Paladin's Strength

by T. Kingfisher

  The crowd showed no sign of letting up. Istvhan waved to them, thinking what a disgusting group of people they must be, to enjoy watching beasts and men be torn to shreds by the corpses of their countrymen. You know, in some countries, they just have oiled naked men wrestle each other and nobody raises the dead at all.

  “Enough, Antony,” called another of the Sealords, rising to his feet. He was an old man with a pouched, sagging face and thinning hair. His box was decorated with the sigil of a ship caught in a mailed fist. Shipbreaker MacLaren? An odd title, but the gods only knew how the Sealords named themselves. Impressive that I can hear him so well over the crowd. This place must have been designed for the acoustics.

  “If your drowgos cannot handle one solitary swordsman, give someone else a turn. I’ve champions of my own to put in the ring.”

  Antony’s voice was strangled with rage. “This was barely an opening act! We sent in a handful to give him a fighting chance. My drowgos will take him and your pititful champions both, like they’ve taken all the others!”

  “Let us see, then,” said MacLaren, and sat down. He made a casual gesture toward the announcer.

  “From Sealord MacLaren, of the Shipbreaker Clan, appearing for the first time in the arena…the Sisterhood of Saint Ursa!”

  The crowd cheered, but Istvhan suspected that they would have cheered at anything at this point.

  And this is where they find out that Clara’s broken her sisters out of their cell. I hope.

  “From the barbaric South, far across the mountains, a tribe of sisters known for their savagery! It is said they capture men for mating, then kill them when they’re finished! But how will they fare against Morstone’s own menace from the deep?”

  If I somehow live through this, I am going to tell Clara so many stories.

  The tension grew. The announcer fell silent. Istvhan dared to hope, and kept his eyes fixed on MacLaren. Any minute now, a runner is going to come in and tell him…any minute now...

  He heard the doors creak wide behind him, and he turned.

  A dozen women were pushed through the entryway, in a tight little knot. They were mostly middle-aged and older, but two teenage novices clutched each other’s arms, terror written across their faces.

  No.

  Oh no.

  Gods, please.

  And at the front of them, the person in the world that he least wanted to see at that moment.

  Clara met his eyes, her expression bleak, and shook her head.

  The crowd did not know what to make of a group of frightened women, no matter how the announcer had billed them. There was some scattered cheering and a lot more muttering and confusion. Istvhan did not delude himself that they wouldn’t be delighted as soon as there was blood on the sand, though.

  He walked toward Clara. An older women, nearly as tall as she was and built along similar lines, moved to get between them, and Clara hastily put out an arm.

  “You shouldn’t be here,” he said.

  “Neither should you.”

  “Yeah, well…” He looked around at the entry doors. Any minute now, the drowgos would start pouring in. “Listen, this is important! They’re smooth men! They’ve got a clay head inside their chests. Smash those and they go down.”

  Clara’s eyes went wide, but she didn’t waste time with questions. “We’ll have to fight,” she said over her shoulder. “These things aren’t alive. There’s a clay thing in their chests. Smash it and they die.”

  The door began to slide open. He gripped the haft of his trident, wondering how many of the nuns had heard that and understood it. Wondering how much of a bloodbath he was about to witness.

  The big woman beside Clara turned to another woman next to her and said, “What do you do?”

  “Smash the clay thing in their chests,” said the second woman. Both of them grabbed two more and repeated the question. Drowgos began to emerge from the doorways, lining the walls of the pit. The dead men stood arm’s length from one another, ringing the colosseum. The crowd’s muttering began to turn to cheers as the pit filled with dead men.

  “Must we fight?” asked a voice at Istvhan’s elbow. The woman was old and frail and white-haired. “We have refused to change for their amusement, and now…” She raised one hand to the crowd.

  Saint of Steel, whatever is left of you, White Rat, if you’ll hear me, Saint Ursa if you exist—please, please let them not be determined to be martyrs. I’ll die with a glad heart for them, but let it have some meaning. “If you do not fight, dead men will tear you to pieces,” he said.

  Clara’s voice was flat and eerily uninflected, as if she were distracted by something of great importance. “I know this man. I will fight beside him.”

  The big woman said, “Not alone.”

  “Sigrid, the Abbess didn’t want—”

  “The Abbess is dead,” said Sigrid flatly. “Don’t ask me to watch the novices go the same way.”

  The drowgos finished filing in. Doors slammed shut with a hollow ring of metal. Istvhan turned in a circle, seeing dozens of the dead men, evenly spaced in a ring around them.

  He turned back to Clara. Torchlight woke green fires in her eyes. “We will not recognize you as beasts,” she said. Her jaw was tight and he realized at last that she was holding off the change with the very last of her self-control. “Get as far away from us as you can.”

  Sealord Antony brought his arm down in a slashing motion, and the drowgos charged.

  Forty-Six

  Istvhan knew one of the drowgos was coming up behind him and so he turned, catching its raised cutlass on his sword and punching the creature in the chest, hoping to find the hole. His fist struck ribs, but they dipped sharply to the left, and his second blow found the clay head. The drowgo collapsed and he spun away from it, took off another one’s arm—oh god it’s so spongey I hate this so much—and then found himself behind the line of drowgos.

  He looked over their heads and saw the Sisters of Saint Ursa.

  Clara had changed while his back was turned. So had the woman beside her. He watched the transformation move across them, like a fire catching, first one, then another, each of them standing up taller and taller, shapes flowing and changing into beasts, the novices half-grown juveniles, the rest as large as any bear he’d ever imagined.

  The noise of the crowd changed abruptly. It did not become silent, but the roar became a hiss of indrawn breath, as every spectator saw what was taking place.

  In that sudden hush, he heard the little old woman standing between two massive she-bears say, “Oh, bollocks,” and then she, too, was changing.

  How odd, thought Istvhan, feeling very detached, it doesn’t seem to have any relation to how big they are as humans. The old woman was a silver-muzzled giant, a third again as large as Clara.

  The drowgos were incapable of astonishment or surprise. They did not slow, but waded into combat, striking at the bears with sword and trident. One of the novices was cut down almost immediately. Then Clara and Sigrid hit the wall of drowgos like a hammer. Bodies flew. The crowd went mad.

  Telling them to go for the chest may have been overly precise. The bears fought like…well, like bears. They smashed drowgos down and flung them aside. Paws larger than Istvhan’s head laid open terrible gashes in the rotted flesh. The problem was that these blows were not particularly fatal unless they hit the right place. Istvhan had his back to the wall and watched as the silver-muzzled bear tore a drowgo’s head from its shoulders, whereupon the drowgo stabbed her anyway, or tried. It had much the same effect as Istvhan’s initial attempt to stab Clara, but it enraged the bear even further. She reared up and slammed her paws down on the drowgo, which crushed it to the ground and apparently took the clay head with it.

  If the bears had fought as a unit, they could have made short work of the enemy. But most of the bears wanted to run away instead of fighting, and only turned when they had been pressed up against the wall. Only a few seemed to retain enough human presence of mind
to know that they had no choice but to fight. Clara and Sigrid and the silver-muzzled old woman were the best of the lot, scything down the enemy like wheat, but they took blows from their own panicked sisters as well as the drowgos themselves.

  To get in the way of the bears was to risk death. To stay out of battle was to let the nuns die.

  It was not even a choice at all. Istvhan saw a knot of drowgos descending on the remaining novice and waded into the fray.

  Time slipped sideways. He lost his sword somewhere. He had a vague memory that one of the bodies had been fresh, not old, and when he hewed into the thing’s ribcage, the bone had locked onto the blade. Well, it hadn’t been a very good sword anyway. And now the bear was in front of him and two drowgos and the bear was trying to climb the wall in a desperate panic to get away.

  The drowgos, he told the tide desperately, it is the drowgos we want, not the bear.

  The tide did not answer. It rarely did. And it had finally seen enough of the bears to begin to understand how to fight them. The face, it whispered. The eyes, the nose. The body is armored. Strike the face and blind it first…grab the trident from this drowgo, shove it in front to take the blow, then aim for the eyes and it will rear back…

  No! Istvhan did take the trident from the drowgo, by the simple expedient of chopping its arm off, but he fought the tide, hooking the shaft over the monster’s neck and hauling it backwards. It squashed unpleasantly against him but it lost its footing, and he smashed the butt of the trident down into its chest, hammering away until he found the hole and the clay head controlling it.

  The second drowgo lifted its blade to cut at the bear’s legs—again, he thought, there was already a splatter of blood on the sand—and Istvhan flung himself between them. He caught the thing’s cutlass on the trident and slapped at its chest with his free hand, trying to find the hole, not finding it, it had to be somewhere, come on—

  The tide wrenched him suddenly to one side, sacrificing his left shoulder as it did. The drowgo’s cutlass slammed down and he felt his collarbone creak with the impact. Not broken, but he was going to have a devil of a time lifting his left arm for a while and why had the tide pulled him aside when—

  The drowgo came apart and a paw larger than his head smashed through the space where he had been standing. Something roared, louder than the crowd, directly in his ear.

  Up, up, get it on its hind legs, you probably can’t go through the belly there’s too much fat and hide there, try the throat, hit it in the face with the trident first—

  He feinted with the trident and the bear snarled, lashing out. He jerked out of the way just in time to avoid having his head ripped off. Somewhere very far away, Istvhan could hear himself screaming, but the tide was over his head now, his vision red around the edges and the pain in his shoulder like a goad and he was made to kill and keep on killing until nothing else moved on the sand and the beast was in his way.

  A cut opened up on the bear’s muzzle, and presumably he’d made it. His left arm was numb. The bear struck again and knocked the trident spinning out of his hands and he staggered backward, groping for the cutlass the second drowgo had dropped and if he could get it and get in low, perhaps he could open up the belly after all, he didn’t dare go high, the bear would catch him in a hug…

  He got the cutlass. He was moving too slow, but the bear wasn’t striking him again. Why not? What was it waiting for? The tide clawed at him, trying to drive him forward, and then the bear shook its head as if to dislodge a fly and took a step back and growled and the tide wanted him to press the advantage and he lifted the cutlass, waiting for his moment.

  They faced each other across the sand, beast and berserker. Istvhan could not tell if the sound he heard was the crowd or the roar of the tide in his ears. The bear shook its head again. Everything was red, red with pain, red with blood, but there was something he was supposed to remember, a word beating in his brain, a name…

  “Domina?”

  The bear’s growl was so deep he could feel it through his boots.

  What was this feeling? Why did he look on a beast with claws like daggers and think of a body under his and a voice laughing in his ear? Why was he thinking of beach plums, of all things?

  There might be drowgo still alive. Certainly there were other bears. He was in mortal danger and the tide knew it, but he fought his way toward the surface anyway and suddenly everything clicked back into place.

  “Clara,” he said, and threw the cutlass down.

  The bear took a step forward and rose up on its hind legs and Istvhan gazed up at his death and took a step forward to embrace it.

  She shivered and dwindled and then she was human and she walked forward into his arms.

  The drowgos were dead. Most of the sisters had become human again. Sigrid was the last to change, standing on her hind legs and gazing at the crowd with small, fury-bright eyes. But then she, too, dropped to the ground and shivered into human skin, and it was only a group of bleeding women picking up the rags of their clothing while some of them wept. There were three dead bears on the sand.

  Istvhan retrieved a long knife from the sand and stood beside Clara, trying to watch the doors in case more drowgos were coming. The announcer was shouting, but all he could hear over the crowd was “defeated at last” and “victory.” The dead bears did not feel like victory.

  He looked up, and the noble in the Shipbreaker box was standing, waving his fists in the air as if he had personally defeated the drowgos. Antony was gone.

  “Do they let us out now?” asked Sigrid, coming up beside them. One of her arms dangled awkwardly at her side.

  “I’ve no idea,” said Istvhan. “That arm looks bad.”

  “Broken,” she said. “Little bastard got one of their damn pitchforks into my leg and twisted right as my weight came down on it.” Istvhan and Clara both winced.

  Clara bled from a half-dozen cuts, none of which looked particularly serious, even though the sight made Istvhan want to find Sealord Antony and carve him up like a ham. I should probably do that anyway, just on principle. He wondered if he could tear off some of his tunic and mop up the worst of it.

  “Don’t fuss,” said Clara, watching the crowd.

  “I wasn’t fussing.”

  “You were absolutely about to start. Anyway, what happened to your arm?”

  “A drowgo, obviously. I don’t think it’s broken, but don’t ask me to do any heavy lifting for a bit.” He shook his head. “I take it you didn’t get out.”

  “They caught me as I was opening the door,” she said. “Sheer bad luck. One of the handlers never left the cell block. He was in the pen with the goddamn tiger, if you can believe it.”

  “I’ll believe anything. Saint’s teeth, are they ever going to let us out of here?”

  “Door’s opening,” said Sigrid laconically.

  Istvhan braced himself for another onslaught, but the only things in the doorway were two men, who waved them forward. “Come on!” one called. “This way!”

  “Do we trust them?” asked Sigrid.

  “No, but what are we going to do, keep standing here until everyone goes home?” said Clara reasonably.

  Istvhan walked forward, sword held down. If they were carrying chains, he’d kill them both, and anyone who came after them. But they were not. In fact, one clapped Istvhan’s shoulder and pumped his fist in the air. “That was amazing! I’ve never seen anything like it!”

  The sisters followed him, leaning on each other. Istvhan emerged into the beast run and there were at least a dozen people there with food and water and what looked like medics with a bowl of water and a stack of cloths and everyone was beaming at them like…like…

  Like you won. Like you were gladiators and they expect you to be proud of your victory. They cannot possibly have their heads this far up their own asses. Can they? Do they not understand that we’re prisoners?

  Apparently they did not. A beaming woman pressed a mug of water into his hands. The me
dics descended on Sigrid, clucking their tongues. Other people brought cloaks and draped them over the sisters’ bare shoulders. Clara met his eyes over their heads and she looked as baffled as he felt.

  “Sir, are you injured? That arm looks a bit rough. Can you move it?”

  “I’m fine,” he growled.

  “Yes, I’m sure you feel fine,” said the medic, “but that’s just the adrenaline talking. If you can get your chain off, I’ll take a look and wrap it up for you.”

  “Give me just a minute,” said Istvhan. “I need to get some more water first. I’m parched.”

  “Yes, of course, sir.”

  He began to move toward Clara, but before he had gone more than a few steps, a familiar voice said, “Well done, everyone!”

  Istvhan froze. It wasn’t possible. He can’t be that big a fool. He can’t have actually come down here to congratulate people he locked in cages. He can’t.

  He turned, very slowly, thinking that he must have mistaken the voice. After all, he’d only heard it shouted above him in the arena, the acoustics surely must have lead him astray, it couldn’t really be…

  Shipbreaker MacLaren beamed at him.

  He had three bodyguards behind him in a wedge, but he was shaking hands with medics and keepers and smiling with all his teeth. “So impressive! A great victory over Antony’s monsters! Well done! This will shake things up, my goodness, yes!”

  There are ten werebears here and one berserker. And he is shaking hands. And his guards are letting him do it. Have they all taken leave of their senses?

  “Once you’re all done here, we’ll see about getting you to better quarters,” said MacLaren, “as befits champions!”

  “This is madness,” murmured Clara in his ear. “Isn’t it? I’m not wrong, am I?”

  “Completely. I almost want to grab someone and remind them we’re prisoners.”

  She huffed a laugh. “I suspect they’d remember in a hurry if any of us tried to leave.”