Dark Warrior Rising

by Ed Greenwood

  Or tried to. Jalandral pushed his speed to the utmost, and used it to slam hard into Shoan, lacerating his foe with the spellblade but also glancing him back in the direction he’d been swerving away from.

  Shoan Maulstryke slammed full-tilt into the unyielding stone ledge, lacking even time to shout.

  Banking sharply away to avoid a similar meeting with the cavern ceiling, Jalandral heard ribs snap behind him, and a grunt of pain. Fighting his way through yet another tight turn, he saw the Maulstryke Firstblood tumbling back up into the air, wincing and groaning, blinded by pain and blood—

  Which made it Olone-blessedly easy to race back, spellblade held sidewise, and almost delicately slice through Shoan Maulstryke’s no longer ward-shielded wrists.

  The severed hands spun away, still gripping a spellblade—and the rest of Shoan, sobbing incoherently, fell toward the waiting cavern floor.

  Smiling bleakly, his eyes as merciless as stone, Jalandral swooped around and down, almost grazing stalagmites as he raced along the floor, angling up …

  Tumbling helplessly, the Firstblood of Maulstryke impaled himself on a waiting Evendoom spellblade, as Jalandral flew viciously upward and into him, hilt-deep.

  Shoan’s sobs ended in a great gasp and gout of blood. He slumped against Jalandral, arms and legs spasming.

  Only then did Jalandral allow himself to laugh in triumph.

  So he was laughing when Shoan died—and spells that had waited a long, long time burst into life, causing the Maulstryke heir’s various hidden amulets and daggers to explode in shards and flame, that no enemy might come to possess them.

  Jalandral’s ward failed almost instantly under the onslaught of so much whirling steel, and he hadn’t even time to roar in pain before it was all over, and he was flying along raggedly, burned and bleeding.

  His innards felt wet and loose and … dangling. Goddess, he should have known …

  His wounds were bad, probably fatal if he didn’t see to them swiftly. He could barely see, his face was so twisted with the pain. Rolling over in the air to give Taerune a salute that began as an airy wave but ended in a spasm of pain, Jalandral called on his blade to translocate him from this place.

  His long-unvisited dire-doom cache, with its healings …

  Jalandral winced at the pain he was feeling—and at the much greater pain he knew was coming.

  He was still wincing when he vanished.

  “Ithmeira!” The hiss came from between her boots; the priestess stepped back so swiftly she almost overbalanced and fell among the jagged, blackened spars.

  By the Ice, she’d almost stepped on Semmeira’s face! No wonder the warning hiss had been so sharp.

  Ithmeira knelt without a word, and started plucking aside the wreckage of Coldheart from around the Exalted Daughter’s grim and furious face.

  All around them was heaped and tumbled wrack—blackened stone and riven, splintered wood—amid scudding drifts of smoldering smoke. The abbey that had been Ithmeira’s home for as long as she could remember was … gone.

  And the vivid memory flooded her mind again: the Revered Mother exploding like a star, shouting out frantic spells to the last. She shuddered, and shook her head, trying vainly to banish what would not go away.

  “Exalted Daughter of the Ice,” Ithmeira asked, as she struggled to heave aside a broken-off length of column that was larger than she was, “are you … whole?”

  “I know not. Free me, and we’ll see.” Exalted Daughter of the Ice Semmeira might have meant to say more, but thick smoke swept over her, and she burst into a fit of helpless coughing.

  Grimly the scorched, wounded priestess worked on. It was so tempting to just go, and leave Semmeira and her ruthless ambition to die here, buried and helpless … but this was a holy place of the Ever-Ice, even as desecrated and ruined as it was now. The Divine Ice would know what she’d done, and punish her accordingly.

  Forever.

  Wherefore Ithmeira dug and clawed and heaved, until at last a stiff and wincing Semmeira staggered to her feet, refusing to groan or whimper, felt her arms and legs with reluctantly probing fingers, and asked curtly, “Are we the only two living?” Then the coughing claimed her again, and she doubled over.

  “No,” Ithmeira replied wearily, dragging her upright and pointing across the streaming smokes that had been Coldheart. “There’s Lolonmae.”

  “Of course,” Semmeira said bitterly. “Well, not for much longer.”

  She fumbled through the tatters of what was left of her robes until her fingers reached the searingly cold dagger of enchanted Ice that all devout priestesses of the Ice wear against their thighs. She drew it forth and started through the wreckage, falling on her face almost immediately.

  “No!” Ithmeira caught her by the shoulder and hauled her upright and around, so as to hiss in her face: “Try to slay her, and I’ll see that you perish first!”

  Semmeira gave her a look that would once have made Ithmeira tremble and shrink back, begging forgiveness.

  This time the priestess stood unmoved, and it was the Exalted Daughter who looked away first—and then turned again to gaze upon Lolonmae.

  Ithmeira felt her stiffen, and knew why. She’d seen that Lolonmae had been changed by the titanic magics in some way. The young holy-she stood dazed but physically unmarked, on a little patch of surviving abbey floor tiles, peering about vaguely—and her sightless eyes were spitting little lightnings.

  “See?” she hissed to Semmeira. “Either by the foe who struck us all down, or by the Divine Ice, Lolonmae may have become the mightiest weapon in all the Dark. If we can but learn how to wield her.”

  Orivon kept his sword ready in his hand. “Do you know who it is?”

  “It was Shoan Maulstryke,” Taerune told him. “It’s no one, now.”

  The body was blackened and twisted, the arms ending abruptly without hands, the torso slashed away to bare bone here and there, the face frozen in a grimace of disbelieving agony that would last until some cave slitherer ate it away.

  “No weapons,” Orivon growled, and lifted his head to look across the cavern to where the spellblade lay flickering, severed hands still clutching its hilt like two gnarled spiders.

  “No,” Taerune said warningly. “Spellblades can be traced from afar. Any Talonar who knows how can find you—and the spellrobes of House Maulstryke can probably awaken the blade, while they’re still standing in their chambers back in Talonnorn and you’re swinging it at someone, to harm you. If this hadn’t been a Firstblood—if I didn’t think Maulstryke was watching—there might be a chance to snatch a spellblade. Here and now, we dare not.”

  Orivon gave her a frown and knelt down to peer at what still adorned the corpse’s ruined forearms: the ward-bracers.

  They’d both seen feeble glows arise from the metal bands earlier. They’d watched those dim radiances dance, flicker, and then fade away again, and Taerune had told the firefist that meant their wearer had died, and his last deathbound magics were spent. She’d also admitted that the bracers had their own magic, that yet survived.

  Orivon reached for the nearest bracer.

  “No!” his former owner hissed, striking aside his fingers. “Spellrobes can trace ward-bracers! If any Maul is scrying their heir, or thinks to seek his whereabouts, they’ll find you!”

  Orivon gave Taerune a grim look.

  “Good,” he told her softly. “I want them to find me.”

  Old Bloodblade waved at the many bright glows ahead in a mincing mockery of a sophisticated Haraedra Nifl’s flourish, and declaimed grandly, “Behold Talonnorn!”

  “Why, thank you, Barandon,” Lharlak replied sarcastically. “Once again your aged wisdom rescues us all! Such is my blindness, I would never have noticed it without—”

  Lharlak was lacking an eye, but hadn’t lost it by being slow in a fray. Wherefore he turned his head and reared back even faster than the hurlbow shaft came streaking out of the darkness—so it snatched away his eye patch rather
than bursting through his head.

  The Ravager standing next to him gurgled around a shaft suddenly sprouting from his throat, and toppled. His fall took him hard into Daruse, driving the amulet-festooned Nifl into a swift stagger aside.

  Which left Old Bloodblade alone to face the warblades rushing out of the darkness.

  Or, if one preferred, gave him a clear field of fire to cook them in.

  He seized his opportunity, well-used sword in one hand and wand in the other, bathing the Talonar in bright, blinding flame before anyone else could aim a hurlbow at what was, after all—before Olone, even he admitted it—a large and imposing target.

  Their screams were so loud that the Ravager leader had a hard time hearing Daruse say warningly, “There’ll come a moment in some battle or other when you’ll boldly unleash that toy, and discover Alathla’s magic has run out. And it won’t be a pretty moment.”

  “Ah,” Old Bloodblade growled, “but this one is! Aye?”

  They stepped back around a stalagmite bigger than both of them and watched the flames fade, many licking along the limbs of staggering, falling blackened things that had been warblades of Talonnorn a breath earlier.

  “D’you think we got them all?”

  “No,” said Lharlak, Daruse, and Sarntor, all together.

  “Well, then, all you experts on the defenses of Talonnorn, d’you think we blundered into one band out on a foray, or is this part of a ring of defenders?”

  “Doesn’t matter which,” Daruse replied. “A city ruled by rival Houses, all of them rich in spellblades; if these were but warblades out on a foray, we have to think they’ve now managed to tell everyone we’re—”

  “Which means,” Lharlak interrupted urgently, “we shouldn’t be here, longer! We should get gone—along there—and come at Talonnorn by another way.”

  “A brilliant plan, Lord Bloodblade!” Sarntor said enthusiastically, and darted off down the passage Lharlak had indicated. There was a rush to follow.

  “I didn’t—” Old Bloodblade snarled and found himself addressing empty air.

  With a smile and a shrug, he stopped talking and lumbered hastily after the band he thought he’d been commanding. ’Twouldn’t do, to find himself standing alone against a score or more Talonar warblades. ’T-wouldn’t do at all.

  The glow around his feet told him he’d arrived.

  Which was good, because he could barely think through the shrieking pain … and even through his agonies he could feel blood pumping out of him. Olone damn Shoan Maulstryke!

  Well, now … she undoubtedly had. Jalandral started to chuckle at that—unwisely. The fresh pain left him sagging helplessly against the nearby stone wall, groaning.

  Do it, Dral. Do it or die.

  He told himself that, again and again, as he fumbled along the ledge. The flagon, the vial … and Goddess, yes, the row of little hollows with dusty gemstones in each. The healing stones, the spells on them his deliverance. He’d need at least three …

  He almost dropped the vial getting its stopper off, but managed to empty the hissing acid it held into the flagon instead. This was going to hurt worse than anything he’d yet felt on this little journey … and for a very long time before that, perhaps ever.

  With trembling fingers he dropped the gemstones in and watched the smoke rise and the hissing intensify as they dissolved.

  It soon died again, and the Firstblood of Evendoom lifted the flagon, murmured, “Hail, all you crones,” and—tossed it down his throat, letting the flagon fall and sinking to his knees before the burning agony could choke him.

  He made it, or thought he did, before the eternity of moaning through a ruined mouth and throat, their burning agony like swallowing coals. It went on searing him long after soothing relief had spread slowly—oh, so slowly—out through the rest of his body.

  His torture sank down into a dull aching at last, and Jalandral found himself curled up on his side on the cold, hard stone floor. He was whole again, or nearly so, and had best be up and out of this place before some busynose tried to trace him with spells …

  With a sigh of relief at finding the agony gone, leaving only a tightness in his limbs where he’d convulsed and fought against collapse, like a remembered echo of unpleasantness, Jalandral stood, stretched, and—froze as he became aware that someone was watching him.

  It was a Nifl face he knew—a she of his own House—and it was wearing a grim smile.

  As Evendoom crones often did, when they weren’t looking haughty or coldly displeased.

  Klaerra Evendoom.

  Jalandral straightened as swiftly as he’d ever done anything in his life, plucking and hurling a dagger from his sleeve. Lightning-swift he threw another, spinning right behind the first—and watched them both come to a sudden halt in the air, to hover in front of her throat and breast.

  Her wards were up and waiting, and they were stronger by far than any he’d yet seen. Those blades bore runes that carried them through most wards as if those defenses didn’t exist …

  Klaerra lifted her hands between his motionless daggers and then casually spread them apart, thrusting the steel fangs aside—whereupon they regained their former swift spinning in an instant, and flashed past her to crash and clang off the stone walls behind her. Her smile never changed.

  “We must talk,” she said softly.

  Sarntor turned to the rest of the Ravagers and pointed, saying not a word. He didn’t have to.

  By the glow flooding down it, they all knew the cross tunnel opened into the great cavern that held Talonnorn. His manner of pointing told them the tunnel didn’t seem to be guarded.

  Lharlak and Daruse held up their hands to the other Ravagers in clear “stand and stay” commands, and went with Sarntor.

  All three returned almost immediately to signal “clear, come!” and the Ravagers started forward—only to be jostled aside by a puffing Old Bloodblade, who’d been hurrying along in their rear. Spreading his arms wide to hold everyone back, he aimed his wand down the cross tunnel at the waiting city and triggered it.

  Bright flame burst forth—and then rebounded back at the Nifl leader, even as it raced outward in all directions, to form to a huge sheet of roaring flames that filled the tunnel, and made more than one Ravager whirl and run.

  The heat smote their faces, and unlike the wand-bursts they’d seen their leader hurl before, the flames crackled on hungrily, fading only slowly.

  Old Bloodblade turned, inclined his head to them all in the manner of a vindicated House lord regally forgiving those who’ve doubted him, and growled, “We older, wiser Nifl have our uses.”

  Sarntor frowned, and nodded at the flames. “So what is that, exactly?”

  “The wards of Talonnorn. If you waited until all the flames are gone and the air looks empty again, you’ll still be dead if you stepped forward too far.”

  “What?” Lharlak asked disbelievingly, watching the flames die.

  Old Bloodblade nodded. “To reach Talonnorn, we’ll have to wait until the Talonar open a breach in their wards, to let some of their own in or out, and try to rush through—and by the Dark, we’ll have to be quick! Some of those crones don’t care how many of their own warblades they slay, so long as they fell any foes and get their way in all things!”

  “I’ve spied on Talonnorn before,” Daruse said suspiciously, “and the wards glowed then. And hummed. A sort of blue sheen that was always in the air …” He waved at the air in front of him, up and down, as if shaping a wall.

  Old Bloodblade nodded. “Those are the everyday wards, a wall of glowing air you can see through, that’s solid and blocks arrows, flung stones, prowling monsters, slaves seeking to run out—and Nifl like us. They stop some spells, but let others through.” He waved at the tunnel, and the glow of the castle-filled cavern beyond. “These, here, are invisible wards, that stop all magic”—he pointed at the flames—“and slay creatures blundering into them. Including Talonar, which is why they’re so seldom used.”
/>   Lharlak sighed. “Should we feel honored?”

  “It takes six or so spellblades quite some time to raise this sort of ward,” Old Bloodblade told him. “Longer than it’s been since we came within sight of Talonnorn. Unless a sentinel saw us way out in the Dark, and somehow came to believe we were a huge army, they don’t even know we’re here.”

  “That last band of warblades know,” Daruse said. “Now.” Around him, Ravagers chuckled mirthlessly.

  Lharlak hefted his curved sword. “So, do we tarry and wait for a way in to open, or work our way all around the wards, testing them at every tunnel? Or turn away, and try again another time?”

  “We turn away,” Old Bloodblade growled. “We came to raid and make ourselves richer, not launch a war. Every moment we stay here makes it more likely they’ll see us and send out warblades enough to overwhelm us. No, we go back. Out into the Dark, and hope to find traders coming in or one of their fighting bands coming home—so we can pounce. Or if the band’s too strong, skulk after them and see if we can learn the way in. A signal, or a token they carry, or sentries and a pass phrase … it must be something simple, or no Talonar would be able to understand it, aye?”

  “You,” Orivon growled accusingly, “just don’t want me to get my hands on spellblades or bracers—or any other Nifl magic I can use!”

  Taerune shook her head. “No, Orivon, I just don’t want us to be hunted from now on, by foes who know exactly where to find us! Do you want to spend all the life you have left—and it’ll be short, believe you me—doing nothing but fighting and running and fighting, against foes who never, ever stop attacking?”

  Orivon shook his head. “You’ll say anything to stop me getting any Talonar magic!” He reached again for the bracers—and when Taerune made an exasperated sound and thrust her hand in his way, whirled around and slapped her hand away, glowering.

  She glowered right back.