by T. O. Munro
“What did you tell him, Kaylan?”
He shrugged. “I don’t know, there are only fragments of questions and answers in my mind, but there was a moment, a moment when he looked at me most oddly, something I said. And the bastard walked away more steadily than I, begging pardon for the curse, my Princess.”
“You think your clumsy drunken questions may have put him on guard?” She raised an eyebrow. “Maybe I should be the next to examine this secretive Easterner.”
He grabbed her arm at that. “No, my Princess!”
“Come Kaylan, you let me into this horrid deception and would have me sit on my hands and do nothing, waiting for where the next blow may fall.” She was angry now, frustration at the weeks of fruitless enquiry bubbling over. “Who else should do it, Kaylan? Who else should we share this burden with. Perhaps I should bring Quintala into our little secret?” The thief gave a hoarse dry swallow at the suggestion as Hepdida went on, “I think she suspects something already.”
“The half-elf knows nothing. It must stay that way, my Princess.”
“Well I can’t go on sitting idly by, Kaylan. I have a whole new set of nightmares since that night in the nursery. I must do something. Maybe if I were to speak with master Fenwell...”
His fingers pressed into her arm. “No, my Princess. Leave Fenwell to me. I will find a way. You must do nothing. Do you hear my Princess? Nothing.”
“I hear you, Kaylan,” she said flatly.
***
Kimbolt woke from another vision of the shimmering blue gate. The dream had been given added menace by the intrusive cold of the ground beneath his blanket and the freezing air which bit at his cheeks. To complement the dream’s forbidding sense of some lurking menace, he rose bleary eyed to the guttural grunts and shouts of alarmed orcs.
It took him a moment to collect his wits and align his bearings. The sky was lightening with the approach of dawn and the huge siege engines towered beside him, just waiting for the new day to be dragged into their attack positions. The bulk of Dema’s division was further up the pass, securing the ground for the artillery battery against any incursion from the human lines. Only a small guard had remained with the machines and the prisoners and it was this troop that rushed in alarm, calling for water.
As Kimbolt’s eyes adjusted to the gloom he saw there was another source of light. The still hidden Sun had lit the sky above their heads a darker blue, but lilac shadows flickered against the rocks and boulders at the pass’s edge.
“Ogre Piss!” Kimbolt exclaimed. There were flames in the heart of the great boxed counterweights. Fingers of fire flitted between the planking and caught the timber in a colourful embrace. Were it not such a disaster, the rainbow hues of the mauve and green flames would have been an entertainment to befit a Prophet’s day festival, or an orc chieftain’s wake.
An orc flung a cauldron of water at the seat of the flame, but the liquid hissed into steam before it could touch the strips of incandescent soot. Ribbons of flame swept up the structure, wrapping themselves around the pillars like deadly bindweed. Despite the orcs’ frantic cries, there was no water to be had, the puddles frozen over. Kimbolt almost wept to see his creations destroyed before a stone could be cast in anger.
“The engines are gone,” Dema was shouting behind him. “Look, don’t let the bastards who did it get away.”
In the shadows of the Northern cliff face, Kimbolt saw what the Medusa had spotted. Two figures dancing with their own cleverness and, as the first outlander ran at them he erupted into a pillar of mauve flame to match the fire which consumed the trebuchets.
“Bastard elves!” Dema was screaming.
The figures heard and ran, not up the pass towards the enemy lines, but down, hugging the cliff-face while the entire enraged camp hurried in pursuit.
Kimbolt buckled on his sword and pulled on his boots before hastening after them. The elven pair were running up a narrow gully. He had spotted it when they made camp. “They’re trapped!” he cried. “That way is a dead end.”
The pursuers surged forward at that encouragement. Kimbolt spun round looking for the Medusa’s approval.
He stopped then. On the other side of the pass, where the prisoners had been quartered, there was movement too. A thin line of them snaking towards a crack in the southern cliff face. He had checked that too, a crevice which crept and climbed and widened up into the hills. It was too narrow for them to have launched an assault through; a few Medyrsalve spears could have held back an army in that confined space. He had posted guards at the opening to ward against any incursion from Medyrsalve, but the assault had come unlooked for from the North wall of the pass. The guards were gone from their posts, drawn in pursuit of the elven saboteurs. In their absence the shadowy stream of prisoners limped towards the opening, unhindered by anything but their own infirmity.
“Orcs’ blood,” Kimbolt swore. The enemy meant not just to destroy the catapults, but to free the prisoners also. There were whoops behind him as the guards poured into the gully to the North and then a soft whoosh, a flash of purple light and a moment’s silence before the screams of orc and human split the dawn.
“Get in there you cowards,” Willem, the big outlander was shouting. “The bastards are still trapped.”
In a paralysis of priorities Kimbolt spun from North to South. “The prisoners are….” he began to shout, but then a small yellow glow of flame drew his eye. A conventional fire this, which had caught the two cartloads of rotting bodies. The flames licked around the wagons swiftly blooming into an impromptu funeral pyre for Listcairn’s dead.
In the light of this second conflagration, Kimbolt caught sight of a lean figure sprinting, long red hair streaming behind her as she ran from the new kindled fire after the fleeing prisoners. And detaching from the darkness another more familiar figure hurried in pursuit, hood back, snakes writhing. Dema was on the hunt.
***
“What kept you?” In his anxiety the Prior had forgotten the formality of ‘your Majesty.’
“Even the dead deserve some peace, Abroath,” she told him between gasps for air. “How far ahead are the prisoners?”
“Not far.” When he saw the dissatisfaction in her eyes, he added, “many of them are very ill and barely clothed. They cannot move quickly and the path is broken and uneven. ”
“You were to heal the sickest.”
“And I have your Majesty, but I cannot put food in their bellies or heal all their ailments, or give them the night vision to pick their unshod way between the stones.”
“I’m sorry, Prior, I had just hoped to be further from pursuit.”
“Did Tordil and Elyas not draw the enemy off?”
“Admirably and with Thom’s help they will make it back to Sir Ambrose to tell all of their adventure.” She leant against the rock face. “I will just feel happier when we are there ourselves.”
“The dawn is coming fast, your Majesty. There will soon be light enough for the poor wretches we have freed to see their way more clearly. The pace will quicken then.”
Niarmit nodded and then froze at the skittering of a stone behind them. Abroath heard it too. He started to speak but Niarmit pressed a finger to his lips and waved him urgently up the jagged pathway. Still he hesitated, so she pushed him in the chest until, the Prior reluctantly resumed his scrabble up the narrow channel in the rocks, chasing after his flock of freed but sickly prisoners.
Niarmit turned and drew her sword, reassured by the gleaming edge of the Vanquisher’s blade. The steeply sided sloping gorge was an admirable place to mount a defence. Two men standing shoulder to shoulder would seal it completely. By the same token, it offered no place to hide. She backed a little way up the trail to take advantage of a slightly steeper climbing curving section. It would hide her from the pursuers until the last few yards and give them the challenge of a sharp uneven slope if they tried to charge her.
She had time for a brief prayer to commend her lost soul to the Goddess, before t
he pursuers hove into sight. There was just one, but it was that one. Niarmit heard the hiss of snakes before she saw the glint of chainmail in the growing glow of morning. She hefted her sword and glanced up the tall figure of the Medusa looking no higher than Dema’s mouth. The Medusa’s lips were redly human, from toe to mouth she was no monster at all, with only the jagged scar that Rugan’s blade had scored to mar her perfect form. Niarmit had no intention of looking any higher.
“Well, well, bitch,” the abomination hailed, clapping her sword against her shield in greeting. “We meet again!”
“You must mean someone else,” Niarmit shot back. “I’ve not had the pleasure.” Talking was good, taunting was good. The more time the snake lady wasted in insults the further up the path the fleeing prisoners would get.
“You will, bitch. Let us see how good you are without your precious helm.”
It was so fast. The Medusa seemed to fly up the slope, sword swinging at speed. It must have cleared the rock walls by just fractions of an inch with Dema wielding her weapon in the confined space as freely as if they were in an open field.
Niarmit got her own blade up just in time, flat edged to block a blow so thunderous it would have shattered a weaker weapon. She pushed the Medusa back, eyes on the sword, always the sword. “That’s a pretty blade,” Dema spat. “I’ve seen one like it before. I turned its owner to stone. Prince Thren, was he anything to you?”
Niarmit ducked and drove forward with her sword. The Medusa twisted, the sword caught Dema’s shield and sliced right though it as though it were made of cloth not wood and steel. Niarmit drove on swaying to the right to avoid the squirming snakes that seemed to be hissing their dismay. The hilt of the sword slammed into the surface of the shield as Niarmit’s anger drove it home.
“Good, little girl, good,” Dema’s voice murmured in her ear. “But not good enough.”
Dema twisted her shield arm, using the leverage to prise Niarmit’s grip from the hilt of the sword. The shield with its embedded weapon swung to the left. In that moment Niarmit saw how the blade had scored its path between the Medusa’s shield arm and her twisting body. A blow no more damaging than the times Matteus had caught her wooden playsword in his armpit and tumbled to the ground in a long drawn out pantomime of death.
Niarmit could have wept. The Medusa lazily swung the shield and its implanted sword over her shoulder. There was a metallic ring of metal on stone as the precious weapon fell beyond Niarmit’s reach. She stumbled backwards up the path, watching always the point of Dema’s blade as the Medusa swung it left then right. Niarmit lunged down for the knife within her boot, but the Medusa’s mailed foot flicked out catching Niarmit a stunning blow on her jaw that had her spinning face down onto the frosty ground.
She tried to rise, but a foot in the small of her back held her down and the tip of a sword by her cheek prompted a certain stillness. “Well, well.” The hiss of the snakes grew louder as the Medusa bent closer. “It seems the future can be changed after all. Do you know who I am little girl?”
“I know you, Dema.” Niarmit spat back. “I know all your foul history.”
“I am a soldier, little girl. The greatest soldier there has ever have been.”
“You are scum, honourless mercenary scum. Selling your sword, betraying your promises. You are nothing.”
“I keep my promises, all of them and I promised myself I would kill you.”
“What of your promise to Hepdida!”
“Who?”
“A girl you promised would be safe, a girl you handed over to Grundurg knowing full well how the beast would torture and rape her.” Tears stung Niarmit’s eyes, though she could not tell if they were for her or the cousin she would never see again. “You are no soldier, you are Maelgrum’s lackey and just as evil and dishonourable as him.”
“Enough words, bitch. I give you a choice.” Something dropped on the ground by Niarmit’s face. It was a black gauze mask. The serpents’ sibilant fury was reaching a crescendo as the Medusa spoke. “You can choose how you end. By my blade or my gaze. Which is it be bitch.” The Medusa’s voice rose to a scream as she demanded, “sword or stone?”
***
It was like a cold shower for the mind. A flood of numbing images shot through his head. A smiling dark haired girl. A grinning orc. A sharp blade in the creature’s hand. Dema. Dema smiling. His friend Captain Thackery at the top of Sturmcairntor, his last gasped “why?” Tears on a young girl’s cheeks. And then there was the blue gate, the gate of fear but it disappeared. The thing he feared was not the gate. After it came Dema all hissing snakes and bloodied sword, her unshielded eyes staring into his, chilling his flesh to stone. Hepdida. The girl’s name was Hepdida. How could he have forgotten?
And there he was standing in the narrow gully. A few yards ahead stood his Mistress, sword in hand bent low over a prone figure. Her snakes hissing venom at the woman on the ground, the woman who had shouted of Hepdida and broken promises.
“Sword or Stone?” Dema screamed.
“Oh my Goddess,” Kimbolt murmured. “What have I done?”
***
Niarmit waited for the pain of the blade. She was not going to be anyone’s statue, nor was she going to give the abomination the satisfaction of an answer. She tried not to tremble but death held more fears than dying. Somewhere, the Helm was waiting to capture her soul and keep her forever separate from those she had loved, both in this world and the next. She wished, oh she so wished she had told Hepdida to never wear the Helm.
The weight on her back lessened as Dema leaned away for the killing blow. “Sword, then bitch!” she cried.
Niarmit shut her eyes and clenched her fists instinctively.
The weight was suddenly gone from her back, the freedom she needed. There was a soft thump. Niarmit rolled to one side, twisting to grab the knife from her boot and springing to her feet as Kaylan had taught her. She did not see what she expected.
A ragged outlander stood before her, a bloodied sword in his hand. The Medusa lay stretched out on the floor, fingers scrabbling feebly at the ground, her snakes lethargically wriggling, as she tried to force herself up. She coughed, without the strength to turn her head. A spray of blood speckled the ground beneath her. “You lied to me,” she wheezed with a painful exhale. “You lied to me, bitch.” And then she was still.
Niarmit swung from the Medusa’s corpse to the man who had saved her. He looked at her dumbly, the point of his sword still raised, tears running down his cheeks into his ragged beard. “I am in your debt, sir,” Niarmit said, aware that he still had a sword while she had just a knife. “What is your name?”
He shook his head and waved her back with his sword. She stepped away as he knelt beside the Medusa’s body, his eyes on Niarmit all the time.
“Who are you, sir?”
He shook his head. “I was Kimbolt,” he said. “Now I am nothing.” He flung the Medusa’s corpse on its back and gazed into Dema’s dead open eyes.
“No!” Niarmit screamed. “Don’t.”
The man did not turn to stone, instead he shivered with sobs of grief. Cautiously, Niarmit let her eyes slide over her fallen foe. There were no snakes now. Long blond hair was strewn across the ground. The eyes that stared so blankly at the weeping Kimbolt were a deep brown hue. She watched as he touched the body’s skin, ran a finger over her parted lips, traced the length of Rugan’s scar.
“She’s warm,” he cried. “Warmer than I’ve ever felt her.”
Niarmit leapt past him to retrieve her sword from Dema’s discarded shield. There were shouts and cries from along the gully, they had not long.
She tugged the mournful Kimbolt by the hand but he would not move. “Come fool, there will be others along soon.”
“I meant to die. I am meant to die,” he told her, stubbornly unmoving.
“You tried to die and you didn’t. It cannot be the Goddess’s plan for you to die, not today at least, Captain Kimbolt.”
He shook his head
. She pulled again.
“Come Kimbolt, Hepdida at least will be pleased to see you.”
His face creased in incomprehension. “She lives?”
“The girl lives. The orc is dead. The rest of the story will have to wait until we are out of this fucking gully. Now Kimbolt, for the love of the Goddess, come!”
And at last he did.
***
Hepdida had reached an understanding with the horse. All it took was enough oats and the animal would do whatever she required of it. She clicked her tongue and the cob moved a little faster, threading its way between the trees. There was a clearing ahead just as she had been given to expect. It resembled the clearing in Hershwood so long ago and far away where she had first told Niarmit and the elves her tale. There was even a twisted tree at its centre.
She slipped, more or less gracefully, from the saddle and looped the cob’s reins over a low branch. He nuzzled at her hip for the purse in which she kept the oats. A handful seemed to calm him, for the moment at least. She hurried to the centre of the clearing crossing grass made crisp with the morning frost.
A protruding root twisting out of the ground afforded her a dry seat where she could draw her knees up to her chest. The knife was in her sleeve in case she should need have need of it. Kaylan made her carry it always. She hoped she would not have to wait long. The morning was cold and she felt the chill more sharply in the marks that Grundurg had left.
She pulled the crumpled note from her purse. It had been beneath her pillow, left after her bed had been made that morning. She read it again, a simple servant scrawl, not unlike her own writing. ‘I saw who went to the nursery the nite the elf bitch was killed. It wasn’t your friend done it. I’m scared. Meet me at the great oak an hour after sun up. Come alone or I run.’ She looked around, trying to remember the faces of the many servants who had attended on them since they had arrived. Rugan seemed to maintain a constant rotation of maids and footmen to his guests, wary of any of them forming any bond with the outsiders. But one of them it seemed had done so, reaching out to Hepdida.