Wind Rider's Oath wg-3

by David Weber

  Paratha’s entire face knotted with livid rage at the sound of that bright, almost joyous laugh, and the spider snarled behind her. But Kaeritha only laughed again.

  “Your reach exceeds your grasp, Paratha. Or should I say Shigu?” She shook her head. “If you think you want me, come and take me!”

  “You may threaten and murder my tools,” that voice hissed again, “but you’ll find Me a different matter, little champion. No mortal can stand against My power!”

  “But she does not stand alone,” a voice deeper than a mountain rumbled from the air all about Kaeritha, and Paratha’s face lost all expression as she and the power using her flesh heard it.

  “If we two contend openly, power-to-power, this world will be destroyed, and you with it!” Paratha’s mouth snarled the words, but the entire audience chamber shook with the grim, rumbling laugh which answered.

  “This world might perish,” Tomanak agreed after a moment, “but you know as well as I which of us would be destroyed with it, Shigu.” Paratha’s lips drew back, baring her teeth like a wolf’s, but Tomanak spoke again before she could. “Yet it will not come to that. I will not permit it to.”

  “And how will you stop it, fool?!” Paratha’s voice demanded with a sneer. “This is My place now, and My power fills it!”

  “But you will bring no more power to it,” Tomanak said flatly. “What you have already poured into your tools you may use; all else is blocked against you. If you doubt me, see for yourself.”

  Paratha’s eyes glared madly, but Kaeritha’s heart leapt as she realized it was true. She had never faced such a terrifying concentration of evil, yet that concentration was no longer growing.

  “If I am blocked, then so also are you,” Paratha grated. “You can lend no more power to your tool, either!”

  “My Swords are not my tools,” Tomanak replied softly. “They are my champions—my battle companions. And my champion is equal to anything such as youmight bring against her.”

  “Is she indeed?” Paratha laughed wildly. “I think not.”

  Her saber seemed to writhe and twist. The blade grew longer, broader, and burned with the same sick, green radiance as the giant spider and its web.

  “Come to me, champion,” she crooned. “Come and die!”

  She leapt forward with the words, and even as she did, the remaining priestesses charged with her. They came at Kaeritha from all sides, a wave of deadly blades, all animated and wielded by the same malign presence.

  Unlike the priestesses, Kaeritha was armored. But there was only one of her, and she dared not let them swarm over her with those envenomed daggers. Nor did she care to face whatever unnatural power had been poured into Paratha’s blade while the priestesses came at her back. And so she spun to her left, away from Paratha, and her twin blades struck like serpents, trailing tails of blue fire as she ripped open the belly and throat of the nearest priestess. She vaulted the body, lashing out with her right-hand sword, and another priestess staggered away as the backhand stroke slashed the tendons behind her knee.

  Paratha—or Shigu, if there was any difference—shrieked in wordless, enraged fury. Her remaining tools pursued Kaeritha, charging after her madly, and Kaeritha laughed coldly, deliberately goading Paratha with the sound.

  She supposed some idiots who’d paid too much attention to bad bard’s tales might have thought it cowardly, or unchivalrous, to concentrate on her unarmored, dagger-armed foes rather than go directly for the opponent who was also armored and armed. But although Kaeritha might be a knight, she’d been born a peasant, with all a peasant’s pragmatism, and Tomanak’s Order believed in honor and justice, not stupidity. She turned again, once she was clear of the closing perimeter, and two more of Paratha’s priestesses caught up with her … and died.

  Paratha’s shriek was even wilder than before, but the two surviving priestesses fell back. The sole unwounded one bent over and seized the crippled one’s arm and dragged her to one side, and Kaeritha turned once again—slowly, calmly, with a direcat’s predatory grace—to face Paratha and the flaming spider form of Shigu.

  The glaring light web still connected Paratha’s body to those of the false Voice and all of the others except Kaeritha herself, living or dead, in the audience chamber. But there was a difference now. The strands connected to the dead women glared with a brighter, fiercer radiance that flared high, then faded and died. And as they died, the nimbus about Paratha blazed more brilliantly still. The bodies themselves changed, as well. They went in an instant from freshly slain corpses to dried and withered husks. Like flies in a true spider’s web, Kaeritha thought, sucked dry of all life and vitality.

  Tomanak had blocked Shigu from pouring still more strength into her avatar, and so she had ripped everything from her dead servants, devouring even their immortal souls and concentrating that power in Paratha.

  “Come on, ’Major Kharlan,’ “ Kaeritha invited softly. “Let’s dance.”

  Paratha screamed wordlessly and charged.

  Whatever else Paratha might have been, she was an experienced warrior. She had the advantage of reach, and her armor was every bit as good as Kaeritha’s. But she also realized she had only one weapon to Kaeritha’s two, and for all her shrieking fury, she was anything but berserk.

  Kaeritha discovered that almost too late, when Paratha’s headlong charge suddenly transmuted into a spinning whirl to her left. The demented shriek had very nearly deceived Kaeritha into thinking her foe truly was maddened by rage, attacking in a mindless fury. But Paratha was far from mindless, and she pivoted just beyond Kaeritha’s own reach, while her longer, glowing saber came twisting in in a corkscrew thrust at Kaeritha’s face.

  Kaeritha’s right hand parried the thrust wide, and their blades met in a fountaining eruption of fire. Blue and green lightning crackled and hissed, exploding against the chamber’s walls and ceiling, blasting divots out of the marble floors like handfuls of thrown gravel. She gasped, staggered by the sheer ferocity of what should have been an oblique, sliding kiss of steel on steel. No doubt Paratha had felt the same terrible shock, but if she had, it didn’t interrupt her movement. She was gone again, fading back before Kaeritha could even begin a riposte.

  Kaeritha’s entire right arm ached and throbbed, and sweat streaked her face as she turned, facing Paratha, swords at the ready, while alarm bells continued to clangor throughout the temple complex.

  “And what will you do when the other guards come, little champion?” Paratha’s voice mocked. “All they will see is you and me, surrounded by the butchered bodies of their precious priestesses. Will you slay them, as well, when I order them to take you for the murderer you are?”

  Kaeritha didn’t reply. She only moved forward, lightly, poised on the balls of her feet. Paratha backed away from her, eyes lit with the glitter of hell light watching cautiously, alertly, seeking any opening as intently as Kaeritha’s own.

  Kaeritha’s gaze never wavered from Paratha, yet a corner of her attention stood guard. She’d always had what her first arms instructor had called good “situational awareness,” and she’d honed that awareness for years. And so, although she never looked away from her opponent, she was aware of the remaining unwounded priestess creeping ever so cautiously around behind her.

  Paratha gave no sign that she was aware of anything except Kaeritha, but Kaeritha had almost allowed herself to be fooled once. Now she knew better. And she also knew she had only one opportunity to end this fight before the guards Paratha had spoken of arrived. If the major stayed away, settled for simply holding her in play until the guards burst in on them, she would be doomed. So somehow, she had to entice the other woman into attacking her now … or convince the major that she’d tricked Kaeritha into attacking on her terms.

  Paratha slowed, letting Kaeritha close gradually with her. Her saber danced and wove before her, its deadly, glowing tip leaving a twisting crawl of ugly yellow-green light in its wake, and Kaeritha’s nerves tightened. The priestess with her poisone
d dagger was close behind her, now, and Paratha’s glittering eyes narrowed ever so slightly. If it was going to happen, Kaeritha thought, then it would happen—

  Now!

  The priestess sprang forward, teeth bared in a silent, snarling rictus, dagger thrusting viciously at Kaeritha’s unguarded back. And in the same sliver of infinity, with the perfect coordination possible only when a single entity controlled both bodies, Paratha executed her own, deadly attack in a full-extension lunge.

  It almost worked. It should have worked. But as Tomanak had told Shigu, his champion was the equal of anything the Spider might bring against her. Kaeritha had known what was coming, and she’d spent half her life honing the skills she called upon that day. Perfectly as Paratha—or Shigu—had orchestrated the attack, Kaeritha’s response was equally perfect … and began a tiny fraction of a second before Paratha’s.

  She twisted lithely, turning her torso through ninety degrees, and lunged at Paratha in a consummately executed stop-thrust. Her left-hand blade met the longer saber, twisting it aside in another of those terrible explosions of light and fury, then slid down its glaring length in a deadly extension that punched the blue caprisoned short sword through Paratha’s breastplate as if its hardened steel had been so much cobweb. And even as she lunged towards Paratha, her right-hand sword snapped out behind her, and the priestess who’d flung herself at Kaeritha’s back shrieked as her own charge impaled her upon that lethal blade.

  For one instant, Kaeritha stood between her opponents, both arms at full extension in opposite directions, her sapphire eyes locked with Paratha’s hell-lit eyes of brown. The other woman’s mouth opened in shocked disbelief, and her saber wavered, then fell to the floor with a crackling explosion. Her left hand groped towards the cross guard of the sword buried in her chest and blood poured from her mouth.

  And then the instant passed. Kaeritha twisted both wrists in unison, then straightened, withdrawing both her blades in one, crisp movement, and the bodies of both her opponents crumpled to the floor.

  Chapter Forty-Six

  The alarm bells continued to sound, and Kaeritha turned from her fallen enemies to face the audience chamber’s double doors. Foul smelling smoke drifted and eddied, and small fires burned where the reflected bursts of contending powers had set furniture and wall hangings alight. The walls, ceilings, and polished floors were pitted and scorched, and the windows along the eastern wall had been shattered and blown out of their frames. Bodies—several as seared as the chamber’s furnishings—sprawled everywhere amid pools of blood and the sewer stench of ruptured organs.

  The blue corona of Tomanak continued to envelop her, and she knew any priestess who saw it—and who was prepared to think about it—would recognize it for what it was. Unfortunately, it was unlikely that most of the temple’s regular guards would do the same. Worse, she knew that although Shigu’s avatar had been vanquished, the spider goddess’ residual evil remained. Shigu might have been considerate enough to concentrate most of her more powerful servants here in the Voice’s chambers for the attack on Kaeritha. But she hadn’t concentrated all of them, and even if her remaining servants hadn’t hungered for revenge, they must know that their only chance of escaping retribution lay in killing or at least diverting Kaeritha.

  Her jaw tightened. She knew what she’d do, if she’d been one of Shigu’s tools faced by a champion of Tomanak. She would feed the uncorrupted members of Quaysar’s guard force straight into the champion’s blades, and the chaos and confusion and the fact that none of the innocents knew what was really happening would let her do exactly that. Any champion would do all she could to avoid slaying men and women who were only doing their sworn duty, with no trace of corruption upon their souls. And if, despite all she could do, that champion found herself forced to kill those men and women in self-defense, the Dark would count that a far from minor victory in its own right.

  But Kaeritha had plans of her own, and her sapphire eyes were grim as she kicked the chamber’s doors wide and stalked through them, swords blazing blue in her hands.

  The bells were louder in the corridor outside the Voice’s quarters, and Kaeritha heard sharp shouts of command and the clatter of booted feet. The first group of guards—a dozen war maids and half that many guardsmen in Lillinara’s moon-badged livery—came around the bend at a run, and Kaeritha gathered her will. She reached out, in a way she could never have described to someone who was not also a champion, and seized a portion of the power Tomanak had poured into her. She shaped it to suit her needs, then threw it out before her in a fan-shaped battering ram.

  Shouted orders turned into shouts of confusion as Kaeritha’s god-reinforced will swept down the corridor like some immense, unseen broom. It gathered up those who were responding to what they thought was an unprovoked attack upon the temple and its Voice and simply pushed them out of the way. Under other circumstances, Kaeritha might have found the sight amusing as their feet slid across the temple’s floor as if its stone were polished ice. Some of them beat at the invisible wall shoving them out of Kaeritha’s path with their fists. A few actually hewed at it with their weapons. But however they sought to resist, it was useless. They were shunted aside, roughly enough to leave bruises and contusions in some cases, but remarkably gently under the circumstances.

  Yet some of the responding guards were not pushed out of Kaeritha’s way. It took them precious seconds to realize that they hadn’t been, and even that fleeting a delay proved fatal. Kaeritha was upon them, her blue eyes blazing with another, brighter blue, before they could react, for there was a reason her bow wave hadn’t shunted them aside. Unlike the other guards, these were no innocent dupes of the corruption which had poisoned and befouled their temple. They knew who—or what—they truly served, and their faces twisted with panic as they found themselves singled out from their innocent fellows … within blade’s reach of a champion of Tomanak.

  “Tomanak!“ Kaeritha hurled her war cry into their teeth, and her swords were right behind it. There was no way to avoid her in the corridor’s confines, nor was there room or time for finesse. Kaeritha crunched into them, blazing swords moving with the merciless precision of some dwarvish killing machine made of wires and wheels.

  Those trapped in front of the others lashed out with the fury of despair as they saw death come for them in the pitiless glitter of her eyes. It did them no good. No more than three of them could face her simultaneously, and all of them together would have been no match for her.

  Those in the rear realized it. They tried to turn and flee, only to discover that the same energy which had pushed aside their fellows caught them like a tide of glue. They couldn’t run; which meant all they could do was face her and die.

  Kaeritha cut them down and stepped across their bodies. She continued her steady progress through the temple’s corridors, retracing her path towards the Chapel of the Crone, and sweat beaded her brow. Another group of guards came charging down an intersecting passageway from her left, and once more her battering ram broom reached out. Most of the newcomers gawked in disbelief and confusion as they were shunted firmly aside … and those who were not gawked in terror as Kaeritha stalked into their midst like death incarnate, brushing aside their efforts to defend themselves and visiting Tomanak’s judgment upon them in the flash of glowing blades and the spatter of traitors’ blood.

  She resumed her progress towards the chapel, and felt a fatigue which was far more than merely physical gathering within her. Forming and shaping raw power the way she was was only marginally less demanding than channeling Tomanak’s presence to heal wounds or sickness. It required immense concentration, and the drain upon her own energy was enormous. She couldn’t keep it up long, and every innocent she pushed out of her way only increased her growing exhaustion. But she couldn’t stop, either. Not unless she wanted to slaughter—or to be slaughtered by—those same innocents.

  Her advance slowed as her fatigue grew. Every ounce of willpower was focused on the next section o
f hall or waiting archway between her and her destination. She was vaguely aware of other bells—deeper, louder bells, even more urgent than the ones which had summoned the guards to the false Voice’s defense—but she dared not spare the attention to wonder why they were sounding or what they signified. She could only continue, fighting her way through the seemingly endless members of Quaysar’s Guard who had been corrupted.

  And then, suddenly, she entered the Chapel of the Crone, and there were no more enemies. Even the innocent guards she had been pushing out of her way had disappeared, and the clangor of alarm bells had been cut short as though by a knife. There was only stillness, and the abrupt, shocking cessation of combat.

  She stopped, suddenly aware that she was soaked with sweat and gasping for breath. She lowered her blades slowly, bloody to the elbows, wondering what had happened, where her enemies had gone. The sounds of her own boots seemed deafening as she made her way slowly, cautiously, down the chapel’s center aisle. And then, without warning, the chapel’s huge doors swung wide just as she reached them.

  The bright morning sunlight beyond was almost blinding after the interior dimness through which she had clawed and fought her way, and she blinked. Then her vision cleared, and her eyes widened as she saw a sight she was quite certain no one had ever seen before.

  She watched the immense wind rider dismount from the roan courser. Despite his own height, his courser was so enormous that it had to kneel like a Wakuo camel so that he could reach the ground. He wore the same green surcoat she wore, and the huge sword in his right hand blazed with the same blue light as he turned and the courser heaved back to its feet behind him. She stared at him, her battle-numbed mind trying to come to grips with his sudden, totally unanticipated appearance, and his left hand swept off his helmet. Foxlike ears shifted gently, cocking themselves in her direction, and a deep voice rumbled like welcome thunder.