The Wayward Knights

by Roland Green

  He rose from the water with the force if not the grace of the Dimernesti, the bar in his hand. The sharp end tore up under the lower rim of the Creation's skull, bone cracked and peeled, and Darin drove the bar into the exposed brain.

  The Creation found a voice then, an enormity of raw sound, corrupted nature roaring its hatred of all uncorrupted nature. Foam rose higher than Red Elf's deck as the Creation churned out the last of its unnatural life.

  Those nearest Rynthala were torn between leaving the widow alone and drawing near, lest she fling herself after Darin. Then part of the foam showed a darker core, the core moved, and Sir Darin waded out of the Creation's death maelstrom.

  His hands were empty, and indeed he seemed to be favoring one arm. He wore rags of clothes and a painful array of scratches and cuts, and had he been able to find the breath to speak would have said that he preferred wrestling bears. But he walked out of the water to find Torvik hugging Rynthala. It was an odd pairing, as the young captain was a good six inches shorter than the knight's lady.

  "You did it, you did it!" he was babbling. "You put those arrows exactly where they belonged. Magnificent!"

  Darin tapped Torvik on the shoulder. "Excuse me, Captain. I agree that my lady is magnificent. But your sister had something to do with the victory, I think, she and her archers."

  Torvik drew back from Rynthala, who looked ready to burst out laughing. "Very well," he said. "Then, Sir Darin, you can kiss my sister."

  "Yes, and then we will all kiss you," Rynthala said, finally losing her composure. "The thing did not have many brains left, but those it had, you dashed out."

  Torvik cheerfully refused to kiss Darin, but was amenable to kissing Mirraleen. This left Darin free to kiss Chuina, which he did quite properly, for all that he had to stoop considerably to meet her lips and she winced at the pain of standing on tiptoe to help him.

  Stooping sent pains shooting up and down strained muscles and scarred limbs, but Darin did not believe in letting minor pains distract one from honorably kissing a lady.

  What distracted him—and everyone else—was a shaking of the ground that was accompanied by a distant rumble.

  Looking down the torrent, Darin saw a distant ruddy glow reflected on the foam. A similar glow seemed to be spreading ahead, in the darkness on the far side of the lake, beyond the reach of the glowballs.

  "We'd best start looking for that last passage Mirraleen's directions describe," he said. "The lake may drain out, and that much water washing about here could bring down more rocks."

  That was true enough, but earthquakes could yield bigger rockfalls than all the water under the Smoker put together. Also, water flowing down volcanic vents could reach molten rock and turn into steam. Seeking an upward passage, the steam might cook them and Wilthur alike, as if they were so many chickens on a tavern spit. Not finding that passage, the steam might build pressure until the entire mountain tore itself apart in one cataclysm.

  Going up and getting out of the Smoker had just become a race with death. Nor was the magic of Wilthur the Brown any longer the only likely source of that death.

  Zeskuk had come to the rim of a hole where another passage dropped steeply downward, when word came that the humans had caught up. He knelt beside Lujimar, who was lying on the rock, peering down into the hole as if his gaze could pierce not only the darkness but the rock itself, Zeskuk wished it could, and pierce Wilthur like an arrow when it found him. That would save a great deal of muddling about in the darkness, in passages that were becoming a tight fit for humans, let alone minotaurs.

  "Do we let the humans take the lead from here?" Zeskuk asked. "We can always follow, to pull them free if they become wedged."

  "I sense no barriers of rock between here and Wilthur," Lujimar said. He sounded no worse than tired, but his tone still chilled the chief. "Other barriers are as may be. For these, we will need human aid."

  Lujimar stood, turned his back to Zeskuk, and held his staff out over the hole. He muttered something that the minotaur chief was very glad not to fully understand, and the tunnel was suddenly lit as by the noonday sun. Wind blew both up and down, and Zeskuk would have been prepared to swear that it blew sideways, through the walls.

  Instead, he cursed, as he suddenly found a small, bony human female flung into his arms as if by a siege engine.

  "What do you fatherless minotaurs think you're doing?" Lady Revella Laschaar screamed.

  "A simple spell of transference," Lujimar said. Zeskuk could not see him over Lady Revella's high-peaked cap, but would have wagered the priest was smiling.

  A second thought chilled the smile. Teleporting another wizard of Lady Revella's strength, without her consent and without warning, was vastly potent magic. It had been plain for some while that Lujimar knew more than priests' arts. Now it was a question of how much more.

  Zeskuk had no answer to that question, which needed none in any case. Lady Revella, on the other hand, needed many answers, as well as being put on her feet in a reasonably dignified manner. When she had shaken dust from her clothes and cap, and laced up her boots, she glared impartially at the two minotaurs.

  "I suppose you think I can do more good here than from aboard ship?" she asked.

  "I know it," Lujimar said, in a tone that froze even Lady Revella's tongue. Zeskuk was glad someone else had answered; he could not have spoken.

  "Well, then," the Black Robe said. "I will be of much more use much longer if I do not have to walk every step of our road through this volcanic pest hole. Where I can ride in a litter, I would prefer to do so."

  "Of course," Zeskuk said, finding his voice at last. His bellow of four names sent echoes ravaging everyone's ears.

  When Lady Revella had taken her hands from her ears, she was glaring again. "I am to ride in a litter borne by minotaurs?"

  "Free minotaurs," Zeskuk said. "Surely you have ridden in enough borne by minotaur slaves, a lady of your rank? You must allow us to give you the gift of this new experience, trusting yourself to freeborn minotaur warriors."

  Lady Revella's face said that she would as soon trust herself to ghouls, but prudence kept that message from her lips. Before she could frame a more diplomatic reply, moreover, glowballs and hurrying footsteps told of the arrival of the human vanguard, and nothing could undo her embarrassment now.

  Wilthur the Brown was not embarrassed. He was enraged at the demise of his Creation and the destruction wrought around the lake. His defenses would surely prevail against flesh and blood, but would the mountain be safe afterward?

  Perhaps, perhaps not. He could still make a new abode in the Green Mountain, even if there was less magic to draw on in it. He would not flee.

  The gods were not embarrassed, either. They were quite content with the progress of the battle. Some were not so content with Takhisis's reminding them that Wilthur had been White, Red, and Black, so was a balance in and by himself, and should be carefully preserved.

  Zeboim spoke rarely, but now said things about Takhisis that the Queen of the Abyss had seldom heard even when incarnate as a human woman, from the most foul-mouthed males. There was silence among the gods for some while after that, except for some subdued laughter from Sargonnas.

  Gerik was still less embarrassed. He had no time. When one is within minutes of attacking eighty men with thirty, one has no time for anything except the work that will soon be at hand.

  Particularly, one has no time for a kender tugging at one's sleeve, even when he is being quiet about it.

  Chapter 22

  With the strength of fury, Wilthur flung spells at his defenses. The spells contained the stolen vitality of the dead of Suivinari. Fed into the defenses, that vitality would render them invincible.

  Instead, the spells went astray, some of them, or reached the defenses but bounced off them, like arrows off the finest plate armor. As the spells scattered, so did the stolen, hoarded vitality. As the vitality failed to enter the defenses from within, and the enemies tore at them from wi
thout, the defenses weakened.

  At last Wilthur rested. He would have to find the point in the defenses (or points, perhaps as many as three) where the enemy sought the final penetration. He would strengthen the defenses there, and there only, however much he could.

  He might not break the bodies of all his foes, human or minotaur. But he might do enough harm to break their spirits.

  It was a sad decline in hopes, from being ranked near to the gods to merely disheartening foes who were close to victory, but the only alternative was still flight. And that alternative was as futile as ever.

  Wilthur girded himself with spells against despair and for greater concentration, and prepared for the final battle.

  Horimpsot Elderdrake did not dare make more sound than came from tugging at Gerik's sleeve. When that failed to draw the young lord's attention or even make him turn his head, Elderdrake felt as close to despair as a kender can.

  He still wanted to find out what would happen next; a kender's curiosity dies only when he does. But he did not expect that next event to be something he would enjoy. Not if a second band of enemies came down on Gerik's rear while his attention was fixed so completely to the front.

  They would have to do something about that themselves, he and the kender who had brought the news.

  Elderdrake slipped out of the bushes and back toward his comrade. The other kender greeted him with a sour smile. "What took you so long?" the other kender asked.

  "Trying to keep us from having to do this all by ourselves?" was Elderdrake's reply.

  The smile grew even more sour. Then the other kender nodded. "His name was Fujindor Staffbinder," he said.

  It took a moment for Elderdrake to realize that he had just heard the name of the priest whom Gerik called "the Shorn One." He had only known the dead kender as "the priest of Branchala."

  "You are as likely to get free of this as I am," Elderdrake reminded his comrade.

  "Or as unlikely," the other replied. "But all the others of our woods band know, too. Our friend's name will not die unless all of us do."

  It took the two kender no more than the time for hard-boiling an egg to slip through the trees to within reach of the second enemy band's trail. Indeed, it was more of a series of gaps between the trees them a proper trail, but the ground was damp, soft, and moss-grown in places; the horses' hooves made little noise.

  Elderdrake briefly wished that they had a few more packets of Staffbinder's horse-allergy powder. But there was little breeze to scatter it, and what there was might bring it down on Gerik's band as well. They didn't want that. Gerik's enemies could still win even if on foot, while Gerik needed to be able to mount and ride.

  There was no time for subtlety, so the kender used none. Elderdrake's friend simply whipped his hoopak over his head, flinging a stone from the sling-thong. The stone struck a rider in the forehead, dropping him from the saddle. Then the first kender flung himself out of shelter, striking or stabbing with his hoopak depending on which end was closest to an enemy. Elderdrake followed, considering that neither he nor his friend would likely tell anyone much of anything—but if they did, it would be a far better story than just the priest's name, as deserving of memory as he was.

  Something struck Elderdrake hard in the right arm, and all sensation and use left it. Fortunately a hoopak was one thing he could wield with either hand. He dived to retrieve his fallen weapon, rolled under the belly of a horse, and prodded the belly as he came up on the other side.

  The horse reared, throwing its rider. The rider landed on his head, leaving his neck at an impossible angle to his shoulders. Elderdrake wasted no time, because a rider who hadn't seen that his friend was dead was coming in. The kender held the hoopak up with his good left arm, then twisted aside as the shaft deflected a sword cut, whirled the hoopak like a sea barbarian cutlass-dancer, and rammed the spear into the rider's thigh as he swept by.

  The thigh was armored, but the spear point had not lost its sharpness, nor Elderdrake's left arm its strength. The man shouted, swore, and twisted in the saddle. He was left-handed, so he had to bring his battle-axe around and over.

  As the axe blurred downward toward Elderdrake's skull, he heard something that sounded like a kender's death cry. He heard a hideous din that sounded like the death cry of many humans. He even heard, for a single heartbeat, the whisper of cloven air as the axe completed its downward arc.

  Then he heard a sound that was not a sound, but the end of all things, as the downward arc ended in his skull.

  Pirvan thought briefly that a few folk not eager to be in the vanguard would now be more help than the small army of those who were. The tunnel showed no signs of broadening enough to accommodate more than two humans and two minotaurs. Each folk wanted to have the greater numbers in the vanguard, and Pirvan and Zeskuk were too jostled, squeezed, and short of breath to take counsel and introduce a trace of order to this underground chaos.

  It could have been as bad with the magicworkers, except that no one of either folk wished to deny Lujimar his place ahead of all warriors. Certainly not Lady Revella, who could not have kept up with the advance on foot and whose bearers took up the whole width of the tunnel where they were.

  In his mind, the knight made gestures of aversion, that the tunnel not drop so low overhead that the bearers must set the Black Robe down. Trampling underfoot one of a host's two most powerful magicworkers was not a recipe for victory.

  Instead of dropping, the ceiling rose further and the walls receded. Before Pirvan had fully realized it, the vanguard had spilled out into a vast underground chamber, taller than the highest tower in Istar and so wide that an entire regiment could have formed a line of battle across the floor. Or rather, they could have, if a vast expanse of white webbing hadn't stretched across the chamber from side to side. It hung a man's height off the floor, rose two men's height higher than that, and seemed to spread over at least half the chamber's area.

  It also glowed, with a pearly light that recalled no kind of spell Pirvan knew of, and made him wish that Tarothin was alive or Lujimar not wholly lost in his own purposes. The knight was commander of this host; he needed to know his enemy.

  One thing struck several fighters of each race at the same moment: the light made glowballs unnecessary. They dropped theirs and rushed forward. No one saw whether a minotaur or a human reached the webbing first, but everyone in the chamber saw what happened to the first of each.

  It was not without reason that Pirvan had thought of spiders when he saw the webbing. What crawled out of the webbing had twelve legs instead of eight, and poison-dripping hooks on the inside of the foremost legs instead of fangs. They also had more eyes than Pirvan dared count, all glowing a diseased blue that might have been found in the coldest part of the Abyss or in some nightmare cave on Nuitari.

  To these not-spiders, the minotaurs and humans charging them were as flies. In moments all were reeling about the chamber, clutching where the venom from the foreleg-hooks was eating into their flesh. Pirvan saw the envenomed slashes turning black and flesh crumbling as it turned the color of charcoal, pouring out blue smoke at the same time.

  The victims fell to the floor, but their weapons did not clatter beside them. The tendrils of webbing had already wound themselves around the weapons and snatched them aloft. Now the same tendrils dropped to the chamber floor and began reeling in the dead and dying in an obscene parody of fishermen with their catch.

  Pirvan kept his eyes firmly fixed on the horror, to not show weakness and to learn more of what they faced, if any untutored eye like his could see anything useful. To the side, Pirvan glimpsed Lujimar, standing as solid and as impassive as a boulder on a mountainside.

  He wanted to shout at the minotaur to do something. He also wanted to shout at the murmuring humans behind him to show some pride before the minotaurs. The "Destined Race's" warriors were probably as uneasy about this deathtrap as their human comrades, but were certainly hiding it better.

  It was then that Si
r Niebar stepped forward, out of the ranks of the humans. He was wrapped in his cloak, all but his sword arm, and moved like a man just risen from a bed of near-mortal sickness. Behind him stepped Lady Revella—who had to be ten years older than the knight, but now walked as if she were twenty years younger—carrying only her staff.

  A look passed between knight and Black Robe, of a kind that Pirvan knew he would never be able to describe. Nor did he wish to. Knights of the Rose were not supposed to share secrets with Black Robes, and there were those in the Keeps who would make a scandal if they suspected such.

  Sir Niebar halted until the webbing had swallowed the last of the bodies. It now jerked and twisted, like blankets over restless sleepers, and Pirvan had the stomach-turning thought that it was digesting the bodies. Perhaps the spiders were only the servants—the hounds coursing prey for their master, the living web.

  Niebar took the last three steps, to within reach of the nearest spider. For the first time, Lujimar seemed to notice what was happening. He raised one hand in an urgent gesture.

  Before the minotaur could finish the gesture, Sir Niebar raised his sword. He raised it high overhead, held level, within easy reach of the nearest spider or the web. The spider did not take the bait. The web did. Tendrils as thick as tent ropes poured down and wrapped themselves around the web—and around Sir Niebar's sword arm. Pirvan saw his face twist in pain; there must have been something like acid on the tendrils.

  Then the web lifted the knight clean off the floor. As it did, he came within arm's length of the spider. His free hand darted under his cloak and came out with a glowball. With an arrow-swift gesture, he thrust the glowball into the spider's gaping maw.

  Then the web jerked the knight upward again, so violently that Pirvan thought—and hoped—that the motion must have snapped his neck. His close-cropped white hair vanished into the web; Sir Hawkbrother cried out in rage and despair. Close at hand, Pirvan heard Haimya fighting not to do the same—and Lady Revella raised her staff.