by Garon Whited
It was also possible I might get my head removed, but I was already in a bad mood from a six or seven-storey fall. I shot to my feet and launched myself into the palace. A door disappeared as I rammed a shoulder straight through it on my way in. Then I made for the base of the tower.
The tower was a semi-independent structure. That is, it wasn’t just a rounded bit of the palace architecture. It was solidly walled like an independent building, except with doors that granted access to some floors of the tower. Guards were posted outside the door on the ground floor. I ignored them and the door exploded out of my way, breaking as it slammed open; it was unlocked. Oops.
I think the guards were just registering that there was a problem.
The stairs slowed me down a trifle. They followed the inside curve of the round tower and I didn’t want to run on the wall. But I planted my feet right up against the wall to keep from sliding sideways as I wound my way around and up to the sixth floor. Yes, the sixth floor was a prison of some sort. I grabbed the heavy, wooden door with taloned fingernails to counter my upward momentum, then ripped the thing apart.
If the prisoner in that cell hadn’t been Bob, I don’t know what I would have done. Cried, maybe. Screamed, probably. As it was, Bob looked at me with an expression of disbelief. I ignored it and paid more attention to his chain. His hair hung loose around his face and he needed a bath. Someone had removed his hands, probably to keep him from doing anything to escape. His chain ran from a large ring in the stone wall to a thick iron collar.
I have a monomolecular-edged blade. I sliced the collar off him and he tried to go to his knees.
“Not now!” I barked, and jerked him to his feet. He staggered a bit; he was very thin, probably starved. Not in the best condition to run for his life, in other words. So I scooped him up and continued to the top of the tower.
The spell-shield around the palace was still there. I couldn’t tell if it would ruin spells going out of it as well in. I also couldn’t tell if I could break it down in time to do any good.
“Bob, are you willing to risk dying in an attempt to escape?”
“Yes, Dread Lord.”
No hesitation on that. A flicker of a thought wondered what he’d been through. I started casting. First, a healing spell, because he could use it and very well might need it in a couple of minutes. Second, my best gravity-reduction spell. I also wrapped him in my cloak because he was naked and cold. I’m a softie.
“When you land, get going. Get farther down the pass. Bronze will get you back to Karvalen if anyone chases you.”
“Yes, Dread Lord.”
One advantage of being the Dread Lord is that people don’t back-talk or question; they just do.
Next, I built a quick-and-dirty grounding spell, much like the one I used to drain the Ascension Sphere. I decided to convert spell energy to electricity and, with that in mind, shot the spell’s “anchor” into the courtyard. The grounding “cable” of the spell I just tossed through the scryshield and other barriers.
The crackling and sparking were tremendous. It looked like a transformer explosion that just kept going. I didn’t wait for it to finish. Instead, I grabbed Bob, whirled him around, and threw him as far as I could. While he was in the air, headed for the shield, I hammered it for all I was worth, trying to break it locally in the instant he was passing through it.
I must have succeeded; he didn’t plummet like a typical rock just outside it. He sailed distance like a rock, drifted down like while drifting slowly down. I thought he was likely to clear the outer wall and land outside the city. Whether he survived the landing or not was another story, but was also his problem.
While I was watching him sail over the city wall and out into the pass, Keria came up through the rooftop hatch in hyperdrive.
That probably saved my unlife.
Traveling at the speed of dark has its drawbacks. She came up the stairs, kicked off the wall to change course toward me, but failed to account for her upward vector. She shot into the air, screeching in rage. Sadly, she didn’t go far enough to clear the edge of the roof. Her need to recover gave me enough time to turn and draw my sword.
She had a short, curved blade in either hand and a wild look. Her fangs were out, her eyes glowed red, and she was strangely beautiful—cold, moonlight-silver-white, with just enough angularity to her face to make her natural beauty into an exotic one. Her hair was tied back, but loose; it whipped around behind her head regardless of the wind, as though alive. She wore a silky, silvery sheath gown with some sort of lacings and corsetry around the middle. The skirt was already split more than halfway up her thighs just from the sprint up the stairs.
Keria came at me, shrieking, the moment one foot hit the floor. Both weapons whirled, singing as they cut the air toward my head. The weapons reminded me of scimitars, just smaller and heavier. They were enchanted, too; fine edged, hard and strong, easily capable of cutting a throat to the spine and taking the head off with the second stroke, even without the benefit of undead strength behind them. If she connected with my head or neck, I had no doubts her next several blows would be overkill.
We fought for seconds—only seconds? They felt like hours—while I shifted into higher and higher gear to match her. I was fast, but so was she. I’d never faced anything that moved as fast as I do. She attacked with everything, slashing in a strange, circular, whirling style, giving no thought to defense, giving me no time to think of anything else. With that much sharp steel trying to turn my brain into cutlets and backed by an all-or-nothing frenzy of aggression, I parried faster and faster, stepping back with almost every stroke. More than once, I met her attacks with an edge-to-edge block, hoping to shear right through one of her weapons. My sword should have been able to cut through any normal blade, but hers were enchanted to have an extra-sharp, extra-hard edge. So, if I wanted to cut through one of her swords…
She cut at my head and neck, constantly. Cuts to the body don’t bleed; a stab in the heart won’t stop me. She knew it, and she went for the brain. I parried frantically, making sword-steel ring continuously, as I backed away and ducked. I didn’t like her two-sword style. All too often, her left hand engaged my blade and her right hand slashed for my face. I blocked two cuts at my head with my armored left forearm; it held, mostly, at least well enough to keep my hand attached.
Enchanted armor. Totally worth it. I take back every unkind thing I ever said about armor.
Then she scissored her blades at my head, shrieking. I raised my left arm to shield my head again; I used a saber’s fifth parry for the other stroke. And she kicked me in the codpiece.
Let’s be clear about a couple of things. When I demonstrate something, like nailing my hand to a bartop with a knife, it hurts. It hurts a lot. I can feel every millimeter of the blade, every splintery bit of wood. The only reason—the only reason—I don’t mind it too much is that I know it’s only a minor inconvenience. Almost as soon as I pull the knife out, the wound will close up and disappear completely.
I may not have much use for the dangly bits at night, but I’m still kind of attached to them. Having that section driven up into my abdomen by a full-power vampire kick did nothing to improve my evening. But, as with a knife through the hand or a sword through the guts, it helps to know that the normal cycle of pain—in this case, a long-drawn-out affair involving hours of recuperation and misery—would pass by in seconds.
Fortunately for me, I didn’t have to defend myself immediately. The kick was enough to badly dent the codpiece and send me backward over the edge of the tower. Spectators of all races scattered as though the tower was falling on them—which might have been safer, come to think of it.
It’s amazing how long it takes to fall a hundred or so feet. I had all the time in the world to tuck, turn, and land on my feet. Again, I went down instantly, rolling into the fall, absorbing the impact bit by bit as I collapsed.
Everything hurt, but I’m sort of used to that. I continued the roll and made it to my
feet. I turned around and looked up just in time to see Keria halfway down, headed for me face-first, swords out.
Purely by reflex, I made a backhanded gesture at her with my left hand, striking her with a solid mass of tendrils. I’m tempted to say the thick mass of them was more like a tentacle. It hit her, hard, and slammed her into the side of the tower.
I didn’t know I could do that. It was a powerful strain to do so, but apparently the dark tendrils of my spirit could be used to exert much greater force than I previously believed.
Keria, however, did not let me wonder about it. She landed about as well as I did, sprang to her feet, and closed with me like a bladed, silvery cannonball. She continued to shriek the whole time, one long, continuous sound of rage and hatred, eyes blazing with a bloody light.
I was ready for her now. I set my footing and prepared to meet her rush.
Sparks flew in that first clash as I fenced against her slashing blades. We fought, standing there, facing each other, blades shivering at every touch, sparking at every scrape, singing their ringing song of death every instant they hung free in the air. I started to counterattack, scoring hits on arm, chest, neck, thigh—things that would have been important on a mortal. Against an undead, they merely served to increase her vast rage.
I leaned back as her first, right-hand blade cut at my face, even as I parried a backhand, lower down, from her left blade in prime. I stepped forward as I did so and drew both our blades out of line. As the backswing from her first blade returned, I grabbed her forearm and forced it up and over, around and down, bringing both her blades and mine down and to my left, binding them there. She struggled against the bind, but, as I suspected from our first clash of blades, I was stronger.
With a twist of my wrist, I brought the edge of my blade against the flat of one of hers, avoiding the majority of the enchantment on it. My weapon sheared it off an inch or two above the guard while I kicked her feet out from under, making it easy to twist her remaining sword-arm around some more. With that extended and clear from her body, I held her wrist in one hand and severed her remaining sword at the elbow.
It was a little disconcerting to find her severed hand wouldn’t let go. I cut the fingers from the hilt, then sundered that weapon as well.
While I did that, she flipped herself to her feet and threw the hilt of her ruined weapon. It didn’t do anything but ring off my shoulder. She charged me as I finished cutting her weapon in two and plowed into me, clawing at my throat and neck, biting at my face. Her claws scored my armor, screeching almost as loudly as she did; her teeth snapped at me, trying to bite.
Fine. I could stand to vent on her a little more. I have a lot of angry things in the basement.
I let go my sword to get a grip on her and used my superior strength and mass to roll on top. With one forearm across her throat to keep her face away from me, the other hand gripping her wildly-thrashing hair, I hammered a flagstone with her head until she stopped struggling. Yeah, her regeneration was working fine, but if you scramble the brain enough, even a vampire has to take a time-out for repairs.
Then, because I was feeling more than a little upset with her, I use my fist like a hammer and beat her in the forehead a couple of times, just to make sure she wasn’t getting up for a few minutes. I recovered my sword, cut her at the shoulders and hips, and kicked the extraneous body parts some distance away. It takes a lot longer to grow them back than to reattach them.
When her skull resumed its normal shape and she opened her eyes again, they weren’t glowing. Her hair had calmed down, too.
Do my eyes glow when I’m angry? Does my hair do weird things? I’ll have to ask some survivor who’s seen me angry.
I lifted her by the throat and laid the flat of my blade on top of my hand, under her chin. Cutting her throat wouldn’t do much; cutting her head off, however…
“Now,” I said, in my most reasonable tone—which, given my level of annoyance, wasn’t very—“you can either talk like a civilized being, or I can see if I can take slices off your head faster than you can grow them back.”
“You fool,” she said, quietly. “He was right. You are an utter, utter fool.”
“I’m not the one disarmed and dislegged. You’re my prisoner, bitch, and I’m about to drag everything you know out of you if I have to peel you like an onion to do it!”
Then there was a flicker of shadow and darkness across her skin, like a sudden sweat of black mist, appearing for a fraction of an instant, then gone, vanished, leaving behind a smell that reminded me of demonic Things—burning, acidic, acrid.
She screamed. It was a sound like nothing else I’d heard from her. It rang through the air and echoed from the mountainsides. It grabbed the nerves like fingernails on a blackboard and scraped them, stretched them. It went on and on and on, rising higher, growing louder.
I dropped her just as she burst into flame: Violet, indigo, black, crackling and sizzling, crawling over her body, her face, even on the scattered, severed limbs. Demonic fire, burning like the blackest soul set aflame. I remembered it from Zirafel; a soulless corpse, animated by some terrible Thing from beyond the world, burned like this. Skin flaked away, turned to ashes, vanished. Layer by layer, she disappeared, eaten away by dark fires. Even with her ribs burning away, her lungs disappearing into ashes and nothingness, that scream went on, longer and longer, lasting the rest of her life.
And then there was silence.
Is that how vampires die? I wondered. The soulless ones who have died during the day, losing all semblance of mortality… is that what happens? Will that happen to me, someday?
I didn’t think that was typical, but nothing in my digested memories leaped out to answer my question. Maybe when I got back to the mountain I could have someone see what sunrise did to some of my vampire experiments.
Wait a minute. “He was right,” she said. He said I was a fool… who was “he”?
I stood there and looked at the blackened, melted places where her flesh had touched while it burned, thinking about the glassy outline of Sasha’s death and wondering what Keria meant.
The courtyard was empty. Strangely, no one cared to witness the duel between their dark and terrible gods. I can’t imagine why.
With measured tread, I made my way through the palace to the throne room. There were a number of creatures in there, mostly orku and humans, with a smattering of galgar and one rather well-dressed ogre—that is, dressed in clothes and pieces of armor, rather than hides. No elves.
Everyone knelt and placed their foreheads on the floor. I thought that a very good idea.
“Bring me my sword,” I said, softly, and it carried to all the corners of the room. Yeah, I was in that sort of mood.
At least a dozen people leaped up and ran out of the room. I let them go.
“It is my understanding that the usurper, Keria, had a magician or two in her service,” I said, and nudged the nearest subject with a toe. “Well?”
“Yes, Dread Lord! Three, Dread Lord!”
“Fetch them.”
“Dread Lord! Two are slain; only one remains.”
“Then you will be even quicker about it,” I suggested.
Fading impression of someone sprinting out the door.
I moved to the throne, noted that there was no magic on it, and slouched into it. I didn’t bother to tell anyone to get up. They shuffled about a bit, though, changing direction so they were kneeling at me the whole time. I was vaguely tempted to pace around the room, just to watch them try and keep oriented.
Six people came in, carrying what reminded me of a coffin. A ceramic coffin. They set it down at the foot of the stairs that led up to the throne, then backed away and resumed kneeling positions.
There was a lot of magic on that case, most of it designed to prevent fires; a couple of spells blocked most forms of magical communication or sensing. I tromped down to it and flipped the lid open. It came off like the lid of a sarcophagus and crashed to the floor, shattering.
“Hello, Firebrand.”
You have no idea how glad I am to see you! Is the crazy bitch dead?
“Yes, Keria is dead.”
I’m almost as glad to hear that as I am to see you.
“I’d imagine. I don’t suppose they saved your sheath?”
Doubt it.
“We’ll get you another,” I told it, lifting it out of the case. “I know people.” Firebrand ignited, at least four feet of flames rippling along the metal like the Damascus striations in the blade. It felt good to have a big, heavy blade in hand again. The dragons-head pommel seemed to grin at me in delight.
I don’t suppose we can find something flammable, maybe?
“Soon,” I promised. “For now, I just want to know who Keria had as her chief lieutenants. Do you know?”
Yeah, I’ve met people. You want the magicians or the lieutenants?
“I’ll settle for the lieutenants for now.”
Two of them are right here; the other two are probably out minding the wall or running the place.
I kicked the ceramic case, twice, breaking the rest of it into pieces, then returned to the throne.
“Bring me the ones who served Keria as her chief lieutenants,” I ordered. A few people ran from the hall, two others rose, advanced, and laid their foreheads on the bottom step. I ignored them, waiting on the results of the ones who ran. Sure enough, two more guys came in before long, hurried to my end of the room, and laid their foreheads on the bottom step.
“Is this everyone?” I asked. There was the general murmur of agreement with the dread lord. “Everyone else, get out.”
They did. They didn’t quite have a traffic jam, but they also didn’t care what door got them out. In seconds, the room was clear, except for four sweating guys—three orku and a human.
“Tell me,” I began, “do you know who I am?”
“Yes, Dread Lord,” they chorused. Not bad, but not the smooth chorus of the twins. Not even as good as my personal guard. But not bad.