by Rick Shelley
“I think it’s dead,” I mumbled—too softly for anyone to hear, I think. Then I pulled the sword out of the eye, cleaned the blade in the sand, and carried it back to the elf.
“Well done, Hero,” he said. Then his eyes closed for the last time. I knelt and felt for a pulse in his neck. Nothing. It was strange—not that he was dead, but the way I felt. Not long before, I had been ready to fight him, but now I was mourning his death. I looked up at Annick as I stood.
“He wasn’t your father by any chance, was he?” I asked.
Annick shook her head firmly. “No, he can’t be. I’m sure I would know if we met.”
I wasn’t about to get into a discussion about that.
“I guess we should bury him,” I said instead.
“Even I wouldn’t dishonor him so,” Annick said. “An elf warrior belongs out in the open air.” I wasn’t going to argue. I knew zip about elf customs and I wasn’t at all sure I wanted to learn.
“Whatever you say.” I felt tired suddenly, fatigue just trying to swallow me whole. I stabbed the claymore into the sand at the elf’s head. “I wish I knew his name. He was really something fighting that dragon.” A true hero, I thought. I looked down. The magic I had felt from him before was gone. A supposed immortal had found that he wasn’t, not by a long shot. I shook my head and started to walk toward my horse.
“You’re not going to leave his sword, are you?” Harkane asked. His voice actually sounded pained.
“Why not?” I asked.
Annick answered. “To leave an elf warrior’s sword would be disaster. It would return to kill you.”
“Why? I didn’t kill him.”
“It will seek you out if you abandon it, though. That is the way of such weapons.”
Again, I couldn’t argue the point. I didn’t know what I was talking about. I pulled the blade from the sand. Harkane pulled loose a heavy sash from the elf’s body. The claymore hadn’t been in a normal sheath. Two spring-loaded C-clamps closed over blade and guard. I strapped on the rig and tried it. With proper pressure, the clamps freed the blade—very smartly.
There were a bunch of fancy characters etched high on the flat of the blade, above the blood channel, near the guard. Annick looked at them and said, “The runes name this sword Dragon’s Death.” For one dragon at least, I thought. I looked at the runes, traced them with my finger. I had thought that the translation magic was supposed to handle writing too—I had been able to read that Chapbook once I got to Varay—but I couldn’t make out anything at first. But when I looked closer, I could read the inscription. The script was just very convoluted, worse than my mother’s handwriting.
With the sword in my hand now, I could feel its magic.
14
Elflord
We chased our shadows away from the Mist after we washed off the gore of battle. Despite the continuing risk of being discovered along the beach, all four of us went into the sea to get clean. The salt water stung our minor cuts from the fight with the swamp trolls, but I figured that that was all to the good. It might clean them out, lessen the chance of infection. We headed northeast then, deeper into Fairy. At first, I aimed that way just because it seemed to be the fastest route away from the carnage on the beach. Then it seemed right for a couple of better reasons. Most important, any pursuit would look to the south if anyone suspected that we had come up from Varay. And going north might actually give me a chance to sow some of that confusion I had bragged about, my wild idea to make the Elflord of Xayber think that one of his peers was raiding his territory.
Sunset caught us before we had traveled far, but we kept going as long as we had enough light to navigate by in the open. We stayed clear of the swamp and even avoided the gnarled forest as much as possible. After two hours of riding, we found a sheltered area away from the road that looked decent. There was fresh running water for everyone, and plenty of grass for the horses.
I didn’t tell the others that I planned to keep going deeper into Fairy until we camped for the night. There were no objections. I hadn’t expected any. Lesh and Harkane would obey orders, and Annick was delighted at any chance to hurt the Elflord of Xayber some more. Going farther into Xayber’s territory was a gamble—and quite possibly stupid. I had no way to know how powerful the magic of the elflords was. I didn’t know a lot about Fairy and the seven kingdoms. But I did know that we were going to have to take some real risks to have any chance to stand off both the elflord and the Etevar.
I took the first watch again and sat with the two-handed elf sword in my lap. Dragon’s Death. The blade felt sharp enough to shave metal with but so strong that it couldn’t be nicked or damaged in a fight. Even after seeing the blade in action, I thought that it was an impossible combination. The hilt of Dragon’s Death was designed for larger hands than mine, but I could hold it. I might even be able to wield it in a fight—but not a marathon. It was a magic blade. I was still new at all this magic hocus-pocus, but I could feel the sword’s magic in my mind, and that’s something else that is hard to explain. On the simplest level, it was something like the static electricity discharged when two sets of the family rings touched, an aura, or maybe a physical field. I wished that I knew what the sword’s magic was, precisely, how it might help or hurt me. Maybe Parthet would be able to puzzle it out when we got back to Varay. Using a magic I didn’t fully understand could be dangerous. I had no trouble thinking of magic as a weapon—a weapon with all the potential of a gun or a sword. Of course, I was already using a lot of magic I didn’t really comprehend—the magic of the Hero, the magic of the doors, the magic of the land itself.
It all needed a lot of thought, and I was too tired to do it all that night. I hadn’t had a full night’s sleep since leaving Varay, and our last night in the swamp had been almost sleepless. An exhausting day had followed. Gil Tyner—Dragon Slayer. Another ludicrous title to add to my collection. Fortunately, my danger sense didn’t kick up all night. I woke Annick and went to sleep. When Harkane woke me just before dawn, I felt rested enough for another day in the saddle.
We crossed the spine of the isthmus early that morning and turned north between the main ridge and a line of lower hills to the east. The paths were narrow, often steep, but at least we didn’t have the swamp or low-hanging branches to worry about. After the past couple of days, it was almost a picnic. No one had any idea how far we might have to go to find a village or town to harass. I had a rough idea of racing through some sleepy little burg and setting fire to a few buildings before we turned around and scooted south. I didn’t want to skulk around slitting throats in the night. Maybe I would face the warriors of Fairy in battle someday, but I had no taste for the kind of action that Annick seemed to delight in.
Since my danger sense remained quiescent—just barely ticking over—we didn’t push our horses while we headed deeper into Fairy. I wanted to save their speed for our escape. Late that afternoon, I used my bow to bring down a miniature mountain goat after Lesh said that they made good eating. There was a sheltered dent in the hillside nearby, and Lesh assured me that he could make a smokeless fire, so we made camp early and got ready for a hot meal. We hadn’t seen anyone on the road all day, hadn’t even heard any horn calls.
Lesh did the cooking. Harkane tended the horses. I climbed the ridge to get a better view of the countryside. Annick followed me.
“You don’t think much of me, do you?” she asked when I stopped just below the crest, maybe 150 feet above our camp.
I peeked out over the top of the ridge, careful not to stick my head up too far. There was nothing special to see, just more country like that we had been riding through. Then I sat on a rock and looked at Annick. I couldn’t, wouldn’t, come out flat and tell her that I thought she was a bloodthirsty bitch. But I wouldn’t lie to her either.
“You get too much pleasure out of killing,” I said. I kept my voice as neutral as possible.
“They were our enemies—my enemies, at least.”
“What you did
that first time wasn’t an act of war. It was something private and dirty—murder, nothing more.”
“Vengeance is my right!” She flared the way I had expected her to. Maybe vengeance was her right, in Varay. Maybe, in the skewed logic of the buffer zone, it was even her duty. But …
“That’s not the point. What I said is that you enjoy it too much. In my world …” I shook my head. “Let’s just say that the standards of my world and yours are considerably different.” I didn’t want to get into an argument with her. I was afraid that it would get out of hand.
“I’ve never seen your world.” She didn’t sound as though she had much interest in it either. “All I have is my world. Why are you here?”
“Damn good question. I wish I had a good answer,” I said, still hoping to avoid an argument. It was a question I had asked myself often enough. I still wasn’t sure. “I guess I’m here because I’m the son of my parents.” I told Annick, as briefly as I could, how I had learned about Varay and why I had come, and the rest of the story up to my arrival at Arrowroot.
“You’re here because it’s your duty to be here,” Annick said—with some force, as if she were trying to emphasize a point won in a debate.
“That’s what everyone seems to think,” I conceded.
“You do your duty. I do mine. Is it so wrong to want to do what you’re bound to anyway? To enjoy fulfilling your destiny?”
I didn’t continue the argument—ah, discussion—because I could smell supper, and if Annick and I went on any longer I’d ruin my digestion if not my appetite. It was time to take another quick look over the ridge, then climb back down to camp.
Lesh did a bang-up job on supper. He had roasted the meat with the last of our onions stuffed into small cavities he had carved into the meat, and had collected the drippings and heated them with water to give us juice to spoon over the meat and to dip our hard bread in. It tasted like a feast after the days of dried, salted beef. All that was lacking was the beer. The four of us ate about twenty pounds of meat, and there was enough left over for breakfast and lunch the next day—that much longer before we would have to return to our jerky.
“It do fill the nooks and crannies,” Lesh said, slapping his belly after Annick and I each complimented him on the meal.
The night was surprisingly chilly. While I was on guard, I walked around to keep warm. The air was clear, the sky studded with a wealth of stars for a change, giving me enough light to avoid tripping over my companions. I stayed on duty as long as I could keep alert, then woke Annick. As on the other nights, she woke instantly, immediately alert. She was still on guard when I woke again, sensing imminent danger. I woke the others with a word while I tried to pinpoint the threat. Before, the sense had always been strongly directional. This time the danger seemed to surround us.
Annick got her bow ready and stood in the center of our camp, turning slowly, peering toward the top of the rises that concealed us. With her elven night sight, she was the only one who could see clearly. Our starlight suddenly seemed inadequate. I focused on the narrow entrance to our cul-de-sac. The weapon that came to hand when I first jumped up was the elf sword. I held it in front of me at an angle, ready to spring into the fight I knew was near.
But it didn’t come. After a time, I lost the edge of my danger warning, but it didn’t fade completely. The danger was still there, close. We settled down and waited. For an hour or more, the feeling of danger ebbed and flowed.
“There’s someone out there,” I whispered. “They’re either trying to catch us off-guard or they’re trying to screw up their courage to attack.”
“This isn’t the best spot to be in, I’m thinking,” Lesh said. “We’re in a jug, and all they’ve got to do is cork it.” We could have gone over the top, but that would have meant leaving our horses behind, and we were much too far from Varay for that.
“We’ll have to make do,” I told Lesh.
“A quick charge out in the dark?” he suggested.
“Not unless we have to. But let’s pack everything up.”
“I don’t feel magic out there,” Annick whispered. “It must be trolls.”
“Then they’re smarter than the trolls in the swamp,” I said. I was still having trouble with the nuances of language, even with the translation magic. It wasn’t nearly as unnerving talking in the dark, when I couldn’t see that everything people said was out of sync with their mouths. The difficulty seemed to be that the translation magic wasn’t as sophisticated as it might have been. For instance, it lumped together a lot of different creatures under the generic “troll.” Like lumping together humans and the great apes as primates. Maybe personal introductions aren’t essential, but it would be nice to know what kind of diner I was going to give gas to.
We made noises packing up. That must have made the difference.
I yelled, “Here they come!” as the awareness swept over me—an almost intuitive knowledge that bypassed the normal thinking processes. I had slung the claymore rig over my shoulder again while we were getting ready to leave. The claymore was the weapon I reached for, and I can’t explain why. My own sword was at my waist, and I had years of practice with it. And the Smith & Wesson was within reach. But I went for that six-foot cleaver as if it were my customary weapon.
It was the proper reflex, however it came about. As I brought the elf sword over my shoulder, it bisected one of the mountain trolls jumping down from the perimeter of our hole in the wall. I hardly felt a strain. The blade went through that troll like empty air—bones and all. I don’t know if it was that “strength of Vara” that initiation as Hero was supposed to confer or if it was some magic of the sword, or a combination. I just know what happened.
The blade glowed in the dark once it had tasted blood. I found myself whistling a strange melody while I wielded the sword. The third surprise was that the elf blade felt almost weightless in action.
There was something else. We were fighting in the dark, but even though I could only make out vague shapes, mostly when they moved, I knew exactly where everyone was all the time. Throughout the engagement, I was aware of positions. Lesh and Harkane were at the exit from our campsite, keeping any trolls from coming in that way. Annick was at the back of the depression with her sword and knife, working hard to stay out of my way. I ranged through the rest of it, moving toward trolls as they came over the top—sometimes anticipating their appearance. I couldn’t see well, but I didn’t have to. I knew where everyone was.
And I knew more. Dragon’s Death wasn’t leaving wounded trolls to pop up and cause trouble later. The elf sword sliced too thoroughly. We got a little more light in the cul-de-sac as the fight progressed. Blood flowing on the blade of the elf sword made it glow more brightly. That happened fairly quickly. By the time I sliced into my fifth or sixth troll, the blade was as bright as a Jedi light saber. The trolls could see me clearly enough. And I could see the trolls that came close enough for Dragon’s Death to reach.
The fight went on for a few minutes more—not long, really. I heard words that I couldn’t understand and can’t duplicate—the first failure of the translation magic. Then a guttural voice shouted, “The elf was masked!” Those trolls who could escape did. A fair number couldn’t. The glow of my elf sword faded quickly. My danger sense idled again.
“They’re gone,” Lesh said.
“Let’s get out of here before they come back,” I said.
“They won’t be back,” Annick said. She sounded very confident. “They think you’re an elf warrior because of the sword and the song. How did you know to conjure with that?”
“I didn’t, and they may discover their mistake, so let’s move.”
I used my flashlight to make sure we didn’t forget anything. That also gave us a chance to take a better look at our attackers. They were as ugly as the swamp trolls, but not as dirty or vile-smelling. They didn’t look exactly the same, but the differences could only interest another troll.
We rode north again, deep
er into Xayber’s lands. Just after sunrise we found a pass through the lower line of hills and turned east. Beyond the hills, the land was gently rolling, tall grass with occasional wooded stretches. These trees actually looked fairly normal—not the haunted-forest type of trees we had seen farther south along the isthmus. We rode from one copse of trees to the next, worrying more about cover than roads or speed. We stopped once when I felt that unseen presence probing again. It passed, then returned and passed again, more slowly the second time.
“He’s closing in,” I muttered. It had to be the Elflord of Xayber. I couldn’t hope to evade him forever. The others looked at me. Nobody questioned my awareness of someone searching for us with magic. My companions took my magic sense more for granted than I did.
“If we can’t find somewhere to strike at the Elflord today, we head back to Varay,” I said. “The deeper we get, the harder it’ll be to get out in time to meet the Etevar’s army, and right now, he’s a greater threat to Varay than Xayber.” I stared at Annick for a long moment, but she didn’t speak.
We found our target before noon. We came through a wooded draw between two low hills and saw a riot of bright colors a half mile off.