Warautumn

by Tom Deitz

  Shadows stretched long before him as he mounted up the wide slabs of pure white marble that comprised the final stair. And in that early light, the marble seemed to glow pink like flesh flayed free of skin and left to perish there. How many went with him, he had no idea. Only that Merryn and Lykkon were still present, though not at all pleased with him, and that Merryn had sought to yank the shield away—and got burned fingers for her trouble.

  He hated that, too: Part of him did. But if they would only give him a chance—only a hundred breaths more, it would all be over. Since Tyrill was not in the Court of Rites, there was only one possible place she could be. He knew, and more to the point, the gems in his shield and helm and sword seemed to know in some uncanny way, beyond fear and doubt.

  And then he reached the top of the stair and entered the building proper. He paused there briefly to let his eyes adjust to the relative gloom—and to see a number of Ninth Face guards dispersing down the corridor that encircled the Hall of Clans itself, while four more moved to block the entrance.

  Their folly.

  Avall had no patience for diplomacy. No time for more than the most minimal effort to save four lives. “Move now or die,” he shouted. And with that he twitched the sword so that the whole length of the blade flashed fire—which made it easier to recognize.

  One guard took his advice and dodged left and around one of the pillars that flanked the doors. One raised a crossbow, one a dagger. One hesitated.

  All but the first one perished, as Avall flexed the sword a certain way—and sent power slamming into another splendid work of fine wood and well-wrought metal.

  Miraculously, the doors withstood one blow—though those who had stood before them did not, as the fires of the Overworld burned their skin away—and a good portion of flesh along with it.

  Avall snarled beneath his helm as he readied a second bolt and let it fly.

  This time the portals gave way. The hinges on the one to the right broke free entirely, which left what remained of the other free to swing back against the wall of the span-long corridor that pierced the solid stone of the Hall of Clans’s inner wall.

  And with that second blow, Avall felt some of the madness that had possessed him dissipate. This was it. Tyrill was here, and most of his enemy. It would be easy enough: He would simply run in and—

  Where was she, anyway?—as he felt the sudden weight of a hundred pairs of eyes swivel toward him even as his own momentum carried him full into the chamber.

  His gaze swept around the Hall. Time had slowed again, and that gave him ample opportunity to see that most of the assembled Chiefs had little claim to their titles. More to the point, it gave him time to note the nine Priests assembled upon the dais. And to see a small, frail, white-haired shape rise from a stone chair before all that multitude, less than a dozen spans away.

  “Tyrill!” he shouted, and started forward, sword to ready, shield on guard.

  “Avall! Lookout! No!”

  —From Tyrill, Merryn, and Lykkon all together.

  Too late—even with the gem driving his perceptions—Avall saw the archers in the gallery: the gallery that encircled the Hall on every side.

  And he had blundered a third of the way down the aisle already.

  He had just started to spin around to check behind him when the first arrow struck him—on the right side of his back, directly atop his shoulder blade.

  He felt the impact before he felt the pain, and fortunately mail covered a double layer of leather there, which in turn covered a modicum of muscle and sturdy bone.

  Yet for all that, it struck with sufficient force to set him stumbling forward when he wanted to retreat. Which opened his back to a clearer shot from another arrow, which found the lower curve of his left thigh. Thus impaled, he staggered on until his legs tangled in the shaft and sent him stumbling. He flailed wildly, which jiggled the arrow in his back. Pain became the world for an instant, and then redoubled as a third arrow found him a handspan to the left of the first and perilously near his spine. He heard the point crack against a rib. But what he felt even more than pain was a sudden numbness. He could no longer hold the sword—yet if he dropped it, everything would be over.

  But there was still one mad thing he might do. Without thought—but with a prayer to whichever of The Eight might be observing to grant him aid—Avall flung the Lightning Sword down the aisle, watching it slide, hilt first, past countless aghast faces—

  Until it was brought up short—perhaps it was Fate again—by the pile of rugs brought to soak up her blood, right at Tyrill’s feet. The hilt, he saw, as the floor came up and struck him, was barely a span from the tips of her shoes.

  Tyrill saw the flash of the sword as it slid toward her, and for the briefest moment feared that Avall had gone even farther down the road to madness than he appeared and had tried in some impossibly awkward way to kill her before Priest-Clan could.

  Which was as stupid as it was preposterous.

  And then suddenly that blade was lying stock-still within easy reach of her bound hands.

  And the archers’ attention was still focused, most of them, upon Avall.

  It was rash; it was foolish; it was completely from reflex and utterly without reason. But it was also her single chance for life—or if not for life, for a death that would accomplish something worthwhile.

  So it was that not even a breath passed her lips before she had flung herself forward onto her knees and was scrabbling for the hilt of that terrible, magical weapon: that weapon that Strynn had made and into which Avall had set one of those damnable, troublesome gems. She had avoided contact with them over the last few eights, but time for avoidance had ended.

  Fingers still strong from eight decades of smithing grasped the hilt, even as shoulders that had swung many a hammer in her youth yanked upward. As she did, she felt something prick her palm and remembered the trigger and how one had to feed this sword blood in order for it to be in anywise extraordinary. She pressed down at once, securing her grip, then slid her other hand onto the hilt as well, since the presence of the bonds on her wrists effectively required it.

  Power lashed out at her: a furious outpouring of energy that had as its vanguard a curious kind of questing, as though it sought to know who she was.

  One who would serve this Kingdom, she raged back. One who was there when you were made.

  And then she had no more time for thought, for the sword seized upon some instinct that lay latent far more deeply inside her than even the need for survival and yanked her hands aloft in defiance of her conscious will.

  Which was how she remained when the first arrow thudded home in her breast. It nicked her heart, and she felt that trusty organ skip a beat and falter. But her senses had shifted now, so that she seemed to have complete control of her entire body, and more important, knowledge of how that body functioned. And she knew from what that knowledge told her that she was dying.

  But if that were the case, then she had to make her death count in earnest. These folks around her—these so-called Priests—they had assailed her clan and her Kingdom and killed many people she had long known and loved. Worse, they had destroyed the order not only of her life, but of countless others. They had even—it seemed—destroyed Avall—and whatever else he was, he was a genius when it came to metal. And the wanton destruction of one as gifted as he was something that could not be endured—and certainly not twice in one generation.

  That was the final trigger.

  A twitch of her hand, a more subtle twitch of some part of her brain, and she thrust the sword into the Overworld and ripped out a portion of what she found there—and hurled it around the room.

  Avall had called the Overworld lightning, but this was a whip of the same unearthly force, and she lashed it, first of all, across the gallery where stood those damnable archers. She heard them cry out warning, heard them scream, heard them die. Heard some of their bows drop to the floor below, and heard the strange buzzing hiss as the fire from th
e sword ignited arrows already in flight.

  More screams, and she heard feet pounding behind her and saw men and women rising and starting to flee—some of them—or rush forward to put an end to her.

  And that could not be countenanced either. She had the sword. She held in her hand the most powerful weapon in that or any Kingdom. And if she lost it, it would fall into the hands of those who would use it to no good end.

  So it was that she raised it one final time and pointed it at that marvel of blue faience mosaicked ceiling, and called down the lightning over and over. Eight times, she called it: one bolt for each of the piers that supported that splendid, airy dome.

  So quickly did she move, however, that the dome still remained there unsupported for an impossible instant, as though considering whether it was subject to the laws of the world.

  Then it began to fall.

  It scraped and slid for the first few spans, but after that, it began to fragment at the edges. Yet it was still mostly intact when it slammed into the floor of the Hall of Clans, obliterating, so Tyrill intended, not only herself, but all nine Priests on the dais, and every sneaky, cowardly, upstart Chief in the Hall.

  Tyrill felt herself knocked to the floor as the sword seemed to explode in her hand. And then she felt darkness reach out to enfold her. But she never felt the dome crash down atop her skull.

  Relief. The first emotion that coursed through Avall when he saw Tyrill seize the Lightning Sword was relief. Yet hard on its heels came a sick feeling deep in his gut that Tyrill would not be able to control it, and more to the point, that he really had ruined things now, and delivered the ultimate weapon into the hands of the enemy.

  And hard on the heels of that came the realization that he had lost control of the sword but still wore the rest of the regalia, which was therefore completely unbalanced. And finally, he remembered that he had been shot, not once, but many times, and that his back was a solid sheet of pain.

  Which was when he finally stopped the skidding half roll that had sent him to hands and knees—and briefly chest and chin—from which he had recovered to knees again, only to come up short against the side of one of the pews where the Chiefs of Glass normally would have sat, where he collapsed once more.

  He lay there winded, too far gone into shock to take more initiative, and felt pain wash over him in sharp red waves that threatened to become the world.

  That position also gave him a prime vantage from which to see Tyrill wield the sword.

  As to what followed—It was thunder, it was lightning, it was a whole summer storm let loose in one suddenly too-frail building. He knew when the archers died because he heard them screaming.

  But when Tyrill aimed her blast at the dome—Well, that was too impossible. It was blasphemy: that an artist should damage another artist’s masterwork. It was, in fact, an act of highest treason. But Tyrill had already determined to pay the price, he knew—and with a few deaths buy many, many lives.

  And then the dome was falling. It took Avall a moment to realize that it represented an untold weight of stone and would surely crush him, but by that time, it was too late to rise and flee.

  The only thing left to do was to raise the shield—and even that he did mostly from reflex.

  It was the loudest noise Avall had ever heard, and the strongest force he had ever felt. Though he was already sprawling upon the floor, the weight continued to push down, as though it would grind him into the marble.

  And then it was over. His ears were ringing, he noted—which was not what he had expected. And then he realized that he really was alive, if totally filthy and totally awash with pain. He could see nothing at first, however, for the lightning had—for the nonce—burned away his vision. But then he discovered that he could make out dim shapes cut out against a duller light.

  Shapes that moved. He tried to move as well, and felt something shift, then meet resistance, mostly against his left arm. Stone grated against stone; dust trickled down.

  Sweat—or blood—slicked his hand and he released whatever he held—it proved to be the shield—and only then did he truly puzzle out what had just occurred.

  Tyrill had brought down the dome, which should by rights have smashed him. But he had still born the shield at the time, and had raised it without thinking, and the power it possessed—which was to take whatever force was directed against it and fling it away to the Overworld—had still been in effect, and had taken even the force of the falling dome onto itself. And since that act also stripped away matter from whatever struck the shield, it had effectively made a hole in that portion of dome above him. Which, with the sturdy stone pews against which he had lain, had saved his life and limb.

  Giddy with surprise, he tried to rise to a crouch, aware at some level that people were yelling, screaming, and crying out, but that most of those cries came from beyond what was now an open-air cylinder, not an enclosed hall. Yet the instant he moved, he was reminded of the arrows that pierced his flesh. Perhaps the gems would cure him, perhaps not, but neither would occur while those shafts still burrowed deep in his muscle and bone.

  He had to get out, had to, and so he began to work his way free.

  Which was when he discovered the pain in his right little finger—with so much else to torment him, he had almost missed it. He blinked through sweat and dusty blood and through the eye holes of a helm that had shifted askew. But what he finally saw through the clouds of stone dust still swirling around him made his heart skip in his breast and all his blood run cold.

  His finger had been severed. A fragment of the fallen dome had clipped it neatly at the joint that wore the nail, pounding it completely flat and leaving it hanging by a thread of skin.

  He was still staring stupidly at it when Merryn and Lykkon found him.

  Only when he saw their faces and felt their arms slide around him to help him to his feet did he relinquish the helm at last. Merryn took it away solemnly, urging him across the shattered stones to where waited an army of earnest, confused faces above the nondescript colors the clanless wore. He tried to smile, but staggered, then collapsed entirely, and was totally unaware of anything but pain as Merryn and Lykkon laid him facedown in the corridor outside the shattered Hall.

  He heard something about getting the arrows out, and something about the likelihood of there being a lot of blood, and something else about keeping the regalia free of blood, just in case, but also of keeping it close to hand.

  And then someone—one of those nameless men who had followed him, he thought—was gripping the arrow in his calf and—not pulling, but pushing: driving it onward through his leg. The pain was epic, yet he endured. The arrow in his shoulder had evidently fallen out, while the one that had nicked a rib still jogged and poked, held in place by his mail. His unknown healer made short work of that as well, and pronounced him likely to live.

  “Live,” Avall echoed groggily. “Oh Eight, Merry—Lyk—Is it over? That in there? Did it fix things, or will I have to—?”

  He reeled again as blackness hovered near, and only then discovered that his churgeon was tying a bandage around his leg.

  That accomplished, he let Merryn and Lykkon lead him to a seat beside the greater chaos that was the Hall. Dimly he was aware of a noise a-building: a rising chant of joy. It took him a moment to realize that they were chanting his name: “Avall! Avall! Long live King Avall!”

  “I didn’t do anything,” Avall mumbled, even as he tried to determine what to do next, since standing did not seem to be an option. These people needed a King, and he had no Kingliness left to give them.

  Yet even as he sat there debating, the chant began to fragment, as a new phalanx of commoners pressed their way into the vestibule. Avall blinked at them stupidly, noting flashes of red among the duller hues. Red … Warcraft crimson … The colors of War-Hold and Clan Ferr.

  Ferr …

  All at once he recognized them: the stocky, bearded man on the left, the solidly built woman on the right. And the tall,
handsome man in the middle.

  “Tryffon,” he gasped, trying to grin. “Veen. And Vorinn …!”

  Vorinn …

  Something jogged in his memory at that. He started to rise, to take their hands, but as he slapped his right hand against his thigh, the severed finger joint made its absence known with a preposterous pulse of pain. But with that pain came realization: something he should have recalled earlier.

  The King of Eron had to be physically perfect! And he, Avall syn Argen-a, was perfect no longer!

  In spite of the pain that throbbed up his wrist, he grinned—and was still grinning, as he rose shakily to his feet and extended that hand before him so that Vorinn and Tryffon and Veen could see before all others. And then he raised that hand on high, with blood still running down his palm to vanish up his sleeve.

  “Long live High King Vorinn,” he shouted.

  Tryffon syn Ferr-een, called Kingmaker, gazed at him like a fool—and then a grin likewise split his face. “Long live High King Vorinn!” he yelled, even louder than Avall.

  And then that name once more—from Veen, and almost as quickly, from Merryn and Lykkon.

  And finally, like a return of the storms Tyrill had unleashed, the chant took fire within the assembled multitude and went rumbling around the Hall.

  “Long live High King Vorinn. And blessed be Once-High-King Avall.”

  It was to alternating chants of “Vorinn” and “Avall” that Avall finally succumbed to shock, blood loss, and pain and lapsed from consciousness, there in an out-of-the-way corner of what had once been Eron’s Hall of Clans.

  The first thing he heard when he recovered was “Vorinn, Vorinn, Vorinn …”

  CHAPTER XXXV:

  RELIEF AND RESOLUTION