The Rose of Sarifal

by Paulina Claiborne

  And in the morning, then what? Go back and try to pick up the right trail, now stone cold? Lukas could not bear the thought of Marikke and Kip in captivity. And he had so little information. One thing he knew: It was obvious they’d been set up, that the fire they’d seen burning on the Gwynneth hills when they had crossed the straits had been a signal to alert the lycanthropes on the other side.

  But why? Lady Ordalf was the only person who knew about their mission. She had hired them to kill her sister, whom she suspected was alive somewhere on Moray. She had paid them real gold thalers—why, if she had wanted them to fail? The fey loved gold, hated to part with it, and though it was possible to imagine this whole expedition as part of an elaborate and cruel practical joke, it was harder to image it was worth the expense. The gold, delivered to their boat the morning they had sailed from Caer Corwell, was real. Lukas was no judge, but the Savage had tested it.

  No, if this had been a joke, the equivalent of a spoiled child drowning his pets in an effort to distract himself, then the lycanthropes would have killed them on the beach at Kork Head, when the Savage and the others had brought the skiff ashore. Instead, they—or whatever mage or power had wielded the white sword he had seen that night—had captured them alive, abandoned the slain and carried their prisoners inland … for a purpose. And if Lady Ordalf had invented the entire story of the lost leShay princess—then what? Or if the story was partly real, except for the detail that the sisters were in close communication, and Lady Ordalf had delivered them to Moray for some obscure shared purpose—then what? Or if the story was entirely real, and it was possible that Lady Amaranth had spies at Caer Corwell who had lit the signal fire at the straits, and that she was the one who had waited for them on the beach at Kork Head—then what?

  It was impossible to know the truth. In the meantime Suka languished in her fey prison. Doubtless by this time her jailers had removed one pair of bars. Even though Lady Ordalf might have lied about the threat, Lukas had to assume she told the truth, which meant any goal he set himself had to be accomplished quickly. Although if the leShay queen had sent the gold in payment to her sister, or under the assumption that it be returned, then the little gnome was already as good as dead. It made him miserable to think so.

  So the choice was to concentrate on Suka, find Lady Amaranth, deliver her to Gwynneth, and hope the queen would honor her side of the bargain—a wan hope and a difficult task, particularly since the Sphinx was at the bottom of the sea. Or else to concentrate on the other captives and retrace their steps.

  Three lives against one. “First light, we go back,” he said.

  They had camped at the bottom of a steep, shallow gully out of the wind. Above them the dry ridge was covered with coarse grass.

  The genasi, standing beside the fire, was impassive. Lukas listened to his high, soft voice speaking as if to himself: “Often it is possible to stuff a meringue with custard or fruit confiture—”

  He stopped, turned his head. Lukas watched his nostrils flare. But he himself was already moving, because he had heard something above them on the crest of the hill. He had chosen this place for the campfire because the light could not be seen. But now as he reached for his bow he kicked over the small pyramid of sticks, while the genasi extinguished them, scattering sparks over the chalky ground. He drew his scimitar, and both of them crouched in the gorse bushes, waiting.

  “Orc,” whispered Lukas.

  He had grabbed the rabbit from its stick and flung it away into the heather. Perhaps they could retrieve it later. Wiping his hands, he strung his bow and waited for the orc to show itself on the ridgeline. He could smell it up there, a sour, fecal smell. His own senses—eyes, ears, nose—were sharper than the orc’s. He worried about the rabbit, though. With one hand, he grasped the bag of supplies he had taken from the skiff and slung it over his shoulder, then he and Gaspar-shen crawled backward, deeper into the bracken. Down below them at the bottom of the dell there was a tiny watercourse, and beyond it the land opened up.

  Then Lukas saw the creature on the ridge about a hundred feet above them, a stocky orc taller than a man, with a long torso and long arms, and short, bandy legs. The night was too dark to see clearly, and so Lukas supplied the details out of his knowledge and prejudices so he could see clearly—the long fingers and toes, the predatory teeth, the face like a plate of stones, the thin black hair gathered in pigtails, the wool or leather clothes, looted from some Northlander settlement, the turquoise and coral jewelry, mined in Trollclaw. In all things they were slovenly and dirty, except for the care of their axes and knives, which were always greased and sharp. In embossed leather pouches the males carried the dried penises of enemies killed in battle—so Lukas had heard.

  The creature moved his heavy head from side to side. Some orcs were half blind because they’d gouged out one of their eyes in ritual homage to their god. This was proof of their foolishness, Lukas thought as he nocked an arrow. The purpose of divinity is to raise us up, not cripple us.

  But he hoped he was dealing with a zealot, and that was the reason for the uncertain, bobbing movement of the creature’s head. Another possibility was that he smelled the meat but couldn’t find the direction because of the wind. It was unlikely, though, that he was alone.

  “Ware,” said the genasi, next to his ear.

  He meant “beware.” Lukas didn’t feel like it. Frustrated with his mistakes, he felt like killing this orc. The genasi must have guessed it, because he put his hand on Lukas’s bow. The lines shone muted, blue and silver on his greenish skin.

  The evening was gathering in. Lukas waited for the orc to move away, but he did not. He looked as if he were waiting too, surveying the countryside from his high point, peering in every direction like a scout or a ranger, though oblivious to the enemy that lurked so close. He grunted loudly, then raised his arm, and in a few minutes he was joined by others of his kind, a dozen or so warriors.

  Soon the darkness would come, and Gaspar-shen and Lukas would slip away. In the meantime his thighs were killing him as he crouched down. The orcs were in no hurry. They were setting up camp there on the ridgetop. They didn’t care if their fire lit up the night. Some of them had carried wood from the other side, furze bushes ripped up by the roots with the needles still on. Piled high, they made a smoky, inefficient bonfire, and by its light Lukas could see the flag they’d erected at the top of a long pole, a forked banneret hanging from a crossbar, bellying in the breeze, a silver seahorse on a black ground. Even their devices and insignia they had stolen from their enemies—this one was Northlander work, surely. Lukas guessed, as the evening drew in, that he and Gaspar-shen were witnessing the celebration of a successful raid. The orcs had broached a barrel of liquor on the ridge, and one, probably the leader, one of the so-called eyes of Gruumsh, was distributing the drinking cups out of a leather sack, a collection of mismatched crania, the skulls of defeated enemies, some of them chased with silver. He was a gigantic, hairy, shambling brute, who cut a clumsy caper along the edge of the fire, his black figure silhouetted. The others brought up captives.

  “Ware,” said Gaspar-shen.

  It was dark enough now for them to creep away, but they did not. The orcs had captured women from some village or outlying farm, a common event. They were not so far split from human beings that they could not interbreed, and Lukas had seen in all the towns of the Moonshaes and the cities of the Sword Coast their half-caste offspring, drunk and homeless in the streets, orphaned or else abandoned by their unfortunate mothers.

  “Too few,” warned Gaspar-shen.

  They couldn’t see much of what was going on above them, but they could hear the screams, the pleas for mercy in the Common tongue. Wisps of prayers, borne on the wind. The orcs were shouting out some kind of music while Lukas counted them: two dozen, now. Out of frustration, he held his bow out flat and drew an arrow to his ear—then what? Maybe he could pick off six or seven. But what would happen to Suka then? What would happen to Marikke?

>   Or he could wait till they were drunk—but no. These women needed him now. An orc shambled down the slope on their side of the ridge, a Northlander bucket in his hand, looking for water. He was out of the circle of firelight, climbing down through the bushes when he smelled the rabbit, still caught in the branches where Lukas had thrown it. He staggered down the remaining steps and found it, cold now, only half cooked. He was holding it up to his pale and cratered face, sniffing it, confused, when Lukas shot him through his open eye. The genasi, moving silently, caught the orc and cut open his throat before he could make more than a grunting, wheezing gurgle.

  “They will not miss him for a while,” whispered Gaspar-shen. “Do we have a plan?”

  No plan. Lukas examined the wooden bucket where it fell: a pretty object, banded with complicated Northlander ironwork, now staved in along one side. He found the sight of it unbearable. “Come,” he said.

  And then he crossed the stream and climbed up the other side of the dell, up onto the knoll on that side, where he could see the fire burning at a distance of a hundred yards. The banner had blown down but no one cared; they were busy with the women. Gaspar-shen followed him, his scimitar drawn.

  It was a cloudy, moonless night, threatening rain. Lukas figured he could get off half a dozen shots before the orcs even knew where he was. Then they’d have to run down through the gorse bushes, and he and Gaspar-shen would have the high ground. He wished Marikke were here to pray to Chauntea for a pause in the wind, which blew from behind him. Even so it was fitful enough to throw him off, because he wanted accuracy. Not a wasted shaft. And he wanted to hit them in their faces, always in their faces, where Corellon Larethian hurt their one-eyed god in the old days—Lukas was hoping some of them would notice, would feel the weight of their superstitions. He unstrapped the sword from his back, slipped off his boots so that he could dig his toes into the dry soil, and stuck twelve arrows into the ground in front of him.

  “Wait for them in the bushes down below,” he said to the genasi. “I’ll join you.” When his arrows were done, he’d prefer close quarters for the rest of the fighting.

  First, the brutes on this side of the fire, whom he could see in silhouette. And even if he missed his aim, maybe he would hit someone behind. One, two, three—a miss. Four. Three orcs were down, one shot through the throat in the act of raising his skull-cup to his lips.

  But now they were shouting and screaming on the ridgetop, pointing toward him in the darkness, grabbing for their axes and their spears. One, two, three more orcs were down, and now a fourth, a massive creature whom he shot through the shoulder as he stumbled down into the dell. One more on the ridgetop, and he had three arrows left.

  Against anyone but orcs, he and the genasi would have retreated into darkness at this point, moving to evade a second group of warriors who would have circled back behind the hill to close them in. But one-eyed Gruumsh had taught his worshipers the doctrine of the furious assault. Everything else was cowardice. Tactics were cowardice; bows were elven, coward’s weapons. And so now the bulk of the orcs crashed down the slope into the dell, an undifferentiated mass. Lukas could see the genasi down below, his short sword in one hand, his scimitar burning with a watery, cold fire, lines of energy snaking in patterns down his back as he crept through the bushes; he shot his last three arrows almost without aiming, drew his sword, and ran down the hill to meet his friend.

  It was only after he had disabled two of the enormous, enraged, brain-damaged creatures—one with a cut across the hamstrings, one with a thrust into the belly—that he realized how difficult their situation was. It had been hard to estimate the numbers. But now he could see that fourteen warriors at least were left, and despite their losses were pushing Lukas and Gaspar-shen steadily back, steadily uphill out of the bushes that were their only cover. Once in the open ground, it would be hard to guess how they’d survive.

  Lukas wondered as he hacked and parried, cut and thrust, whether it was normal for him to think so clearly and dispassionately in these moments of bitter combat. His body moved without thinking, and his thoughts, untethered, floated upward as if into the moonless sky. Looking down, he could see the land laid out around the fire on the ridge, beside which the orc leader, Gruumsh’s eye, peered down into the dell, a hideous smile on his mutilated face. At the same time he was thinking of the catalogue of mistakes he had made, not just here, tonight, but in the recent past, ever since the first mistake of choosing to accept the commission, for no evident money, to accompany Lord Aldon Kendrick on his idiotic journey to Caer Corwell. And even in the not-so-recent past, when he had left Baldur’s Gate where he had built the Sphinx, whose spars now, doubtless, littered the beach below Kork Head; he could see the wreck in his mind’s eye as he continued his ascent, and the entire coast of Moray from the Orcskulls to Trollclaw, more than a hundred miles. He saw lightning storms in the mountains, and moving toward him. He imagined he was rising up and up, and he could see the coast of Gwynneth now and Alaron behind it. Only his body was struggling in the dirt down below, ducking under the massive blade, stumbling up and backward, always backward, with the genasi at his side. He was wounded. He could feel that, too, a heavy pain in his side.

  “Ware,” said Gaspar-shen. And then they’d run out of room, and so they staggered up through the last trees. The open knoll was above them. Lukas found himself looking up into an orc’s murderous face. He really did have one eye. The left one had been cut away, and so Lukas stepped to the blind side and cut the brute across the neck; he didn’t go down. Off balance, Lukas saw the axe start its descent, just before the fletching of an arrow sprouted in the orc’s breast, and he fell backward down the slope.

  Another archer was up there on the knoll, a good one. The wind had come up and the storm had risen. An explosion of lightning, and in the interval before the thunder crack the archer managed to bring down three orcs in succession while Lukas clambered toward her, holding his side and dragging Gaspar-shen, who had lost his sword. The genasi was wounded behind his ear, a deep cut that flowed with the shining green ichor that was his blood.

  And the archer wasn’t alone. Others were up there, pale figures in gray robes, who ran down softly through the throng of astonished orcs, armed with light weapons, knives and slings, pulling down their heavier prey and chasing them into the gorse.

  Soon it was done. Bewildered, Lukas waited for the rain. He sat beside Gaspar-shen, watching the quick gray figures climb the ridge to the bonfire and the eye of Gruumsh and his captives. The archer squatted above Lukas, and with quick, impatient hands she examined his side under his shirt.

  “I’ll live,” he said in the Common tongue, accepting a bloody towel to press into the wound. “Look to my friend.”

  But now he saw that someone had taken Gaspar-shen away. He felt lightheaded, weak from lost blood. He looked up at the archer, dressed in light leather armor and a leather cap, which she stripped off to reveal a coil of red hair.

  “Where is he?” Lukas asked.

  The archer shook her head. “It’s going to rain. Let us bring you to some shelter. I am—”

  “I know who you are,” Lukas said.

  A RESURRECTION

  EIGHTY MILES AWAY THERE WAS RAIN IN THE ORCSKULL Mountains and in the deserted city below Scourtop. There was even rain that trickled down through ancient ventilation shafts into the cavern at the mountain’s root and seeped across the floor. It puddled in the slime below Malar’s table where the lycanthropes had circled round, as if to protect their slumbering god from the onslaught of three warriors—the Savage with his red sword, and the two druids, Einar and Eleuthra in their animal shapes.

  Marikke hung suspended in a net of chains, her wrists chafed and bleeding. She lifted her head to watch the wolf and the leopard rip into the pack of beast-men, who at the first moment of the assault were almost human, vulnerable in their terror. But as they grasped the crushing superiority of their own numbers, their most bestial instincts returned to them. Marikke watched
the leopard go down under a seething pile. On the other side of the tunnel’s mouth, the wolf had been brought to bay by the albino pig-lord. The Savage, in the center of the floor, had opened the bellies of a pair of werewolves, and as Marikke watched he brought his sword down across the back of one of the great cats. Red lightning flickered from his blade, and the lycanthropes cringed away from him until Argon Bael climbed down from the table, his own sword glittering with light. Marikke saw him swell and grow, his face shining so bright he was hard to see. In a moment all the darkness and the shadows in the cavern were banished to its edges, while at the same time the angel’s wings, visible for the first time, stirred the air and extinguished the torches, which were useless now in any case. The light streamed from the angel’s head and hands, and the runes along the blade of his two-handed broadsword gleamed with holy power. The elf seemed diminished, frail by contrast, until with game courage he lifted up his blade, lifted his face also, and Marikke could see his eyes.

  The light that flowed from the angel, transfiguring and pure, was now the greatest source of light in the noisome cavern. Whatever object it touched, it seemed to light it from within. The surface of the stone table glowed, and the sleeping bulk of the Beastlord also appeared to glow, each black hair alight. Kip had fallen to the side, and he seemed asleep, though with an egg of light inside his chest that illuminated the bands of his ribs. Argon Bael swung his sword, which seemed to cut away the lies from everyone it touched, leaving them defenseless. One of the druids was already dead, his naked body gnawed to the bone. The other cowered in a corner, a simple human woman wrapped in a wolf’s skin.

  The Savage stood over her, protecting her, his own sword branching with electric current—a winged, batlike creature sprang at him, and he slashed it from the air. Marikke hung above him. The wolf-men had fled, leaving her alone. Now, undistracted by their malice, she could work on the manacles that held her, which had been made for someone with larger wrists. Her own were slippery with sweat. She was able to slip the heel of her left hand through the ring, little by little, while at the same time she watched the duel that moved below her, tentative at first, as the opponents took each other’s measure. The angel’s sword separated truth from darkness, and when the light of it cut across the Savage’s face, Marikke gasped in astonishment as she worked her left hand free, for suddenly she understood why she had mistrusted him all this time. She had been right to hate him, wrong to feel guilty or unfair. What the golden elf did, whether he behaved nobly or honorably, manipulatively or arrogantly, all that was unimportant now that she saw him for what he was, revealed in the light of the angel’s stroke, which cleaved the air. The Savage’s beautiful features, his golden hair and green eyes, all that was a lie.