by Jeff Wilson
Half of his opponents were dead or out of the fight, but they were none of them amongst any of the enemies that really mattered. Esivh Rhol had retreated as far back as he could into his chair, paralyzed with fear. Neither Áledhuir nor his thrall had left their positions in the corner. The draugr had simply stood and watched with almost passive interest. He stepped forward now and raised his impossibly large weapon as high as he could—the ceilings were high but not tall enough to allow the draugr to raise the weapon all the way above his head—and in one sudden instant the towering monster brought his weapon down atop the table.
The entire near end of the table was obliterated by the impact. Edryd leapt clear before it collapsed, but the draugr, his thrall, and also Esivh Rhol and his two remaining guards, were all covered in shards of splintered wood. Áledhuir retreated backward into the corner. He did not intend to engage Edryd directly yet. He had just wanted to create some space in which the others could fight. He said something unintelligible in a low rumble that only his thrall understood. In response to his master’s command, Seldur stepped into the middle of the room and waited for Edryd to advance. The two swordsmen protecting Esivh Rhol used this as an opportunity to skirt their way past Seldur and escape, following the lead of the first guard who had been covering the door, but was now long gone. No one made any effort to stop them.
Edryd moved forward to meet the thrall’s challenge, and acting upon an insight that was not his own, he understood that he needed to take the initiative. For the first time in his life, Edryd consciously took hold of the dark and began to shape it into a pattern. His first swing was blindingly fast, carried enormous force, and was incredibly clumsy. Seldur managed to block but he should have evaded and used the opening that followed to counter. Instead he was driven back a step, staggered by the force behind the attack.
Edryd’s second strike was better, more precise and delivered with improved control. His third and fourth efforts were better yet as Edryd incorporated the knowledge and experience gained from working with the speed and power of his own attacks. The thrall was unable to respond, stretching the limits of his skills just trying to ward himself and absorb the impacts. The uneven footing became a weapon for Edryd. Backpedaling precariously through large splintered boards that remained in the aftermath of Áledhuir’s destruction of the table, Seldur could not retreat safely. The thrall stumbled, his heel catching awkwardly on the remnant of a broken table leg, compromising his balance and sending him to the ground. Seldur dropped his sword as he instinctively stretched out his arm to break his fall.
Edryd reacted instantly, but his finishing strike never landed. Áledhuir had intervened to protect his thrall. The sigil blade drove a notch an inch deep into the Huldra greatsword, and remained locked in place, bound up by some artifice of the towering draugr’s making, shaping the dark with a skill and knowledge that Edryd could not counteract. The two of them struggled, pitting raw strength and raw power against one another.
Seldur broke the stalemate. Recovering quickly, he rose up beneath Edryd, striking upward with the palm of a bare blackened hand. Edryd recognized the technique. It had nearly killed him once. Remembering anew the painful bruising it had left behind and the long weeks it had taken him to recover, Edryd understood it perfectly for what it was now. He could see the components clearly. One part of the pattern protected Seldur’s hand, and the rest was a buildup of raw compressed power that would be expended painfully into his chest once it made contact.
A flash of external insight transferred a crucial piece of knowledge into Edryd’s mind. Seldur’s attack, could with little difficulty, be turned against him. Edryd touched the dark, reshaping the pattern that protected Seldur’s hand, shredding the thrall’s simple warding in the process. It then took only the slightest of pressure against the compressed forces Seldur had bound together in order to release them. The result shattered every bone in Seldur’s hand. The thrall screamed in agony, rolling on the ground clutching at his useless hand as it began to swell.
Áledhuir released the pattern that had been holding Edryd’s sword locked to his own, and in a fit of disgust, drove his weapon through Seldur’s head, pinning the thrall’s lifeless body to the ground, and leaving the point of his great blade buried inches deep into the stone floor.
The opportunity was there, and Edryd did not waste it. He struck immediately, before there was any time for Áledhuir to free his weapon from the floor. Edryd swung the sigil sword at the corner of the creature’s neck. The attack sliced through the bunched cloth where Áledhuir had lowered the hood of his cloak, but it glanced off of the draugr’s hardened skin. The creature’s armored exterior had proven stronger than even the sharpened metal of the sigil blade.
“You cannot kill me, Son of Elduryn,” the draugr said. Pure hatred radiated from the creature as the words tumbled up his throat and through his decaying mouth.
Edryd struck once more, the sigil blade alive now with a profusion of intense white light. He smoothly pushed the weapon straight through Áledhuir’s chest, right where Edryd supposed the creature’s heart would have been. But this creature had no living heart. What had once been Áledhuir’s heart had been transformed by arcane means into an object of solid metal. The same was true for the veins that had once carried blood throughout his body. He had no vital organs, only empty cavities where such things had once been. He was the morbid shell of what had once been a living breathing Huldra.
As he bound Edryd’s sword to the metal inside his body, Áledhuir laughed. Or at least Edryd thought it might be a laugh, he couldn’t tell. “You are as reckless as your father was,” said Áledhuir. “His interference destroyed my people. You must content yourself in the next world with having achieved far less.”
Áledhuir effortlessly freed his sword, extracting it from the stone floor and the ruinous divided remainder of Seldur’s lifeless head. Áledhuir began to raise the weapon in preparation to strike, giving Edryd two obvious choices. He could abandon the sigil blade and retreat, or he could remain there and die. Edryd tried a third desperate option instead.
Reaching out for the dark, he began to shape. Edryd formed a simple pattern he had seen Seoras use before, a method for creating a flame. The technique produced heat, and nothing more. A flame came only if the heat could be made intense enough to ignite something. Edryd focused the pattern through the sigil blade, infusing energy directly through it into the veined metal structures that were embedded within Áledhuir’s body.
The draugr did not immediately appreciate what was happening. His long dead body did not feel physical pain. He recognized the danger only when his flesh began to smoke, burning from the inside. Áledhuir tried to interrupt the energies flowing into him, and he tried to disrupt Edryd’s shaping, but he lacked the strength to do either. He was not as strong as Edryd. It was too late anyway. Moments later the sigil sword came free as the creature’s chest deteriorated into a red hot circular mass of molten metal and disintegrating flesh. Edryd, without taking any pause to wonder at what he had done, swung the sigil blade once more, cleanly passing through the weakened torso of the creature.
The draugr’s riven body was split into two pieces. The creature’s hips and legs remained upright, like some kind of monstrous statuary. Áledhuir’s head, along with his arms which were still connected to what was left of his shoulders, fell to the ground. Disturbed, Edryd delivered a kick, pushing the set of legs over. There was no blood, just a spray of molten metal that rapidly cooled on the stone floor beside the ashen remains of burnt flesh.
“Finish what you started, Son of Elduryn!”
Edryd was startled at hearing his collapsed enemy speak. He couldn’t think how Áledhuir produced these words without the help of lungs to compress any air. It soon came to him. Áledhuir had had no lungs to begin with. He spoke by means of subtle shaping, pushing currents of air through his throat. This creature, though horribly broken, was still dangerous.
“To what end?” Edryd said. “Do you think
that I owe you such mercy, that I should choose to release you from your ruined body?”
“I will become as Aodra was,” Áledhuir threatened. “I will haunt you to your death.”
“I should leave you here then, as nothing more than two broken halves of one dead and useless body, sealed up forever where you can do no harm.”
If Edryd doubted that the defeated creature was still a threat, that notion was dispelled when Áledhuir began to shape a powerful rage filled pattern. The creature was trying to replicate what Edryd had just done, continuing a process that had ceased before its ultimate completion. Edryd was unsure what would happen if Áledhuir succeeded, but he was reluctant to move close enough to do anything about it. He observed from where he stood, studying what he saw.
Edryd noticed then a golden band around one of the draugr’s arms, exposed where the creature’s cloak had burnt away. It was similar to the hollow bracelet he was carrying in his coat, only much larger. He thought he heard something for a moment, a kind of inaudible whisper telling him that the armband was Áledhuir’s anchor.
The sigil blade surged with light once more and Edryd brought the weapon down, cutting through Áledhuir’s arm and dividing the golden band cleanly into two pieces. His weapon did the rest. Without any participation from the exhausted man holding it, Edryd’s sword finished the battle. In a struggle in which it was thoroughly overwhelmed, a shaped piece of the dark, a pair to the demonic thing that had been a prison to Aodra, faded from this existence, rejoining the æther where it was delivered into a prison of its own.
Áledhuir was truly dead now, leaving no one else between Edryd and Esivh Rhol.
***
Concealed within an empty storehouse, Oren and his men waited for a signal from Logaeir. They had been in place for several hours now following their arrival over land before the attack had even begun. The call to battle finally came, in the form of three low mournful blasts of an Ascomanni horn, which signaled that they were being called in to support Sarel Krin. The island’s defenders had gathered their forces and were mounting an attack on the northern pier, trying to dislodge Krin and his men, who had by this point successfully taken many of the most important ships.
Oren, along with the nine other Sigil Warriors, each in light protective armor and clothed in simple white cloaks, closed in on the rearguard of the defending forces. Someone shouted in alarm as they approached, and several men turned to face them. Sword already in hand, Oren slashed through the exposed leg of the nearest enemy before turning to take another defender in the chest. The men of this island all had various weapons, but they had no practical sense for how to defend themselves. They were more familiar with the myriad ways in which these instruments of violence could be used against defenseless victims, than they were accustomed to engaging with armed opponents who were similarly equipped.
Oren did not forget that these now frightened opponents could still pose a lethal threat if he was careless, but that threat was growing less as he fought his way forward. The defenders were running from him now, wanting no part of the fighting with this group of professional soldiers. The overmatched men had witnessed a dozen of their friends fall in few short seconds of fighting and they had no wish to be next. Oren and his soldiers did not race off in pursuit. The enemies could only flee in one direction and could only run so far. There was no need to expend energy in a chase. This was going to be a long fight.
The panicked rearguard triggered a rush as they ran. Men coalesced into a frightened mass possessed with a combined will, most of them unaware of what it was they were escaping from. The crush of men put ever more pressure on Krin and his group of Ascomanni warriors, but they had prepared for this, and they knew what to do. They formed a phalanx in the middle of the pier. Enemies died, impaled on Ascomanni spears and cut down by Ascomanni swords, but even more fell into the sea on either side of Krin’s formation, pushed by the crush of allies surging in behind them. Those that could swim would escape, but were unlikely to rejoin the fighting. Those who could not were fated to drown in the deep water where they had fallen.
Oren and his men were closing the distance and infusing urgency into the crowd of enemies struggling to flee. Not one man turned to face them. Oren had trained for battle since he was a young boy. This should have been the fulfillment of so many years of hard work. But this was not battle. He had never killed before, not until now, and he was not enjoying it. The screams of wounded men up ahead assaulted his ears, and the unheeded cries for help from men drowning in the water demoralized him further. This would be over soon, he promised himself. The fighting that would follow in the city would have to feel less distasteful than this one sided massacre, but if it did not, he was just going to have to withstand it.
Oren killed several more men, terrified men who were trying desperately to run, trapped between Krin’s bloodthirsty raiders and the professional warriors over whom Oren had been given command. And then it was over. The surface of the stone pier was slick with blood, and crowded both with the dead and with the dying. Many of Krin’s men were injured, and a good number of them were dead. Each and every one of them stared at Oren and the other soldiers with awe. None of the Sigil Corps soldiers had suffered even the slightest harm.
***
Edryd stood over the defeated draugr. He was reluctant to look away, fearing that Áledhuir might strike at him through the dark if he turned his back. The power that had flowed through Edryd dissipated, and the light from the sigil blade slowly faded away. The calm that he had been infused with faded as well, and Edryd’s preternatural sensory perceptions collapsed along with it. He felt blind, and he was beyond the point of exhaustion. His anger had not lessened though, and it prompted him to turn and focus on the object of his ire.
Esivh Rhol was there, tightly gripping the arms of his chair, finding it impossible to respond to what he had seen. His breathing was rapid and his eyes darted around the room. There was no one left to help him. He lacked the will to confront Edryd, or even the resolve to rise and attempt to flee. His mind was working though, desperately trying to find a way to save himself from the Blood Prince. That is who this was—the man who the dark haired little girl had promised would be coming to kill him.
“I didn’t hurt her,” Esivh Rhol said, pleading fervently.
“Who didn’t you hurt?” Edryd demanded.
Esivh Rhol didn’t respond. He felt confused, and afraid to answer.
“I know that you killed Irial,” Edryd said, helping Esivh Rhol along, “so who was it that you didn’t hurt?”
“Eithne, I didn’t hurt Eithne. I never touched her,” Esivh Rhol said, stressing the point that he had never touched the girl. His reputation being what it was, it was important to be clear about that.
“You mean apart from leading a group of draugar and their thralls to Eithne’s home, killing her sister, and subjecting her to the gods know what, you did not harm her,” Edryd corrected. “Why did you take her? Was it all just to bring me to you? I hope you are pleased with the result.”
“That isn’t why…” Esivh Rhol began to explain, before stopping himself as he seized upon a small hope, a means by which he could negotiate his safety. “If you let me go, I will tell you where she is.”
The Ard Ri’s attempt to bargain with Eithne’s life enraged Edryd. Without considering what he was doing, Edryd dropped the sigil sword and piled both of his arms into Esivh Rhol’s chest. Grabbing a fistful of the man’s expensive tunic in each hand, Edryd pulled the man up and slammed his back against the heavy oak chair. “I know where she is,” Edryd said, “she’s locked in the next room.”
“There must be something,” Esivh Rhol cried out hopelessly.
“Look around,” Edryd said, gesturing towards the five dead men and what was left of the body of the draugr. “Those men are dead because I had to go through them to get to you. There are no bargains to be made here. Do you think that there could possibly be anything that would mean more to me than your death?”<
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Esivh Rhol tried to maneuver, reaching for the jeweled dagger belted at his waist. He managed to free it from its sheath, but Edryd easily wrested it from him before he could do anything with it. Edryd took a step back, examining the weapon, and saw the traces of blood that Esivh Rhol had not managed to clean out of the crevices between the hilt and the blade. Esivh Rhol had an unusual reaction to seeing Edryd holding the knife. The object was precious to Esivh Rhol, all the more so now for the memory of what he had done with it. He wanted it back.
Edryd saw the fire in the Ard Ri’s eyes, and knew then for certain that this was the weapon Esivh Rhol had used to kill Irial. Esivh Rhol could in turn see what the Blood Prince intended to do now, and in reaction to that knowledge, he surprised both himself and Edryd by suddenly became defiant. “Give that back to me,” he demanded. “Give that back, and then it will not be said that you were guilty of killing an unarmed man.”
Edryd had become what could be called experienced in the discipline of inflicting death, but in every previous instance, when he had taken someone’s life, he had never once debated in his mind how best to dispatch the opponent. The circumstances had dictated his actions, the immediacy of conflict recommending certain responses which were singularly appropriate in each situation. Edryd was now imagining a dozen different deaths for Esivh Rhol though, none of which would last long enough or cause enough pain.
Ultimately, he just wanted the life of this evil man to be ended, and it didn’t matter how it was accomplished. Edryd drove the point of the blade upward beneath Esivh Rhol’s jaw, pushing the point up through the middle of the man’s skull. Edryd had thought this would kill the Ard Ri instantly, but it took a minute for the man to die. He felt very little satisfaction, but even less remorse.