The Warslayer

by Edghill, Rosemary

  Dylan fired again. A piece of the wall dissolved into a spray of sparkling chips beside her head, and she realized that the roaring in her ears had been replaced by the angry shouts of a mob, not an audience. She darted a quick glance across the room. With Charane gone, her pet mercenaries were off the leash. They were on their feet, reaching for their weapons, moving in all directions. Some—not all—were heading this way.

  Glory reached the end of the terrace. Dylan was behind her, ready to fire again. There was no place to go but down, but the first of the villains were already at the foot of the steps. She heard a crash, and saw one of the tables go over, trapping struggling bodies beneath it. She heard screams soaring above the shouts, and the high pure clang of steel.

  Dylan fired three shots in quick succession. He was rapidly losing his gun-shyness, though fortunately his aim hadn't yet improved. How many rounds did that make?

  The terrace directly below was still clear. It was an eight-foot drop. Glory turned away from the stairs and jumped.

  They hated having her do her own stunts on TITAoVtS, because if she got hurt, production stopped dead, but in fact she was damned good at it, and the stuntpeople had taught her a few helpful tricks. She held the sword well out from her body and threw herself into a forward somersault, landing on her feet, crouching to absorb the impact—just like the vaulting horse, that—and backing up quickly against the wall. If Dylan was as rattled as she was, it might take him a second or so to figure out where she'd gone.

  The noise was deafening, and the floor beneath her feet shook. She looked out over the room, catching her breath and trying to think of what to do next. What had been orderly moments before was . . .

  There really were no words.

  As if Charane's presence had been the only thing keeping them in order, her creatures had turned on each other. If they'd all been trying to get to the High Table, she, Dylan, and Ivradan would be dead now, but they weren't even that orderly.

  Some were trying to get out, fighting their way up the long steep staircase to the only door they could see. The chamber might have been designed to trigger a bloodbath, and with a distant clinical thrill of horror, Glory wondered if it had been. The ones who had already gotten out were trying to push the doors shut to keep the others inside (why?), but the doors were jammed open by the fallen bodies of the dead and dying. Others were simply fighting, as if for the sheer joy of it, slowing those who were bold enough to rush the High Table.

  There was blood everywhere. A swampy smell, sulphurous and meaty, rose up from the floor below. The liquid on the floor—wine and blood and ichor commingled—stood in pools. More trickled down the edges of the white stairs in absurdly cheerful candy stripes. Men and creatures slipped in it, and fell, and died, and all for no reason that she knew. It was bedlam, this chamber a proving ground designed by a master sadist, being put to its intended use.

  She heard screaming that brought tears to her eyes, and turned her head resolutely away from the direction of the sound. She would not look.

  Ivradan. She had to get to Ivradan.

  She forced herself to shut out the distractions, to focus, to move, clutching the sword so hard her fingers hurt. She had no doubt now that she could use it on anything that got in her way. She was terrified, and filled with a cold unemotional purpose all at the same time. Here, in this room, was the reason Cinnas had chained the Warmother.

  The stone at her feet exploded in a shower of chips. She looked up. Dylan was standing at the edge of the terrace above.

  "It never runs out of bullets," he shouted happily. She could barely make out the words. He aimed out at the crowd and pulled the trigger half a dozen times, with the relieved look of one who knows that nothing matters because this is all a dream. Then he pointed the gun at her again.

  "Dylan—no! Don't do what she wants!" Glory shouted, though she knew it was useless. He probably couldn't even hear her. And he'd already made up his mind.

  The javelin caught him neatly in the chest, just below the breastbone. It appeared as if it had suddenly teleported there. To throw a javelin twenty feet into the air with enough force that it will pierce a human body upon its arrival is no small matter; someone down there was skilled. There was no blood; the javelin plugged Dylan as neatly as a cork in a bottle.

  Dylan stared down at it; Glory saw him blink in surprise. He reached up to it with the hand that held the gun, but never completed the gesture. He went limp, collapsing at the knees and falling forward to land at Glory's feet. The impact drove the shaft through his body in a red rush. It wavered, teetering upright, tapping out sketchy wet hieroglyphs against the pristine wall behind him.

  Numbly, Glory bent down to pick up the pistol. She was still clutching the sword in her right hand, precious little use though it had been to her so far. At last she turned and looked in the direction from which the javelin had come.

  Standing in the middle of the floor, surrounded by her warriors, was one of the tall grey-eyed Amazons, a still point in the chaos that surrounded her. She held another of the slender throwing spears in her hand. The woman was bloody to the knees; even the edge of her short fringed tunic was red. For a moment their eyes met.

  Not knowing why she did it—it seemed somehow fitting—Glory tossed the gun down to the woman. The Amazon queen caught it easily and stared at it curiously, then looked back at Glory. Glory pantomimed squeezing a trigger. The woman nodded, smiling grimly, and turned away, raising the gun.

  Glory turned back to the wall, the moment already forgotten. If this was shock, it was a damned useful invention, a small part of her mind said perkily. She had to get to Ivradan, and straight up the wall was the fastest way.

  Behind her, she heard the sound of gunfire.

  She reached up, setting the sword on the level above her, then jumped as high as she could. She managed to get her elbows over the edge. The cloth puffs around her elbows slipped on the slick surface, and she swore, but the studded leather on her forearms gripped the floor, and she squirmed up, fighting hard for every inch. At last she dragged herself over the edge, grabbing the sword and rolling under the table without thinking.

  It was dim under the cloth, and gave the illusion of safety. She blinked, willing her eyes to adjust, and began to crawl forward. If he'd panicked and run— If Charane had taken him somewhere—

  Then she saw the huddled figure, curled into a tight fetal ball in front of the tumbled chair, still clutching the ragged remains of the blue elephant.

  "Ivradan!" she gasped. The word came out in a husky croak. She wriggled forward, dragging the sword, and reached out for his hand.

  And the world went dark.

  CHAPTER SIX:

  Stone and Clouds

  For one sickening, surreal, disorienting instant, she thought she was back on the set. A number of other equally plausible alternatives presented themselves in quick succession.

  She was blind.

  She was dead.

  She was in yet another godlost alternate universe.

  Then she moved, and the sense of her body returned to her. She could feel weight on her wrists, and emptiness beneath her feet.

  She was hanging in chains.

  She'd been in this situation before, only then she'd been standing on a box (placed outside of camera-range, of course) so that her full weight didn't dangle from her wrists. Now there was nothing beneath her feet but air. The bracers protected her wrists from the full brunt of the shackles, but her arms were stretched wide, and all her weight was pulling her shoulders taut. She kicked back, and felt the wall at her back. Getting her feet behind her and pushing out helped a little, but not much, and she had no idea where her sword was. It had been in her hand. It wasn't now.

  She felt dazed and battered, off-balance. The absence of the chaos of a moment before was as much of an assault on the senses as its presence had been. Her heart was still hammering, making it hard to breathe, and she struggled uselessly against her chains, fighting against a threat that was
n't there any more, the horrors she had seen playing themselves out inside her mind.

  Dylan was dead. She'd barely registered the fact at the time, but now, in the darkness, she saw it again too clearly: the spear sticking out of his chest, the moment of shocked surprise, the awful, utter, deadness of him when he fell.

  And what had she done? She'd given his gun to the woman who'd killed him. How heroic was that? She'd rewarded his killer.

  She choked on a sob.

  "Slayer?"

  Ivradan's voice came out of the darkness. No, not darkness. Her eyes were adjusting now. Dimness. She blinked, realizing she could actually see him looking up at her.

  He was alive and whole. Scared to death, but that was a sane and wholesome response to the situation. She took a deep breath, forcing herself to relax, settle down, focus.

  "G'day, mate."

  "I don't know what happened," Ivradan confessed, as if it were somehow a failure.

  "Neither do I," Glory admitted. "Fine pair of heroes we make."

  "Hero?" Ivradan sounded outraged at being given such a title. It made Glory smile, though she'd never felt more like bursting into tears.

  Her feet slipped on the wall, and she fell to hang full length in her shackles again. The jolt of impact dragged her hands halfway through the cuffs, and that gave her an idea. If they were that loose . . .

  "Say, Ivro, how chipper are you feeling?"

  He came over and stood at her feet, still holding the decidedly more slender Gordon. She could now see that she was hanging only a few feet off the floor, but a few inches or a few yards, it didn't make much difference to her shoulders. It did make a difference to what she wanted to try.

  "'Chipper,'" he echoed warily.

  "Can you lift me up a little? I think I can work loose from these cuffs if I can get a little leverage."

  Ivradan stepped forward and set Gordon down carefully. He bent down and hugged her firmly around the knees. Then he straightened up.

  Glory felt the release of the strain as a thousand tiny needles of fire along her shoulders and back, and the resulting cramps in her legs as she fought to balance in Ivradan's grip. But now she could hear the chains clank, and feel their weight, and she could lift her arms enough to make the manacles slide on her wrists.

  But that wasn't what was going to get her out of them. She pulled down, carefully, twisting her wrist back and forth as she did and inventing new curses for the costume designers at the same time. She folded her thumb into her palm as hard as she could, and strained against the metal, and hoped . . .

  Her right hand slipped free of the shackle. And at the same time Ivradan dropped her.

  She had just enough warning to point the fingers of her left hand. There was a wrenching strain as all her weight hung suspended for a moment from one wrist, and then the cuff simply slipped off. She dropped to the floor and fell sprawling, more or less on top of Ivradan.

  She rolled out of the tangle, and it seemed like too much trouble to get up, so she didn't. She lay there, wishing all her problems would go away. If she hadn't killed Dylan (and she didn't feel quite guilty enough to shoulder the blame for that one, not quite), at least she hadn't saved him, and that was bad enough. He was a pratt, certainly, but he was her pratt, and he hadn't deserved killing.

  Only now he was dead, no matter whose fault it was. A lot of people were dead, each of them the stars of their own lives, butchered like bad cattle—and for what? Window-dressing in the Warmother's set-piece? Was she that . . . wasteful?

  If she was (as she claimed to be) War Incarnate, the answer to that was a resounding "Yes," and the real question became, why in Heaven's name didn't everybody run screaming the moment they heard of her instead of sticking about?

  But people were funny that way, even blue people, or gold scaly people, or people in any of the other odd shapes and designs she'd seen today. People were funny in general, when you came right down to it: Glory'd even heard there were such things as Satanists, and if you wanted to talk about unprepossessing targets for fealty . . .

  The Amazons didn't seem to fit in with the rest of the Warmother's crew, somehow, though—maybe they'd manage to get shut of Charane while her back was turned, or something, though why they'd followed her to Erchanen in the first place . . .

  Glory sighed, realizing she'd really better pay attention to the problem at hand instead of letting her mind wander off down pathways that were more interesting simply because they weren't related to the matter at hand. Item: one dungeon, constructed for the reception of neither Australian nor Allimir, to judge from the size of the shackles.

  If there could be cement here (and she didn't actually know there couldn't be), she'd say this place was made of cement. It was damp and cold. There were several sets of rusty shackles set into the wall above her head; she watched the set she'd recently vacated swing slowly to a stop, bouncing back and forth along the wall with a dull clanking and scraping. The ceiling itself was too far away to see. Set into the wall at her feet, maybe fifteen or twenty feet up, was a line of narrow windows, horizontal slits really, that let in the remains of a pallid, wan, grey, overcast entirely unprepossessing day. The air, like the dungeon, smelled wet and cold. It was probably raining somewhere.

  She sat up with a groan, then stood (reluctantly), looking around. She spied her sword over in a corner, under a bench, and went to fetch it, inspecting it carefully. It seemed unharmed and untampered with. Was it so irrelevant and harmless that Charane didn't think it worth bothering with, or so powerful that she couldn't touch it?

  I wish I knew—that among other things. She slipped it back into its scabbard.

  "Let's get out of here," she said aloud.

  "How?" Ivradan asked simply.

  And Glory took another look—a really good look this time—at their prison. All of their prison.

  It had windows and manacles and chains and benches, high smooth walls and a distant vaulting ceiling. All the things you'd expect to find in a high-class dungeon.

  But it had no door at all.

  * * *

  Half an hour later she knew more than she had before, none of it encouraging.

  Even if Glory could lift Ivradan up far enough to reach the window-slits—and she couldn't—they were too narrow for him to get through.

  The Sword of Cinnas, fine magical item though it was, could not chop through the walls, or even dent them.

  The benches could not be removed from the walls.

  There was no way out.

  It bothered Glory, and she wasn't exactly sure why. It seemed that the two of them were going to have plenty of time to think about it, though.

  "It just doesn't work," she said, pacing the cell. It was nice that there was plenty of cell to pace in: the floor of the cell was at least twenty feet by forty, and Glory was using every foot. Back and forth, and all she could come up with was the conviction that this would make a lousy episode of The Incredibly True Adventures of Vixen the Slayer. Meanwhile, the light from outside slowly dimmed. Eventually, it would be entirely dark.

  Bummer.

  "She likes to play. Helevrin said that about her, Ivradan. Cat and mouse. Never too much all at once," Glory said. Thinking out loud—or at least trying to. She wasn't having much luck so far.

  "That is so," Ivradan admitted, watching Glory warily. The Allimir horsemaster lay full-length on one of the stone benches, looking utterly spent. But Glory was too keyed-up to rest.

  "But why this? It's like she's quit. Where's the fun for her in just locking us up somewhere in a magic dungeon to starve to death?"

  "Perhaps," Ivradan said in a peculiar voice, "in that we could get out if we would."

  Glory stopped pacing and stared at him.

  "Slayer, I have been thinking," Ivradan said, still looking as if he'd suddenly swallowed a live carp. "About the horses."

  "Yes," Glory said quietly. If she startled him now, she'd never hear what he had to say, and it might well be important.

 
"You remember the mist on the trail, and how they walked into it without changing their gait? And how, when they reached the summit, even though there was green grass all around, they would not graze?"

  "I remember," Glory said.

  "That is not how horses behave, and it has puzzled me, but now I think I have found an answer. I do not believe they saw either the mist or the grass, though we did, and felt them, too. Could it be that they were not there at all? And if such things could be illusion, could not this prison be illusion as well?"

  "Oh, sure," Glory said flippantly, and then thought about it. Hard.

  If Ivradan said the horses didn't react to the mist and the grass because they were illusions, he probably had the right of it. And if the two of them were stuck in a dungeon that wasn't really here, that would be enough of a giggle to keep Charane amused, wouldn't it? Watching them commit suicide in a prison that wasn't one?

  "If it is an illusion, how do we make it go away?" she asked.

  Ivradan sat up and looked at her hopefully. Glory sighed. He was right. It was the sidekick's job to come up with the fool notion, and the hero's job to make it work. Division of labor. Only she hadn't the faintest idea of how that was to be accomplished. The dungeon certainly looked—and felt—real.

  As real as the grass—and the mist—had.

  Not much to go on, that.

  She walked over to the wall and leaned her forehead against it, concentrating on its not being there. The wall remained stubbornly solid.

  "Slayer—" Ivradan said in an awed whisper.

  She opened her eyes. Bright violet light illuminated the wall, casting her image upon it in sharp black shadow. The Sword of Cinnas had woken up, glowing as brightly as it had back in the Temple.

  "Oh, silly me," Glory said weakly. "I've been using the wrong end of the sword."

  She stepped back from the wall and—feeling just a bit as if she were playing Joan of Arc—drew the sword and grasped it below the crosspiece, where the blade was dull. The violet crystals set in the hilt glowed as though lit from within, almost too bright to look at directly.