by Cam Banks
“I’m … trying,” he said.
“Vanderjack! Get up!” he heard Gredchen call out.
“I’m … trying!” he repeated. He got to one knee and felt the tremors beneath.
“You need to jump,” said the Conjurer from off to the left or the right.
The girallons tensed, their muscles twitching, bunching up to leap at Vanderjack and tear him to pieces.
The Balladeer hovered nearby, in front of a dense wall of vegetation and foliage. “Help is coming,” the ghost said.
Vanderjack found his footing. The eyes of the girallons were locked on his, their fangs and teeth slick with their own ravening. Vanderjack could smell their rancid breath from where he stood. It smelled like rotting meat.
“You need to jump,” said the new voice of the Cook, right beside him.
In that last second, the girallons pounced, Gredchen finally succumbed to a scream, and the leaves and trees and thick, twisting vines all around them flew apart as if released from years of wound-up tension. Something even larger than the girallons tore through the wall of leaves behind the Balladeer. It flew straight through the ghost as if he weren’t there; a huge brass cat with wings furled close to its body, tiger-striped all over where the scales did not reach. On its back rode a gnome, clutching a familiar polearm under one arm like a lance, the other arm holding tightly to the fur at the back of the creature’s neck.
“You got it, fella,” Vanderjack responded to Etharion’s ghost and threw himself sideways, toward the gnome and his scaly mount. The girallons landed right where he had been, smashing through the foliage. More leaves filled the air. Gredchen lunged and grabbed the cat from the other side as the gnome cried, “Go, Star, go!”
Another heartbeat later and the green hell that was the Sahket Jungle exploded in sound and noise, the tiger roaring a pure and triumphant note, carrying its passengers high above the highest canopy and skyward.
The Sword Chorus faded again from sight, but Vanderjack, lying across the back of the dragon-tiger, didn’t care. He was blissfully, finally, unconscious.
Highmaster Rivven Cairn stood nose to belly with an ogre, but onlookers would have sworn later that they were the same height.
The fully armored and helmed half-elf, sword on her back and gauntlets firmly pressed against her hips, was always an intimidating sight. The ogres, half-ogres, and ogre kin presently dominating Willik weren’t smart, and they weren’t accustomed to seeing their spiritual leader challenged. In the case of a high-ranking dragonarmy officer, however, they were smart enough and wise enough to know that creating trouble for the highmaster was like poking a stick into a basilisk’s nest. That was doubly true in the case of Highmaster Cairn, for Rivven had been there many times before. It was Rivven who had overthrown the large town for the spiritual leader she was presently holding her own against, a fact she never let him forget. At the moment, though, she needed him out of there.
Cheron Skerish was a veritable giant. He was nine feet tall and thick around the shoulders and arms, though stooped and bent with age. The ogre must have been in whatever passed for middle age in an ogre, with a mane of greasy, gray hair surrounding a shiny bald pate covered in age spots and warts. Some ogres couldn’t grow beards, but Skerish sported a long, droopy mustache and a forest of spiky hair at his chin, making him look wizened. As a shaman, Skerish affected numerous trinkets, talismans, and grisly amulets crafted from the body parts of animals and worse. Tattoos and scarification covered his bare arms, symbols of his dedication to his mighty god, Sargonnas.
“Yes, you heard me correctly, Skerish,” Rivven said in a clear and ringing alto voice. “I’m temporarily relieving you of command. Go. Go now.”
“You have idea how long I work to make town right?” Skerish grunted in response.
“I do,” Rivven said. “I know that you and your god are very popular here. It’s done wonders. The highlord is very impressed, all the way back in Kern, and he wonders if at some point you might care to visit him there. I was thinking now would be an excellent time.”
“Gonnas speak not to I,” said Skerish, using the ogre name for the god of vengeance and spite. “Last I know, Gonnas want I stay here. Highlord or no highlord.”
Rivven looked aside. The other ogres and all of their human slaves stood in a huge group around the shaman and the highmaster. Skerish’s confidence must be at a very high level, Rivven thought. Or maybe it was just his stupidity.
“We get our orders from Her Dark Majesty,” said Rivven, lying. She’d never been given direct instructions from Takhisis, of course, but the shaman claimed all kinds of things from Sargonnas, so perhaps he’d allow her that little exaggeration without examining it closely. “I assume you-and your god-are not so proud as to countermand a request from the Queen of Darkness.”
The shaman frowned, looking around him at his followers, some of them several degrees human as well as ogre, one of them a trusted lieutenant willing to risk death fighting the highmaster for Skerish if he was asked. None of them looked happy or pleasant. “Gonnas no like I leave Willik. Gonnas want proof highmaster make speak with Darklady.”
Now who’s making things up, thought Rivven. She was convinced that Sargonnas didn’t give a gully dwarf’s nose what she or Cheron Skerish wanted. She had to make the ogres believe her, however; she needed a little demonstration.
“You can tell your god that his mistress, the Queen of Darkness, speaks through dragons, and her dragons speak to me. I have a red dragon just outside the town walls waiting to burn this place down if you won’t relinquish control immediately.”
That caused a number of frightened and angry grunts and growls from the ogres and ogre kin. Rivven knew Skerish didn’t have any dragons of his own, despite being the shaman of Sargonnas. Skerish wasn’t an officer in the dragonarmies, merely an infamous ogre shaman with good connections. If Black Dragon Highlord Lucien of Takar were there, or even that Green Dragon Highlord Hullek Skullsmasher in the south, both of whom were half ogre and half human, that might be a problem. Rivven was half-elf, and they wouldn’t overlook that. But, of course, she had Cear at the ready, and the black and green highlords weren’t there.
“Gonnas say highmaster do his worst,” said the mule-headed Skerish, apparently assuming Rivven was male. Or maybe that was how ogres spoke of all high-masters. “Gonnas is fire god. Gonnas is vengeance god. Highmaster try burn down Willik, maybe find Willik no burn so good.”
The shaman was irritating Rivven, calling the highmaster out like that before his loyal ogre lackeys. It was the sneering that really got to her. She poked the shaman hard in the chest with one gauntleted finger.
“Listen up, Skerish,” she snapped. “I’m not going to stand here all day arguing with you. Either you go on a short vacation to Kern with all of your friends, or you’re going on a very long and extended vacation in the Abyss with your god.”
That was clearly the wrong thing to say.
Cheron Skerish drew back his big, meaty hand and brought it forward, catching Rivven full on the side of her helm, knocking her sideways with a blow that would have stunned an ox. She staggered, feeling a concussion blossom like an angry purple flower within her head.
“Nobody threaten I without back up threats!” yelled Skerish, his voice echoing around the dirt streets and wattle-and-daub houses of Willik. His followers muttered approvingly. “Gonnas! Bring wrath on heathen who speak for Darklady! If heathen speak true, Dark-lady protect! Ogflamgoddag!”
Rivven spoke only a little Ogre, and his last statement wasn’t part of her vocabulary. Her magical training told her that it was probably an incantation or evocation of the shaman’s god, however, so she didn’t want to stand around and see what was going to happen. Pride-fully shaking off the ogre’s blow, she fell back two steps and swiftly whispered the words of her own magic in response.
Wizards did not wear armor, typically, nor carry weapons. The gods of magic were said to allow the use of a dagger in honor of the wizard Magius,
who had reportedly died doing something noble involving a big knife. But Rivven spared little thought for magic’s history or its traditions. Emperor Ariakas had taught her to eschew those petty restrictions, to walk the Left Hand Path that he followed, the one that Takhisis offered him and he had, in turn, offered her. With training, therefore, armor had become no hindrance.
Skerish’s invocation manifested itself moments later as a column of roaring, twisting, black flames, thundering upward from around Rivven like a fountain of incandescent darkness. Rivven had spoken the words to a protection spell, however, which deflected some of the shaman’s fiery magic; she laughed aloud at the irony of using fire on a red dragonarmy highmaster. Rivven’s armor was magically enhanced with protections against fire and heat, in part because the red dragons the Red Wing made use of were prone to turning on their masters. With her magic and her armor combined, all Rivven felt was a light scalding around her legs. Skerish had done his best. She’d had worse.
“Was that it?” she taunted, drawing her sword smoothly from her back.
The other ogres backed off, widening the circle around the shaman and the highmaster. Skerish wasn’t easily cowed, however. It was obvious that he was expecting a battle, and might even have decided that before his pathetic magical outburst. He reached out one big hand, as if asking somebody to place something in it. From somewhere over the heads of the ogres in that direction, an enormous blackened warhammer-a weapon almost as big as Rivven herself-flew toward the shaman. He grasped it and brought it down, sending up clods of earth inches away from where Rivven was standing.
Not bad, thought Rivven. Skerish really did have powers that would impress any other opponent. She didn’t really want to kill him; he was too useful in Nordmaar, keeping his ogres in line. She had often used ogres in her efforts to quell rebellion among the Nordmaaran towns, but if Skerish was going to refuse her orders, Rivven regretted she might have to get rid of him.
Darting forward, Rivven Cairn launched into a routine that she’d practiced often. Her blade came low; the style allowed her some footwork options, a number of defensive positions, and so forth. All very academic, she thought, but when you have to fight an ogre, having something up your sleeve was key.
Skerish watched Rivven approach and simply brought the warhammer down again, pounding the ground. When that didn’t work, and he’d taken three or four cuts to his arms from Rivven’s sword, he tried swinging the warhammer from left to right, hoping to knock her over. One swing almost caught the highmaster on her side, but she evaded it. Even though he wasn’t able to land a hit, however, he was making it very hard for her to get close enough to score a decent wound.
The shaman’s ogres stood back and watched patiently. A duel in ogre society was always left to play out its course, never interfered with. Ogres feared the reprisal of a superior officer or a chief, and especially the reprisal of a shaman. Getting involved was a bad idea, so they didn’t. Rivven knew, however, that if she beat Skerish in a duel, she was likely to be dog-piled by ogres soon after.
The highmaster knew that if she called Cear, the dragon would arrive and belch flames all over the crowd, finishing them off. That was appealing in some ways, but she didn’t want to kill all of her potential ogre allies. It was far more important to show Cheron Skerish that she was in charge, show him where she stood on the ladder of power.
“You may not believe me,” she said, ducking out of the way of another swing of the shaman’s warhammer. “But the Queen of Darkness is very much on my side. I can tell your shamanic powers are good enough for this crowd, and the highlord in Kern is going to miss having you around, but I’m not going to put up with insurrection.”
“So far you not show any sign to I that Darklady is with you,” Skerish grunted, taking another superficial cut from Rivven’s blades. “Magic armor save you from Gonnas’ spell. Not save you from Gonnas’ hammer.”
All right, then, Rivven thought. She needed something flashy to prove that she was in Takhisis’s good graces. Stepping back in time to avoid a brutal crash of the hammer, she sheathed the sword, lifted her hands, and called upon her magic once again. As she always did, she felt the hot prickling of power deep within her soul, that rush of energy filling the hollow left behind by her commitment to Takhisis’s path. She never heard the mages of the Towers speak of magic in such a way, as an injury that the use of magic temporarily eased. But they did speak of an almost addictive quality to the art, and there was nothing more addictive than the feeling of relief from such an abiding inner pain.
As the words of her spell seized hold of that well of power and brought it forth, her body became ghostlike and insubstantial, almost vanishing from sight. Before Skerish could react, she stepped forward, forcing her spectral hand through the wall of the ogre shaman’s chest and into his massive heart.
Skerish shuddered and stiffened, his eyes rolling back into his head. The ogres in his retinue watched him collapse backward, landing heavily in the damp earth. Three of them called obscenities in Ogre and charged Rivven, but her spell was still active. They ran right through her, tripping and falling over each other.
“Cease this!” she cried, her voice eerie and chill. “I am the Darklady’s servant! She is displeased with you and Gonnas, her consort! Your shaman is not dead, but he walks the paths of the spirits as we speak. No doubt Gonnas will protect him, but even the god of vengeance cannot deny the will of the Dragon Queen.”
The ogres muttered and growled, and the lieutenant who Rivven had noticed earlier stepped forward. Rivven stood before him, wavering, an ethereal mist coiling from her incorporeal body. She had to admit to herself she looked good. “Are you the second in command?” she asked the lieutenant.
“Yes,” he said. He had some human blood, she noticed, wasn’t as tall as the shaman, and probably had more education. “I am the shaman’s half-brother, Trom.”
“Are you through with opposing me?” she asked him, wondering whether the rotten apple had fallen far from the tree.
“Yes,” he said. “My brother is proud. He is a good leader, and Gonnas favors him, but he forgets that we all serve Darklady, shaman or not.”
Rivven breathed a sigh of relief, masked by her helm. “That shows wisdom,” she said. “Listen, Trom. I’m going to set up my base of operations here for the time being. I’m expecting somebody to come along this way in a day or two, and I plan on being here when he does. Take the shaman and your war band south to Kern, and report to the highlord’s camp. You’ll be told when you can return.”
More than likely, Red Highlord Karelas would refuse to see the ogres and have them sent off to some guard post or another. Karelas was happiest being left alone. Still, Kern was an ogre nation, and Trom and his brother would find welcome somewhere.
Trom bowed then gestured at the prone figure of Cheron Skerish. “How long will he be like that?” he asked.
Rivven shrugged. Her body grew more substantial as she released the spell, returning to normal. “About an hour. Give him a lot of water and make sure he eats enough meat.” She smiled to herself. It was like leaving care instructions for a pet animal with a family member. Leaving Trom to organize the exodus of ogres from Willik, Rivven walked off in search of some home or building suitable for her temporary quarters.
At the end of one street, near the gates to the town, she saw four figures standing in wait for her.
“Ah, there you are,” she said. They looked like ordinary peasants or common folk, but there was something predatory about their eyes. “I’ve just made an arrangement with the shaman. He’s leaving.”
“That is good news, Excellency,” the first peasant said. “You will not be needing our services?”
She shook her head. “No, not at the moment. Proceed on ahead to Castle Glayward. I want you to attend to the wizard Cazuvel there, in case the Ergothian decides not to show up here in Willik.”
“In which form shall we attend the wizard’s needs, Excellency?” asked the man.
; Rivven considered. “May as well drop the disguises,” she said. “Cazuvel knows what you look like. If I have any further instructions, I’ll send them along to him.”
“As you wish, Excellency,” said the man. Before Rivven’s eyes, the four peasants began to swell in size, their features distorting, growing more and more metallic and scaled, their clothing melding into their bodies and being replaced by thick plates of armor. When the transformation was complete, four sivak draconians-as large as ogres, and capable of winged flight as well as being able to take on the forms of those they kill-stood before her.
The four sivaks bore the markings and insignia of the infamous Red Watch, indicating they belonged to the elite forces that once served Emperor Ariakas when he was alive. They were a parting gift of his, before the end of the war and his death at the hands of the Whitestone Forces. She hoped those in front of her performed better than the others she’d left watching King Shredler in North Keep.
As the sivaks took wing, Rivven chose an empty building in sight of the main gates as her own. As always, she was being forced to move pieces around on the khas board that was Nordmaar. With the information she had gained from her sources, Rivven felt she’d covered all possible moves on the part of the Ergothian.
All she had to do was wait. That, and get somebody to wash away the stink of ogre.
CHAPTER ELEVEN
Vanderjack was soaring above the early-morning jungle.
Technically, he thought, it’s this creature that’s doing all the work. Theo’s new friend, who bore an uncanny resemblance to that totem Gredchen had identified back in Pentar, was a powerful flier. With the wings of a dragon and the strength of a great cat, the dragonne-or so Theo had identified it-could carry the gnome, the sellsword, and the baron’s aide without affecting its ability to fly.
Theodenes had named it Star, but it was not a saber-toothed tiger kitten. Granted, the whole mess with the original Star and the circumstances of Vanderjack’s parting of ways with Theo was half a decade gone, and had Star survived, she could have grown since then. But it was very unlikely that Star could have sprouted wings and acquired the scales of a dragon. And besides, though the dragonne’s jaws were filled with razor-sharp teeth, none of them were as long as knives and permanently hanging out of the creature’s mouth.