Williams, D M - Renegade Chronicles [Collection 1-3]

by David Michael Williams

  The query took Else by surprise for it seemed far off topic. She had indeed caught ear of the gossip regarding Prince Eliot Borrom’s surprise visit to the island. There were many versions of the rumor because no one could guess why the prince had made an unexpected voyage across the Strait of Liliae.

  Some claimed Eliot had secret business elsewhere in Capricon, while others alleged that the prince had taken up residence at the Celestial Palace. Else had dismissed the chatter as drivel, stories fabricated out of sheer boredom, but now…

  Sir Walden continued, his voice barely above a whisper. “I personally presented the prince to Lord Minus. What words were exchanged between the two men is not of importance here, but suffice it to say, Prince Eliot decided not to linger in Rydah. He left the next day, his departure as clandestine as his arrival. He took the highway to Fort Valor.”

  Else considered the Knight’s words, overwhelmed by the news that Prince Eliot had actually been in Rydah no more than a week before and confused about how it tied in with Mitto and Toemis.

  “We have received word from the Commander of Fort Valor that the prince has already quit Fort Valor for Fort Faith.”

  Now Else was even more baffled. What interest did the Crown Prince of Superius, son of the greatest among the Kings of Continae, have in some old ruins? But then she recalled what Baxter had said about the Knights’ reoccupation of Fort Faith. As her thoughts sped down this new path, she quickly made the connection: Prince Eliot had taken up residence at Fort Faith, which was also Toemis Blisnes’s destination.

  Before she could ask another question, Bryant Walden said, “We have no evidence that the old man is out to harm Prince Eliot, but neither can we be sure that he is not a Renegade assassin. And this is why I have sent two of my finest men to follow them. You can rest assured your merchant friend is in the best of hands.”

  Although she was sure she knew the answer, Else asked, “Sir Baxter Lawler wouldn’t happen to be one of them, would he?”

  The Knight arched his eyebrow in surprise. “Why, yes, how did you know?”

  Feeling dumfounded by everything she had learned, Else fell back in her chair and shook her head. She couldn’t decide whether to be grateful or further worried that Mitto’s life was in Baxter’s unpredictable hands.

  * * *

  The battle within the wintry lodge lasted less than ten minutes in reality, but to Ruben Zeetan it might have lasted days. Throughout the harrowing ordeal, he waited for one of the fiends to impale him with a serrated blade. Since his hands and feet were bound securely—and painfully—behind his back, he could only do his best to squirm over to a far corner of the room.

  He nearly fainted when he felt someone touch his arm and probably would have screamed like a maiden in distress had he not lost his voice completely. When the razor-sharp edge of a sword failed to pierce his flesh, he opened his eyes. He was greatly rewarded; kneeling over him was Sister Aric.

  She said something to him, but he couldn’t hear her over the din of the melee. She looked like nothing less than a goddess just then. While Mitto, Toemis, and the Knights had forgotten him entirely—leaving him for dead by the fireplace—Aric had overlooked his crimes and come to offer him whatever succor she could. He hoped his eyes did not betray the terror that clutched at his entrails.

  His self-consciousness quickly abated when the decapitated head of one of the Knights rolled over to him, settling against his chest.

  Tears streamed down Aric’s cheeks, but the sight of the disembodied head didn’t cause her to swoon. Slowly, almost reverently, she pushed the bloody head away from them. Watching Aric, Ruben was suddenly aware that the two of them were not alone in the corner. The bundled-up body of Toemis’s granddaughter sat on the other side of the priestess. Aric had the child pressed up against her, cradling the girl and whispering comforting words into her ear.

  Ruben had never been so jealous of anyone in his life.

  When his attention was drawn back to the battle, he was suddenly aware of a strange light emanating from the warriors’ midst. As he searched for the source of the brilliance, which cast a metallic light over the combatants, Ruben saw Mitto O’erlander swinging his quarterstaff with deadly accuracy. He spotted Toemis just as one of the fiends scored a vicious slash across the old man’s flank.

  Toemis hit the floor hard and didn’t get up. When his attacker reared back to make the killing stroke, one of the Knights threw himself at the fiend, impaling it with his bloodstained sword.

  Ruben watched in mute horror as two more of the fiends detached themselves from the fray and came at the heroic Knight from both sides. The man managed to block the first creature’s sword but could do nothing as the other plunged a barbed spearhead through his chain-link vest. The Knight fell under the serious blow only to be stabbed twice more by each of the monsters until he lay still.

  Mitto and the remaining Knights were greatly outnumbered. Of the Knights, only four remained on their feet. The others, like Toemis Blisnes, had either passed out or died. Ruben would have guessed the fiends’ number at somewhere near twenty. The one-room lodge was literally crawling with murderous vermin. Nothing short of a miracle would turn the tide of the battle, and once the fiends finished with the warriors, he and his ladylove would be next.

  It took a moment for him to realize all four of his limbs were free. He stared at Aric blankly when she shouted into his ear.

  “I’ve cut you free! Use your magic to help them!”

  Ruben gasped. He would rather have died while tied up than demonstrate his true helplessness before Sister Aric. Gawking stupidly at his hands, which were discolored from hours of bad circulation, Ruben nearly perished from humiliation right then and there.

  She was depending on him to save them all. How could he admit to her he was incapable of casting even the feeblest of spells?

  As he struggled with his shameful confession—the words that would likely be his last—the uncanny light grew brighter until Ruben thought that the sun had abandoned its place in the heavens. Both he and Aric turned to peer into the impossible sunrise, forgetting everything but the inexplicable golden splendor.

  He followed the sunburst to its source and found the Commander of Fort Valor, whose name he still couldn’t remember, swinging an enormous sword in one hand and a smaller weapon in the other. The bronze glow originated from that second, rod-like weapon.

  Ruben had never seen anything like it. He was on the verge of asking Aric if her eyes were playing ticks too when the commander threw his sword like a javelin and took the gleaming club with both hands.

  The Knight reared back, and as he swung the extraordinary weapon in a wide arc, the brassy light engulfed the lodge, fully blinding Ruben.

  Passage VIII

  He had awoken to countless hangovers in the past. They were often the consequence of celebration, the inescapable result of revelry, and he had long ago come to accept that. He would not give up drinking and merrymaking into the wee hours of the morning—never that!—and so there was no use complaining about the aftereffects.

  “It’s as pointless cursing the mosquito whose unseen feeding leaves you scratching your arm all day…as futile as reasoning with a midge,” Else Fontane had once said of hangovers.

  Now he silently cursed the innkeeper, thinking surely she had something to do with his present condition. Only at Someplace Else, it seemed, did he sometimes forget his limits and overindulge. It was that damn Dragon’s Hoard, he decided. Else and Mitto drank the stuff like water, but spirits always hit him harder.

  His skull throbbed in time with the beating of his heart, and his insides roiled and churned like the angry sea. He lay on something hard and moist, which was a disheartening discovery to be sure. He could only hope that he was wet with sweat and not something worse. The others in the barracks would never let him live it down if he had soiled himself like some snot-nosed tot!

  As he tried to recall when his next shift began, Baxter resolved to open his eyes in spit
e of the painful sunlight that would surely assail his sensitive eyes.

  One opened, but the other lid wouldn’t budge.

  Very curious, he thought and brought a hand up to touch the uncooperative eye. Or rather, he would have done this if he had had any control over his arms. As it was, when he tried to move either one of them, a searing pain raced up from his wrists.

  Baxter blinked away the film covering his good eye and saw he was not, in fact, anywhere near the Knights’ barracks. He was lying on the ground in a forest, bereft of all clothing, and suffering the effects of something far worse than alcohol. Managing to raise his head slightly, he looked down at his hands, which were bound tightly with a barbed wire.

  His memory of the clash with the monsters returned to him with the force of a war-hammer.

  I should be dead, he thought. A second survey of his condition found that his body was riddled with many cuts and wounds, and a layer of blood and filth coated his flesh like a second skin.

  I should be dead, along with Sir Damek and Ahern and his men, he reasoned. But he had been spared. The realization did nothing to improve his spirits.

  His next thought was that of escape, but there was little chance of that. At the moment, the blinding rays of the rising sun were blocked out by shade provided by three distinct bodies looming over him. Their faces were cast in shadow, but by their shape, he knew them to be the same inhuman foes as yesterday.

  One of the monsters uttered a series of sharp syllables, only to be interrupted by the middle creature when it interjected with a single sound that resembled a snarl. The same creature then burst into a short dialogue that was all harsh consonants and guttural vowels. Baxter had never heard anything like it, and he had been privy to more than a few foreign tongues throughout his tenure as a Rydah gatekeeper.

  After the monster in the middle finished speaking, it made a sudden gesture with the long pole it was carrying, and the other creatures backed away out of sight. The remaining monster strolled over and looked down at him. Baxter stared up at the abomination, wondering what heartless deity was responsible for breathing life into such twisted creatures.

  Everything about the creature’s face promised cruelty and violence. The feral eyes were a dull orange and held no more emotion than a prowling cat on the verge of pouncing. Fang-like teeth peeked out as the monster opened its mouth to speak.

  Baxter’s ears heard the creature’s nonsensical sentence, but then, impossibly, he understood what it had said.

  “They want to kill you, you know.”

  The words echoed through his head like his own thoughts, but he knew beyond a doubt that it was the creature that had put them there. It was a dizzying sensation, and for a moment he feared he was losing his mind.

  The creature resumed its discordant chatter, and again, the translation found a way into Baxter’s brain.

  “That is why you are here, outside of the camp, where my soldiers will not be tempted to put a spear through your bowels.”

  Baxter didn’t reply. The creature’s words were sinking in. They had set up a camp in the forest, and there was no telling how many of them there were. The monster before him had spoken of its kind as soldiers, had said “my soldiers.” Hence, he was in the presence of one of their leaders. The idea that these creatures were organized to that extent made Baxter’s despair only greater.

  “But I saved you from their enthusiasm. I will not let them undo all the work I did to keep you alive because I spared you for a reason, human. You will tell me everything I need to know.”

  “Like hells, I will,” Baxter said, not caring whether the monster understood him or not. Torture wouldn’t loosen his tongue. He’d use the barbed fetters to saw through his veins before he betrayed anyone to the walking nightmares.

  The monster laughed. “Your cooperation is not necessary.”

  The creature pointed the long pole it was carrying at Baxter’s head. He had dismissed the thing as a spear, but now he could see, with the tip of it mere inches from his face, it was a staff of some sort. Inky black feathers sprouted from the base of a leering skull, and the pole itself resembled wood except for its dark, gray color.

  When the hollow sockets of the skull lit up with a reddish flame, Baxter felt a vice clamp over his heart and fought the panic welling up inside of him.

  The Knight knew magic when he saw it, and he had no intention of falling under the monster’s spell. He plunged his thorny bonds into his thigh for leverage and began pressing the tiny barbs into the flesh of his leg and his wrists, eager to get on with his noble suicide.

  But no sooner had he made the first cut into his thigh than he found his body completely paralyzed. He couldn’t even turn his head away from the fire-eyed skull and its silent scream.

  “Let us start with something easy,” the creature said. “Tell me where the men in the wagon are headed.”

  “No!” Baxter shouted, or at least he thought he tried to.

  Despite his greatest efforts, his mouth opened, and he heard himself say, “Fort Faith.”

  Anger, fear, self-pity, and, above all, hate for his captor swelled inside of him until he thought he would burst. He wanted to wrench the staff out of his tormentor’s hand and crack it over the creature’s head, shattering both skulls simultaneously. He wanted to kill every last one of them and water the forest with their dark blood. But Baxter Lawler couldn’t even weep as the creature asked him more questions.

  And he answered every one of them, betraying himself, the Knighthood, and all of Capricon.

  * * *

  When Ruben awoke, he was in the arms of an angel. Aric wasn’t looking at him, at least not at his face. She had unbuttoned his robe and was examining what lay beneath.

  Ruben jerked away, pulling his robe shut. The pain that shot up through his abdomen almost sent him back into a swoon.

  “You’ve been injured,” Aric explained patiently. “I need to tend to it, or it will fester.”

  His cheeks afire, he gave a quick nod and settled back to the floor. Careful to avoid the woman’s eyes, he stared up at the ceiling, and that was when he saw that the lodge no longer had a ceiling.

  Further inspection revealed that almost half of the lodge was missing. The logs that had made up the walls and ceiling had splintered into a million pieces. He remembered the commander’s mighty stroke with the glowing rod and how the lodge had lit up like a falling star.

  “I didn’t even see you get wounded,” Aric was saying. “It must have happened at the beginning of the fight.”

  Ruben didn’t answer her. He didn’t have the heart to tell her that he had gotten stabbed by the old man while trying to rob him. Instead, he gasped and produced an agonized expression, though he actually felt little pain. Aric’s hands were as soft as satin, as gentle as a lover’s caress.

  “With the goddess’s blessing, I have mended you,” she told him, “but you should wear this poultice for a day or so to guard against infection.”

  “Thank you,” he muttered, though the words seemed woefully inadequate.

  Aric smiled prettily. “Thank the goddess. I am but Mystel’s lowly servant.”

  Ruben didn’t think Sister Aric was a lowly anything, but he found himself incapable of telling her so—or to communicate anything to the beautiful woman. He had never been able speak to the fairer sex, and Aric was the fairest female he had ever met. He knew he should forget about her and surrender to the truth that Aric would never return his love.

  Neither tall nor handsome, Ruben Zeetan had come to terms with his slight build and gangly arms and legs long ago. His nose was too long, and the acne from adolescence had left scars on his cheeks. He was no maiden’s dream.

  Realizing that he had been gaping at Aric, he gathered the front of his robe and began buttoning furiously. The healer had done an outstanding job at patching him up. While Toemis’s knife had missed any vital organs, the wound had hurt him plenty. His dark gray robe bore a considerable bloodstain as a testament to the trau
ma.

  When Aric made no move to leave his side, Ruben thought to say something witty, something charming, but nothing came to mind.

  Probably for the better, he reasoned. I should keep my mouth shut and forget all about her. If she knew me for what I was—a captured highwayman who dresses like a wizard to instill a false fear in his victims—she would not have wasted her or her goddess’s time on me.

  Aric’s attention was drawn away from him when Mitto and Commander What’s-his-name approached.

  “Why did you untie him?” Mitto demanded.

  He came forward, but then Aric was on her feet, barring the merchant’s way.

  “Be civil, good sir,” she told Mitto, her voice firm though not unkind. “If the wizard wanted you dead, you can rest assured that you would be already.”

  Arms akimbo, Mitto glared past the woman and down at Ruben. With a sigh, he dropped his hands to his side and said, “I am in your debt for your ministrations, Sister Aric, and I do not wish to insult you, but I fear you underestimate this man. Zeetan is a despicable thief.”

  If the merchant’s words stung him, the look Aric gave him was a deathblow. He saw disappointment in her pale blue eyes, a sadness that made him want to curl up and die. He mourned the loss his defender, but more importantly, he lamented the loss of her respect. Maybe it was better to surrender completely and tell her—tell them all—he was no more a wizard than he was the King of Superius.

  “Wait a minute,” Mitto said. “Was he responsible for the explosion that killed all those things…and destroyed half the lodge with them?”

  The merchant was looking at him now with a grudging approval, and Ruben decided that now was definitely not the time to unburden his conscience.