by Jeff Wilson
Seldur left Edryd’s room, carrying the sword that had been left behind in haste. “Does this look like a prince’s weapon to you, Hedryn?” he asked, doubting it belonged to anyone more important than an unskilled hireling.
“Never mind that, I have a door for you to bust through.”
Hedryn, an Ældisir’s thrall, considered himself a more nuanced shaper than Seldur, less reliant on brute force and intimidation, and more adept with the use of intellect applied towards more subtle forms manipulation. Brute force, however, had its uses, and it could occasionally be the better tool.
It proved unnecessary in this instance. From inside the room, someone began to remove the bar. A moment later the door swung inward as she calmly stepped through to the open hall. “What possible cause could you have to destroy my property?” Irial demanded. She looked ready to set upon anyone who spoke, and when no one did, she focused her anger and attention on a single specific target, a nervous looking man who was standing in the center of the room, stone faced and quiet. “If this is your doing, Esivh Rhol, I will have you pay for the repairs or you will regret you ever crossed me.”
“Keep her away,” Esivh Rhol barked to his guards, showing no concerns that his fear of this small woman might appear embarrassing. His guards made no effort to respond to his call for protection. They were wary of this woman as well and in no hurry to get between her and the Ard Ri.
The two thralls seemed bemused by all of this. Her reputation as a practitioner of dark arcane secrets did not impress them. They knew none of it was true. They knew from their time training under Aed Seoras that Irial was just a servant woman, and a threat to no one.
Seldur took one step forward and confronted her. “You are hiding something, Irial. You know better than to do that.” He stepped forward again, forcing Irial to backpedal through the doorway.
“Where is Lord Seoras?” Irial questioned.
Seldur stiffened, standing a little taller, as he reflexively reacted to the name of his former master. “I expect you know how these things go,” he said, “it won’t hurt Seoras, his being kept in the dark.”
“It might not hurt him, but he will hurt you when he learns what you have done.”
This gave the aggressive thrall a little pause. “If he is displeased, he can take it up with Áledhuir and Aodra. I’m sure you understand that my decisions are not my own.”
“I don’t see your masters here, thrall,” Irial pointed out. “Are you telling me that they ordered you to break into my home and threaten me? I can’t imagine your master gave any such command. Seems to me you are actually here under orders from someone else, some unconvincing excuse of man, a weak willed coward who has hired others to do what he would never dare to do himself.”
She didn’t have to look at Esivh Rhol, point him out, or say his name. It was understood from the context who she meant. Seldur constricted, his listless features even more pallid than usual, reacting to an accusation that bore some truth. Esivh Rhol, who had been used as the subject of this taunt, said nothing in response, but he was predictably livid. His face became at first pale, before turning an angry red.
“You will let us search the room won’t you?” Hedryn suggested. “You seem to have known we were coming, and had time to make preparations before we arrived. It raises a suspicion that you are hiding something.”
“No, I will not. And if I was hiding something, I was hiding myself, from a vicious band of thugs.” Irial projected a firm countenance and continued put forward an aggressive offensive, preventing Hedryn from interrupting and continuing on at greater length as he had a tendency to do. “Look at my house! I had good reason to try and keep you out.”
“If we find nothing, we will stop troubling you,” Hedryn said, trying sound as if he were only trying to be reasonable.
Irial knew that for a lie and she was determined not to let anyone go into the room. “Whatever it is you are looking for—“
“Whoever,” Seldur corrected.
“Whoever you are looking for, he isn’t here.”
“We know that already,” admitted Hedryn. “He left just ahead of us, pursued by Áledhuir and Aodra. It is only a matter of time before they catch him.”
“Then why are you here?” Irial asked, covering her concern for Edryd by expressing instead her genuine confusion.
“Because you’re still hiding something, which begs a question that I’m sure we would all like answered, what exactly is it you are keeping in that room?” said Esivh Rhol, neatly summarizing the situation.
Emboldened by apparent support from Hedryn, and having become quite curious as well, Seldur began to move forward. Irial had no choice but to give ground. She retreated strategically, leading Seldur away from the corner where Eithne hid, silently huddled behind a collection of stacked crates. This was more of a desperate gesture than it was an actual strategy. It wouldn’t buy more than a few seconds and would lead to the same ultimate end.
Esivh Rhol followed Seldur in. He had begun to imagine that Irial had hidden away something of value in the room. He was imagining things she could have taken from the many people who had died under her care. It could be a hoard of golden coins or collections of fine jewelry studded with gemstones; almost anything was possible. Reality proved disappointing for him as he entered the room, as it all too often was, but he didn’t give up, for there were plenty of spaces where some treasure could be concealed. With Irial’s attentions focused on Seldur, the Ard Ri was free to move around unchecked, and it took him only a moment to find Eithne hidden against a wall behind the crates.
“Look here, girl,” he said gently. Eithne was already looking at him, a mixture of fear and contempt in her bright sapphire blue eyes.
Recognition struck the Ard Ri almost immediately. He had never seen this girl before, but the similarities were there.
“I think I knew your mother,” Esivh Rhol said. As he looked at her dark hair and blue eyes he put something else together. “And your father as well.” He realized immediately that this girl could be a useful piece of insurance.
Seldur and Irial were still on the other side of the room. They had not noticed he was there.
“I knew you had something in here that you were trying to keep from me,” Esivh Rhol said to Irial with a triumphant self-satisfied smile.
He hadn’t meant to imply what Irial had taken this to mean, what everyone in the room and the two guards in the doorway also thought he had meant. Irial rushed toward Esivh Rhol, trying to get between him and Eithne and ignoring his shouts to stay back. Reacting to the sudden protective fury of this woman whom he feared, the Ard Ri panicked.
His guards having failed to protect him, Esivh Rhol was left with only one weapon. It was a fine short bladed dagger with a hilt inlaid with gold, and a pommel decorated with emeralds. He buried the knife deep, through Irial’s dark simple dress and into the flesh just below her ribs. The knife came away, the blade and the hand that had used it now covered in blood, and Irial fell backwards to the ground in front of Eithne.
Everything stopped for a moment. Esivh Rhol had killed many times before. This wasn’t the first woman either. It just wasn’t usually accomplished so directly with his own hands. The world inside the room began to move again at sounds from outside the cottage. Esivh Rhol’s horse screamed as it broke free from the guards outside who had been holding it, and the sound of weapon strikes could be heard.
“He has come back,” Eithne said. Her eyes red and her cheeks streaked where tears had washed through a layer of dust on her face. “The Blood Prince is going to kill every last one of you for hurting my sister.”
The thralls and the guards all rushed towards the fighting, leaving Esivh Rhol behind with Eithne.
***
Ruach was alerted to Elek’s presence near the crevice by what looked like sparks of lightning, which feverishly attacked the air in front of the thrall, before he disappeared. Ruach, still a good distance from the tunnel entrance, began to run. He did not
know what he had seen, but he had no doubt that it meant his captain was in danger.
He covered the ground quickly and slipped into the tunnel, feeling that he had to move quickly if he hoped to be of any help. He could see that he was getting close to the source of the pulsing light, and as it grew stronger, he began to move with more care, stepping carefully so as to avoid alerting the man that he followed.
Easing around a final corner, Ruach shielded his eyes from the light with his arm. Before him stood a man dressed in a drab grey cloak worn over plain looking brown clothes. The man was staring up in the air at the bottom of a trap door.
Ruach had not thought far enough ahead. He should have drawn his sword long before he had gotten so near to the man, but he couldn’t afford any indecision now. In one fluid motion he drew his weapon and aimed a fatal thrust at the man’s back. He had no qualms about attacking the man from behind without warning. He had seen enough to know that this was a thrall, and Ruach knew his chances were poor at best if he were to try engaging the draugar servant in a fair fight.
Elek turned in surprise at the last possible moment. The thrust still hit Elek, but instead of piercing him through the chest as Ruach had intended, the sword caught Elek in the side, slicing through the muscle above the crook of Elek’s right arm. Ruach felt the impact of his sword deflecting off of bone, heard Elek’s muffled protest of pain, and saw everything go dark as the thrall’s concentration broke and the ghostly light vanished.
The darkness might ordinarily have been an advantage for a shaper, but in this instance Elek needed the light far more than Ruach did. The Sigil warrior did not hesitate. He struck immediately at where he judged his opponent to be, accurately tracking the movement he had seen as the light vanished. Ruach felt the point of his sword pierce completely through his enemy. He tried to pull the weapon free but it was held fast.
Ruach puzzled over this but the cause became clear a moment later when a dim red light began to cast sparse illumination, its source the red hot glow at the end of his blade where it was held in the grip of the thrall’s black hands. Ruach protested in pain and let go of his grip on the hilt of his sword as the heat began to burn his fingers where they came into contact with the weapon’s crossguard. The smell of burning flesh made Ruach retreat, flexing his hand several times to reassure himself that it was not his own injury that was producing the effluence of foul odor.
Elek eventually pulled the sword from his chest and it dropped to the hard rock surface of the tunnel with a muffled clatter. “You are a dead man,” Elek spluttered, his speech sounding like a lesser weaker version of the voice that belonged to his Huldra master. “You are a dead man for what you have done,” he repeated.
“You and I have something in common then,” Ruach said as he stepped forward to retrieve his sword, guided by the faint red heat that still emanated from the deformed section of the blade where the thrall had held it. Ruach judged from the sound of the blood in the man’s throat as he spoke, that his attack had pierced one of the thrall’s lungs.
“Untended, that is going to kill you,” Ruach said, “and no one is ever going to find you down here.”
From his position on the ground where he had fallen, Elek spat a mouthful of fluid in response to Ruach’s sober taunt. The blood and saliva broke into a misted spray that fell well short, as his efforts at showing his spite triggered a fit of coughing. Ruach left the man to choke on his own blood as he felt his way along the tunnel in the dark, travelling all the way back to the exterior entrance. Foolishly, he began thinking that these thralls were not quite as dangerous as he had been led to believe.
The sky was beginning to brighten as Ruach exited the tunnel, and he could just make out two simple looking guards standing outside the cottage. One of them held the reigns of a fine grey mare with an expensive looking saddle. He would have liked to take them out quietly, but they were a dozen feet apart and both of them were looking in the direction of the other. It just wasn’t going to be possible. Relying on speed and surprise, he attacked the guard holding the horse first. He realized this had not been the optimal choice when the horse reacted with fright, alerting additional enemies who were inside the cottage. Ruach killed his opponent with a single piercing stroke, before the guard could ready a defense.
The second guard was strong, but he too was outmatched. Ruach blocked two attacks before finding an opening and delivering a crippling slash across the man’s unprotected shoulder. The guard dropped to the ground, writhing in pain, and screaming for help. In that time, two new enemies had appeared. They were pallid looking men dressed in a similar fashion to the one that Ruach had fought in the tunnel. Four more guards also appeared just behind them, holding back for now, content to leave this fight to the thralls.
The most useful thing Ruach could have done then would have been to run. He largely understood this, but he also knew that he would not escape. Choosing to test himself against these men, Ruach decided he didn’t want to leave without understanding what had happened here first.
***
Edryd could not see his pursuer, but he felt her constant presence. He was driven to run harder as she drew near. He gained some distance while on the causeway, and upon reaching the mainland, he maintained that advantage while being pursued across the flat deserted expanse that had once been the location of the satellite colony of An Innis settlers, but the margin was shrinking now.
Wrongly assuming that once he made it to the tree line he might be safe, Edryd relaxed and slowed his pace as he entered the cover provided by the forest. It was a mistake. The draugr was now moving even more quickly as she entered the forest behind him. The trees were spaced too far a part to give her any significant trouble, and unlike him, she did not seem to tire.
Running again now, Edryd started to bend north, thinking of turning toward the coast where he knew there were areas of thicker vegetation. He gave up on this when he perceived that the draugr was moving at an angle that would intercept him well before he could reach any cover. Edryd took a moment to reflect on the envelopment which shrouded him, seeking confirmation that it remained in place. He had dealt it some permanent damage at some point. The Ældisir had picked up on the exposed aura and was tracking it directly. Any hope of escape was gone. She would only close the distance that separated them faster, if he did anything other than run in a straight line.
Edryd no longer held any hope that he could hide, and recognized that eventually he would have no choice but to turn and fight. He could imagine fighting the other draugr, the Huldra. There was something physical there to contend with. The Ældisir though, was ephemeral and without form. In his haste he had not taken his sword, but a weapon such as that could not harm a creature such as this. In order to fight her, Edryd needed to be able to shape.
A realization came that there might be a benefit to the damage he had done to his concealment. If it had weakened, perhaps the limitations it imposed had weakened as well. Edryd tried to touch the dark, and like every other time he had ever tried, he failed.
The Ældisir was drawing close now, and Edryd heard a whistling sound as a hail of thin pointed projectiles flew toward him from several different directions in the trees ahead of him. They were not real. Edryd could perceive that they were illusions conjured to manipulate and distract him, all except for one, coming from the opposite direction. Reacting to the illusory needles in the way in which the Ældisir apparently intended would have positioned Edryd directly into the path of the real one. Edryd flinched in spite of himself as he allowed the insubstantial objects to pass, without any effect, through his body. The dart that posed true danger flew past Edryd on his left, embedding its sharp point in the trunk of a large tree.
Beginning to comprehend what he was facing, Edryd’s desperation grew. The draugr might not have a physical form, but she carried and could manipulate physical objects. There was no way of knowing what poison that needle had been tipped with. Worse, Edryd could not trust his traditional senses. The Ældi
sir was manipulating some of what he saw and heard.
Edryd, under these difficulties, settled upon a dangerous solution. He would go to a place that he feared more than the creature pursuing him. It was the only plan in which he could envision any hope of success. Edryd took a path that led to the ruins deep in the forest.
Twice more he evaded the attempts to attack him with a combination of conjured illusions and actual steel projectiles. The foreboding presence of the construct towers worked at the edges of his mind, alternately pushing and pulling his focus in different directions, but there was a small comfort to be taken in the reactions he noticed in the Ældisir. She was troubled by the ruins and increasingly anxious to prevent her quarry from reaching them. She was no longer trying to distract Edryd. She was focused now only on reaching him as quickly as she could.
Accepting the absurdity of what it was he was trying to do, but feeling more confident that it was his only chance, Edryd summoned what little energy he had left to make the final frantic push for the borders of the long dead city. He wanted to collapse when he passed through the towering arches at the western edge of the ruins, but he forced himself to remain on his feet, walking in towards the center of the site.
The Ældisir hesitated at the edge of the ancient structures, before unleashing her abilities with an intensity that she had previously held back. Soldiers came charging out at Edryd from the shadowed entrances of the buildings nearest to him. Edryd ignored them and they faded away.
Confronted by the overwhelming presences of the constructs trapped within the towers at the heart of the city, and filled with a terror that was warning him to turn around and run, Edryd glanced over his shoulder. The Ældisir was somehow making these feelings stronger, and playing tricks with his mind.
Pushing through the fear, Edryd faced forward again. He found himself standing less than a foot away from a nearly seven foot tall creature. It was the Huldra warrior, the draugr who had chased him onto the causeway. He had fallen into a trap. Edryd fell to the ground and began to propel himself backwards. The draugr stepped forward, and Edryd tasted the decaying stench in the air that escaped through the masking odor of the salve that coated the creature’s skin. Edryd felt the draugr’s hatred, and experienced the depths of the pure animus under which it looked down now upon the only living son of a man who it hated far more deeply yet.