Dark Vengeance

by Ed Greenwood

  Jalandral did not spare a glance for the Nifl on his other flank. They would be waiting just as eagerly. Hoping for his blood.

  He was all alone in this.

  Or not.

  Damn, he should have done this the moment Raskshaula had challenged him, before all the hurling of grand words. So he could have painted it as just and fitting treatment for a lawbreaker.

  “Klaerra!” he called sharply.

  Silence. Nothing happened.

  He put a smile onto his face, took a slow and showy step toward his challenger, and flourished his spellblade, turning the black flames roiling up and down it to a bright ring of little flames around its tip.

  A tip that he moved sharply, dragging the little sputtering ring through the air. Did his signal have to be so obvious? Or was Klaerra deserting him, too?

  “Klaerra,” he snapped, in a clear command, flicking his sword again. Raskshaula took a slow, deliberate, and showy step of his own, bringing himself that much closer to Jalandral.

  Nothing happened. Again.

  Bitch. Disloyal, gloating old bitch.

  With a snarl the High Lord bounded forward and tried to strike Raskshaula’s blade aside, the spellblades ringing merrily off each other as the old lord parried with ease, fluid and graceful in his shiftings as Jalandral started battering him from all sides, leaping and thrusting like a Nifl gone oriad, surrounding him with a ring of thirsty, leaping steel.

  That Raskshaula, smiling faintly, turned away as calmly as if the ever-darting Evendoom spellblade’s assaults were so many showers of yeldeth drift-spores.

  “Klaerra,” Jalandral snapped again, through clenched teeth, as he felt his wind and his strength sagging once more.

  He stepped back, to draw in a shuddering breath—and saw the ring of flames obey at last, racing across the throne room amid a mewling of alarmed Nifl cries, to engulf Lord Morluar Raskshaula before he could do more than half turn to see his peril.

  The old lord staggered, tried to run—the ring of flames moving with him, which meant Klaerra was directing it personally—and then started to reel and darken, his hair flaring up and his spellblade spitting sparks as he fought to try to call up shieldings that would drink the flames.

  Unable to keep a widening grin off his face and not caring, Jalandral pointed the Evendoom spellblade at Raskshaula and fed him dark, ravening flames, trying to batter the shieldings the old lord did have active, and hamper him in—

  I, Olone, am displeased. With these flames I aid Jalandral. Hail, Jalandral, High Lord of Talonnorn!

  That whisper was a thing of flame, and so both vast and gusty, swirling heavy upon every ear. Jalandral recognized Klaerra’s voice, but then, he knew who was behind this; how many of these young Consecrated of rival Houses could hope to do so? To them, this would be Olone, and—damn!

  In winning the moment for him, Klaerra was weakening him from now on. When the priestesses—and the damned crones, too!—came crying to the High Lord with “Olone says this” and “Olone has always decreed that,” it would be hard indeed to thwart their wishes, and—

  Then, in an instant, all the flames were gone, and Jalandral found himself cowering in a dark corner of his own mind, staring into the horrified face of Klaerra, even as she stared back at him.

  Together, they were both aware of one thing: neither Klaerra nor anything any Nifl in the throne room had done had snatched away the ring of flames.

  Leaving behind a repeating, swiftly fading echo of just four of Klaerra’s words: I, Olone, am displeased.

  Staring at the crisped, slowly toppling thing of bones that had been Lord Raskshaula—and then over at the Consecrated on his right, all toppled senseless, strewn about like so many discarded shes’ playdolls—Jalandral Evendoom, High Lord of Talonnorn, raised his spellblade dazedly in front of his face and stared at its naked steel, the black flames quite gone.

  He had no idea how to bring them back. His eyes—and his unscathed hand, passed down the flat of the blade—were telling him they were no more, yet the sword was insisting to him that they were raging.

  Jalandral blinked, fought back sudden tears, and wet himself.

  7

  Talon and Fang

  Out in the Dark the jests they are few

  Proud boastings and darings a Nifl may rue

  Of Olone’s holy power priestesses sang

  No power there but talon and fang

  So Talonnorn stays and Talonar ways

  Our Hateful shelter all of our days

  Out in the Dark amid promises cold

  No Nifl alone has a chance to grow old

  —Talonar tavern song

  T error passed, leaving him feeling empty and sick.

  Jalandral found himself on his knees in a puddle of his own shame, with Talonar advancing in an uncertain arc in front of him and to his left.

  Their weapons were out, gleaming and glittering, and some had smiles above them that were less than nice. Hastily he found his feet, risking a glance to the right as he moved in that direction. Thankfully, no one stood menacing him there; the Consecrated were still strewn senseless.

  He was alone, all contact with Klaerra lost. He had no feeling that Olone—if it had been Olone, and not a trick of Klaerra or some unseen crones or priestesses seeking to make the High Lord their cowering puppet—was still watching.

  Leaving Jalandral like all other Nifl: knowing that there was no one to care for his skin, nor guard it, save himself.

  Well, then . . .

  “Olone has touched me deeply,” he snarled, finding himself hoarse and unsteady of voice, both at once. “We spoke together in my mind, and she has confirmed me as rightful High Lord of Talonnorn. Away steel, all of you, or be cast out as blasphemers!”

  He drew himself upright, spread his arms wide to flourish his ruined spellblade and seem tall and grandly confident, and added, “All who gainsay me, scheme against me, or seek to harm me in any way incur the divine displeasure of Olone, and are accursed everywhere even before I banish them from our city!”

  Malicious triumph was fading fast in Talonar faces before him, and everyone was lowering their blades and stepping back. Jalandral fought down a sigh of relief and raised his voice again, feeling it gather strength and regain more of his usual faintly mocking tone with each word.

  “I, Jalandral, High Lord of Talonnorn, hereby declare all of House Raskshaula outlaws and traitors. All that they own, even to the buildings where they dwell and the garments now clothing them, are forfeit to Talonnorn. Any who aid or shelter them will share their fate.”

  Swinging the spellblade almost lazily, he added, “Olone’s holy blessing shatters Talonar tradition. I will fight no more duels of this sort. Henceforth, all who dare to defy me will be hounded out of the city, and hunted down and slain like cave-rats. Their homes and coins become Talonnorn’s, and their kin become slaves or—if they manage to reach the Wild Dark—outcast. Dispute amongst us wounded us and was barely noticed, even when we grew so weak that lowly Ouvahlor could storm our cavern and wound us sorely. Wherefore Olone has raised me, enthroned, over you.”

  He strode along the line of chastened Niflghar, pretending not to see blades being hastily sheathed and scepters lowered, until he reached the last dark elf. Whereupon he spun around to regard them all with his best cruel smile and said with soft, menacing promise: “Try not to disappoint me.”

  Orivon Firefist trudged on warily into endless gloom, rough walls of rock curving close at hand. He’d forgotten the damp, spicy many-molds smell of the Wild Dark, but it was all around him now, along with the droppings and old bloodstains and even cracked and gnawed bones of the little scuttling things that dwelt where the sunlit lands of the Above met the uppermost dark vastnesses of Below.

  And died, under the jaws of things he’d thankfully not yet seen . . . though that did not mean—he whirled around for perhaps the hundredth time, his favorite sword out as he shot a glance at the rock ceiling above first, but saw nothing following hi
m.

  Nothing but a brief, gleaming movement that might have been a body hastily sinking down behind rocks, or a peering eye hastily shut against his scrutiny.

  Orivon let silence fall and then deepen, but heard no breathing or movement except his own. Which was worth a shrug, ere he turned back the way he’d been heading.

  He was lost, of course.

  He’d never had any maps—Old Bloodblade had been map enough for them all—and knew only that he had to descend, and head in this direction (more or less, not that the winding, rough-walled caverns and passages allowed anything more precise) to reach Glowstone.

  Eventually.

  If something didn’t eat him first.

  Not that his reception in the Ravager-moot—if it still was a Ravager-moot, and there were any Ravagers left to meet anywhere—bid fair to be any more welcoming than the treatment accorded any human slave on the loose.

  Though this Hairy One had swords and daggers to spare, and knew how to use them. To make them, too, if it came to that, and—

  Something hooted, faint and far-off in the endless caves. Orivon knew sounds carried strangely across the Wild Dark, but knew he’d never heard such a call before, and was fairly certain whatever was making it was a good distance away.

  Which meant it wasn’t a pressing problem for him yet. He wasn’t making much noise of his own, for one thing. Many beasts of the Dark hunted by scent, but had to blunder into it, or into the creature making it, to “nose” prey; amid all the reek of molds and dung, yeldeth and softly drifting spores, nothing could sniff out a particular beast-smell from a cavern away.

  And for all Nifl sneerings to the contrary, unwashed human-reek was among the milder stinks of the Dark.

  Thrusting his fingers into his nostrils as he shouldered through the latest clinging cloud of spores, to keep from breathing them in, Orivon shouldered his way into another cavern.

  The fuzzy, purple-gray spores brushed along his arms and shoulders, tumbling in velvet silence, before they almost reluctantly drifted on past. Orivon paid them no heed; he was too intent on peering warily everywhere for foes. He found nothing worse than a long-legged spider, black and barbed, that his approach had scared into urgently wanting to be elsewhere. It scuttled through a cleft on the far side of the cavern, toward a faint glow beyond.

  Orivon regarded that steady radiance thoughtfully. His darksight was as strong as ever; though there was no light near that was anything like the brightness of the cavern that held Talonnorn, he could see clearly enough in this gloom.

  More than clearly enough, as he crossed the spider-vacated cavern, to see that the glow was coming from markings painted on the rock walls of a passage beyond his cavern, that curved across his intended path and intersected the narrow way the spider had taken . . . a cross-passage that ran past the markings into a greater darkness. Another cavern.

  Orivon halted and stood watching and listening for what seemed a long time. Silence reigned. When time began to seem to stretch, and remained unbroken by any movements or sounds, he advanced again, approaching the two markings cautiously.

  They were Nifl blazons, all right, drawn in an enspelled paint that had eaten into the rock to leave behind a symbol deeply etched as well as glowing.

  Not that he could read them.

  Orivon smiled wryly. They were intricate marks, differing from each other, and seemed to be meaningful symbols rather than actual writing, but that meaning could be anything. “Kiss me, Olone,” as he whispered aloud, or on the other hand: drop your dung here.

  They shared the glow common to all dark elven writings; he was certain these were Niflghar markings, and not all that recent. Yet not defaced or altered, either. One of them he’d seen, just once, beside a door somewhere in a back passage of the Eventowers. So was it a guide mark, a warning to “stay away,” or something else?

  Orivon shrugged. The two runes, if that’s what they were, had been painted side by side next to a break in the curving passage: an entrance to another cavern, beyond, in just the direction he wanted to go, if he was ever to find Glowstone.

  He shrugged again and strode purposefully forward, across the curving passage and along the narrower way, into the waiting cavern beyond.

  It was darker than the rest of the Dark he’d traversed thus far, as if some magic lurking within it was waging silent war against his darksight. Darker, and having its own peculiar, unfamiliar smell, as if . . . as if . . .

  Something moved, just behind Orivon.

  He flung himself to one side without waiting to see what it was, turning to slash in that direction with his sword.

  The “something” looked like a great curved slab of rock, swinging down at him from the cavern ceiling to loom in front of his nose!

  It looked as gray and hard as stone, able to break any number of swords of his crafting—and humans swinging them, too!

  The forgefist ducked away—as something else that felt just as large and hard as the swinging stone slammed into his shoulder and spun him wildly aside, his own sword clattering from his numbed hand.

  Diving after it to scoop it up with his other hand, Orivon caught up his steel, rolled onward as far as he could roll until he fetched up against stone—and found himself staring up at the strangest creature he’d ever seen.

  Spiderlike, it clung to the ceiling above him on six long, jointed legs that seemed to stick firmly to stone, freeing its other two legs—or rather pincers; the great stonelike slabs that had swung at him—to reach down for him. They were shaped like the claws of the Ashenuldar crayfish of his youth, but those had been a waxy whitish-brown and the size of his smallest finger—and these were each as gray as rock, and larger than the door of the grandest cottage of Ashenuld!

  Eyes opened above those pincers. Six of them.

  “Thorar’s rough mothering . . .” Orivon whispered that curse in deepening fear, as he stared at the monster’s three needle-jawed, hungry mouths, and the baleful glares above each of them. Three heads, all of them bigger than his, with necks thicker and more corded with rippling, bulging-vein-laced muscles than the strongest man he’d ever seen.

  It was a cave-sleeth, but far larger than any he’d ever seen before, a sleeth of the monstrous size the slaves of the Rift had sometimes whispered gory tales about, in snatched moments when their overseers had gathered elsewhere to confer about something.

  It moved like lightning, darting a short distance the way many hunting spiders did, and those huge pincers reached down in smooth unison to pluck up a rock—a boulder larger than Orivon—and fling it back the way the forgefist had come, to crash and roll in a booming and clacking of rock upon rock, blocking his way out.

  In the hollow where the rock had been, shattered Nifl bones shifted and slid, a deep pile of death.

  Orivon muttered another curse as he backed away. Three rows of ruthless fangs grinned at him, as the cave-sleeth followed him, advancing leisurely across the ceiling, those great pincers flexing almost playfully.

  Aside from those eyes and the throats beyond those bristling fangs—and there were three of them; there was no telling if cutting one even to blood-dripping ribbons would have any effect on the others, or slow the sleeth at all—Orivon could see nowhere that his swords could pierce and harm. Most of the legs and body were armored in the same stony casings that covered the pincers.

  He was going to die here. Soon, and not pleasantly, by the looks of his foe.

  The junior Watcher of Ouvahlor’s face was sickly pale, and he tried twice to speak through trembling lips before he managed to frame the words, “W-was that Olone? The Goddess? Or did some of the crones or Consecrated of Talonar work spells to trick Jalandral Evendoom, so that he just thought Olone was—”

  Luelldar waved a dismissive hand. “Unless she manifests rather more forcefully, it matters not. Listen to the High Lord; he has already convinced himself it was the latter, or that if it was the former, Olone won’t act against him. If he’s right in that, he has won this test. For
it seems the watching Talonar believe him, and are now obeying him where they were thinking of butchering him mere moments ago.”

  Aloun was still pale. “Do you think it was Olone?”

  The Senior Watcher of Ouvahlor regarded Aloun expressionlessly and for a long time before he nodded.

  “Yes, as it happens,” he said quietly. “I have served as a Watcher for a long time, and seen Olone’s work before. Yet my opinion, too, matters not. What does is what the Anointed of Coldheart—and the Consecrated of Olone, in Talonnorn—believe.”

  “Oh? How so?”

  Luelldar’s face went on betraying nothing as he subjected Aloun to another long stare. At his gesture, in the uncomfortable heart of that stare, the whorl between them spun itself smoothly apart, into half a dozen smaller whorls, that drifted smoothly to orbit the Senior Watcher.

  Scooping one of them into his hand, Luelldar regarded it for a moment and then looked at Aloun harder than ever. “You’ve never seen a holy war, have you?”

  Orivon tried to hurry across the cavern, seeking something high and solid he could stand on, to give battle where the cave-sleeth would have no room to hang above him. Hurrying was no easy matter; bones snapped and crumbled like tinder-dry fallen twigs around his boots, and beneath his hurrying feet coins and gems slid and slithered.

  Nifl must have died here in their dozens, been devoured, and their treasure hoarded. Not that he had much to contribute. Orivon’s right foot slipped down the length of a sword blade, plunging deep through what felt like brittle-as-eggs Nifl skulls, into more coins. The sleeth was right behind him, moving slowly with its pincers held up like a wall in front of it, almost as if it was herding him.

  Or toying with him.

  He found solid stone with one foot, stone that rose under his boots as he moved. Orivon clambered hastily up out of the shifting hoard, shedding bones. He was climbing along a rising shoulder of rock that thrust high up into the cavern; as he went, he shot glances over his shoulder at the sleeth, and tried to peer everywhere else the rest of the time. Surely there were other ways out of this cave; would the sleeth have taken as its lair something it could be trapped—or walled up—in?