“I can do this,” she tried to protest aloud.
“Never doubted it,” Khory agreed, while scooping Elora into her arms.
“Put me down,” Elora told her. “You can’t fight carrying me.”
“Fight’s done,” Khory said. “We tarry; so are you. Which way?” The last was directed at Thorn, but it was Elora who answered.
“To the left,” she said, marveling at how she could be curled up against Khory’s breast yet feel as though her skin encompassed the whole of the Realm around them. She could feel the weight of her own body and those of her companions, like a knot of weary muscle beneath her shoulder. Farther up, past her nose, a succession of staccato footfalls made their hurried way over her face, identifying themselves to Elora as the remaining Black Rose, in hot pursuit. The assassins came armed with sorcery as well as steel and their progress left a trail of spikes along the orbit of her eye. Elora’s inner world tilted, the way a skiff rocks in a heavy swell, and her stomach lurched with nausea, forcing her to fight the urge to be sick all over Khory. The Black Rose were a danger only if they caught up to them; otherwise, they were merely a distraction.
Down her flank, across from where blood still flowed freely from her flesh wound, she recognized the distinctive burr of power that signaled the nexus of a World Gate.
Too bad, she thought and wanted to giggle, I can’t tell Khory and Thorn to rush over to my left hip, that’s the way home.
“To the left,” she said again, hoping she was mouthing comprehensible words because her attempt to point the way resulted in a directionless flail of her arm.
“Along the ridgeline?” Thorn asked, and she grunted a thankful assent.
There was no dignity to their flight—this was a headlong race for their lives. Khory didn’t bother asking permission; she hooked Thorn by the collar and dumped the Nelwyn unceremoniously atop Elora, ignoring both his protest and her moan as he scraped her slashed side and twisted his body into an awkward hump to avoid contact with her chest wound. He tightened one hand around a strap of Khory’s own harness and the other about Elora’s belt. The look in his eyes made plain that he would release neither hold until they were safe.
The Black Rose knew their destination but such was Khory’s speed that only a couple of them were able to reach the Gate before her. Without breaking stride, she plucked Thorn from his perch and slung him full in one assassin’s face. The Nelwyn was as much surprised by her ploy as the Maizan but Thorn was far quicker on the uptake, boxing the man’s ears, then eyes, as soon as he landed on him. As Khory rushed past, she unlimbered Elora’s staff, using it with a skill that eclipsed the girl’s to trip Thorn’s target and bring him down.
The second warrior had only a heartbeat or three’s time to prepare for Khory’s onslaught but it proved sufficient time to prepare a counter. She’d covered better than half the distance between them when he unlimbered a mace on an extended chain, a spiked ball roughly the size of a large Daikini’s fist at the end of a set of links anchored to a haft of ironwood and metal. The ball was too light to damage anyone wearing proper armor, that wasn’t its purpose. Instead, weight had been sacrificed in favor of mobility, the advantage of which could readily be seen by the way the Maizan whipped the chain in a vicious circle about his head. He held the haft in both hands and put the full strength of his powerful shoulders into the spin, producing such velocity that the ball would have screamed through the healthy air of home; here it produced a faintly keening moan that seemed to Elora, held fast in Khory’s arms, like the wail of a lost soul. There were barbs as well, set at random intervals along the chain. The intent of the weapon wasn’t to bonk its targets on the noggin, but to wrap the chain about them. A hearty tug by the Maizan would drive the barbs into clothes or flesh, making it near impossible to escape.
The Maizan was a master of his weapon, striking with such speed and accuracy that Khory was forced to backpedal frantically to keep from being struck. Even so, she had to use Elora’s staff to parry the mace as the Maizan suddenly snapped it toward her head like a whip. Her intent was to use the staff to deflect the attack off to the side but a twist of her foe’s wrists and a snap of the chain, again more like a whip than linked metal, did the reverse and disarmed her, raising a nasty bruise on her cheek where the butt of the staff connected in passing.
Khory feinted and withdrew, again and again, trying to find just the smallest opening for an attack, but the Maizan refused to rise to her challenge. He would move as she did, but only enough to make sure she kept a fair distance from the Gate. Try as she might, she was unable to pull him from his defensive position and both knew that the longer this took, the closer came his companions. Elora sensed rather than saw Thorn’s approach from behind them; it was confirmed by faint shifts in the Maizan’s stance and the focus of his gaze. It was also clear to her that the assassin didn’t consider Thorn a significant threat. He was probably armored as well against spells as against material weapons; also to his advantage was the fact that Thorn’s enchantments probably wouldn’t be terribly effective in this deadened Realm anyway. In this kind of encounter, sadly, the Nelwyn’s stature was a definite liability.
So, too, was Elora’s wound.
The Maizan reeked of confidence. To him, the battle was all but won.
Elora guessed what Khory had in mind to try next. It didn’t take a genius and she was fairly sure the Maizan had reached the same conclusion. During her next charge, Khory wouldn’t back off. Instead, she’d take the Maizan’s best shot, gambling on her own skill and strength to enable her to survive long enough to finish him.
It was an all-or-nothing ploy, but circumstances allowed them no viable alternative. Or so everyone thought.
Khory began her advance and the Maizan sidestepped to meet her. He actually grinned with anticipation as he hurled his mace.
At that moment, Elora wrenched herself loose of Khory’s grasp, surprising both of them with the strength left in her as she used the sleetstorm of pain exploding from her abdomen as a goad to drive her forward. Khory was her fulcrum, and Elora’s sudden, unexpected motion threw her off stride, forcing her to concentrate on staying on her feet, even as she made a frantic, failed grasp at the younger woman.
At the same time, Elora took the mace full on the shoulder. It was a costly stratagem, because she wasn’t wearing any armor at all. She felt the bite of the spikes as they scored her flesh, knew there was worse to come, didn’t really care as her outstretched arms wrapped themselves about the following chain. The weight of her body did the rest as she tumbled to the ground, that and the sick realization from the Maizan that he, like his comrade earlier, had just wounded the very object of their mission.
Shock stopped him dead and a moment later Khory finished him with a blade across his throat.
“I’m sorry,” Elora managed in the faintest of whispers from where she lay, sprawled across his mace chain, as the man dropped to his knees and then his face, the light fading from his eyes as he fell. Yet there was a part of her that felt the glorious chitterings of the Malevoiy, to taste blood once more, to feast on yet another spirit brought to the slaughter, and she repressed the urge to bare her own teeth in sympathetic celebration.
She knew both Thorn and Khory would yell at her for what she’d done; the fact that neither did as Khory peeled her off the chain and scooped her up once more only made matters worse. She had neither breath nor energy left to speak. It was all she could do to keep her heart pumping.
Like the Gate they’d entered through, this was a round of steps, cut into the wall of a perfectly circular pit that ended in what appeared to be a pool of molten silver, the same color as Elora’s argent skin. The stairs made one complete circumference of the pit before disappearing beneath the pool’s surface.
Khory wasted no more time. Once more, she gathered up Thorn and took the stairs in headlong, catlike bounds, reaching the pool itself just as the remna
nts of the Black Rose cadre started down after them.
The surface of the pool didn’t stir in the slightest as they passed. Though it appeared solid, the sensation was more like gossamer than air. The only difference was that, suddenly, without missing a stride, they were climbing a set of stairs identical to the ones they’d just descended.
Now, Khory’s strength and endurance were put to the test as she used her momentum to carry them forward and up. Her long legs proved their worth as she mounted the steps two and three at a time, at a pace that would have broken almost anyone else.
Elora didn’t much care. Along with the last of her own strength, her skeleton seemed to be leaching from her as well. She felt utterly boneless, transformed to a creature of undulant taffy. Thankfully, she’d also apparently lost the capacity to feel pain. She recognized the series of jounces and bumps produced by Khory’s ascent but none had any meaning to her. Her brain simply filed them in her mental copybook and forgot all about it.
She saw the first of the Maizan emerge just before they reached the summit, heard the whistle of a crossbow bolt close by her ear, heard a sharp command to belay, the risk was too great to their prize and enough damage done on that score already.
She felt a tickle in her nostrils and before she could help herself drew as deep a breath as she was able. It was very nearly her undoing because it produced a fit of frothy coughing accompanied by an awful tearing sensation deep within her belly.
She didn’t care. She was actually smiling as Khory laid her gently down and Thorn hunkered over her, quickly laying out all the weapons and tools he’d need for the coming struggle. His expression was as grim as Elora had ever seen; this was a fight he was determined to win. Khory took position between them and the World Gate, bared sword held ready in both hands. Elora noted these actions, with that same portion of her mind that had recorded her earlier pains.
She took another breath, not as extreme as the first but just as delicious, and reveled in the teeth of a winter breeze filling her with air as fiercely cold as fresh snowmelt. There was a heady scent of pine on the wind, tart and minty, and from some impossible distance she thought she tasted a skein of woodsmoke from someone’s hearth.
This to her was true glory. What the Malevoiy offered, the Realm where they dwelled, was no more than shadows.
She heard the clash of arms, blinked once to pull the scene into focus, beheld Khory at the lip of the World Gate, trading sword blows with a Maizan, while another of the Black Rose assassins tried to get a clear shot with his crossbow.
She blinked again, but this time her eyelids refused to open, and in that precipitate rush of darkness, came silence and a welcome oblivion.
She burned. She dreamed. She flew.
Her skin was dry and desiccated as some grub’s husk, so she hacked at it with blunt fingers until they sharpened into claws and then she cheered as flesh cracked to powder and the chrysalis brought forth her ultimate incarnation. She spiraled up and away from the Elora she’d been, unwilling to take a backward glance, far more excited about what lay ahead than what had come before. She felt like molten metal cascading from the pour into its mold, full of potential yet lacking any defining sense of what its final form would take. Her imagination brought forth all manner of choices: she thought of becoming taller, more beautiful, graceful as an elven queen, as strong and resolute as Khory. She thought of the mother she’d never seen and wondered what part of herself echoed those features, that person, and considered that it might be best to be more like her. She thought of not being human at all and remembered the delight she’d found sharing her consciousness with her companion eagles, Bastian and Anele. Their code of honor was as clear as their lives seemed uncomplicated but it wasn’t that simplicity she envied, it was their union.
Friends she had, dearly won and more treasured than an emperor’s ransom in gold and precious stones, but that was all they were to her. None held the special place in her heart that Anele did for Bastian and that she hoped, prayed, demanded, her parents had for one another. Thorn would die for her, she knew, as would Khory and the brownies and a whole host of folk, some of whom she knew but most she never would; that wasn’t enough to ease the sudden and overwhelming ache in her heart. Part of her felt shame for such a desperate longing, as though she were diminishing the loyalty and sacrifice of those who’d pledged themselves to her. She knew that wasn’t so, yet she also couldn’t deny the misery of her own need.
She became aware of claws and fangs, not as a part of her body but as an extension of her inner being. The pure metal of her forging was darkening, stained with colors beyond human ken, ebon and angry blotches that ate away hungrily at her, leaving a void that was quickly filled with passion and cruelty. All her emotions, in fact, twisted a fatal turn off-center so that desire became lust and anger, rage; there was a yearning for love still, but that love looked more to the shadows for sustenance and fulfillment. It found joy in the infliction of pain, delight in the flashfire of terror from prey that knew it was trapped and doomed.
In her mind’s eye, Elora beheld the Maizan once more, falling over and over and over again to his knees after Khory’s blade left its scarlet trail across his throat, then to his face as his head bent sideways at a crazy-quilt angle because she’d cut so deeply there was nothing left to anchor it in place but the man’s spine. There was an obscene beauty in that fountain spray of blood and a keen regret that Elora herself had played no direct, physical part in his death.
She heard what passed for laughter, a chittering of appreciation, a yearning to see more, that she first thought was a presentation of the Malevoiy. Then her lips curled back from bared teeth and she shook herself from top to toe, eager to cast off the last remnants of her prior existence and embrace what was newly offered her. She noted pinpoints of light in the darkness around her, all in pairs, heard the scrabble of claws on slate as the pack approached, felt the gusts of charnel pants from their breath. The shapes gradually resolved themselves into beasts on four legs, with brutally powerful shoulders capable of nigh-inexhaustible endurance. Their fur was thick at the neck, for protection, so no lesser creature could get at their throats, and their mouths were filled with fangs so long and sharp that a single bite was usually all they needed to finish their quarry. They bore the semblance of living things, but they were none of that, the product instead of foulest sorcery.
They were Death Dogs, the Malevoiy’s favored pets.
They waited eagerly for Elora to become one of them.
A splash of radiance tore across her vision from the side, bright enough to blind, yet for all that wild energy it was unable to cast any lasting illumination across this diabolical scene. It caught the Death Dog nearest Elora full in the chest and blasted all the way through him, dissipating only when it emerged from the other side. The dog shrieked and Elora’s throat tore as she echoed its cry. It reared on its hind legs, creating a momentary parody of a human standing erect before toppling backward, its shadow substance eaten away from within by that pure and irresistible light.
The eyes gathered close around Elora, as though the pack were trying to coalesce into a single mass in her defense. Again and again, she beheld those murderous bursts of energy, felt the sympathetic pain of a Death Dog’s passing. There were two sources; she could tell that from the trajectory of the incoming bolts, but what they were remained hidden. The dogs had no knowledge of fear; their response to any attack was a monumental fury that would only find release in the butchering of their tormentor. To that end, they could be infernally patient, for they drew their sustenance from Elora herself. While she accepted the bond between them, even if only a partial one, the pack could not totally be destroyed. Moreover, the dogs could see what she did, that the bolts of light were gradually weakening. Their attackers still possessed the power to inflict grievous harm but their resources were finite and that end was in sight.
Elora turned to an aspect of her old
er self, the part of her she considered forsaken, and called on her MageSight to reveal who was slaughtering her pets.
She hissed at the sight of them, refusing to accept that two such diminutive creatures could cause such harm.
They were brownies, shaped much like Daikini but hardly taller than a garden flower. The one on the left wore a pair of swords, carved from the fangs of a Death Dog he’d slain. He hadn’t emerged from that struggle unscathed. There were scars all across his chest, she knew, though she couldn’t see them now and the expression on his face of implacable resolve was heightened by the pale slash that ran across his right cheek from chin to hairline. There was a fan-shaped spray of silver at the summit of the scar; otherwise, his hair was the same dark chestnut as his eyes. He wore it long, fastened at the nape of the neck by a wrought silver knot.
His clothes were leather, finely tanned hides that fit as well as a second skin, except for a blouse of cotton and an overshirt of finely woven wool. Over his boots went deerskin leggings that rose to mid-thigh; over all went an ankle-length coat of oiled, waterproofed canvas, with pockets aplenty inside and out to contain tools of the trade and loot. Slung across his back was a quiver, in his hand he held a bow; as Elora watched, the brownie drew and nocked an arrow, and let it fly. As it left his grasp, a surge of glittery fire followed, from eyes to hand to the shaft of polished wood, transforming it on contact from something solid to one of fire and sending it shooting to its target with the speed and force of a lightning bolt.
This was Rool.
Beside him walked Franjean. Where one wore skins, the other favored silk. While one appeared more at home in some mountain wilderness, the other apparently favored an Imperial court. One was Frontier wild, his companion the personification of style and elegance. But his weapons were as deadly, his aim as sure, his heart as strong, his soul as true as Rool’s.
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