The Warslayer

by Edghill, Rosemary

  On the other side of the cavern there was sudden light as Belegir opened the lantern and the candle's flame rushed into light once more.

  "Slayer?" he said, sounding much like any man awakened abruptly by a bellowing female.

  "Okay. S'okay. I had a dream, I reckon." She rubbed her eyes, testing the memory of the dream the way you might probe a sore tooth. She'd dreamed she was standing on a dinner plate in the middle of the universe, while some invisible ABC Received type told her that the whole human race was going to live or die based on what she did here on the windy plains of Serenthodial.

  Balls.

  Just what had been in that tea she'd drunk last night, anyway? She sighed and stretched, trying to work out the kinks that came of sleeping rough, from her body if not from her mind.

  "I, too, dreamed." Belegir's voice was low. "And lo, it is morning." From the sound of things, he hadn't had a much better time of it than she had.

  She kilted her blanket carefully around her waist, grabbed her jeans, and groped to her feet, feeling every muscle cry out in protest. Feeling her way over to the door, she pushed it open. It swung outward, letting the pale rosy illumination of the corridor fill the room. She ducked through the doorway and stepped down into the corridor. The smooth stone was cold beneath her bare feet. She stepped out of Belegir's line of sight and dropped the blanket, stepping into her jeans and zipping them up tight. Dressed, or at least covered, she pulled off the sweatshirt and knotted it around her waist, then began her usual morning warmup: a series of kicks, stretches, and backbends, all the while trying to get her mind to settle as well.

  Kick. Kick. Step. Lunge. Turn. Bend. Her sunburn reminded her of its presence every time she flexed.

  Her dream couldn't have been a true dream. Not the way Belegir understood the notion. In the first place, it was too stupid.

  Kick. Bend. Turn. Twist. Reach. Twist. Bend. Kick.

  In the second place, it was about Earth, and it was the Allimir who were the ones who were in trouble.

  Kick. Turn. Better now. She was feeling warmed up. She fell slowly forward onto her hands, then up into a handstand—slow, still, slow—then over into a slow backflip and up. She felt a little residual stiffness, but not too much, and a longer workout should eliminate that as well.

  As for the dream, it was either a really compelling nightmare, a drug-induced hallucination (just what had been in that nightcap Belegir had so thoughtfully brewed?), or an attempt of the Warmother to undermine her confidence, Glory was almost sure. Because it just didn't make sense that the fate of Earth should rest on something Glory did here, particularly when she wasn't quite sure what that might be. You couldn't pass a test when you didn't know what the test was.

  Right?

  Right.

  Therefore, there was no test.

  She was about ready to go back inside when Belegir came out, the rest of his belongings in a neat bundle.

  "We can make tea at the Pilgrim's Fountain," he said, sounding like he was hedging his bets somehow. "And make the animals ready for the journey home."

  "Sure," Glory said dubiously. She'd thought there'd be more to this Oracle business than this—like maybe some answers—but it didn't seem like there were going to be any. And—it belatedly occurred to Glory—she was still here.

  She didn't know what that meant, and from his face, Belegir was in no mood to be asked. She went back inside the wellspring chamber. Her things were waiting where she'd left them, but she really couldn't face the thought of getting back into the armor right now. Not without breakfast, or some of that ale that Belegir had mentioned yesterday. She shrugged, and spread out the blanket she was carrying. With a few deft motions, she folded boots, corset, bracers, slops, and sword into the blanket and rolled it up tight. It would make an awkward bundle, but not as bad as wearing it. When she'd made as neat a bundle as she could manage, she knelt by the oracular pool and quickly washed her face. She felt a faint twinge of desecration at doing so, but she really wanted to get the last of the makeup off from last night and she still felt slightly cheated by the bizarre nature of her dream. Scrubbing her face dry on her T-shirt, she scooped up several palmsful of the icy water, drank, and got to her feet. She tucked Gordon carefully into her tote-bag this time, and slung it across her shoulder before picking up her bundle. Her sneakers were in her bag, but she decided not to bother with them; the temple floor was as smooth as linoleum from here to the fountain.

  Belegir was waiting patiently for her outside. She didn't know what he'd dreamed, but whatever it was, it seemed he'd taken it to heart. The hopeful optimism of yesterday was gone. Belegir had the look now of a man doing nothing but going through the motions. She guessed neither of them had dreamed anything particularly useful.

  Her stomach rumbled, reminding her to worry about that after breakfast. She padded after Belegir in silence, back through the jeweled labyrinth that was the Oracle of Erchane.

  But when they came out on the portico at the top of the steps in the large open cavern, there were no animals gathered around the fountain. Not Kurfan. Not the three ponies. If not for the piles of droppings, and the bundles of her and Belegir's remaining provisions, there'd be no sign the animals ever had been here, either.

  "This is bad," Glory said aloud. Well-worked animals simply didn't go for a wander in the middle of the night, not with water and feed available—and wasn't Kurfan's job to keep the beasts from straying?

  "But what can have happened?" Belegir asked blankly.

  "Trouble happened," Glory said patiently. Her hard-won American accent welled up through her voice like underground water through the rock, turning it hard and edgy. Trouble. And since that was the case, the worst thing they could do was go charging right off into it. "So be a good mage and run and get breakfast started while I get dressed. I'm not chasing horses on an empty stomach."

  Belegir stared at her for a moment and began to shuffle slowly down the stairs. Glory retreated behind the pillars to strip.

  She wasn't really thinking past the moment, not in so many words, precisely, but if she had been, she would have been thinking about getting the Allimir artisans to run her up a slightly more practical set of armor. Something she could still do all her backflips and walkovers in, and that might have a fighting chance of . . . something . . . but there her imagination would have faltered, because she wasn't quite sure what sort of problem she was facing, beyond the obvious (and now apparently obsolete) one of a day's horseback ride in a corset and black leather hot-pants and thigh-high boots.

  So far, she had addressed the problems as they had been presented to her, and not given up. There wasn't much more than that she could do. She knew what her ultimate goal must be, but did not have even the faintest notion of how to accomplish it, or if that accomplishment were even possible. Any time she tried to step back mentally and look at the larger picture, she simply found it impossible. The situation she was in was too stupefyingly improbable to deal with in any other fashion than one step at a time.

  So she would. First, she'd get dressed. Slops and corset, boots and bracers, a big sword and a heavy layer of makeup, and Vixen the Slayer was ready to ride again. She tucked her civilian clothes away in her bag, tucked Gordon carefully into the top, and skipped down the steps, braid bouncing against her back.

  Belegir was waiting for the tea to boil. Without comment, he handed her a large leather mug. Without comment, Glory drained it, letting the thick chewy high-octane Allimir ale blow away the last of the cobwebs. When the mug was empty she scooped it full again from the fountain and carried that over to sit beside Belegir.

  "So. What d'you reckon happened to the brumbies?" she asked companionably.

  "I don't know," Belegir said miserably.

  "Your world," Glory pointed out with judicious fair-mindedness. "What didn't happen to them?"

  Belegir sighed, as though he were sick of answering stupid questions but couldn't think of a polite way out of it. "They did not wander further into the
temple. They did not simply vanish. They did not wander back out into the forest of their own will and choice."

  "And nothing bad came in and took them, because it couldn't," Glory said. "And it wasn't just some other band of Allimir, because why would they take the animals and leave the stuff?"

  Belegir regarded her with grudging admiration. "And so it is something else. What?"

  "We go find out." She took a sip of her water and wished for a hot breakfast, but at least there was breakfast—stale bread and apples and some dried fruit, but it filled the belly. From the look of things, they'd better find their way back to the vardos pretty soon though, or one of the two of them was going to have to develop hunting skills.

  Belegir packed up everything once breakfast was done and looked at Glory. He was waiting for her to make a decision, she realized, and oddly enough, for once the thought didn't frighten her into a blue fit.

  "We leave all this stuff here. Either we can come back for it, or we can't," she said with a fatalistic shrug. "Depends on what's out there."

  Belegir nodded, grimly. She tucked her bag beside his baskets, and the two of them walked out of the Oracle's temple.

  Almost immediately she could see the speck of daylight that indicated the cave entrance. The passage was empty. There was no sign of the animals. The sugar-fine sand underfoot was disturbed, but it didn't hold tracks well enough to tell her if something other than three ponies and a dog had crossed it recently.

  This time she wasn't distracted by the murals and their teasing promise of answers to the Allimir riddle. There wouldn't be any more answer there today than there had been last night, only more questions. She concentrated on walking the stiffness out of her legs and back that had come from a long day's ride and a night of sleeping hard, stopping every ten minutes or so for some deep bends and stretches. Fortunately, the Vixen suit had always been less armor than costume, cut and gusseted to allow her the gymnastic moves that passed for characterization.

  The corridor was shorter than she remembered it being. As the two of them got closer to daylight, everything about the Oracle's temple seemed to recede into the unreality of a dream, as if it hadn't quite happened, and only this was real. Glory was surprised to see that it was only an hour or so past dawn. The day seemed as if it had already been so full that it should be later than that.

  She stepped cautiously out of the cave, Belegir close behind her. For a moment she saw nothing, then a flurry of movement at the foot of the steep spur-track they'd climbed last night in the dark caught her eye. Fat carrion-birds, disturbed by her sudden appearance, flapped awkwardly away from their feast, only to waddle back to it when she made no further move.

  Something out there was dead, and that needed investigating.

  "Stay here," Glory said in a low voice. She drew her sword.

  Getting down the path was a more difficult proposition than getting up it had been, and she made it to the bottom in a controlled slide. Waving her sword like a giant steel flyswatter, she shooed the big black birds away from the body. They went, grudgingly, swearing and grumbling, eager to return.

  It was—it had been—a dog.

  Something had torn off its head.

  Glory felt foolish angry tears prickle in the back of her eyes and fiercely willed them away. Not here. Not now. She prodded the headless body with the tip of her sword, trying to figure out what this meant. The beastie hadn't died of natural causes, or even normal ones, lacking a head as it did, unless there was something in these woods big enough to bite it off, and nothing like that had figured in Belegir's catalogue of predators of the night before. Was this Kurfan? There wasn't enough of the body left to be sure. The dirt was churned up, the earth scored by claws. She looked around, slowly, and barely choked back a scream.

  It had been Kurfan. The thing that had torn the dog's head off had wedged it onto the stump of a branch. Birds had pecked out his eyes, and insects were swarming all over the head, blackening the dangling pink tongue and making the pale fur shimmer with their crawling.

  Something that thought had done this. Something with hands.

  She turned away and all of her breakfast came boiling up from her stomach in a rush. She bent forward and threw up.

  "Slayer!"

  Belegir's terrified shout interrupted her misery. Coughing and spitting, she turned around, trying not to see the impaled head as she did.

  Something had come out of the forest. A monster-thing, covered in black fur but wearing clothes; its back hunched as if it were an effort for it to stand upright. It looked from Glory to Belegir, and in that flat amber gaze she caught the echo of the black wolf-dog's assessment in the village yesterday: is this prey? Is this FOOD?

  And she knew what Kurfan had died trying to kill.

  It was poised halfway between her and Belegir. She raised her sword. But it ignored her, turning toward Belegir, stalking him like a cat.

  "Belegir—RUN!" she bawled at the top of her lungs.

  But Belegir stood frozen. From fear, or because he would not lead the monster into the Oracle's temple, Glory didn't know. She only knew she had to get to Belegir before the monster did.

  She reached the top of the spur-trail about the time the monster did. It was huge—a good foot taller than she was, outweighing her by at least twenty stone.

  "Back off!" Glory shouted, and swung her sword as hard as she could. The flat of the blade connected with the monster's stomach with a resounding slap, and it backed up in surprise, giving her the space to step in front of it.

  It bared its teeth and growled, releasing a scent like ancient sun-ripened garbage, and Glory realized with a thrill of frightened self-preservation that it wasn't going to back off, not for long. This wasn't something she could rout as easily as she could a flock of carrion-crows. She was going to have to kill it.

  And there was no script in place that awarded her a guaranteed and bloodless victory.

  It swatted at her and she ducked, but she wasn't sure of the countermove. This fight hadn't been choreographed in advance, so if the monster left her an opening, she didn't know how to take it. She was fighting on a steep hillside covered with slippery pine needles, and if she tried to decoy the monster to a better killing ground, there was no guarantee it would follow. It wanted Belegir more than it wanted her, or at least it seemed to.

  Then she stopped thinking about things that didn't immediately matter, because it struck her a glancing blow on the shoulder, leaving deep bruising gouges down her left arm and refining all her desires down to one: to kill this thing the way it'd killed her dog.

  It wasn't nearly that easy. But she did her very best. She was actually fairly good with a broadsword—and it was a real sword, forged and tempered—for the show she'd needed to be able to lift it and swing it with ease, so Bruce had taught her some katas, or whatever they were called. She knew the moves.

  But the sword wasn't sharp. Why should it be, when it would never have to cut anything? And strong enough to put on a show was a far piece from being strong enough to do lethal damage with a dull piece of metal. She hurt the monster, bloodied it, did a certain amount of damage.

  But not enough—and it didn't take the creature long to realize that she couldn't. It reached out, grabbing her blade in one enormous hand and squeezing until its own blood flowed between its fingers. Immobilizing the blade.

  And then it hit her with its other hand.

  She didn't lose consciousness. She felt a jarring shock—no pain, not then—and a sort of discontinuity, a sense of distraction as she rolled down the hillside and crashed to the bottom, lying stunned for a moment, unable to remember who she was and what she'd been doing a moment before. There was a ringing in her ears, and beyond it she could hear nothing.

  When she tried to get to her feet she fell, and so she crawled, knowing she had to be somewhere other than where she was. A rush of heat roared through her body, centered in her face. Fresh sweat oozed suddenly from her skin, running into her eyes, and then the pain
came, pounding hotly in time with her heartbeat, but she was already climbing back up the side of the hill.

  The monster was leaning over Belegir. Her sword was lying on the ground behind it, the monster's bloody hand-print halfway up the blade.

  She picked it up. She didn't think. She stepped back and took a stance, swinging the blade back over her shoulder. It wasn't a swordsman's stance, but something from the long ago summers of her life. And then she brought her bat forward, using the edge, not the flat, driving an imaginary ball past the wicket, driving the thin edge of metal into the vulnerable place where the skull met the spine in anything that walked upright, using all her anger, all her fear.

  There was a crunch.

  In the end, the sword in her hands was no more and no less than a long steel club. And that was enough.

  The monster fell forward onto Belegir. Glory dropped the sword and grabbed the creature, dragging it off. The fur against her fingers was greasy and coarse, undeniably the creature's hairy skin, and revulsion filled her. Pain thrilled through her arm and back as though there were wires under her skin and someone was pulling on them. The monster's yellow eyes were wide and fixed, already starting to take on the glassy crystalline cast of death. She'd killed it, and with that certainty she was filled with a strange mixture of dread and glee.

  She turned to Belegir and forgot those feelings utterly.

  He was covered in blood. His face was bruised and torn, his robes ripped open down the front. There were deep claw-marks down his chest, and his throat was bruised. But he was breathing.

  Glory moaned, deep in her throat. She knelt beside him. What should she do? What would Vixen do?

  No. That wasn't any help. What would Sister Bernadette do?

  Sister B would use her nursing skills to take care of the wounded, then use her detective skills to find out who'd attacked them, then explain everything to Vixen so the viewers would understand it.