by J. S. Morin
Iridan switched his vision back to the light, seeing through the gap in the fog that his use of fire magic had created. It was still dark, but there was enough light from the burning men to get a view of his opponent. The man wore blue and gold. By his dark skin, he was Safschan. The blade that had drawn Iridan’s attention enough to warrant a look in the light was a rune-blade—which meant his opponent was a blade-priest.
The blade-priest called out to Iridan. There were several foreign words, which Iridan’s education failed to identify as either Megrenn or Safschan, but the last was a name: “Rashan.” Iridan cocked his head to the side, confused. The blade-priest must have realized Iridan had not understood him, for he tried again in thickly accented Kadrin.
“I am honored by fighting you, Warlock Rashan,” the blade-priest said, repeating his greeting.
Iridan shook his head. The blade-priest stiffened, straightening from the ready stance he had eased into after making his challenge. It seemed that Iridan had offended him. Some small, strange, misguided part of Iridan’s mind could not allow him to cross blades with the misunderstanding hanging between them.
“I am Warlock Iridan Solaran. Rashan is my father,” Iridan said by way of clarification.
The blade-priest’s expression turned sour. “Then I will kill you instead, unworthy spawn of evil. I am Souka, and I will wash my blade in your blood,” the blade-priest said, readying himself once more.
The soldiers who had survived Iridan’s initial attack made no move to intervene. They had been bait for a trap, but had not caught the quarry they thought they were after.
With no further preamble, the blade-priest Souka charged Iridan. Souka held his rune-blade with a greatsword grip, both hands at the end of the elongated handle spaced just a bit apart. Iridan watched his opponent change from a fire-shadowed form obscured by fog to a distinctive blue-white Source wielding a blade that shone brightly as he switched back to the aether to ready himself for combat.
There was a temptation to unleash an aether blast, and see if he could end the fight at once, but Iridan reined in the thought. Tightening his grip on Dragon’s Whisper, he strengthened his shielding spell, and prepared to meet the charge head-on. Souka’s blade hit like thunder against Iridan’s parry, sending a jolt through Iridan’s arms. In the aether, he saw that the Safschan had put a bit of aether through his muscles just before the blades collided. If not for the magically enhanced speed behind his own sword, Iridan never would have generated enough power to stop the stronger fighter’s initial attack.
There was no respite for Iridan to digest this information, and formulate a strategy. Souka’s second slash followed close behind, forcing Iridan to retreat a step as he parried a somewhat less forceful blow, and deflected it wide. The blade-priest slid one hand up the hilt of his sword as he stepped in to follow Iridan’s retreat, reversing the momentum of his weapon faster than Iridan had anticipated. Iridan felt the impact as his shield took a brutal strike that would have bisected his chest had he been wearing armor of steel instead of pure aether.
Thoughts of feeling out his opponent, and husbanding his aether flew from his mind like leaves before a gale. Instinct took over, and Iridan’s aether bolt lifted the blade-priest from his feet, and deposited him supine on the cobblestones some dozen paces distant. Iridan took a moment to catch his breath, and renew his shielding spell as he walked over to where Souka had fallen. Iridan had seen the blade-priest’s shielding spell fail when he hit the ground after it had done all it could just stopping Iridan’s spell from killing him instantly.
With admirable willpower, the wounded Souka drew himself to his feet, using his blade as a crutch, before Iridan arrived. He still held the sword in a ready grip, but Iridan could see that he was merely preparing to give a last accounting of himself before he was defeated.
“You will die with a clean blade, my friend,” Iridan told him, stopping just outside his reach.
The blade-priest was probably glaring lightning at him, but it was a hard thing to discern just by aether. He watched as Souka gathered a bit of aether using a draw that would not have gotten him past most of the fifteen-summer students on Ranking Day at the Imperial Academy. There was no reappearance of a shielding spell around him, though; the aether flowed to arms and legs.
Having seen the blade-priest’s preparation so clearly in the aether, Iridan was not surprised when Souka leapt at him, taking one last desperate shot at killing him. Iridan suspected his shielding spell could turn the blow aside even if he missed the parry entirely, but he had crossed blades once already, and lost to the superior swordsman. Iridan’s second aether bolt caught Souka mid leap, and hurled him against the stone wall of a nearby tavern with a crunch that had a note of finality to it.
The soldiers who had been watching the encounter saw that it was ended, and turned to flee. Iridan sent darts of flame after them, killing all but a pair, whom he did not bother pursuing. Instead he stalked over to examine the body of his adversary. Close examination was not needed to know the man was dead, but Iridan felt better having a look in the light to make certain.
Blood smeared the tavern wall, a place called The Happy Hog by its sign, though it had seen happier times to be sure. The body of Souka lay crumpled in the small herb garden that was adjacent to the tavern, surrounded by a shin-high brick retaining wall. The rune-blade lay just at the base of the wall, in the road, as blood from its former owner ran down the overflowing garden wall to soil it.
“I suppose it does not count if it is your blood, does it?” Iridan asked the corpse.
He regarded Souka’s weapon for a moment, noting the exquisite workmanship, the detailed etching of runes and decorative scrollwork, the gems inlaid in the small cross-guard and pommel. The half-blade, half-handle weapon was versatile in the hands of a master, but it took many summers to gain proficiency. Even if Iridan had no better weapon—and he felt that he did—he knew no one who would be of any use with it.
Dragon’s Whisper came down in a whistling blur, smashing against the rune-blade and into the cobblestones beneath it. The blade did not shatter, but it was bent beyond use, ruined.
Iridan slipped back to aether-vision, and scanned the area for signs of nearby foes, then set off, no particular destination in mind.
* * * * * * * *
With the rush of adrenaline from the battle worn off, Iridan noticed that the blade-priest’s blow had told. It hurt to take a deep breath, likely due to a cracked rib. It was yet another in a long series of minor hurts he had suffered, worse than the ache of an overused Source or a turned ankle, but not as bad as Juliana knocking his teeth out. The latter still rankled him.
“Some warlock I am, not even master over my own bed,” Iridan said to himself. He was getting stronger, he knew. His instincts were being retrained to fight rather than flee or cower. There was no Brannis to save him, as there had been most of his life.
He ran his tongue over his new teeth, feeling the odd contours and unfamiliar shape of them in his mouth. He had grown them in too quickly, not taking the time to do a proper job of it. When he was done freeing Munne, barring another pressing task, he would see to reshaping them a bit until they felt right. It was an unmanly hobby, reshaping the body for aesthetic reasons, but he could find plenty of sorceresses who could advise him on it. Brannis’s sister Aloisha—his cousin or niece or something, he supposed—was part of the Inner Circle, and could likely be trusted for some discretion on the matter. Her beauty was rather unlikely to all be natural. The thought of asking Juliana was out of the question twofold. Not only was she responsible for the ill-fitting teeth in the first place, but she seemed not to practice such magic herself. Surely that color hair was her own doing, but her mother had probably straightened her teeth as a girl, and she was sorely lacking in womanly curves. Iridan did not know if he had the courage to suggest she do something about the latter, else he might be starting over on another new set of teeth.
Wandering the foggy streets of Munne as he m
used, he was startled from his reflections by the gathering of Sources in the area. He had been learning to ignore the unmoving, horizontal forms of the sleeping citizenry that he could make out within the buildings he passed, but the ones he noted now were approaching. They were spread out over a wide area, closing some sort of search pattern, not quite converging on his location, but aware that he had to be somewhere within.
“I should have chased down the survivors,” Iridan said, cursing himself for laziness.
While he had planned to continue his killings, he greatly preferred striking from ambush. Not only was it safer, but it was much more efficient at eliminating large numbers of Megrenn troops quickly. He scanned about for stronger Sources among the searchers to see if they had any sorcerers or blade-priests among them. He also looked for large Sources that would indicate they had gone back to trying stripe-cats against him. He suspected not, since he had hardly seen any since his first night of raiding. The beasts were outrageously expensive to be thrown at Iridan to their near-certain demise—and by the winds did those things have a lot of blood in them!
There were indeed strong Sources to be found among those intent on surrounding him, three in fact. A fourth was borderline, either just an unusually aether-strong soldier or a weakling sorcerer. Iridan picked one of the strong ones at random, and quickened his pace, heading straight for it. It would be best for him to engage them before there was a chance for the strong ones to join forces against him.
A cry went up as Iridan’s hellfire spell crashed into his chosen target and everything within a dozen paces of it. Those not consumed by flames shouted things Iridan could not understand. After a moment’s confusion, he could see that the rest of the searchers had begun closing on his location. A scattering of dead Sources remained where his spell had hit, save for one that shone with the light of a shielding spell, and appeared to be stumbling around, either dazed or choking on the smoke from the corpses and two buildings that had been engulfed in the conflagration.
Iridan ran to close the distance before the sorcerer could recover, wincing at the pain in his ribs as his lungs expanded. The fires had burned away the fog in an instant, so Iridan was crossing open ground as he neared his opponent. Arrows stung against his shield as Megrenn archers among the patrols could now see him. Single arrows were little danger to him, but in the aggregate, they became a threat, wearing away at his shield, and requiring him to draw more aether to strengthen it.
The sorcerer straightened at Iridan’s approach, and he could hear him choking on the first words to a spell. Dragon’s Whisper put an end to that, though, carving the man in half neatly—at least as seen in the aether. Iridan ignored the spray of warm blood as he turned to seek out the archers who had harried his charge. Head-sized balls of flame shot from his hand in the direction of each he discovered. They were larger than the flaming darts he had used earlier, but he wanted to make sure that the bows were consumed in flame as well.
With immediate threats destroyed, and more on the way, Iridan paused a moment to catch his breath, and discovered his folly. The smoke from the many fires his magic had started was invisible in the aether, but he could feel the stinging in his eyes. When he tried to fill his lungs with air, he breathed it in. Stupid, he thought, unable to draw breath enough to berate himself aloud. I heard that Megrenn coughing in it. Dropping to the ground, and crawling away from the fires, his hacking, gasping coughs wracked his injured ribs with agony.
The onslaught began as the outlying members of the Megrenn search team arrived in numbers. Seeing Iridan stricken and debilitated, they tried to finish him much as he had done with the sorcerer. From his hands and knees, Iridan swatted ineffectually with Dragon’s Whisper as he was set upon by swordsmen, whose blows wore at his shielding spell anew.
Iridan wished that it was Heavens Cry he carried instead of the gift from Brannis. He liked the idea of just purging the city with the greenish, acidic fumes of Rashan’s weapon. It would be like smoking out a hive of vermin, purging the city of Megrenn and Kadrin alike, but allowing it to begin anew, fresh and clean of infestation.
Instead Iridan fought to his feet as he cleared his lungs. Dragon’s Whisper took little effort to wield, and against such foes as he faced, he required only a fraction of his attention as he worried more about his breathing. It batted aside their parrying blades as it snapped through the air like a serpent’s strike. The impacts against his shield grew infrequent as he finished off one opponent after another, until he was breathing heavily again, suffering the stabbing pain in his ribs as the price that had to be paid for the victory.
He had not had the presence of mind to keep lookout for the other two Sources he had identified initially. When he found all foes within arm’s reach dead around him, he noticed them again at last, bracketing the length of road he was standing on. There were only ten paces or so between him and each of them: two more of the blade-priests. He might have been able to make it to one of the narrow alleys to one side or the other between the houses that lined the road, but he was in no shape for running.
Iridan stuck Dragon’s Whisper into the ground at his feet, and collapsed to one knee, using the blade for support. Tears streamed from the corners of his eyes from the pain and from the smoke he had just escaped. If either of the blade-priests was aware of Iridan beginning to make a concerted draw upon the aether, neither showed a sign.
“This is not an honorable death, demon-spawn, to face you wounded and two against one,” one of the blade-priests said by way of apology in advance of finishing him.
Iridan saw nothing but a Source and a weapon. “The light is filled with distraction,” Rashan had told him. “Empathy worst of all. See a Source, destroy a Source.” The voice might have been older, but the Safschan accent made guessing tricky. The Source of the voice’s owner was the weaker of the two, but only by a hair.
“To slay Rashan in such a manner might be worthy of note, but to kill one such as you, we do our duty, and no more,” the other blade-priest finished summing up their statement.
Iridan had realized his mistake with the first blade-priest, engaging him in parley to no advantage. The fleeing soldiers had obviously spread the word that it was not Rashan Solaran rampaging through the nighttime streets of Munne. Though there was nothing more he might give away in banter, he was not going to repeat the error. Iridan said nothing, just waited, and drew more aether as they wasted time explaining their motives to a man they intended to live only a moment longer.
They approached briskly, the middling ground between caution and a reckless charge. It seemed very professional by Iridan’s estimation—good teamwork. It also showed a weakness of the blade-priests: a clear lack of awareness of the aether as they fought. It seemed that they were not suited to fighting warlocks.
Iridan let them get close, but not within reach of their rune-blades. Twin blasts of aether hit the two men in the chest as Iridan thrust his arms out to either side, releasing his grip on Dragon’s Whisper. They were tighter, more focused blasts than he’d had time to form in his earlier engagement, when he was fighting in a panic. Iridan found a new moment of panic, however, when the bolts did not stop his adversaries’ momentum. He threw himself backward to the ground as two corpses stumbled into one another with ragged, bloody holes through them.
The impact with the ground nearly made Iridan black out in pain from his ribs. He felt one of the rune-blades bounce off his shield, and another try to knife into his leg as it was caught between him and its former owner. Iridan felt a volley of arrows strike his shield, weakening it near the point of failing. The archers had no reason to hold their fire now that the blade-priests were not in danger.
Iridan drew more aether, realizing too late that the blade-priests’ newly dead aether was closest at hand. He strengthened his shield and shot more balls of fire, both at the archers, and at any buildings within easy range. He needed time. The Megrenn occupiers had shown that they would stop pursuit of him to attend to fires in the city. The
chaos of the frightened peasants who would be flushed into the streets would help as well.
Iridan pulled himself from beneath the pile of dead blade-priests, and retched. The feeling of the dead aether passing through his Source had disgusted him. It was a sensation his body had been unaware it could experience.
His stomach empty of its contents, Iridan wobbled to his feet, retrieved Dragon’s Whisper, and set about to find his shelter for the daytime.
* * * * * * * *
“Very well, we will try your plan tomorrow night,” General Rozen said, staring out into the night to watch the fires of Munne burning. “I am sorry for the loss of your brothers.”
“A priest does not expect to die of age or sickness. To never be defeated is the wish of the vain, thinking that none is better, or luckier, or more worthy than they,” Tiiba replied. He stood at the general’s side, but did not look out at the burning city. His attention remained fixed on the general as a show of respect.
“Do you really think it will work? You seem to assume much.”
“I study. To spend hours each day in sparring and meditation, and think oneself adequately prepared, ignores half the equation of combat. The study of foes is the other half. Understanding his training, his motives, his fears, and his vanities—that is the other half. I have read books, including one about this new warlock’s father. I have reports from the battles he has fought in the city, both his ambushes and in the attack that slew Souka. I will have reports of tonight’s battle, if any survive to make one. I also have other sources of information that—with respect, General—are secret to my kind.”
General Rozen nodded, satisfied that if the plan did not work, it was at least well thought out—and the planner was at greatest risk. Plans that were assembled by men who would be safely removed from battle were never as trustworthy as plans by men who would risk their own lives in trying them. General Rozen did not think to ask what those secret sources of information were. He assumed they were secrets of Tiiba’s brotherhood of blade-priests.