Dark Vengeance

by Ed Greenwood

  Their eyes met.

  “You seem astonished to see me,” she called cheerfully. “Is it so surprising to see a Nifl in the very cavern of her city?”

  Orivon lunged forward, ducking under the sweeping sword of an Ouvahlan, and drove the tip of his own blade into that warblade’s throat. Even before the blood started to fountain, he’d thrust his other blade into the throat of the Ouvahlan who’d fallen underfoot. Snatching up Taerune’s fallen sword, he turned and tossed it back to her, flipping it so that it spun through the air and bit deeply into the back of an Ouvahlan corpse lying right in front of her, quivering upright for her to easily snatch.

  “I . . .” He groped for words, not making the mistake of stopping fighting this time. Still burning-eyed, the Ouvahlans were beginning to falter; was the magic that was driving them starting to fade?

  “I did not think I would see you again,” Orivon finally said, between clanging sword blows. “Alive.”

  Taerune did not seem pleased.

  “Such confidence,” she called scornfully. “And after so many Nifl died so that you could return to your precious Blindingbright, you stand here in Talonnorn again? Have Hairy Ones taken to raiding Nifl cities, now?”

  “Something like that,” Orivon snapped as a wave of Ouvahlans charged forward from behind the ones he was killing. “Something like that.”

  Then the Ouvahlans were surging forward on all sides, in a wave of murderous Nifl, and Orivon and Taerune were too busy frantically hacking, ducking, parrying, and dancing about to say anything at all.

  The forgefist thought hazily that if he could get back to Taerune and they could make a stand back to back, that would be one less direction he’d have to defend in, so that was the direction he tried to wade in, slipping and sliding on bodies as Ouvahlans raged around him, seeking to turn him into one more corpse underfoot.

  He wasn’t going to make it.

  There were just too many blades coming at him, too many—

  The bracer on his arm quivered, and six or seven bright tongues of flame lashed out, at as many Ouvahlan faces. Their owners cried out in startled pain, blades going wide or pulling back entirely—and the bracer quivered again.

  For Talonnorn! Yathla Evendoom cried, in Orivon’s head. For Evendoom! Get to her, man! Get to her!

  More fire lashed out in front of Orivon, and there was room for him to run. Run he did, barely noticing when the bracer quivered again and fire arced around behind him, to immolate a Nifl who was racing after him, and gathering for a spring and pounce. That Ouvahlan dropped his dagger and fell, howling—and Orivon raced on, bursting through a ring of Ouvahlans who’d just slain two Ravagers and were pressing in around Taerune. Flames snarled and spat from the forgefist’s bracer as he came, fire that hurled back startled Ouvahlans and gave Orivon the moments and space he needed to reach Taerune’s side.

  As he did so, sliding on fallen blades and blood, the bracer on his arm sighed and started to crumble.

  Make me proud, human! Orivon Firefist, be my champion! Fight for Yathla Evendoom!

  A sudden ring of fire encircled Orivon’s arm, blackened metal falling away from him like dust, and then roared away into the heart of the Ouvahlans—and burst, hurling burning bodies in all directions.

  Orivon flung himself between Taerune and the blast, to shield her, and for a moment it seemed like she might collapse against him. She sighed, hunched down—and then shook her head, flung it up briskly, and announced, “We’re not done yet. There are plenty of Ouvahlans left still, to—”

  “Is someone going to tell me,” Bloodblade shouted to them then, across the fray, “why we seem to be defending Talonnorn against Ouvahlor? Surely we can just fight our way to the side and let them swarm the city?”

  Orivon frowned as he met the blade of the foremost advancing Ouvahlan, struck it aside, and then booted the Nifl, sending him staggering into the sharp embrace of Taerune’s blade. Reaching for the next Ouvahlan as the outcast Nifl lady beside him slew the first, he called back, “You’re right, Ravager. As usual. Shall we take ourselves yonder, toward the cavern wall?”

  “Yes!” Bloodblade roared enthusiastically, and waved his hands at the Ravagers around him, to signal such a retreat.

  Trying to do the same with the slaves, Orivon caught sight of a slender Nifl-she at the rear of the Ouvahlans—a she who strode about with the air of command, and who was, just now, glaring at Taerune as if her eyes could deal painful and immediate death.

  “Is that their commander?”

  Taerune thrust the blade he’d fashioned to replace her hand into another Ouvahlan throat, peered at the glaring Ouvahlan, and replied, “Could well be. That’s a priestess, or I’m a sleeth!”

  Yet the Ouvahlans were already scrambling away from the Hairy Ones and Ravagers who were slaughtering them with such ease, and shouting in relief and triumph. Bursting past the Ravagers and freed human slaves as if they feared this sudden path to Talonnorn would be snatched away from them if they tarried, they started running across the cavern toward the burning city.

  The glaring female hesitated, and then trotted with them, as if reluctantly deciding she dared not tarry to fight the Ravagers and humans alone.

  “Spread out,” Bloodblade commanded hurriedly, eyeing the Ouvahlan as she turned to glare at them all again. “That one can hurl spells! Spread out, so she has no clear foe to smite!”

  “Gethkyl,” Taerune snapped at a nearby Ravager Nifl, “watch yon priestess, and call out if you see her turn back, or use magic to disappear. We don’t want her back on that ledge—or anywhere else—readying magic against us!”

  “She has disappeared already,” Gethkyl replied grimly.

  The cellar rocked and shuddered a second time, a deep, rolling boom that sent ceiling slabs tumbling, dust showering down, and Nifl staggering.

  “What traitor of a spellrobe is hurling blasting spells?” Jalandral snapped, eyes blazing. “Is any part of the Eventowers still standing?”

  The first priestess to finish a spell looked up at him with eyes that were spilling tears, and hissed, “This is no traitor spellrobe of Talonnorn, but a stranger—just one!—who is blasting down the towers that hold any Talonar spellrobe who dares to cast spells at him! He is the source of the flames!”

  Jalandral sneered. “Come, come! One spellrobe is doing all this?”

  There came another thunderous tremor then, followed by a crash that drowned out the tearful “Yes, but we know not who” replies of several Consecrated.

  “Yes,” one of the Araed merchants said firmly to Jalandral, pointing to the fading, sinking scrying eye one of the priestesses had conjured, “one spellrobe—and I know him. I have been on many caravans faring to and from Ouvahlor, and that is Klarandarr. Said by many to be the most powerful spellrobe ever.”

  “We are doomed,” the old merchant Ondrar decreed, and there was general grim agreement—except from the caravan merchant, who took a step toward Jalandral.

  “Unless our High Lord has hidden away any clever and ready stratagems, or magical tricks of the much-vaunted Houses of Talonnorn? You have another Hunt lurking up your backside, perhaps?”

  “No,” Jalandral snarled at him, “just magic items dozens of us would have to give our lives wielding. Klarandarr can slay most of us as we run to just try to get to the right places to blast him—while he uses magic to take himself from here to there to here again, at will. We . . .”

  Then his face changed. “Another Hunt!” he repeated fiercely.

  “You have another Hunt?” Ondrar asked, in disbelief. “How long were you preparing to seize pow—”

  Jalandral sprang across the room, took him by the arms, and shook him. “The dung-worms! We can do as Ouvahlor did; that much the crones and priestesses can do for us! We can bury him in dung-worms!”

  He waved at the merchants, and then pointed at the priestesses. “Free them, and bring them!”

  Wary eyebrows arched. “Where?”

  “To find the
crone Klaerra Evendoom,” Jalandral snapped. “The spell that masters many worms at once requires the caster’s life—and she owes me hers, thrice over and more!”

  Suddenly, everyone was on the move, and the cellar emptied in the space of two swift breaths—except for Ondrar, the eldest merchant of the Araed, who stared at the High Lord’s back as it dwindled in Jalandral’s haste to be elsewhere, and murmured, “Does she feel that way? I wonder. And who considers that you owe them your life, Jalandral O Most High Lord Evendoom? Thrice over and more?”

  20

  No One Lives Forever

  So I said to him

  Do it if you must

  And I will be there with my sword

  For we are nothing

  If we have no principles

  And no one lives forever.

  —legendary Talonar saying,

  attributed to Sandral Evendoom

  They stood watching Talonnorn burn.

  A short, slender tower somewhere in the holdings of House Oszrim shivered and then collapsed, slumping suddenly out of view, and hurling up a storm of sparks and embers. Nifl were running, now, across the open cavern floor, heading away from the city in any direction except the one where they were standing. The one from which the ragged remnants of an Ouvahlan army were charging.

  “So,” Bloodblade asked the outcast Nifl lady beside him softly, the flickering flames painting his face with bright reflections, “dare we go in to seek plunder, or tarry here and wait for a lot more Nifl to slay each other?”

  Taerune saw the freed human slaves go pale and thin-lipped, and raise the weapons they’d seized from the fallen. They feared being made to go back into Talonnorn more than death—and she did not want to see the outnumbered House Dounlar warblades and Ravagers face so many desperate foes, even if they were ill-treated, untrained-for-war Hairy Ones.

  “For now,” she announced, raising her voice just enough to be heard clearly, “we draw back.”

  Then, quite deliberately, she turned her back on the humans, to say to the Ravagers and Dounlar Nifl, “These Hairy Ones desire to get well away from here, not return to the embrace of those who enslaved them.”

  A long, loud rumble made them all look again at Talonnorn; several towers were collapsing, with a sort of slow inevitability, one crashing into the next and bearing all down into a flood of tumbling stone.

  “With everything burning,” Taerune added, “the fighting will be wild and everywhere. There will be much butchery.” She pointed at the cavern mouth they’d burst out of, earlier. “For now, we go back into the Outcaverns, to wait and watch. There will be a better time to return to Talonnorn.”

  “You go back,” Orivon said grimly. “I’m going in.”

  Silently, many of the surviving Dounlar warblades, bloody swords in hand, walked over to stand with him.

  Taerune frowned. “Why? Man, are you still hungry for our blood?”

  The forgefist shook his head.

  “I came back down into the Dark to recover four children—human younglings—who were taken by Oondaunt raiders not long ago. If they yet live, they are somewhere in there.” He waved at the burning city.

  “Young? If they live, they’ll be picking yeldeth, in the caverns,” Taerune said grimly. “If they live.”

  “And where are those caverns?”

  “Beneath our feet—and under all this rock you see, from here all the way back to the towers,” she replied. “Yet the ways into them are hard to find; they are guarded, and in the cellars of the great Houses. Food is power.” Silence fell, and the forgefist and the Nifl-she stared at each other, not speaking, for what seemed a long, long time—until another distant tower fell, shattering all silence.

  “Lady Evendoom,” Orivon said quietly, then, “I don’t even know which of the towers on the far side of the city belong to Oondaunt. I need you.”

  His onetime tormentor stared at him, and slowly and silently walked over to stand at his side.

  It was Bloodblade’s turn to frown. “Taerune?”

  Taerune lifted her chin and gave him a steady stare. “Those who would tarry are yours to command now,” she told him. “I have—”

  She patted her forearm, where it became a blade, and then used that blade to point at Orivon. “—something I must do. A debt I must pay.”

  The House Dounlar Nifl drew back from them both, in the same silence they’d walked to them.

  Garlane Dounlar, who was bleeding freely from a sword slash across his cheek, gave them both a glare and said coldly, “Rescuing Hairy Ones defends Talonnorn not at all.”

  “I am thinking,” Orivon told him softly, with a grin that promised much death, and soon, “that there will be many Ouvahlans between here and the yeldeth caverns that our blades will have to deal with. And Nifl beyond them who stand with whoever cast you out.”

  “Jalandral,” Barrandar Dounlar snarled. “Jalandral Evendoom, who calls himself High Lord of Talonnorn now.”

  Orivon’s eyes blazed up in anger. “Then your fight is mine, too. My vengeance against the sister is done if she aids me in this; my vengeance against her brother demands his death.”

  “As it happens, I have a score to settle with darling Dral, too,” Taerune hissed angrily. “Let’s be about this!”

  · · ·

  It was unseemly to hurry in Coldheart, but Tariskra was too worried to care overmuch about “unseemly” just now. She bowed her way past the two senior Anointed who guarded the way into the holy inner chamber, and hastened to report to Revered Mother Lolonmae.

  Who lay embracing a great rearing tongue of the Ever-Ice that was jet black and yet seemed full of trapped stars—a wonder that Tariskra would ordinarily have fallen on her knees before, to whisper prayers as she studied it intently. Lolonmae was bared to the cold, as usual, and holy Meltwater was running from under her body, and being collecting in vessels by the silently kneeling priestesses clustered all around the Ever-Ice.

  “Tariskra, you are more than uneasy,” the young, slender Revered Mother observed. “Speak freely; why?”

  “Ah—uh—Revered Mother, my magic . . . my touch to the mind of Exalted Daughter Semmeira has been broken! Several times I’ve tried to restore it, taking great care over the castings and in the end using some of the holy water of the Ice. Failure, always failure. I—I tried another spell, and Lolon—ah, Revered Mother!—I found that my spells are now being deliberately blocked!”

  “Now why would that be? I wonder,” Lolonmae asked, sounding almost amused.

  Twisting away from the Ice to look over one shoulder at the priestesses bearing the holy Melt away, she commanded, “Set your vessels down, all of you, and work a magic together. All of you are to try to contact the mind of Exalted Daughter of the Ice Semmeira—right now.”

  She turned back to Tariskra. “Not you,” she added. “You shall go now to the Watchers, and bring the Senior Watcher here to hear our will. If we are unable to see Semmeira’s mind, that does not mean we should be blind as to her doings; the Watchers’ whorls will show us what befalls in Talonnorn.”

  Tariskra bowed in deep reverence, and hurried to obey.

  She was well away from that chamber, down one passage and then another, when she realized what had struck her most about the Revered Mother’s voice, upon hearing her news.

  It wasn’t that Lolonmae had sounded amused—it was that she hadn’t sounded surprised.

  The younger crone balled her elegant fingers together into shaking fists and burst out, “Who is he?”

  The two crones stood on a high balcony in Talonnorn, watching not the dying flames—now noticeably fewer and more feeble, fading as swiftly and as unheralded as they’d come—but a whorl of their own conjuring, that hovered horizontally in the air by their ankles.

  They were watching a lone tall, robed stranger striding through the heart of Talonnorn, going from one great tower to another, always heading for the grandest structures. He slew all who sought to stop or harm him, again and again blasting su
ch Talonar with contemptuous ease.

  “Does it matter?” the older crone replied balefully. “We can see what he’s doing—seeking magic, everywhere it’s most likely to be had, and regardless of how it’s defended.”

  They had just seen seven House spellrobes work their mightiest spells in unison, to bring their own tower down, destroying it just to try to kill the stranger while he was inside. They had also seen that Nifl, who hurled magic so much more powerful than theirs, emerge unscathed from the rubble, in shieldings of his own magical making—and slaughter the seven spellrobes without even slowing his steady walk toward the next grand tower.

  “C-could this be the one they call Klarandarr?”

  The older crone’s lip curled. “Klarandarr is a myth. A tale woven by Ouvahlor to keep the more ambitious of our own House heirs and spellrobes from destroying that city—as they should have destroyed it long ago. Klarandarr—”

  “What’s that?” The younger crone pointed at a sudden white flare of light, a pulse that shone brightly and then faded just as quickly as it had come, leaving . . . the hands of the stranger empty.

  “Sending his loot home,” the older crone snorted. “He was carrying too much magic to keep from staggering, so he rid himself of his load. So now he can assault the Eventowers in untrammeled comfort.” She leaned forward, sounding very satisfied. “So now we shall see some sights. Evendoom humbled, or yon stranger destroyed—or both.”

  Flashes of spell-light promptly appeared in the windows of the Evendoom gate-spires, and muffled explosions could be heard. House Evendoom, it seemed, stood not unguarded.

  “How can one man . . .”

  The younger crone’s fearful whisper trailed away as the greatest tower of the sprawling and interconnected Evendoom fortress was suddenly shattered from within, as if a great but unseen fist had punched upward from its heart. Shards of stone hurtled in all directions, pattering or crashing down all over Talonnorn—and that great domed tower fell in on itself, in a titanic collapse that shook the cavern, hurled up a huge cloud of blinding dust, and caused nearby towers to crack and topple. A great cloud of dust blossomed in the wake of their falling, amid rumblings . . . and when that deep tumult and noise faded, the dust rose still, expanding in eerie silence.