Paladin's Strength

by T. Kingfisher

  “May I handle the bastard sword on the lower left?”

  The jailer did not uncuff him, but took down the sword. “Elliot’s got a bolt on you,” he said, jerking his chin to another man, who sat on a chair with a loaded crossbow, pointed very clearly in Istvhan’s direction. “Don’t get funny and he won’t have to use it.”

  “I should not dream of it.” Istvhan hefted the sword as well as he could, given the manacles. It wasn’t a good blade, but it had weight, and after the first two or three assailants, you were pretty much using the edge as a club anyway. And he didn’t trust any of the shields on the wall to hold up to a direct hit. “This will do.”

  As he walked toward the ramp that led up to the fighting floor, he caught a glimpse of a colorless shadow against the wall. She stepped forward, gesturing for the keys, and his jailer handed them over immediately, obedient to whatever authority she possessed.

  “When you get to hell,” she murmured, “you may tell the Lady of the Waters that the Dovekies still keep faith.”

  Istvhan bowed to her, very deeply, and went up the ramp, prepared to sell his life dear.

  He’d been in a lot of fights in his life, but this was the first one that Istvhan could remember that came with an announcer.

  "And now, gentlefolk, spectators of the sport, we have a challenger who fought his way into a prison cell! Claimed to be an elite swordsman in his own country. Let’s see what the drowgos think of that!”

  I don’t know if I hate this or if I want one to follow me around for all my fights. Istvhan scanned the crowd. The seats rose high overhead, with the very top open to the sky, though it was nighttime and torches provided all the light. The seats were jammed full, presumably with the wealthiest closest to the bottom and the rabble stuck high in the nosebleed section. There were seven boxes studded around the amphitheater in the bottom row, each with a large sigil on the front. Three represented stylized diving birds, the others a collection of waves, ships, and swords. One for each Sealord, I suspect. Is that one Antony there?

  His suspicions were confirmed a moment later when the announcer shouted, “Still undefeated, Sealord Antony’s drowgos!” and the man in the box stood up, punching a fist at the air. He was a young, rather rat-faced man, with thinning hair and a sailor’s wiry muscle. It was the person next to him that caught Istvhan’s attention. He wore a dark hooded cloak and sat far too still, but it was more than that. Something screamed at Istvhan to pay attention, that this was bad, this was evil, this was important.

  Paladins of the Saint of Steel had never been known for their finer sensitivities. Istvhan was no better at spotting a demon than the next person, and far worse if the next person happened to belong to the Dreaming God. But every half-buried sense of the uncanny that he possessed was suddenly screaming at him, and the cloaked figure was the locus.

  If that’s the necromancer, he’s a damn fool. He’s dressed like a cliché and he shouldn’t be out here anyway. Unless he has to maintain a visual link to his dead bodies.

  Two doors opened on opposite sides of the arena, and figures filed in. The crowd screamed. Istvhan took a few steps backward, darted a glance behind him to make sure that none had come through the door behind him. They hadn’t. Just these, then, at least at first.

  “Dredged from the bottom of the sea and animated with the desire for battle! They feel no pain and no fear! They do not know the meaning of defeat! Can any man actually kill them…twice?”

  He hadn’t needed an announcer to tell him that. The drowgos were most definitely dead. Istvhan had fought far more corpses in the last few days than he ever wanted to fight again, and it did not take an expert to see that these were more of the same. Water dripped from their clothes, smelling of brine. The skin that he could see was greenish-black and had a waxy appearance. All of them seemed to have normal heads, or at least as normal as dead men could get. There were six of them and three had shrouds that covered their faces, but the others were eyeless and swollen, with blackened tongues protruding from their mouths. They wore winding sheets and shrouds and ragged clothing.

  Well. The longer I last, the longer Clara has to get away. Let’s see what I can do.

  Six. Two with tridents, the rest with various swords and cutlasses. Not insurmountable, with the battle tide on him. Not great odds, nonetheless. If they fought as a unit, he’d be in deep trouble.

  Istvhan took a deep breath. The battle tide was rising, a red haze pulling at the edges of his vision. It is time, he told it. He stopped holding back and let it rise.

  “Sisters?” whispered Clara, peering through the barred window of the ape cage. “Sisters, are you there?”

  Oh please, let them be there, let me not be in the wrong place, let them not have moved them before the fight…

  Rustling. Shifting cloth. And then a familiar voice said, uncertainly, “Clara?”

  The hard, knotted space in her chest felt as if it had been struck with a hammer. She clutched the bars. “Sigrid? Is that you?”

  “Clara? But you’re dead!”

  “No, I’m not, I’m really not.” She choked on something between laughter and tears. “I didn’t die. Some Arral found me—oh, it doesn’t matter! I’m here now and we don’t have much time. I’ll get you out.” She fumbled with the keys and slid one into the lock. They were huge, heavy things and the locks were massive. The first one didn’t turn, and she tried the next. The keys jangled on the ring. One of the tigers gave a coughing snarl at the sound and another cat roared from farther down the block, until the whole row rang with echoes. Blessed Saint Ursa, they’ve probably learned that the keys mean it’s feeding time…

  “Are you all right?” asked Sigrid, through the door.

  “I’ve just got to find the right key.”

  And then she stopped, because something very sharp and very cold was prodding her in the back.

  Very slowly, she turned her head.

  One of the tiger keepers stood four feet away. He had a wicked spear with a crossbrace on it, set directly against her kidneys.

  “I don’t know how you got out,” he said, “but I’m guessing you’re one of them. Do you know what this thing I’m carrying is?”

  “Bear spear,” said Clara, her mouth dry.

  “Exactly so.” He put a touch of pressure on the weapon and she felt it slice through the cloth of her robe. The sides would be razor sharp, designed to slide through muscle and shield fat. “There was a fashion for bearbaiting a few years back. Me, I say that’s a damn waste of a fine animal, but I haven’t forgotten my business.”

  Clara swallowed. A soldier or a guard, she would have been confident in overpowering. They were used to fighting humans. But this man worked with animals every day and he was doing everything right. “If you let us go, I’ll give you anything you want.”

  He shook his head. “There’s nothing you can give me. Put your hands on the door.”

  She obeyed. “Please,” she said, not taking her eyes off him. “Please, you must know this is wrong. We’re nuns. We’ve been kidnapped. This is not right.”

  “No, it isn’t,” he said. He looked as old as she felt. “It’s not right when it’s tigers, either, or bears, or men. But I’ve got a granddaughter and I’m all she’s got left, and if you escape on my watch, I’ll be the next one in the pit.” He whistled, not looking away, and another keeper popped out of a tiger cage a few doors down.

  “Uh, sir, is there a problem?”

  “Yeah,” he said. He still didn’t take his eyes off Clara. “Go round up the rest of the keepers. One of the beasts is loose.”

  The drowgos did not fight as a unit, but as six individuals, which was why Istvhan was still alive. He’d already learned that cutting their heads off didn’t do anything. It just meant that he was fighting something headless. They were stumbling and not particularly agile, but they were still very much in the fight. He settled for lopping off their sword arms, which seemed to confuse them. The bodies were obviously well decayed, and cuttin
g off their arms felt more like hacking through a block of hard cheese than flesh.

  I shall simply have to take off their arms and legs until they can no longer get at me, he thought, and his thoughts were incredibly slow, rolling through his skull like stones, while his body moved with the speed of the tide. Sometimes time skipped sideways and he would find himself dragging his sword out of something’s body without quite knowing how he got there. He found that he was actually relying on the announcer to tell him how many he had damaged.

  “And he’s gotten the arms off another one! They may not be dead, but they won’t be taking a swing at him any more!”

  I have got to hire one of these guys… There were three armless drowgos now, and he was working on the fourth. He had gotten one of its legs off and its hand at the wrist. It did not seem pained, but it fell over and began crawling after him. The battle tide rolled over him again. Everything was so slow. The movements of the enemy were clumsy and took so very long.

  One of the ones without a sword arm came at him, trying to catch him in a one-armed hug. He danced out of the way, but there was a second one behind him and it actually got an arm partway around his waist. It was cold and wet and had the same soft, bloated feel as the leg he’d ripped off the smooth man days earlier.

  He’d never been violently ill when the tide was upon him. His shred of remaining consciousness was deeply relieved.

  Istvhan slammed the butt of his sword against the drowgo’s chest, not expecting it to do anything but shove the creature back. Instead, he heard a strangely familiar hollow crunch.

  The drowgo collapsed.

  Even through the red haze across his vision, Istvhan thought, What the hell? It sounded like clay. But that made no sense at all. He got out of the way in case the thing was only stunned, but it lay unmoving on the sand.

  Another was approaching, carrying a trident, and he backed away, out of range of the downed one, and waited to meet it, still puzzling over the sound. That didn’t sound like bone. How is that possible? He had already chopped one’s head half off, and it was flesh he cut through, too-soft and bloated from drowning, but definitely flesh. None of them had an extra head sticking out of their backs or shoulders.

  The new drowgo had reach, but it was so slow. No faster than a human. The battle tide was swift and merciless. He had years to step past the thrust of the trident, to grab the shaft in his free hand and yank forward, pulling the drowgo off-balance, just so that he could angle it and shove backward. The butt of the trident hit it in the chest and he heard another crackle of breaking pottery and it collapsed, lifeless. The crowd howled, a distant roar like the sea striking rocks.

  Istvhan fought free of the tide. It was probably foolish but if he was right, it changed everything. He kept hold of the trident, dug the tines into the wrappings over the downed drowgo’s chest, and pulled.

  Under the winding cloth, there was a shirt. Under the shirt—shit, shit, another one was coming, he didn’t have time but he had to know—there was a gaping hole, black-ish green at the edges, the inside coated with grave wax.

  Inside the hole, there were a dozen shards of broken pottery.

  Clay hearts? Do they have clay hearts? That would make a certain kind of sense, but Stachys never said anything.

  He uncoiled, leading with the sword stabbing straight into the next one’s chest at the approximate level of the hole. A foolish move, one that no smart warrior would have tried on a human opponent. The ribs would knock your blade aside, and if they didn’t, you’d have his torso permanently affixed to your sword, and presumably all his friends and maternal cousins would come running while you had a foot on his sternum, trying to pry him off.

  No ribs. Another crackle of breaking ceramic. Another one down.

  The one crawling toward him was the obvious target. He took off its other arm and rolled it over with the trident. It snapped and kicked at him. He pinned it down with the trident through the neck and pulled its shroud aside.

  …oh.

  It wasn’t a heart.

  The head of a child, cast in clay, snapped its jaws at him and opened its mouth in a soundless snarl.

  Forty-Five

  Clara had hoped to be reunited with her sisters as a liberator. Instead, she was shoved unceremoniously through the door on the point of a bear spear. The door slammed and left her blinking in the gloom.

  “Clara,” said Sister Sigrid, and folded her arms around Clara’s shoulders.

  “I was trying to rescue you,” she said, feeling tears coming. “Oh god, I was so close, it’s so stupid to get caught now…”

  Sigrid patted her back as if she were very young. “We’re all together again. That’s worth something.” Then she stepped away and there was another hug and another and even though she’d failed, they were here at last, after so long…

  “Clara!”

  “Late as always, I see.”

  “I thought I’d never see you again.”

  “I’m so glad you’re alive.”

  “We all thought you died!”

  She tried to answer all of them, but Saint Ursa only knew how coherent she was. Towards the end, she was just nodding and sobbing and unable to form any sentence at all.

  “Is…is everyone still alive?” Clara asked, when she could get control of her voice again. She looked around the cell, her eyes adjusting to the gloom. The ape cage had been hastily converted to a kind of dormitory, with hammocks slung above and below and a table with food and drink. She tried to count bodies and gave up. “Where’s the Abbess?”

  “The Abbess didn’t make it,” said Sigrid gruffly.

  Clara felt her heart clench. “The wagon was too much for her?”

  “It wasn’t the wagon. But how did you get here?”

  “What do you mean, it wasn’t the wagon?”

  One of the two novices began to cry. Sigrid put her hand against the door as if trying to keep the world out. “We spent two weeks at a manor house a little south of here. The man that the raiders handed us over to demanded that we change, to prove that he wasn’t being swindled. The Abbess refused. Said that we were not animals to perform for their amusement. So they hurt her until we complied.”

  Clara inhaled sharply. “Hurt…”

  “She died of her wounds.”

  “We should have obeyed her wishes,” said Sister Emilia. “We lowered ourselves to change, and for what? It didn’t save her.”

  “If we’d done it sooner, it would have,” growled the Sister Apothecary.

  “It’s done,” said Sigrid. “It doesn’t matter now.” She looked at Clara, and Clara read in her eyes that it mattered very, very much and Sigrid was holding her temper by the barest shreds. “Do you know where we are?”

  “Morstone,” said Clara. “And we’re about to be sent into the fighting pits.”

  Dismay ran through the assembled sisters, but Sigrid only nodded. “Tell us what you know, then.”

  Istvhan could hear the crowd screaming, could see another legless drowgo crawling toward him, but he couldn’t look away. The sculpture in the dead thing’s chest was no larger than his fist and there was something dreadfully misshapen about it. The forehead bulged over the face. Its eyes were far too widely spaced and had been sculpted closed, like a monstrous fetus.

  Bizarrely, his first reaction was relief. This wasn’t necromancy. This was evil, but it was a simple, straightforward evil that he understood. No one was dragging the dead back from their endless rest. The drowgos were not undead, they were simply dead flesh being driven forward by a wonderworker’s magic.

  Stachys told us. He said that he’d been angry when he made the last mold, that it wasn’t right. And I thought he meant that it didn’t work right, but no, he meant that what he’d created wasn’t right. It wasn’t something that could pass on the street. Maybe it was his way of trying to stop what his creation was doing.

  Poor fool. That thing he created just found another way to use it.

  The crawling thing jerke
d and twisted on the end of the trident. Istvhan smashed the clay child’s face with his boot heel. The drowgo went limp.

  He yanked the trident free and made his way across the sands, pinning each of the crawling drowgos and stomping down on its chest. Only one survived. He hauled the wet cloth off it and saw that the hole was in its belly instead, the clay head jammed in upside down, half-buried in a tangle of blackened viscera.

  Don’t puke in front of the enemy. Don’t give them the satisfaction.

  “He’s done it!” screamed the announcer. “He’s killed them! Through the heart, every time! The swordsman’s strategy pays off!”

  He stalked toward Sealord Antony’s box and flung the trident down. It landed upright and quivering in the sand. “Well?” he shouted. “Have you got any more?”

  It was absolutely grandstanding and the crowd loved it. Antony turned an ugly shade of mottled red and pounded his fist on the edge of the box. The hooded figure next to him turned their head and gazed down at Istvhan from the shadows of their cowl.

  You’re no necromancer. You’re Stachys’s great creation, aren’t you? You found a way to get bodies supplied for you. I’ll bet diamonds to dogshit that you’re harvesting the bodies of the people you kill in the arena. Maybe soaking these overnight so they swell nicely, and jamming one of your nasty little heads into their guts. Oh, what a fine deal that must be. Every fight humans lose, you win.

  He wondered how many previous gladiators had figured out that the little clay objects were controlling the corpses. Did you just bury them under a wave of bodies, then put another head on top of them? The drowgos are undefeated, so no one’s lived long enough to pass word. And from the crowd, it probably just looks like I’m destroying their hearts. The heads were so small and the walls were so high. As long as the drowgos left no survivors, and as long as he kept the people who cleaned up the bodies happy, Antony could keep going indefinitely, feeding bodies into the smooth men’s mill.