swords locked, guard to guard, and into his foe’s face hissed, “Why are you doing this, Morluar? You were the one lord whose advice I wanted, whose word I thought I could trust!”

  Lord Raskshaula’s face, looking back into his, seemed more sad than anything else. “Then you should have behaved in a manner that could let me trust you, Dral. I wanted to. I kept on wanting to, as your tyrannies mounted. I started warning you—as many did—and you sneered and dismissed us, and kept right on. To bring us here.”

  “Yes, here!” Jalandral snarled, trying to shove the old, shorter Nifl back by means of their locked blades. “You’re going to lose, Raskshaula! You’re going to die here!”

  It was working.

  He gained a step, and then another, forcing his challenger slowly back toward the ring of flames.

  “And what of it?” Raskshaula might have been calmly assessing a trading deal with visiting merchants. “All of my friends—and foes—are dead and gone, the Talonnorn I knew and loved gone with them. I like nothing of what I see of this new Talonnorn you offer. Nothing at all. You’ve taken from me all I had left that I cared about.”

  “I? I barely know you, Lord Raskshaula! How could I have taken what you hold most dear?”

  Jalandral suddenly broke their clinch, stepping back and slashing viciously at Raskshaula’s legs. The old lord turned his attack aside with almost casual ease—and launched a mirrorlike strike of his own, so swiftly and smoothly that Jalandral actually had to hurl himself backward to save his own knees.

  This time, Lord Raskshaula strolled after him, pressing his attack with casual elegance.

  “There is something you just may live long enough to learn for yourself,” he answered Jalandral, still speaking as calmly as if they sat at ease at a table, rather than seeking to kill each other in a ring of dueling flames. “And it is this: it is never easy for lords of rival Talonar Houses to befriend each other. Erlingar Evendoom was my friend, and when I see his eldest son swaggering around the Eventowers proclaiming himself Lord of Evendoom, and I no longer see the face of Erlingar Evendoom in Talonnorn, I know who to blame. Not all dead are dismissed, unavenged.”

  “I have not,” Jalandral snarled, “slain my father. I don’t even know where he is!”

  “Then you are a lawbreaker and a disloyal son beyond match,” the old lord told him coldly, “to claim the lordship of your House, when your every waking moment should be spent finding your sire and restoring him to his rightful place—or recovering his bones and avenging his death, if he has perished at the hands of another.”

  Lord Raskshaula let Jalandral hear his contempt for the first time. “To do otherwise—as you have done—is to leave me regarding your protestations of innocence as to the fate of your father with disbelief. Jalandral Evendoom, I believe you not.”

  The Evendoom spellblade cut at him with all Jalandral’s strength behind it, but this time the old lord met and parried it with his own sword, standing unmoved amid the shriek of tortured steel.

  “And if you care nothing for my opinion,” he continued calmly, as if they were holding goblets full of wine rather than spellblades whose warring had numbed both their hands, “considering it will be swept away when I am dead, then listen to other Talonar, and learn this well: all Talonnorn believes your father dead, and you the cause.”

  “You dare to accuse me of this?” Jalandral snarled, at first seeking to appear righteous before Olone in the eyes of the watching crowd but finding himself losing his temper before his question was half out. “Do you truly insult me this much?”

  Raskshaula shrugged. “Evidently,” he replied—and parried in a manner Jalandral had never seen before, that let his blade rebound and bend momentarily, so that its tip darted in to slash open Jalandral’s cheek, just below his left eye.

  “Olone!” the High Lord of Talonnorn cried, both as an oath to pour out his feelings, and to make any devout Goddess-worshippers in the crowd think Ol
one was with him, healing him, as he awakened the healing powers of his spellblade.

  Again, the old lord did him the mock courtesy of stepping back and halting his attack while Jalandral healed himself.

  Leaving the High Lord regarding him balefully, anger gnawing steadily in his throat now.

  This dangerous old lord was going to greet death here, even if it cost Jalandral Evendoom’s life in the bringing of it to him.

  As it was starting to seem it just might.

  Aloun chuckled and bent closer to the whorl. “This is splendid!” he said with a grin, lacing and interlacing his fingers excitedly. “You think the old Nifl has a chance?”

  Luelldar shrugged, did something with his will and two of his fingers that made the whorl grow larger and brighter, and said nothing.

  “He’s the better blade, this Raskshaula,” the younger Watcher of Ouvahlor added. “But then, he would be, wouldn’t he? Yet he’s shorter and older, and can’t be as strong. And for all his talk of doing ‘anything,’ he’s letting Evendoom catch his breath and heal himself! And we haven’t seen any sly magics out of Jalandral Evendoom yet, but he must have some! How soon before he gets really angry—or hurt—and unleashes one of them?”

  “How soon, indeed?” Luelldar echoed quietly. “What matters is how the newly established High Lord of Talonnorn, Lord Jalandral Evendoom, deals with this very public defiance of his rule by the most respected surviving head of a Talonar noble House, Lord Morluar Raskshaula. Or rather, what all watching Talonnorn thinks of how he handles it. In that sense, however horribly he dies, Raskshaula may have won already.”

  Aloun looked sidelong up at the Senior Watcher. “So now the real question: who do you want to win? The old-blood veteran humbling the haughty upstart, no matter how entertaining his prancing has been to us? Or is the entertainment afforded us by the flamboyant Jalandral worth more than any amount of tradition, old wisdom, and morals?”

  Luelldar’s face betrayed nothing. “I am a Watcher of Ouvahlor,” he said calmly. “In matters I observe, I do not have ‘wants.’ I may predict what will befall, or expect certain things to happen—in certain ways, even—but I shun all preferences. To do otherwise is to color my observations, and make them worthless to our superiors. More than that: if I cling to mistaken beliefs and judgings, I taint what I see and any conclusions I dare to reach, henceforth. It is my duty to avoid such things.”

  Aloun sighed. “And let this be another lesson to me, yes?”

  “Of course. And the sooner you lose the habit of secretly wagering on outcomes, the better.”

  The junior Watcher’s face went pale.

  “How is it you know about that?” he whispered.

  Luelldar rolled his eyes. “I am a Watcher of Ouvahlor, remember?” He waved his hand, and yet another whorl rose into view, behind him. It was right across the room, small, and dim—but grew in brightness as it came to him.

  “Unless one of those you have been unwise enough to wager against has talked about your dealings—and they all do, look you, sooner or later—no one else yet knows,” he added calmly. “No Anointed, to be sure.”

  “Sure? How can you be sure?”

  Luelldar rotated one of his hands almost lazily, and the new whorl turned in the air to face Aloun, showing him the scene in its depths.

  “This little whorl of mine—and no, it’s not my only little background eye, before you ask—has been keeping its eye on the Anointed of Coldheart for quite some time.”

  Aloun drew in his breath sharply. “You dare to do that?”

  Luelldar shrugged again. “My duty to my office, fellow Watcher, demands no less.” He leaned closer and added in a murmur, “As it happens, I’ve been growing very suspicious of what Semmeira might very soon do.”

  “Lady,” the Evendoom maid murmured, looking up from where she knelt before Taerune with eyes that were wide with admiration and love, “you are the most beautiful Nifl-she I have ever seen. Truly Olone smiles upon House Evendoom.”

  The other maids all nodded and smiled in enthusiastic agreement as they glided forward with her new gowns held high.

  “We are so favored to serve Lady Taerune Evendoom,” one said, sounding close to tears. They all nodded happily.

  Taerune smiled back at them, though a small, dark worm of foreboding was rising in her, she knew not why.

  They were bending toward her before their faces changed, this time, admiration and love melting to shock and fear, then revulsion and hatred, as they went pale and started to scream.

  Shrieking and hissing, her maids shrank back—and then charged at her, faces contorted and hands raised to claw her, in a spitting, keening chorus that rose to earsplitting terror as Taerune flung up her arms to ward them off—and saw that the left one was gone, ending in a stump that spurted blood, pumping and spluttering . . .

  The last Ouvahlan Nifl is smiling ruthlessly as he twists his way through the fray that rages in the Long Hall of the Eventowers every bit as adroitly as Taerune has ever done. Avoiding both the lumbering gorkuls and the blades of his fellows, he finds room enough to thrust his blade at her spine.

  Desperately Taerune twists around, seeking to strike his blade away with her left arm no matter how badly she gets cut, hoping the now-toppling gorkul she’s just slain will both knock his blade down and shield her in its helpless, roaring toppling of tusked flesh.

  The gorkul obliges, so the blade meant for her vitals cuts deep into her arm, driven by the entire weight of the gorkul falling past, shearing muscle and sinew and bone alike, in a pain so coldly intense that the breath is forced out of her, in a shriek like a sword point slicing down a metal shield.

  She’s never felt such pain before . . .

  “Monster!” the maid who loves her most of all shrieks, crying tears of terror as she stares at the spurting stump of Taerune’s severed arm. “Monster!”

  Then she is alone in the darkness, choking on her own bitter tears, bitterness like blood in her mouth.

  Maharla wouldn’t heal me.

  My father’s only daughter, Thirdblood of Evendoom, and she refused to do her duty, out of sheer spite. And cast me out, with the battle still raging, to hide her crime.

  Treachery forgotten in the rush to deem me the greater offender.

  Blasphemer, outcast . . . less than Nifl.

  Because I wouldn’t kill myself, they think I’m a monster.

  Suddenly Taerune was awake and panting in the darkness, staring up at the rough ceiling of the cavern overhead.

  A cave out in the Wild Dark.

  Where she was lying alone, on her back, fully clad and wrapped in a blanket, some distance from the other Ravagers who snored or sleep-sighed gently around her.

  Far enough away that her sobbing awakenings wouldn’t rouse them.

  Out here where hungry monsters slithered or stalked. Where she was safer, among the lawless Ravagers—almost every one of them a dirty, ruthless rampant who’d not seen a willing, yielding Nifl-she in too long a time to rightly remember—than she’d be in Talonnorn.

  Yes, she was safer out in the Wild Dark, sleeping with the Ravagers, than in her own palatial bedchamber in the tall, spired heart of the Eventowers.

  She lifted her left arm and gazed at the blade the human Orivon Firefist—the best slave she’d ever had, tall and strong Hairy One that he was—had fashioned and fitted to the stump of her arm.

  She was safer because of this, too.

  She turned it, sharp and deadly. Part of her, now.

  The Consecrated say this makes me a monster. So all Talonar call me “monster.”

  And so I am.

  I am a monster. Yet we Niflghar—we’re all monsters.

  Black flames swirled up around him as Jalandral Evendoom strode grandly away from the steps that ascended to his throne, and started putting on a show. The spellblade in his hands moaned again, and spat more black flames. Pity they did so little against the defenses of the spellblade being wielded against him.

 
; Olone damn Morluar Raskshaula for defying him and starting this—but he, Jalandral, was damned if he was going to let old Raskshaula go on making him angrier and angrier.

  No. If he had to die, he was going to do it his way. Jaunty, smiling, with a jest or two and a sneer or six. Just as that grinning old highnose on the other side of yonder spellblade had been doing to him.

  “Well, now, bright bauble of House Raskshaula,” he drawled, lifting his chin as he advanced, Lord Morluar’s calm old face quite close now, “have at you again. Olone has just whispered to me that she’s quite pleased with me, so—”

  “Indeed. She said those very words to me, too,” Raskshaula replied with a smile. “And followed them with some more: I thought he was going to whimper and wet himself before your blades have even struck a handful of sparks off each other. Yet it seems he can stand up unaided, Lord Raskshaula, if you just give him a little, ah, aid. From time to time.”

  “Blasphemer!” Jalandral snapped triumphantly, making his eyes flash and the fire of his sword flare up in a perfect echo. “You—”

  “No, Evendoom,” another Consecrated said loudly, using magic to make her older, dagger-sharp voice carry. “You are the blasphemer, to claim Olone spoke with you personally when She did no such thing. We Her priestesses are attuned to Her; we can see, hear, and feel Her every nearby manifestation. None of us did, High Lord. Which means you are a liar.”

  “And Lord Raskshaula is not?” Jalandral snarled, feeling anger surge in him again, almost chokingly this time.

  “Morluar Raskshaula has been Lord of House Raskshaula for a long time. We know he is a liar, and he confirms—not disappoints—our expectations. He did not name himself High Lord of Talonnorn, Evendoom. You did.”

  Jalandral stared at the priestesses beyond the flames, and they looked back at him. Eyes gleaming.

  Then he turned and looked at Lord Raskshaula. Who stood courteously awaiting him again, blade grounded.

  The bastard.