Dark Warrior Rising

by Ed Greenwood

  The winemaids set down their wine and hastened out, not wanting to hear one word of whatever reply the crone might make.

  Baerone smiled after their swift and deft vanishings ere turning to the table, sitting down, and saying briskly, “First, we must slaughter this dangerous Maharla Evendoom. Then we must eliminate the most cruel of the surviving upper priestesses of your temple. Please don’t misunderstand me: I’m not trying to sweep away all Consecrated—I want you to decide which of your sisters must be brought down. My intent here is to make it possible for us all to survive the fighting that you’ve so wisely fled from.”

  Priestesses looked at each other around the table. “Will you submit to a truth-reading spell?” Drayele asked quietly.

  “Of course.”

  More silent looks were traded, and this time some of them were accompanied by nods.

  “We are agreed,” Auree told the crone. “Welcome.”

  “Start scheming,” Zarele said simply, reaching for the nearest decanter.

  Erlingar Evendoom’s shoulder hurt. Swimming slowly up from the drowsy dimness of a slumber somehow heavier than he’d felt in a long, long time, he became aware of two things: that he was slumped over in his own chair, all his weight on one arm that must be as numb as its shoulder was aching—and that excited voices were chattering in his head. Familiar voices; Nifl-shes he …

  Kryree and Varaeme! But what were they—?

  Never, in all the many, many Turnings of his tramping off to the depths of the Araed to take his pleasure with them—or any of the willing shes of the Waiting Kisses where they dwelt and worked—had he so much as breathed their names here, in the Eventowers. So what, by Olone’s blinding beauty, were they doing here?

  In anger, Lord Evendoom came fully awake, and found himself sitting alone in a silent chamber. Kryree and Varaeme’s converse was spilling into his head from the ring by which he always bespoke them from afar, to tell them to be ready for his arrival.

  He stared thoughtfully down at it now, the plainest of the massive rings he wore on every finger—the only one not adorned with a knuckle-sized gemstone. He hadn’t been aware its magic could awaken without him willing it to, or carry anything to him but the replies they thought at him after he’d contacted them.

  Erlingar started to frown. Across the room, a wall sculpture of polished silver spheres orbiting endlessly, silently around a central sword, had broken apart into wild orbits that flung spheres well out into the room, and back again. And this heaviness still creeping along his limbs … somehow that had the smell of magic about it, too; he could taste it, at the back of his throat.

  What was going on? Letting out a sigh that was more a snarl than anything else, Lord Evendoom thrust his attention to listening to the voices of his mistresses.

  They weren’t talking to him … had no idea he was listening. So something was twisting the magic of his ring.

  Kryree and Varaeme were excitedly discussing something they’d seen—something that had been seen all over the Araed, they’d just been told. Something about a Dark Warrior—a human—a champion, Maharla Evend—Maharla?

  He must have shouted that as loudly in his mind as in the room, for the door was banging open and a warblade was looking in, sword drawn. “Lord?”

  Evendoom raised an imperious hand to tell the guard to stay where he was, and keep silent, as he listened to the startled voices in his mind, asking him if he was himself.

  I am Erlingar, whom you both know well, he said firmly in his mind. Kryree—Varaeme—what is this matter of a Dark Warrior and Maharla Evendoom? You saw it how?

  A spell, it seemed, Maharla’s spell, intended for crones and priestesses and seen by them all over the Araed and presumably Talonnorn. A spell that the magical wards of their pleasure-house, ironically intended to block magical prying and scrying, had captured—and were now repeating, presenting it over and over again for anyone inside the front room of the Waiting Kisses to see. Mistress Tarlarla was sending for a spellrobe right now to purge the wards and banish it, but until then there’d be no escaping this Dark Warrior, this forge slave standing in a cavern with … with …

  Taerune? Lord Evendoom’s mind-shout made them cower. Tell Tarlarla to leave those wards alone until I get there and see this magic of Maharla’s! If she does not, I’ll bring the Waiting Kisses down on her head! Tell her that!

  Minds tremulous, they agreed, but Erlingar barely heard their reply. He was striding across the room to snatch down a spellblade he hadn’t used for as long as he could remember, the dangerous one that—

  “Raelaund!” he snapped at the guard. “Fetch me a score of warblades, armed and armored and in the front hall by the time I get there! I want double-strength guards on our gates, and the rest to come with me! Go!”

  “Lord!” the warblade snapped back, whirled away, and was gone.

  Erlingar strode after him, and then came to a halt. Now where was the other really powerful spellblade, Olone damn it?

  “Ice and Beauty, but I’m getting old!” he snarled. “I can’t even storm out of the Eventowers properly anymore!”

  Orivon had never eaten cave-sleeth before, but it was good. The dark, tendon-crowded meat, not just the steaming sauce the Ravagers had boiled it in and then ladled over it. Everyone had crowded around the carcass and gone to work with their daggers, Taerune clumsily with only one hand. Nearly getting the point of her dagger in his eye, dripping sleeth impaled on it, Orivon had reared back, looked for the Ravager he’d noticed earlier with the belt bristling with forge tools, and asked if he might borrow some briefly.

  “Why?” had been the blunt response.

  “To fit one of my blades to the stump of her arm. In payment, I offer one of the other blades I’ve brought. I made them; they’re good warsteel.”

  The Ravager had turned and looked at Old Bloodblade, who had slowly nodded.

  The sleeth had vanished down to bones in a surprisingly short time, and everyone had drunk much. There was much telling of crude tales, of ambushes in dark caverns and creeping beasts and pratfalls of blundering Talonar patrols, and then the yawns had begun. When the Ravagers started to disperse, some plucking forth sleeping-cloaks from their packs, Daruse and Lharlak were among many who were already slumped over, drunk and snoring. Old Bloodblade pointed, here and there, and Ravagers who’d drunk much less quietly went around covering their sleeping fellows with cloaks.

  Ravagers, it seemed, slept by finding smooth rock, laying down a cloak in it, rolling themselves in a second cloak, and lying on the first cloak. It also seemed they fell asleep the moment they were down, still in clothes and boots.

  Old Bloodblade kept standing. He was busy at his pack, unrolling and laying out tunic after tunic on a rock as tall as he was. “Wrinkle,” he muttered often. “They all wrinkle.”

  Taerune stared in fascination at the badges adorning the garments. “You have tunics with the badges of all the major Niflghar cities?”

  Bloodblade crooked an eyebrow at her. “Of course! Doesn’t everyone?”

  Then the Ravager with the tools came up to him. Bloodblade watched Orivon’s blade traded for the loans of the tools, nodded, and then pointed at the human and then off into the darkness at a particular cave mouth. “Do your work yonder, as quickly as you can, and come back, after,” he said. “Yon cave goes nowhere, and we’ll be using it for other things.”

  Orivon and Taerune nodded, trying to stifle their own yawns, and headed off to the cave mouth.

  The moment they’d vanished through it, Daruse and Lharlak abruptly stopped snoring and sat bolt upright to look at Bloodblade.

  He nodded, and they shed their cloaks to steal silently off after the Dark Warrior and the outcast Evendoom.

  “I-it repeats, Lord, from here.” Kryree’s voice quavered.

  “So I’ve seen it all?” It took Lord Evendoom some effort to keep his own voice level; fury was almost choking him.

  At their nods, he said curtly, “I thank you both,” and st
arted to stride away.

  Kryree could move quickly when she wanted to. “My lord,” she murmured, nose to nose, her arms around him and her breath as sweet as ever on his chin, “you are troubled, and this pains me. Lord Erlingar Evendoom should be happy and content whenever he departs this house, and—”

  Iron-hard but precisely careful Evendoom fingers lifted her under her elbows and set her aside, and their owner’s burning gaze looked past her to still the nimble fingers of a voluptuous and smiling Varaeme, in the midst of their task of unlacing her own bodice to offer her charms to him.

  “Fondly though I’d love to tarry and dally with you both, who play ‘lady’ immeasurably more than the titled shes of my own blood and give me far more love and loyalty, I must now depart in haste to attend to the safety of my House and our city. Be assured I’ll return when I can, and accept these as payment for the service you have just done all Talonnorn.”

  Lord Evendoom plucked two rings off his fingers without looking at them, handed one to each pleasure-she, and whirled away.

  He was long gone while they were still gasping at what sparkled in their palms. Bristling with gems, the rings were by far the largest payment either of them had ever received.

  Erlingar Evendoom was half a street closer to home by then and striding hard, the warblades who’d stood outside the doors of the Waiting Kiss now trotting to keep up with him.

  “The Lords of the other Houses will soon be arriving,” he snapped to Taersor, the most senior of his guard, “with guards of their own. Greet them with courtesy and escort them with all honor to my chambers; there is to be no fighting or turning any of them away.”

  “The Lords of all the Houses?” Taersor echoed. “With priestesses and Eldests, too?”

  “I doubt it,” Lord Evendoom said grimly. “I’ll be burning the Talon.”

  Faces went pale all around him, and guards shrank back.

  Erlingar Evendoom paid them no heed, but rushed on, passing through his own gates like an angry whirlwind.

  Aloun of Ouvahlor frowned down into his whorl. “Burning the Talon? What’s that?”

  Luelldar lifted his head from his own whorl and said as gravely as any intoning underpriest: “At the founding of Talonnorn, the lords of the great Houses who’d fled from Evennar established a means to summon each other aside from their crones and the priestesses of Olone. Each has a claw fashioned of ordauth. When plunged into flame, it alerts every other lord; no matter where he might be, his head fills with a vision of the burning talon. By this oldest law and tradition of Talonnorn, those ruling lords are compelled to attend that summons as swiftly as they can, with heirs and bodyguards if they wish, but without priestesses or spellrobes.”

  He leaned forward to examine the arc of smaller whorls floating in front of him, around the larger central eye. “They’re rushing to the Eventowers right now,” he added, pointing down at several of the smaller whorls. “See?”

  Taerune’s face tightened. “Hurts,” she murmured.

  Orivon nodded. “Unavoidable. If it doesn’t clamp tight, it’ll chafe and cut, and rot will set in. Remember the gorkuls I fitted with carryhooks?”

  She nodded, almost impatiently, and ran her hand again along the underside of her forearm, feeling the straps that now led to her elbow, and around her arm just above it.

  “I’ll alter the buckle so you can fasten it by yourself,” he told her shortly, reaching for the little tap hammer again, and guiding her arm to the stone that was serving him as an anvil. Taerune winced in anticipation. “Is your Orb shielding us well enough, d’you think?”

  Every hammer blow, as precise and dainty as they were, made the outcast Evendoom flinch in pain. She set her teeth, and through them hissed, “Yes.”

  “Good,” Orivon growled, lifting her arm to peer closely at the flange he’d fashioned of its hilt, that would cover the tender end of her stump, “because I want you to know just how furious I am with you, Taerune Evendoom!”

  “Why are you furious?” she sighed wearily, face white with pain as he set her arm back down and struck again, more firmly this time. Sweat was starting to drip off her chin.

  “I wanted to just skulk through the Dark and find a way up to the Blindingbright, to get home—and you neatly made that impossible. ‘Dark Warrior,’ my fist! A name, nothing more! You’ve lauded a hollow champion, and these Ravagers will see that soon enough—and they’ll slay us just as dead as the Talonar hunting parties would have done! You can perhaps find a life among them, but you’ve trapped me, good and proper!”

  Orivon’s hammer came down hard enough to make her jump in his grip and cry out. In its wake, as he pulled Taerune’s arm upright to examine it again, she hissed, “They would have killed us right there and then, like they killed Unc—my uncle Faunhorn, and the rest! My words kept us both alive—and while we live, you still have a chance at reaching the Blindingbright. More than that: we’re among the Ravagers, not hiding from them or being chased by them as well as patrols from the city! Only by being here can you prove your worth to them—and only with their help will you ever have Olone’s own hope of ever finding a way to the world above!”

  “So you have said,” Orivon said shortly, unbuckling the blade and drawing it off, to work almost impatiently on its growing network of straps and buckles. “I should make two of these harnesses, so cut or broken straps can be replaced in moments.”

  Cradling her stump, Taerune nodded silently.

  He cast a glance at her tear-streaked face. “All right?”

  “I’ll live,” she murmured. “There is … much pain, but I’m grateful for this.”

  “Good,” Orivon said tersely. “I’m still angry at you.”

  “I … understand. Yet please believe I meant to aid you, and keep us both alive. You can trust me.”

  Plucking up her arm again to put the blade back on, Orivon crooked a disbelieving eyebrow at her.

  “You saved my life,” Taerune told him, almost pleadingly. “I am … grateful. And have always been … fond of you.”

  “Fond,” Orivon echoed furiously. Letting the blade fall with a clatter, he snatched out one of the whips from the bundle still lashed to his thigh, and thrust it under her nose.

  Taerune sighed wearily, clumsily tugged open the bodice of her leathers with the hand she had left, and turned as she sat, to present her bared back to him.

  “You have too many Turnings for me to count, in which to lash me,” she said over her shoulder, “if we are ever to find any equal measure in dealing pain to each other. So strike now. I’ll try to get used to it.”

  Orivon hefted the whip, his face stony. Then he let fly, letting it crack hard across her back. She flinched, curling over in silence and biting her lip.

  Her former slave flung the whip down and aside disgustedly, as if it were a snake, and said roughly, “I’ve no stomach for slicing you like meat. Cover yourself.”

  She turned, her half-smile a challenge. “Or you’ll—?”

  Orivon growled, caught hold of her stump with one hand and her throat in the other, and muttered, “I don’t know. I truly don’t. Some of me would love to break your neck right now. And more of me thinks that’d be too swift and easy a passing for you, by far. And … and a little of me would die with you, if ever you fell. And a little of me judges you too beautiful and smart and spirited to ever harm, for any reason. And part of me never wants to see your face again.”

  “It seems you have many parts to you, Orivon Firefist,” she murmured. “May I choose which part I deal with, henceforth?”

  They stared into each other’s eyes for a long time before she started to chuckle.

  It was even longer before he chuckled, too.

  They ended up leaning chest to chest, shaking with laughter they were trying to stifle. It took some time for their mirth to die away before Orivon managed to growl, “I must return these tools.”

  “And I must sleep,” Taerune replied, yawning.

  Orivon nodded, fitted h
er blade back onto her, and growled, “Keep it on. You have to get used to it.”

  Then he reached down to one of the bracers he’d taken off his arms and legs when he’d started work, thrust it against her chest, and tugged the bodice of her leathers together over it. “Here. It might do you some good, in a fight.”

  “But … why don’t you just put it back on?”

  Orivon gave her a wry look as he shoved the other two bracers down his own front. “Didn’t you watch what I was doing? Where did you think I got the buckles and straps from? The bare stone around us?”

  Taerune flushed, and then tossed her head. “The pain left me not thinking clearly about much of anything. Now spare me the bitter comment about how poor a slave I’d make, please.”

  Orivon regarded her expressionlessly for a moment, and then bowed his head, sweeping his arms about in mockery of a haughty servant’s flourishes. “As my Lady Evendoom wishes.”

  While she was still thinking of a reply, he sprang up and reached down a hand to haul her up to her feet. She swayed for a moment, unused to the weight of warsteel on her left arm, and then said briskly, “Right. Back to join the others. What should I carry?”

  Neither of them noticed two Nifl rising like silent shadows from behind nearby rocks, and exchanging winks to tell each other that they’d both heard every word passing between the human and the Talonar she.

  Lharlak and Daruse then sank back down to wait, knowing that Orivon, at least, would almost certainly turn to look back before leaving the cavern.

  Ravagers didn’t grow old by making mistakes.

  “Ouvahlor invades us, and you burn no Talon,” Lord Oszrim growled. “So now the priestesses go mad and butcher each other—something I see as Olone’s will, and just fine, besides—and now you summon us. Why?”

  Lord Evendoom crossed his forearms and scowled, but before he could say anything, Lord Raskshaula leaned forward and said, “Easy, Erlingar. I’d have put it more gently than Lorloungart, but I wonder the same thing: why this, and why now? Surely the battles of the Holy Ones are just that: the battles of the Holy Ones, not our affair.”