“Should … should we help him?”
Armecia casually reached over and into the bag of meat, producing a piece of her own. Chewing thoughtfully as Leonard loosed a war whoop that was far too enthusiastic for a man whose eyeball had just been replaced by a branch, she shook her head.
“He can take care of himself.”
“He doesn’t seem to be doing a very good job of it so far.”
“Well, I mean he can’t beat her, obviously,” Armecia replied, “but he’ll probably wear her out eventually.”
“I suppose that’s true.” Nitz forced his own bite down. “He doesn’t seem to be tiring … in fact, he doesn’t seem to even notice he’s hurt.”
“Hm … was it the severed arm that gave it away?” She grinned a grin full of beef-stained teeth and winked her blue eye. “He’s a Nazj-Nazj. He’ll be fine.”
“A Nazj-Nazj.” He chewed once, swallowed, then blinked. “You brought Sir Leonard, Scourge of Savhael, slaughterer of women and children, back and turned him into a demonic vessel.”
“In summation,” she shrugged, “why? What do you know about it?”
“I read.”
“You’re literate. Congratulations.”
“I mean I’ve read the annals of the Uncharred Library,” he replied, decidedly more hastily. “Tomes of Hashuni myth and sorcery that, after reading, I think should have been burned.”
“But are left whole for purposes of studying the heathen.” She rolled her eyes. “I’ve heard the rumors. But you’ve read about Nazj-Nazj, so you know they’re not that big a thing.”
“A thing?” He gestured to the brawl wildly. “A corpse raised from the dead, infused with a demon, and anchored to the mortal world, is not just a thing. A man who doesn’t bleed and who batters women with his severed arm qualifies as something slightly more blasphemous than a ‘thing’!”
“Listen, if I phrased everything so gloomily, I could make you sound pretty vile, too.”
“This was Sir Leonard! A friend of my father’s!”
“But not your friend.”
He could find no words to offer in reply, no fury, righteousness, or combination thereof that he suspected should have been in his voice.
She was right. Sir Leonard had been his father’s friend.
For obvious reasons, of course. Sir Leonard, if legends were true, had been a holy terror before his namesake. Savhael, the city that straddled the border between the kingdoms and heathenry, ceased to be after he visited it. All great Crusaders were named for what they destroyed.
His own father had an accruement of titles the equivalent of a small country.
“Besides,” Armecia replied, “it’s not like it’s really Sir Leonard out there.”
He looked toward the brawl, eyes wide. In the moments he had been conversing with the sorceress, the battle had shifted in favor of Sir Leonard. He now straddled Maddy’s torso, pinning her arms under his knees and bludgeoning his arm against her scarred face with a holy vengeance.
Holy as it was, no legend ever mentioned Sir Leonard having the ability to beat women … with his arm, at least.
“That’s … not Sir Leonard?”
“Well, I mean, it’s his body, sure.” Armecia bit off a large piece of meat. “Some of his brains are probably rattling around in there, too.”
“But the rest of him is demon,” Nitz muttered gloomily.
“Spirit, actually.”
“The difference being?”
“The difference is that your people tend to brand whatever they don’t particularly care for as ‘demon,’ which, while understandable for a race of ignorant, god-bothering book-burners, would be far too broad a category to be of any use for classifying Lenny.”
She winced as Maddy wrenched a hand out from beneath the knight’s legs, seized him by the throat, and pulled him to the earth. Digging her knee sharply into his chest as she drew herself up, she snarled and delivered a large-booted kick to his side.
“Not to mention that a demon would put up a better fight than this.”
“Well, stop him, then!” Nitz demanded, painfully aware of how his voice tended to crack during moments of attempted authority. “You can command him, can’t you?”
“Well, not now; he hasn’t had anything to smoke.” Seeing his confusion, she rolled her eyes. “Apparently you haven’t read far enough. Putting a demon—”
“Spirit.”
“I lied. There’s no difference.” She waved a hand dismissively. “Anyway, it’s a thing not of earth, so it can’t exist in a living body … or, rather, a body that used to be living, without an anchor.”
“Something to tie it to the earth.” Nitz nodded. “I read that chapter. Witches use heathen relics to tie their spirits to their service.”
“If they’re rich, sure. I had to make do with what I could find when I found his body.”
“And you chose … the Devil’s herb?”
“Well”—she sighed—“Savhael is only known for three things: weed, women, and song. And by the time I found Lenny with a spear through his chest, he had already crushed and raped two of those.” She cringed. “I’ll leave it to you to decide what he did to which.”
“I’m not sure I follow.” He scratched his chin, painfully aware of the futility of trying to look philosophical without even a wisp of facial hair. “The books all say that a relic is required to give the spirit meaning and duty in order to keep it obedient.”
“True enough, for most Nazj-Nazj. However, most witches use demons of pride.”
“There’s … there’s types?”
“It wouldn’t be interesting otherwise, would it?” She talked through a full mouth. “Demons of pride, or spirits of metal, if you’re versed in the old scriptures, won’t obey without purpose. They require a relic to give them their duty, something to be proud about, as the name implies. Otherwise, you’ve got nothing but a lifeless husk … apparently a humble one.”
“Whereas Sir Leonard …”
“Is powered by a demon of wrath,” she replied. “Storm spirit. He needs something to mellow him a bit; otherwise, there’s the exact opposite of what happens with demons of pride.”
“He rips himself apart?”
“No, he rips me apart.”
“Hence …”
“The weed, yes.” She beamed at this, apparently quite proud. “It works. The more he smokes, the more coherent he becomes, the easier he is to command. But there’s a problem.”
“One would expect reanimating corpses to bear their own little issues, yes.”
“I know, right?” She punched him in the arm, apparently missing the sarcasm. “See, wrath demons don’t like to be chained. They’re constantly fighting their host body for control. The problem with that is, that the host fights back. So, the more he smokes, the less he fights.”
“The less he fights,” Nitz hummed, “the more his host fights?”
“Precisely. If the demon wins, then it takes control and kills me. If the demon loses, then Sir Leonard takes control.”
“And kills you.”
“Isn’t that how it always ends?”
“In the books, it does.”
“And those were all crafty, full-blooded sorceresses, not half-breeds.”
“Wouldn’t it be easier to get rid of him? I mean, it’d be easier if you hadn’t raised him in the first place, but …”
“Well, for the time being, I still need him. All I have to do is keep a careful eye on how much he smokes.”
“Need him … for what?”
Immediately, her head went low as she averted her gaze. She seemed to shrink then, curling into herself like a scolded puppy. No, Nitz corrected himself, more like a child, a frightened child … a frightened child with a large, murderous, one-armed doll, he corrected himself further.
A litany of condemnations had already formed in his mind, words he knew he ought to hurl at her, along with stones and a torch, if he had one handy. But he found himself unable to bring them to
his tongue.
Her position was uncomfortably familiar, a mirror in a woman’s body of how he had seen himself. He was always shrinking, always wilting, like a plant starved for light in a broad, all-consuming shadow. And he could see her now in that shadow, and he felt the urge to show her the reassuring smile he never could see through the darkness of that shadow.
The shadow that only a father could cast.
“I need him for lots of things,” she replied, apparently as unaware of the eternity of silence that had passed as he was. “Specifically, I need him to kill a dragon for me.”
“What … Zeigfreid?”
“You’ve heard of him?” She blinked, thumped herself in the head. “Of course you have. Why else would you be here?”
“I don’t know …” He glanced up at the macabre décor dangling from the lair’s mouth. “Sightseeing?”
“While that wouldn’t surprise me at all, I’ll have to protest your presence.” She rose up, dusted her skirt off, and assumed a position he could only assume was intended to be intimidating. “We’ll be killing Zeigfreid.”
“With?” Nitz sneered, gesturing across the clearing to Maddy, who was apparently attempting to induce some form of oral intimacy between Leonard and a large stone. “Your frozen-eye trick didn’t even slow Maddy down.”
“I’ve got more powerful tricks than that.” She matched his sneer. “Besides, it’ll be a dragon, not some psychopathic barbarian man of a woman.”
“She’s just …” He glanced over at the one-eyed warrior woman and grimaced. “Unrefined. Besides, what do you even need to kill Zeigfreid for?”
“A book.”
“A book.”
“You’ve got a better reason?”
“Lord and land,” he replied, puffing up as best he could. “The mandate of heaven and the command of the Order. Zeigfreid is the Devil’s work in His purest form and must be destroyed.”
Her eyebrow, cocked just high enough to be insulting, suggested that she wasn’t believing it. Either that, he thought, or she had actually seen what he looked like with his chest puffed out and was restraining laughter.
“I don’t believe you.”
Somehow, he thought, he should be less relieved at that than he was.
“Why not? I’m a very impressive … you know, I’m a pretty good Crusader vassal.”
“I’ve seen many of your people before,” she replied, “and I’ve heard the whole ‘mandate’ and ‘kill the heathen’ rhetoric before. They say it with conviction.” She reached and deflated his chest with a single jab of her finger. “You … not so much.”
Struggling hard to convince himself that her words were the reason for the sudden ache in his heart, he felt himself wither under her. He could feel her eye boring into him, regardless of the fact that he had turned away; which eye, he couldn’t be sure, partially due to having no desire to decide which one was more disturbing.
He felt a hand on his shoulder and looked up and saw her smile. It was a pretty smile, he thought, unusually white, but rather pleasant against her dusky skin, dark hair, and dual-colored eyes.
“Not to mention,” she said, “there’s the whole ‘not killing me while I was unconscious’ thing. Not that I’m not grateful, but I doubt a Crusader, even a vassal, would pass up the opportunity to kill a heathen, even half of one.”
He found himself more comforted by her words, her touch, than he knew he should be. She was a heathen, after all, an enemy of God, a spiller of Crusader blood and slayer of godly men. Beyond that, she was a sorceress, a decrepit matriarch that stood for everything any good Kingdomer stood against.
She was an enemy. She was his enemy. She was the enemy.
Yet, when she asked, he found himself unable to stop from answering.
“What do you fight for, Nitz?”
“Fraumvilt,” he said with a sigh.
“What?”
“Fraumvilt,” he repeated, “my father’s mace.”
“You’re risking your life for a weapon?”
“Technically, I’m risking Maddy’s life. And it’s not for a weapon; it’s for Fraumvilt.”
“Look, regardless of whatever you might have heard about the Hashuni, we don’t actually have the innate gift to understand what in God’s name you’re talking about if you keep repeating the same word over and over. Who was your father that made his mace so special?”
Nitz grimaced. He was hoping to have kept it a secret, or at least, to have never mentioned it to a heathen in a position to kill him. For she was, he reminded himself, still a heathen; she would most certainly have heard of his father.
And yet, again, he found himself unable to resist answering.
“Kalintz.” The name fled off his tongue as he held his breath.
She blinked, and he breathed. That, he decided, was better than what he had expected.
“Kalintz …” she repeated.
“Kalintz.”
“That Kalintz?”
“That Kalintz.”
“Kalintz the Heavenly Killer?”
“Yes.”
“Kalintz, God’s Scourge of the South?”
“Uh-huh.”
“Kalintz the—”
“The Divine Destroyer, the Glorious Butcher, the Humble Murderer, and the Servile Slaughterer,” Nitz paused to cough, “as well as the Rapist From On High, toward the end of his life.”
He had expected her to use her magic on him, then, to freeze him or burn him or turn him into a toad or his genitals into squawking chickens. He had hoped that she would merely settle for turning Sir Leonard away from his current battle to break his neck quickly.
What he hadn’t expected was for her to scratch her head, swallow her jerky, and break wind.
“Dear me,” she said.
“You’re not …” He bit his tongue, unsure as to whether to continue, given his stroke of luck. “I mean, you’re not mad at me? You’re half—”
“So I was reminded, daily.” Armecia’s glower turned bitter. “By both sides of my family. My father’s, at least, had a reason to loathe me.” She turned a smile to him, just as pretty, he noted. “Suffice to say, I know that families aren’t always the blessing they’re supposed to be.”
“And I can see how a book would be worth fighting a dragon over.”
Armecia hummed at that, then reached out to take a piece of jerky.
“You know,” she said, “I think I like the way I said it better.”
“Yeah, I know.”
“But listen,” she began, “a dragon’s a big thing, isn’t it? It can be divided into many smaller pieces, enough, at least, so that we can both prove we killed it.”
“If we can ever fight it,” Nitz muttered, eyeing the dragon’s lair. “We can’t fight it in there.”
“Too dark,” Armecia agreed.
“And it doesn’t seem to want to come out.” He sighed as the battle between Maddy and Leonard roared into his view. “One would think he would at least come out to see what all the noise was about.”
“One would think …”
Armecia scratched her chin contemplatively, causing a twinge of resentment to fester in Nitz’s heart. How did she manage to look so much more intelligent doing it, he wondered.
“I think I’ve got an idea, though,” she replied. Glancing up at the fight, she barked out an order. “Lenny, stop fighting!”
Almost immediately, the knight lowered his severed arm as he stared at her with an incredulous expression. Such outrage, however, quickly shifted to agony as Maddy’s leather-bound fist came crashing into his jaw, sending him to the ground. While surprised, Nitz felt the need to call out as she raised her axe.
“Maddy, stop!” he shrieked. “Don’t kill him!”
“I feel we may have a difference of opinion of who takes orders from whom,” the woman replied, keeping her axe raised high. “But, just for humor’s sake, why shouldn’t I kill him?”
“We can use him to kill the dragon.” He glanced at Armecia. �
��That’s where you were going with this, right?”
“Right.”
“Right, Maddy!” he continued. “He can’t feel pain, anyway. He’s not alive.”
At this, the woman’s face shifted. The mass of scars became dejected, like a disappointed child. With a sigh, she shouldered her axe, bowed her head, and turned around, kicking at the earth.
“What’s the point, then …”
Nitz smiled to himself; usually, getting her to stop wasn’t that easy. That thought brought another realization to mind as he whirled toward Armecia.
“Wait a tick,” he grunted, “you said you couldn’t command him because he hadn’t had enough to smoke.”
“Hey, I lied about that, too! What a coincidence!”
“That’s not a coincidence, it’s just you being a b—”
“As I was saying,” she interrupted, “we need to bring the dragon out here. We can’t lure him out; we can’t annoy him out.”
“That’s not an accepted phrase in polite society, but pray tell, whatever do we do, then?”
The smile she flashed him this time, he decided, was not pretty.
“Smoke him out.”
ARMECIA looked down at the several bags piled into a rough amalgamation of burlap and green herb that resembled something like a malformed sheep. Apparently far more used to the intoxicating scent than Nitz, it was with a suspicious glare, rather than a nauseous one, that she turned to Sir Leonard.
“Is that all of it?”
The knight, for the first time since Armecia had bound him to her service, seemed less than happy to reply. His eyes were disturbingly clear and coherent; he stood frighteningly erect, his newly healed arm tense with restrained anger.
“Lenny,” she asked again, taking a slow step away from him, “is it all you’ve got?”
“It’s all I can spare,” he snapped. “But by all means, if you want to see me angry, take my last pouch.”
“I’d like to see you angry,” Maddy said with an unpleasant grin.
“Not now,” Nitz growled at her. He looked at Armecia intently, expressly avoiding the knight’s irate gaze. “A dragon’s a big thing. We’ll need every ounce we can get.”
Dragon Book, The Page 23