Redemption's Blade

by Adrian Tchaikovsky

  Things had degenerated into talking behind him, which wasn’t ideal, but everyone was still obviously engrossed with each other, which suited him fine, He cast a look back at Fisher, who he knew could see him. Wringing his hands with worry, the old fool. Catt made sure to flash a big grin at the man before lifting the lid of the chest.

  His face fell.

  Nothing more than the bare floor of the chest, notably crown-free.

  A false enchantment, Fisher had said.

  Oh, bother.

  SHE HAD BLOODIED Wall, but it was just a graze—and hurt, he was angrier and faster without becoming careless. Heno had scrabbled back out of reach, but Nedlam’s next swing ended up with her club being swiped from her hands, flying ten feet to leave a crater in the canyon wall. Ralas went off at the same sort of trajectory, signifying the end of his active contribution to the fight. Then Wall turned back to her with murder obviously in mind, to find her closer than he’d thought and already hacking at his helm.

  Her blade cut, shearing into the metal, but if she was hoping to bisect him down the middle she was disappointed. There was an awkward moment when her blade actually got stuck and she ended up getting a foot against his thigh and yanking furiously to free it. Wall struck her in the shoulder with the butt of his hammer, which sent her tumbling back, thankfully still in possession of her sword. In the brief moment’s respite that won him, another of Kul’s arrows rammed into his visor, not piercing but wedged into one of the slits. Wall batted at it, snapping the shaft but leaving the head in place as a wedge-shaped shadow in his view.

  She was on her feet, at least, bunching up for another rush at him, but Nedlam got there just ahead of her. Possibly Wall had discounted her when she was disarmed, but an eight-foot-tall Yorughan was a weapon in her own right. She jumped him and got an arm past his hammer, crooking her hand around the shaft to put it out of the way. Her other hand ended up about his neck, trying to pry his battered helm off, levering at his visor. She was trying to give Amkulyah a shot at the face underneath, confident he would make it.

  Wall bellowed and shoved. For a moment Nedlam was matching him strength for strength, and the two of them swayed back and forth, grunting and straining, as Celestaine ran in and circled round, fully intending to stab the Guardian right between the shoulderblades. Then Wall slipped down to one knee, apparently vulnerable, save that it had been a feint and Nedlam fell for it. She lurched forwards and over Wall’s shoulders, and then he flipped her heels over head, to come down hard on her back.

  He almost fumbled his hammer trying to bring it down on her before she recovered, contenting himself with ramming the butt down into her shoulder. The sound of breaking bone echoed down the canyon like thunder.

  Nedlam screamed, a shrill, appalling sound from so huge a woman. Celestaine was already bringing her sword down at Wall’s back but he was turning as she did so, hammer on the move so that it met the edge of her blade full speed, head on. She fully expected that weighty head to go whickering off into the sky like a startled bird.

  Something gave. She felt that familiar contact and then lack of resistance that told her the sword was doing its job, ending up stumbling past Wall with the force of her own stroke. Recovering, she brought her sword back into guard ready for her next blow.

  Dumbly she stared at the hilt in her hands, utterly denuded of the blade, which had buried itself twenty feet into solid rock somewhere.

  Wall seemed equally surprised, but he recovered with more aplomb, ramming the head of his hammer into her chest to knock her down again, then putting a huge foot in its place to make sure she stayed there.

  “So,” he said ponderously, and she could just about hear him breathing, heaving within the helm. At least they’d made him work up a sweat. “So perish all those who would taint themselves with the power of evil.” He lowered the hammer’s head until it was touching her brow, pressing the back of her head into the hard ground. “You should have stayed on the path of righteousness, Celestaine, but it is those who were once good and who fell that must be destroyed most utterly, like the Kinslayer himself.”

  “Like you’d know about that,” she got out. It was supposed to be defiance, but it sounded more like a whimper in her ears.

  “I knew only the greatest seekers of evil would find me here,” Wall went on, obviously happy to hear his own story of how right he was, now she wasn’t in a position to argue. “I set trials to catch those weaker than you. Those corrupted heroes of less worth than you would have been killed by the monsters at Bleakmairn or in the Unredeemed Lands. Those lesser servants of evil would have been executed in Ilkand or Dorhambri.”

  “In—? You’re casting Jocien Silvermort as an enemy of evil?” she gasped.

  “He is the Liberator,” Wall said simply, and then another arrow slanted off his visor and his head snapped up. “Enough! Your time will come, archer!”

  Mustn’t have anything spoil your moment of self-indulgence, Celestaine thought. “Silvermort was making a new Kinslayer, you goddamned idiot!” And then she cried out as he leant ever so slightly on the hammer.

  “He is the Liberator,” Wall repeated. “A good man.”

  “Oh, he—took you in—you gullible bastard,” she got out through gritted teeth.

  “Enough.” And she had the sense he was genuinely hurt that she wasn’t telling him how right he’d been all along and begging for mercy.

  Wall’s head whipped round—so fast that she thought another arrow had struck him. A moment later his foot was off her chest and he was whirling, hammer swinging, leaping back towards the archway and the cave.

  “How dare you!” she heard him bellowing. “You think I don’t see you, you little thief?”

  Something shimmered there, and she had a brief glimpse of none other than Doctor Catt clutching at his brooch before the hammer swung sidelong into him.

  There was a brief flare of purple as his magical shield sprang up around him, but the hammer shattered it to pieces and sent him flying out of the cave, tumbling end over end before fetching up in a heap along the canyon wall.

  “So perish all who seek the crown!” Wall bellowed, apparently to the very sky itself. “And for what? Did you find it, little thief? You found nothing. You found only my trap for you. You die for an empty chest.”

  Catt didn’t seem to have actually died quite yet, but his amulet was in pieces and possibly so was he, with blood on his lips and splashed bright across his torn robe. For once, he had no wit to bring to bear against the world.

  “Now.” And Wall stalked over, hammer raised, obviously even more angry that a single blow hadn’t been sufficient. “Any more tricks, any more pitiful defences for me to destroy, evildoer?”

  Something growled. The sound turned Celestaine’s legs to water. It was all the wolves in the world, all the bears and tigers, every beast that had ever seen a human as prey.

  Hammer still poised over Doctor Catt, Lord Wall turned slowly.

  Chapter Twenty-Nine

  SHE THOUGHT IT was a wolf at first, big enough to swallow the sun. It stood on four legs at first, but then ran in on two, its long taloned arms ready to rake. For a bowel-loosening moment she thought it was coming for her, but then it was past her, tumbling her aside, howling its savagery at Lord Wall.

  The Guardian stared and said, in a remarkably small voice, “Fury?”

  Celestaine’s stomach lurched with sudden vertigo as she re-evaluated what she was looking at. Only moments before, she had been made to think of the statues and carvings of the Ilkand Temple. Lord Wall had been their chief model in all his superhuman martial glory, but the Temple had boasted five Guardians at its height. The Custodian had been slain by the Kinslayer, the first ever of their kind to die. Vigilant had died defending the Temple when the Kinslayer came back. By then, the other Templar mainstays had faded away. Wall had gone north in search of new and more fanatical converts, and the other two had simply dropped out of sight after the Kinslayer’s first defeat and before his resurge
nce. Celestaine knew all too well what the Undefeated had been doing, but nobody had ever discovered the fate of Fury.

  She remembered the statues: a dog-headed man, jaws wide in a snarl, bestial where the others—even the shape-changing Undefeated—were depicted as entirely human. But a dog, nonetheless; a defender of the hearth, the friend of mankind.

  This was no dog, it was not even a wolf; it was every savage beast of the wilds. Fury might have guarded the Temple once, but he had been off the leash for a very long time.

  Stretched about his barrel chest and shaggy shoulders was the ruin of a robe in the Cheriveni style, Celestaine could not help but notice, of the same drab colour formerly worn by one Doctor Fisher.

  “Fury…?” Wall repeated, and then he had possession of himself again and all his self-justifications fell visibly over his face like a portcullis. “Even you? Even you are corrupted by this—?”

  Fury was plainly as unimpressed by the rhetoric as Celestaine had been as he leapt at Wall mid-speech and slammed into the armoured Guardian’s chest, knocking him flat. Celestaine thought it was over right then as the wolf-monster went for his throat, but a moment later Wall had thrust the haft of his hammer up, knocking the huge creature off him, then catching it a blow about the shoulders with the head as both of them leapt to their feet.

  “Then die!” Wall was howling. “You were never as faithful as I! You abandoned the cause of right! Die for that alone!”

  The two of them thundered together, both of them brimming with a strength far more than natural. Fury seemed by far the more dangerous, each talon like a knife, each fang like a dagger, but Wall had redoubled his speed and strength, laying into his brother with a thunderous might more like a storm than a man.

  Facing that, Celestaine seriously considered just running far enough away that neither of them would ever find her. She had baggage, though, too much to just pick up and carry. Nedlam was groaning, plainly not about to to have it away on her toes. Heno had tried to haul her further from the scrum, but she had cursed and slapped at him with her good arm. Her skin was pale grey, like ashes.

  Still, she was alive and obviously not about to drop dead unless Wall gave her another nudge. Yorughan constitutions were more than human, after all. The same could not be said of Doctor Catt, who was probably breathing his last.

  And deserves to be, Celestaine thought fiercely. The weaselly, treacherous little toerag. And yet, and yet…

  “Well, it looks like we’re royally out of luck,” she told them: Heno, Amkulyah, the reanimated Ralas.

  “The chest’s empty,” Kul told her flatly. “The one Catt was after.”

  “We have bigger problems,” Celestaine said. She could feel her next words coming on her like a tidal wave, something she was unlikely to survive. “Heno,” she spat, hating herself. “Go sort Catt out.”

  “Kill him?”

  “No, keep him alive!”

  “What?” he demanded. “Piss on him.”

  “Heno, as you love me, just do it. Your fire wasn’t even singeing Wall.”

  “I’m not a physician.”

  She gave him a level look. “We both know what you were, for the Kinslayer. You were about to do it to me, before you had that change of heart I thank the gods for every morning. Heno, a torturer-magician knows more than any physician about keeping the wounded alive.”

  The Heart Taker was abruptly very sober. “He won’t… enjoy that.”

  “I don’t care if he’s comfortable, but keep him alive.”

  “And you?”

  She yanked Nedlam’s dagger from its sheath: long enough to be a shortsword. “I will fight.”

  “Celest—”

  “I will fight,” she repeated, more for her own sake than his. “Ralas, stick with Ned here. Do what you can. Kul? Watch for your shot.”

  The Aethani nodded.

  Celestaine turned to where the two Guardians were tearing at each other. She saw Fury rip one of Wall’s pauldrons off, sending the heavy metal spinning off to ring against the rocks. In return, Wall belted him across the muzzle, shattering a fang and bloodying his snout.

  She was only human. Either of them could have crushed her and barely noticed. Her magic sword was broken, her friends were in disarray.

  I don’t know if stabbing up the Kinslayer in a frenzied ambush counts as a heroic deed. They keep telling me I’m a hero, though. About time I did something to properly earn it.

  The Forinthi taught five different ways of killing with a short blade. Wall counted as an armoured target if anything on earth did, so she gripped Ned’s dagger point-down like a theatrical murderer and ran in, dodging the hammer’s backswing and then leaping up, scaling Wall like a mountain in the hope of burying that blade in the back of his neck.

  RALAS HURT. NOT only the pain he had been living with for years, the memory of old injuries stamped into every muscle and bone, honed by the very magic that would always mend him just so far and no further. Now he hurt because Lord Wall had shattered him again, one more death for the tally. He knew he should be taking up a knife or a stone or something and charging back in to help Celestaine. After all, what was the worst that could happen?

  The Forinthi said that wounds made you stronger, but Ralas was forced to admit that the country of his birth was an almost wilfully ignorant one. The worst that could happen was pain, and pain was something he was never allowed to get used to. Every knock and bruise brought with it a unique savour of hurt. The old and constant injuries didn’t deaden the new, just added extra levels of pain. Watching Wall swing that hammer about, all Ralas could think of was how it would feel when it staved in his ribs or shattered his spine.

  He couldn’t; he couldn’t follow where Celestaine was leading. He cursed himself for a coward, but the realist in him knew that he would achieve nothing and suffer greatly, and he didn’t have it in him.

  I have only my voice, and Wall isn’t going to stop fighting if I sing a rondel at him.

  Nedlam was trying to prop herself on one elbow to see what was going on. She looked in pain too, but more than that, she looked frustrated that she was missing the fight. Ralas saw Wall shake Celestaine off, and then she was hurling herself aside to escape the hammer. Fury smacked Wall across the helm then, claws leaving bright scars in the metal, and the armoured Guardian returned his murderous attention to his brother.

  We have no part in this fight, Ralas thought, awed and horrified by the sheer force of the blows being dealt out, the two strongest Guardians laying into each other without quarter. He glanced at Heno doing something eldritch to Doctor Catt, who writhed and cried out under his ministrations. At Ralas’s shoulder, Amkulyah had his bow half-drawn, his body still as stones, waiting for some opening.

  So it’s just me, then. Ralas stood, trying to get a knife from his belt and fumbling it, hands trembling like an old man’s. Gods, what can I do? This is no fight for mortals, still less for a used-up thing like me.

  The thought had a sequel though. Ralas was a gambling man, a habit that had been the original prompt for him taking up a travelling life where inconvenient debts might be left behind on the road. Right now he was willing to bet he wasn’t the only immortal watching this fight play out.

  “Hey!” he shouted, looking around at the burrow-riddled canyon walls. “I know you’re there. You’ve been dogging Celestaine since before she found me. You won’t have given up now.” And he hoped to hell he was right, and that this would accomplish anything. “Now’s your moment!” he shouted. “You come and pitch in, you cowardly bastard. You make good on all your promises, and I will sing the best goddamned song of valour and glory the world ever heard. This is your chance, for the whole of the pot. You can be the hero this time, but you have to act now!”

  The echoes of his voice rang back at him, interspersed with the roars and snarls of Fury and the metal thunder of Wall’s hammer striking stone. Ralas stood and waited.

  CELESTAINE HACKED AT Wall’s calf, but couldn’t even pierce the fine ma
il there. Then his steel-capped boot lashed out at her and she caught the edge of it on her hip, a sharp flare of pain that would slow her as soon as her body forced her to acknowledge it. She tried to get her dagger up into his groin but only bent the blade against his armour. For a moment she had his attention, though—a knife in the ’nads will do that—but before he could crush her, Fury was wrenching at his helm again, jaws locking about his visor and twisting it out of shape.

  Wall bellowed and smashed Fury in the jaw with a mailed fist, over and over. Celestaine saw at least one more tooth shatter under the pounding, but the metal visor was twisting still further, and Fury had a huge clawed hand about Wall’s neck. The hammer whirled back, wild and uncontrolled in a single-handed grip, crashing in under Fury’s ribs. The bestial monster yelped, just like a whipped dog, and tried to wrestle Wall for the weapon. Celestaine chose her moment and ran in again. This time she waited for the hammer to reach the end of its backswing and just jumped on Wall’s arm, riding him until he had brought her close enough to stab.

  She went for his face, and that nearly turned out very badly, since Fury had the same idea and almost ended up using her as a toothpick. He shied away at the last moment, the air about her hot and reeking with his animal breath, and then she had Ned’s dagger wedged behind the twisted visor, trying to get it into the flesh beneath.

  She must have jabbed something soft; Wall roared and tried to swat her off with his free hand. She saw the gauntlet reaching for her head, about to crush her skull like an egg, but Fury snapped at it, grinding two metal-shod fingers between his horrifying teeth and giving her a moment’s grace.

  She rammed down on the blade, then nearly fell as the visor suddenly gave, hinging away on its one remaining pin to reveal Wall’s rage-twisted face beneath. His eyes rolled, foam forming at the corner of his mouth. “Unworthy!” he was bellowing. “Unworthy!” and she wondered if he had just been chanting that single word all through the fight, muffled beneath his helm.