Battle Born

by K L Reinhart

  Again, the high-pitched, rhythmic hissing sound which Terak thought sounded like the thing hissing in laughter.

  How badly am I hurt? His thoughts raced, as his body was still too flooded with shock to be able to determine how badly he was injured.

  It’s only pain, he told himself, yet again. Only pain. Pain was his teacher. It was his guide. It would show him his limits, but it could also lie to him. The path that he walked taught him to know the difference.

  Right now, the elf knew that at least he wasn’t about to die from the slice to his shoulder. He might die from the insect warrior that was looming over him, scimitars ready to strike, though.

  Terak punched the ground with the flat palm of his hand, swinging his legs around in a wide sweep that took out the Ixcht’s near leg. With a hiss, the creature fell backward with a heavy thump, giving Terak time to hop to his feet.

  He barely had time to dodge to one side. The insect man threw a scimitar straight at him, point over pommel in a spinning arc that would have carved into his face had he not seen the warrior’s movement.

  The Ixcht unfolded himself in a complicated, series of moves, unnatural to the eyes of the elf, and weaved his remaining blade through the space between them.

  “You can’t win,” Terak taunted, stepping back lightly as the creature advanced.

  “Tsrk!” The thing chittered again, that unreal and sibilant laughter.

  “Even if you kill me, what will you have accomplished?” Terak continued, taking another bounding step backward as the thing lunged. It was easy to spot the move coming, and easy to avoid, but Terak also knew that the slope outside the Eastern Gate would fall dramatically soon enough. The southern edge of the slopes that sat in front of the Black Keep gave way abruptly to the Cliffs of Mourn, and the eastern slopes were really a compacted slide of rock and dirt that curved around the Cliffs.

  Perhaps, with all that has gone on, the elf had momentarily forgotten the hard lessons of the Path of Pain. His will trembled, giving way to doubt for just a moment.

  Terak made the mistake of looking behind him. He still had twenty feet or so before the sloping ground dropped in sections, like the crazed, uneven steps of a giant.

  Enough to work with, he thought. In the same instant, he realized his mistake.

  “Hsss!” The creature took the advantage of Terak’s lapse in concentration to jump forward, slashing at the elf.

  Terak didn’t have time to swear or to panic as he ducked, dodged, and jumped back.

  But the Ixcht was pressing his attack, loping forward on his long legs with a dizzying array of attacks that saw him spin entirely on his three-clawed feet, or sweep his arm upward in a strike that would have disemboweled Terak, had the elf not continued to give ground.

  That was when Terak realized his deeper mistake—the Ixcht didn’t care if he died, or even if he forced them both off the Cliffs of Mourn. The creature would happily plummet to his fiery death if it meant that he would also take out an enemy. Terak had, after all, seen these warriors fling themselves at the Lady of the North above as if, well, they were flies hitting windowpanes.

  The creature charged, and Terak felt the void behind his back foot as he sought to avoid the next lunge.

  No-no-no! The elf tumbled, but then his soft-soled shoe jarred against solid ground. It was the first of the terraces of rock that stair-stepped their way down to the Cliffs below. Occasionally, entire schists would appear after heavy storms, and the outermost of these terraces would fall entirely into Mourn Lake, breaking from the Black Cliffs like an act of some vengeful god . . .

  Terak staggered, keeping his balance through sheer luck as much as skill. The Ixcht bounded to the edge of the terrace step above him, his four-part mandibles flaring grotesquely in triumph.

  “Potenna!” A deep, baritone voice suddenly shouted, and Terak saw a flash as something streaked through the air and hit the Ixcht in the side. The blow sent the creature flying, long limbs dangling and waving as he spun through the air over Terak’s head.

  The attack resembled a flaming bolt, the color a striking white, tinged with blue, and wreathed around a crossbow quarrel or arrow.

  Terak had ducked, crouching on the ground as the Ixcht thumped and rolled down the second terraced step, his side blackened, and his scales cracked and smoking.

  “Terak! Get behind me!” shouted a voice as a figure leapt to the spot where the Ixcht warrior had been. His black cloak swirled around his stocky frame. The gloved three-fingered hand of the Chief External was still extended, pointing at the creature on the other side of him.

  “Chief!” Terak couldn’t help but shout his relief, as he struggled forward.

  Just as there was a grating sound from the rocks behind him.

  “First and Second Moon!” he heard the Chief External exclaim above him.

  “What?” Terak turned around, his back hitting the low wall of the terrace with the Chief External above him.

  There, a few feet from the edge of the Cliffs of Mourn was the Ixcht, standing now, although it still leaned to one side where Father Jacques’s battle magic had hit it.

  Rising behind it was the Mordhuk.

  It’s you, Terak thought. Even though the creature crawling up and over the edge of the cliffs was an abomination, the elf found that his heart surged with delight.

  The Mordhuk had once been a statue in the Loranthian Shrine, but a spirit of the Ungol realm—the demon realm—became bound to it. When Terak had retrieved the Loranthian Scroll, he had also broken the enchantment that kept the Mordhuk frozen in stone, and had apparently earned himself a strange sort of ally.

  The Mordhuk still had stone-like skin, but it had taken on a deeper, more organic sheen of gray and brown beside its cracks, nodules, and encrustations.

  The creature was shaped vaguely like a dog or a big cat, with backward knee joints and a long, hulking back, from which erupted a series of serrated tines. It also had a hairless snout a little like a dog’s, but there the similarity to anything mortal ended. The creature opened its maw to reveal multiple rows of dagger-sharp teeth. Around its obscene head, there was a mane of freely moving tentacles, each one ending in a barb of bone and talon.

  “Don’t move!” Jacques hissed, before starting to mumble and mutter, making complicated, weaving motions in the air with his three-fingered hand. Terak saw more lines of the shining white force appear, glowing in intensity, whirling and winding around each other.

  “Don’t!” Terak cried desperately. He knew why the Mordhuk was there—at least, he hoped. The creature had saved him on at least two occasions—first by killing the orc champion that had been about to skewer him, and second by killing Big Mendes, the enraged and enchanted novitiate who had been determined to kill him.

  We share a bond, that thing and I, Terak wanted to say, but how could he? The Ungol was everything that they were committed to stopping. It was the nightmare realm that was constantly seeking to overwhelm their own with a tide of demons and monsters.

  “What?” the Chief External looked sternly at Terak, but before the elf had to confess anything, the Mordhuk moved.

  “Tsrk!” The Ixcht warrior finally realized it wasn’t alone on the ledge and turned with a blade outstretched.

  The Mordhuk slapped it out of the insect-warrior’s hand with one of its great paws. There were gouts of green ichor where the thing’s talons had gouged at the Ixcht’s scales and fingers.

  Both Terak and Jacques watched in a sort of horrified admiration as the Mordhuk casually leant over the Ixcht, whose throat and chest was already starting to glow with a putrescent green fire . . .

  Be careful! Terak wanted to shout at his demonic protector but knew that he couldn’t show any allegiance to it.

  Snap! The living statue’s snout flashed forward, closing around the waist of the Ixcht and, with a shrug of the head, threw the Ixcht backward behind it, over the Cliffs of Mourn.

  The demon-thing turned its head back around and looked straight at Ter
ak. Then it disappeared in a leap, somersaulting back down the Cliffs, the sound of its claws echoing as it clambered away.

  PHOOOM! The sound of the Ixcht warrior exploding far below brought Terak back to his present situation.

  It was done. The battle was over, and Terak let out a long sigh of relief.

  “Chief, I have a message to pass on to you from Thorogood,” Terak breathed. “It’s about how the old Lord General died. And a man named Menier.”

  Father Jacques was still looking at the blank edge of the cliffs, his eyes squinting. When his voice returned, it was low and serious. “Yes, novitiate, I think that there is much that we have to talk about,” the Chief External said seriously.

  12

  The White-Faced Legion

  He’s going to ask me about the Mordhuk. Terak’s thoughts were anxious and constant as he and Father Jacques made their way back to the Black Keep. But before they reached it, the father made Terak stop. He examined the wounds on the elf’s hand and back.

  “Vitor, vitor, vitor . . .” Terak heard the Chief mutter, as he waved his three-fingered hand in complicated movement over Terak’s wounds.

  A blue-tinted radiance seemed to coalesce out of the air and settle on his body. It tingled and felt surprisingly cool.

  “Dammit!” He heard Jacques mutter irritably.

  “What is it?” Terak asked. The cut on the back of his hand was a lot better, but it wasn’t healed. Instead, there was a ragged red line across his knuckles that felt warm when he closed his fist experimentally.

  “There should have been enough force behind the Vitor enchantment to heal you, but your, ah . . . abilities . . . seem to be developing.”

  Abilities, Terak thought. He means the fact that I’m a null, doesn’t he? The elf wasn’t sure that being one of those with a rare lack of magic in a world where magic was plentiful counted as an “ability.”

  The Arcanum sees it as further evidence of how unholy and accursed I must be, Terak thought. His lack of magic marked him for the Arcanum’s disgust. It wouldn’t take much for the Chief Arcanum to move to expel him from the Black Keep.

  Or worse, the elf thought grimly. When the deranged acolyte Big Mendes had attacked him, he had been armed with a magical blade that would never allow a wound it inflicted to heal, and gauntlets that gave their wearer incredible strength.

  And someone gave him those items, didn’t they? the elf thought grimly. So no, there was no way that he could say anything to the Chief External or anyone else about his strange bond with the Mordhuk. Not yet, anyway. Not until he had figured out for himself just what was going on.

  “Well, you’re not in any danger now, at least. Nothing that time, rest, and good food won’t cure,” the Chief said, nodding for the elf to follow him. Terak still worried about the encounter with the Mordhuk, however.

  What do I tell him when he asks? The elf was aware that the Chief External—the entire Enclave, in fact—had dedicated their lives to closing the Gates and vanquishing the spirits of the Ungol.

  The pair made their way back into the Black Keep. The place was in an understandable uproar. Terak had never seen the Enclave in full war-mode, and now it appeared as though there was an entirely different side to their lives which he had not thought about before.

  The Brothers and Sisters of the Wall Guard had split evenly between the battlements above and the Courtyard. Meanwhile, the gray-belted novitiates like Terak and even the brown-belted journeymen appeared to have set up medical stations inside the courtyard or were stacking provisions and tools. It felt like watching a theater or a dance suddenly spring to life, one that everyone knew the movements to—apart from Terak.

  “Is the Magister back yet?” Father Jacques called out to the smaller, barrel-shaped form of Father Gourdain, the Chief Martial. Gourdain hurried down the steps beside the Eastern Gate.

  “Do you see her out there?” Father Gourdain snapped with a nod to the blood-drenched morning beyond their gates.

  There’s no love lost between those two, Terak knew.

  “We’re going to need to treat Brecha’s wounded,” Father Jacques said with a frown, casting an eye back outside. The Lady of the North, still smoldering, was once again lowering herself to the slopes, but listing heavily to one side.

  “Keep your mind to your own work, Chief,” Father Gourdain muttered under his breath as he neared them. “I’ll see to all the battlefield matters.”

  Terak saw the side of Jacques’s mouth flicker with amusement. The elf wasn’t precisely sure how the power was shared between the Chiefs of the Enclave, but he knew that Inedi held Jacques in close regard.

  “I’ll leave you to your own important work.” Father Jacques nodded, standing aside to let the smaller Chief pass, before turning with a heavy sigh to Terak.

  “You still have the Acai Juice about you,” the man said. “Good. You can accompany me as my personal aide.”

  “Chief-sir,” Terak bowed his head. It wasn’t unusual for the senior Brothers and Sisters to commandeer the house staff for their daily tasks, be it anything from carrying scrolls to running messages for the black-clad cultists.

  “Now, report, quickly!” Jacques murmured, stepping aside to the shadow of the Eastern Wall.

  Did he mean the Mordhuk? Terak froze for a moment. Of course not, he reminded himself. Thorogood. The Black Hand.

  “I made contact with Thorogood, but he was killed by an assassin’s dart inside the Lady of the North,” Terak began his tale, earning no reaction from the Chief External but a careful nod.

  The elf told him everything he remembered about his short time on the air-galleon, and what he suspected: that the assassins were highly trained and clearly knew what they were doing.

  “They must have been stationed inside the air galleon for some time,” Terak concluded. “Which indicates a well-planned, and prolonged conspiracy . . .”

  “Indeed,” The Chief whispered, scratching the knuckle of his missing finger distractedly. It was a sign that he was worried.

  “Thorogood said that the assassins killed a contact called Menier in Aldburg, with the same substance that they used on Falan’s father, and that the Adviser Semuel believes it to be something called the Black Hand.”

  “What did you just say?!” Jacques hissed urgently, and his cheeks gathering twin spots of high color.

  “That is what Brother Thorogood told me, sir,” Terak nodded. “Before he died—” Before he was killed, the elf corrected silently. “Thorogood told me that the assassins used something called the Black Hand, and that Thorogood believed that Menier was about to uncover the plot, but was silenced on the same night before he could spread his message . . .”

  He really did know nothing about it. Terak watched the Chief carefully. Thorogood had insisted that only the Enclave used the Black Hand, but if anyone knew about poisons in the Black Keep and how to use them, then it would be the Chief of the Enclave-External, right?

  “This is far more serious than even having the Ixcht attack us out of nowhere.” The Chief External glowered, and Terak became even more convinced that the man didn’t know anything about it at all.

  Terak made a choice. “Sir, Thorogood . . .” the elf hesitated over his words. “The assassins were well-trained. Very well trained.”

  “Go on.” The Chief eyed him seriously. There was no backing out now.

  “And Thorogood said that only the Enclave had access to the Black Hand,” Terak said.

  The Chief External was silent for a moment, and then nodded. “Aye. That is correct. We thought we had eradicated the Black Hand from the world, but clearly, we cannot be certain of that now. If some other group has access to it, then it is a danger for everyone.”

  But the possibility still remains, doesn’t it? Terak thought. That someone from inside the Enclave had ordered the assassination.

  “But the use of that vile stuff is only the yeast that leavens the bread,” Jacques whispered. His eyes glittered hard.

  What do yo
u mean? Terak frowned. Wasn’t it bad enough that all evidence pointed to the Enclave’s involvement in the targeted murder of a leader of an entire kingdom?

  “You said that Brother Menier was killed,” Jacques said seriously. “Yes, the Courtier Menier was a fellow Brother of the Enclave-External. He was stationed in Aldburg as my eyes at the court of the Lord General.”

  Okay . . . Terak listened as he had been taught to do.

  “Novitiate,” The Chief had made up his mind. “Someone wanted the Enclave to be suspected of this attack. Whomever the actor or actors were, they knew that new Lord General Falan would be advised to come directly to us as soon as he had determined the poison.” Father Jacques raised his head to look out of the still-open Eastern Gate, where the scorched circles were still visible.

  “And, what is more, we were attacked by the White-Faced Legion on the very night that the new Lord General would be here, at the Enclave.”

  “The White-Faced Legion?” Terak said. “The Ixcht?” The name for them made sense, as their scales lightened from the deeper green hues along their shoulders and backs to a pale, creamy sort of color on their chests. Indeed, their face-scales had been almost white.

  “Yes, Terak, the White-Faced Legion are the primary field-unit of the Ixcht empire. And they have never come this far north before. Ever.” The man broke into a run, with the elf following him.

  “Sir?” Terak could see that this wasn’t just about the White-Faced Legion attacking them. Something urgent had occurred to the Chief of the Enclave-External. They ran into the First Gallery and across to the stairs to the Lesser Hall, where already, a loud and angry exchange was going on. Lord General Falan and his Brecha Court were arguing with Magister Inedi and her battle-stained senior Brothers and Sisters.

  “None of this is a coincidence, Terak. Stay close,” Jacques hissed as he wound his way around and through the crowd of people. Terak could hear them shouting all around him.