Strife & Valor: Book II of The Rorke Burningsoul Saga

by Regina Watts

  Crying out as the abomination made to tear my head from my shoulders, I blindly wrenched the sword from its grasp. Now it was the rat’s turn to scream in pain. Exigence’s sharp edge effortlessly severed three of its fingers and, to nurse this wound in shock, it released me. I gestured with the tip of the sword at Gundrygia.

  “I hope your heart overflows with remorse for the creature you made conscious only so it might die at the tip of Weltyr’s blade.”

  With a cry, Gundrygia stepped forward, then backpedaled quite a bit as the beast stumbled. I slashed at its hideously contorted muzzle and it howled, its bright yellow fangs now painted with as much blood as they had been foam. Nevertheless, the creature met me again, snapping at me, its tail thrashing wildly in the air.

  Exigence met it in the heart. All its motion ceased.

  The dead abomination slid off my blade and thudded upon the floor of the tunnel.

  “Release us,” I commanded Gundrygia.

  But the glow about her brightened and her hands raised to meet me. Fire danced at the tips of her fingers, swirling about her palms and wrists and growing wildly between them. As soon as the flame had been contained into a pulsing ball between her hands, she hurled it at my companions.

  Acting on instinct, I dove between them and lifted Exigence.

  The fireball split in half, its flames dissolving on contact with the truly magical blade. While Gundrygia cried out, I spared no time before I charged her.

  Once, in the grove, I had struck her and been haunted by it. This was a different situation altogether. Teeth bared, the witch opened a hand. Her empty palm seemed to swallow the darkness around it. A hard obsidian blade swung forward, pulled from the very absence of light in the tunnel system (or its faerieland duplicate). While Zweiding’s blessed steel had suffered immediately beneath the pressure of Exigence, Gundrygia’s sword of darkness fared better at absorbing the blows of Weltyr’s weapon.

  Her body, however, could not absorb the strength of mine quite so easily. While she was a powerful sorceress and might too have been a fine enough opponent for some fighters, my lifetime of sword-fighting—and, of course, my earlier victory that day—gave me an undeniable advantage over her in matters of physical conflict. She might parry a blow here or there, but she had better luck relying on her nimble frame to avoid my strikes.

  While my companions cheered me on and cried out on those rare instances Gundrygia’s haphazard fighting style permitted her the unpredictability required to almost wing me with a hack from her blade, I wore her down and began to increasingly catch her in parries. Each meeting of our swords marked a reduction in her strength. Soon her arms trembled when our blades sparked and she, without a chance to so much as think one of those spells of hers, looked pale to think the end was quite possibly near.

  “You took such exception before,” she panted, a few untamed curls falling across her sweat-beaded face while her arms slowly succumbed beneath my pressure. “In the grove, when you struck me—I felt your shame, no matter how sweet it was to savor the heat of your anger. What makes now any different?”

  “Because…now I have given you every chance to release us. Now, you are holding us captive—endangering the women I love. And that, I can never permit.”

  With a last push, I knocked Gundrygia back and used the recoil to lift Exigence. The blade fell once again against hers with a sharp crack. To my relief, the summoned sword fell from my opponent’s hand and dissolved back into the rest of the darkness like smoke or sand. When her lips curled in the genesis of a magical word, I sliced at her, and I do confess—guilt singed my heart to hear her cry as she gripped her cut hand.

  Still, dangerous as she was, I could spare no quarter. While she stumbled back beside the metal rail, falling upon the concrete beneath it and pushing herself away with her feet, I advanced. The sword remained between us.

  “Rorke!” Gasping to stare down the tip of Exigence’s blade, she searched my features desperately and begged, “Be reasonable, now! I’m not really any threat to you, am I?”

  “If I kill you now,” I asked her, keeping my expression as hard as I could for a woman so beautiful and, even if by her own nature, imperiled, “will we be trapped in this nether-space of yours forever?”

  “How could you ask that?”

  “Answer my question.”

  Nostrils flaring, Gundrygia stared defiantly into my face.

  “No,” she admitted, “you’ll be free from here if you kill me. If it’s so important that you continue living as a deluded slave, then fine.”

  Moving quickly, Gundrygia rolled forward upon her knees and once more grasped the blade. My companions gasped while, lifting her chin, the witch guided the tip of the sword to her throat and stared me hard in the eyes.

  “Kill the mother of your child, Rorke Burningsoul.”

  My mind struggled to parse the words once spoken aloud. Lips parting in shock, then tensing, I prodded the blade against her neck and said above her softly hitched breath, “You’re lying.”

  “Not about this,” she assured me, maintaining that steady stare into me.

  Full of all number of strange emotions, I struggled to find some hint of deception in her face. Indeed, I prayed to find it.

  There was defiance there, and feral hostility. But there was no trace of a lie.

  I lowered Exigence.

  “Rorke!”

  Valeria’s cry drew my attention away from the witch kneeling before me. Whirling about, blade already raising, I prepared to defend myself against a pair of rat-beasts that thundered along the rails through the tunnels for me—

  And, with a rapid chant, Branwen hurled a bolt of lightning as though launching a javelin through the air. Roserpine may have struggled to reach the mockery of space that was Gundrygia’s pocket dimension, but the witch herself had claimed Nature to be her very god. I should not have been surprised that it was our druid who counted most just then.

  With a bright explosion more rapidly blinding to the durrow than the fireball had been, the druid’s lightning danced down the line of the rail and ran through the charging rat-beasts. By the time they tumbled within ten feet of me, both were dead and smoking with the abhorrent stench of roasted meat and burning hair.

  I turned back to Gundrygia, but the witch was already some yards away from me.

  “How lucky you are to have your little entourage. Where would you be without them, slave?” Glowering at me through the pale moon of her sullen face, Gundrygia gestured to Exigence. “You will throw away ultimate power—destroy yourself—in following the commands of your master. If you don’t come with me now, Burningsoul, you’ll be exactly as free as Exigence there.”

  Plagued by the conflicting desires to hold the mother of my child and destroy a threat to my life, I felt only deep sorrow for Gundrygia. I wanted to save her from her own grim fate—or the grim fate to which she bound herself by the decisions she made. By holding in her heart such a fearful loathing for Weltyr.

  “So,” I suggested to her, sliding Exigence back into its place at my hip, “come with us, instead.”

  Scoffing, looking totally taken aback by such an idea, Gundrygia demanded, “What do you mean?”

  “I mean just that. I mean, come with us. Help us find Valeria’s ring.”

  “Yes,” said Valera hurriedly, stepping forward despite the protests of Indra and Odile. “Yes—oh, a child of Rorke’s! How pleased I’d be to meet such an angel. What love I feel already to think you the vessel of such life!”

  Now looking more sincerely confused—and, perhaps, just a bit angry about the confusion, or a suggestion she possibly perceived as a joke—Gundrygia shook her head. “How can you be his lover yet say such a thing? You dark elves truly are quite bizarre, aren’t you!”

  “It’s not just them,” said Branwen, her hand to her heart, a new urgency in her earnest eyes. “I understand why she would say that. I love Rorke—I’d love any child of his, whether mine or someone else’s. Maybe especially someone
else’s,” she added with a wry laugh that Odile dryly echoed.

  Smile fading, serious again, Branwen went on to Gundrygia that, “You haven’t hurt any of us, and if you had, knowing you’re with Rorke’s child would change things. Anyway…Rorke obviously cares about you, or he would have already killed you and freed us from this place. Since he cares about you, we do, too. There must be something he sees that’s worth loving in you, and I want to know what it is.”

  “Me, too,” said Indra, nodding. “Rorke’s such a good-hearted person.”

  “If he thinks you can be saved from a death at the other end of his sword,” Odile agreed, “then I’m willing to give you a chance.”

  “Please.” Valeria stepped just to the edge of the light, her hands clasped before her heart. “Please, Gundrygia—come with us.”

  I had not expected to receive such commendable help from my companions, but I ought to have believed they would stand by me. Each one of them was a good woman from the first day we met; and though some of them made questionable decisions from time to time, they all had pure hearts and wills unquestionably aligned with my god.

  For just a few moments, Gundrygia looked nearly swayed by these good hearts. The warmth that was offered to her would have been alluring to anyone—and to someone like Gundrygia, who had for so long been alone and abandoned in the world, I could not begin to imagine just how deeply she desired to take us up on the offer to join our party of travelers.

  Alas, we were not yet a family…and family called to her then, a baleful black voice echoing through the bleak space that mimicked the tunnels beneath Skythorn.

  Come home, Gundrygia, commanded the familiar voice, everywhere and nowhere around us. Come home, daughter. Bring the new Wotsung with you.

  Gundrygia’s hopeful face fell, the open expression of marvelous possibilities clamming into a tense, cold mask.

  “Yes, Father,” she answered it, raising a hand.

  Bright light filled the tunnel fast enough to blind even me.

  ALL ABOARD THE BATTLE SWAN

  WHEN THE WITCH’S light faded from our eyes, we found ourselves on the surface of Urde while busy people passed to and fro around us.

  I was in a daze after what I had just learned, and delirious to find myself so abruptly under the sun again. We all looked about ourselves in astonishment—and the durrow, with fear and the quick but ultimately unnoticed snatching up of their hoods—but I, most of all, felt instantaneous relief.

  How had we gotten aboveground? Had we gone ourselves, like sleepwalkers in the clutches of some dream? Or had we been in some way teleported by the most powerful magic-user I had ever met?

  In either case, I found myself before a familiar face. Lively regarded us as though we had simply walked up to her, and in fact seemed mid-turn as though to address someone who had tapped her on the shoulder.

  “Oh,” she cried, her face lighting up to see us, “oh, there you lot are! Almost too late—cor! You look like you’ve seen a ghost, Rorke.”

  “Only tired, Madame,” I told her, patting her shoulder when she briefly embraced me. When we released, Lively drew our purse from her bodice. As Odile took it, I assured our friend, “It’s been a long, long day, and looks like it’s going to be an even longer one.”

  “Well, it would have been infinitely longer if you hadn’t gotten here when you did. The porter’s just made a call for five minutes to launch.”

  “Did you get the tickets, Lively?”

  Beaming, the kind woman plucked five oblong and ornately carved chips from the pocket of her apron. Each bore an intricate design of the airship’s logo—in this case, a fragile-necked swan with two marvelously plumed wings outspread—and a small magical sigil that glowed to indicate the tickets’ authenticity. She turned them about for us, then passed them over.

  “The Battle Swan,” read Indra, a few locks of white hair falling across her eyes and thereafter pushed back into the mess hidden in her hood. “What a strange name!”

  “Swans are vicious,” I said, “and some of these airships running today are re-purposed from previous wars…this is just such a one.”

  Dubious, Odile fit her goggles on and peered up above the gates of the airport. The swollen edge of the dirigible was just visible, shining on the other side of a tarmac heated with the noonday sun. Forced to grimace against the glare even with her welding goggles, the skeptical rogue said, “I don’t know…the last time you people were at war was before you were born, Burningsoul. Do we really want to risk riding in a thirty-year-old dirigible?”

  “Now you’re starting to sound like Sharp,” I teased her, adding as I distributed the tickets, “but rest assured, the airships are maintained by dedicated crews. There’s very rarely an accident. I’ve heard it said riding in an airship is safer than riding a horse.”

  “That may be so, but you lot be careful on your journey.” Kissing my cheek, then Branwen’s, then the rest of us in turn, Lively pressed the tips of her fingers to her lips and regarded us with glittering eyes. “Oh! I’m getting bleary. Get on with it, now! Pray for me, Master Burningsoul, and I’ll pray for you in turn.”

  “That sounds like a deal to me, Lively. Fare you well! We’ll be in touch, we swear.”

  And then, by Weltyr, we made it aboard the airship.

  Perhaps it seems anticlimactic that, given our pursuit, we managed to board the blimp without further problem—but the truth was that the porters were annoyed with our last-minute arrival and barely bothered to glance at the economy class tickets they took from our hands. Actually looking in our faces was out of the question. If there had been any concern that we might be identified, or that the durrow might be singled out due to their species, those evaporated when aboard the airship.

  The only trouble was, of course, our weapons—one may imagine I was even less keen to check Exigence than I had been to permit temporary confiscation of Strife—but I was confident none of us would need anything of the sort. Especially not as we entered the airship and saw the happy faces of all the laughing, chatting, bright-eyed, excited passengers.

  The Swan was an older ship than some of the ones the Rhineland airports might have boasted, but it was my first and, still to my mind, the most beautiful I’ve seen. When it was initially remodeled there had been no such thing as an economy class, and as a result the economy passengers were seated in a renovated ballroom. Past gilded scroll-work windows and through the polished arches of doorways, my companions and I found two rows of empty seats. Arranged in threes as they were, we were able to form a merry group by trading seats with an amiable couple who would be getting off at the layover in Estos, the region in the Eastern half of the continent where a few species of orc made their homes alongside some populations of human and wood elf. The thought of this reminded me of Soot and their new gimlet neighbors. How I prayed they would be successful!

  And how refreshing it was to talk of mundane things with good, wholesome, god-fearing people who took one look at my durrow companions, assumed correctly that they were nothing more than a species of elf about which they’d never heard, and paid the matter no further mind. After the shock I’d received that morning with Zweiding and the Order’s position on mankinds other than human, I had to wonder about nearly everyone I met. Did they, too, harbor some secret impulse against the other species in the world? How could such kneejerk reactions be overcome in any way that mattered? I thought of my own constant rivalry with Grimalkin, who was in his turn quite opposed to humans—the men, at least. Was he aboard the Swan? I hoped he was; it seemed now that we owed it to one another to make amends.

  When the ship was steady in the clear, blue sky and making its easygoing way over Skythorn, a crew member entered to announce we were free to move about the ship. While the entire room relaxed and people stretched, Indra and Odile sprang up together. They announced their plans to explore the ship and admire the view—we had all seen, on our way to our seats, the sprawling observation window that permitted passengers to watch cl
ouds beside us and the planet below—and scurried excitedly off to do just that.

  Branwen and Valeria, meanwhile, remained. They studied me with some concern.

  “How are you, Rorke?” Valeria slid her hand into mine from where she sat between myself and Branwen. Her touch was somehow dizzying. I shut my eyes, aware at once of how exhausted I was.

  And aware, too, that somewhere—somewhere north of Rhineland, if she had spoken truth—Gundrygia was with my child.

  “I’ve certainly felt better,” I confessed with a dry but not altogether humorless chuckle. “And worse. At least I didn’t almost die this time.”

  “Don’t curse it,” said Branwen, grinning lightly. “There’s still time yet before we find Valeria’s ring.”

  “True…I’d ought not to tempt Oppenhir to challenge Weltyr’s will. Ah! But, I must admit—it is a painful and confusing will sometimes.”

  “That is the way with all gods,” said Valeria in gentle agreement, her soft, cool hands working back and forth gently over mine. I sighed at her caresses, leaning toward her, and she took her head in my arms to draw me against her sweet-smelling bosom. There I filled my lungs with tender flesh and drowned my ears in the steady rhythm of her heart. I shut my eyes again as Branwen reached over to trail her fingers down my scalp.

  “Do you want to find her?”

  The high elf’s gentle question was truly a question, unladen with suggestion or reluctance. All the same, I shook my head, saying, “Yes—but there isn’t time. Who knows what the spirit-thieves might do with Valeria’s ring.”

  Valeria asked the next question. “And who knows what she might do with your child, Rorke?”