Immortal Swordslinger 3

by Dante King

  I flung the rock at the earth spirit. Sand spurted, and the rock flew out the far side. Fragments of the spirit fell into the lava behind it, where they melted, merged for a moment into clear glass-like crystals, and then were lost in the flow.

  The spirit swung a pair of punches at me, one from the right and one from the left. I leapt back, somersaulted over a lava flow, and landed on an area of flat stone surrounded on all sides by molten rock.

  The spirit jumped across the lava and landed facing me. It swung another punch, and I was forced to dart back, but at the same time, I was grinning. I had a plan, and for this plan, I had the spirit exactly where I needed him.

  I punched and kicked, raising a little dust from the spirit but not much more. In doing so, I left myself open to attack, and he took the opportunity. He shoved me back toward the nearest lava flow. I went with the shove, moving back with exaggerated wobbling steps, until I stood with my heels only inches from the molten rock.

  The spirit advanced and pulled his hands back, ready to shove me into the lava. I lunged forward, my fists joined together, turning my whole body into a weapon. My fists hit the spirit in the stomach. There was a spurt of dirt, as there had been when the rock hit, leaving a hole in the middle of the creature’s body.

  I dived through the cavity in his torso, landed behind him, and spun around. Before he could react, I kicked him in the back. This time, I met resistance, and he stumbled before falling into the lava.

  As the sand body of the earth spirit hit the lava, it melted. Individual grains flowed together into a pool of clear glass in the shape of a four-armed man. The molten glass rose out of the heat, hardening and crystallizing. His sharp edges shone in the light of the volcano’s fire.

  I kicked again. My foot collided with the center of the creature’s body, and it shattered into thousands of shards.

  Two spirits down. Now, the third would come, and judging by previous encounters, it would be the deadliest of the lot.

  The lava in front of me rippled and rose. A creature formed out of it, humanoid in shape like the others, as tall and broad as Kegohr. He had the face of a demon, with curling horns and red eyes shining from a black visage. His body was cased in plates of rock, with molten stone glowing at the joints.

  The magma spirit crawled out of the lava, rose to his feet, and strode toward me. The rock melted beneath its feet, leaving molten puddles in his wake. The whole world seemed to be consumed by his heat and power. I felt as though I was being roasted just standing this close to him.

  It had been one thing to grapple with the fire spirit, when I already had the element on my side to protect me. But this was a different creature, his heat far more intense, and I didn’t have the ability to tap into my Vigor and use a technique like Fire Immunity.

  The creature stamped a foot. The stone beneath him shattered, and lava spewed forth from the gap.

  I couldn’t just muscle my way through this one. I needed something else.

  For now, the easiest thing to obtain was time. I turned, leaped over a lava flow, and sprinted away down the side of the volcano. The ground was rough underfoot, and I almost fell a dozen times as stones rolled away beneath my feet. But I had to keep upright, had to keep moving; I could hear the spirit lumbering after me.

  A ball of magma hurtled past an inch from my ear and spattered the ground with its fiery ooze. The creature was turning the lava into a weapon in a way I couldn’t.

  I heard a hiss as a second ball of magma flew at me. I dodged to the left, and the magma missed, landing in a glowing stream of molten rock. I jumped over that stream, heard another hiss, and did a forward roll to stay low to the ground. Magma soared past above my head and disappeared over the cliff edge that now loomed before me.

  I stopped at the edge of the cliff and looked down. The drop was at least a hundred feet, with jagged rocks to impale anyone who fell. Climbing down wasn’t an option because the surface was completely slick and without protrusions to hold onto.

  The magma spirit roared as he approached. He was too close now for me to avoid him by running along the length of the cliff. But he stopped a dozen feet from me and flung a ball of magma at the ground by my feet. I jumped aside and found my back foot on the very precipice of the cliff. The spirit laughed, a sound like an avalanche rumbling down a mountain.

  I looked over my shoulder into the lake, then back at the magma spirit. I picked up a rock and flung it at the spirit. The rock melted as it hit and dripped onto the ground.

  The magma spirit laughed again and flung more gobbets of magma at me. I danced around the shots, ducking and diving, leaping and rolling, keeping clear of his attacks but never more than an inch from plummeting off the cliff.

  The spirit’s expression became fiercer, and he flung his magma faster as his frustration mounted.

  “Getting a little angry?” I asked. “Good.”

  I continued dodging his projectiles until he let out a final roar before charging me. I waited until the last moment before spinning aside, and he hurtled over the cliff before plummeting to the bottom. He screamed as the spiked rocks at the bottom impaled him. Lava oozed from his body and bubbled over the spikes jammed through his body. I waited a few moments, wondering if his molten body might melt the rock, but then my vision wavered.

  The spirit realm faded, and I was back in my hiding hole beneath the desert boneyard.

  Now that I had triumphed over its spirits, I could see the maga blueprint in my mind’s eye. I reached inside myself for the powers of earth and fire, then brought them together. They intertwined and combined inside me, swirling and surging. Each resisted being bound with the other, but I had mastery over them. I squeezed with all my Augmenting skill and power, and the two became fused.

  A new core throbbed with power within me, a magma core.

  “So powerful.” Nydarth said, her voice clear and low inside my head. “Is there any battle you cannot win?”

  “Let’s hope not,” I said. “Now, tell me, you’ve seen these Vigors combined before. What power have I gained here?”

  “This first combining will give you Magma Burst,” she said. “At first glance, it seems like Untamed Torch, but it’s for magma instead of fire. A burst of boiling magma that you can shoot from your palm. But in the right circumstances, it can be so much more powerful than Untamed Torch. It will blaze through almost anything it hits. Wood will catch fire and char away to nothing. Any flesh will be cooked or crystallized in rapidly cooling stone, depending upon what creature you hit. With practice, it can melt through stone and metal with ease.”

  “Sounds useful,” I said. “Let’s try it.”

  I activated Hidden Burrow and shot up through the earth to emerge beside the great cairn. As the dirt settled, I saw that night had fallen and I was alone in the boneyard, with only the moonlight to see by.

  I raised my hand and urged the magma to flow. Intense heat blazed through me, then burst from my hand. A ball of magma, like those the spirit had flung at me, shot out. It landed, glowing, next to one of the smaller cairns, and the dirt around it melted.

  This was clearly a powerful weapon, but any weapon was only as good as the person wielding it. I aimed at the cairn and channeled the magma again.

  Once more, a glowing ball burst from my hand and sailed through the air. It hit the heap of rocks and spattered across them. They melted and ran into each other. Within seconds, the whole cairn had dissolved into a pile of slag.

  “Wow.” I looked at my hand. “I thought you said that came at high levels?”

  “You are the Swordslinger,” Nydarth purred. “Are you really surprised that you’re already so powerful? And, I suppose there are also benefits to wielding the Sundered Heart.”

  “And the Depthless Dream,” Yono added. She’d been quiet after I’d gained the new element, and I figured she probably didn’t have much to say about a combination element that didn’t involve water.

  “I’d better not keep practicing here,” I said. “Don’
t want to destroy this place. Let’s head back.” I sheathed my sword and trident before I started moving toward the fortress.

  I pause for a moment and considered something else. We needed an edge if we would ever take back the city from the cultists. I’d been wondering whether Mahrai was truly in the service of the cultists, whether she could be swayed to join against them.

  She had likely returned to the city. Even if she hadn’t, I could always do a little intelligence-gathering by going to the city by myself. If I returned to the fortress and shared the idea with the others, they’d think I was crazy.

  Hell, maybe I was crazy. But I’d done undercover missions before. And this would be just another op. I was already wearing the uniform of a city guardsman, so I could slip through the gates without so much as a second glance from the soldiers manning the walls. As long as I was back within a few hours, Kumi and the others would be none the wiser, and I’d potentially have a new ally or at least some new information we could use.

  Chapter Nineteen

  I headed out of the boneyard, down into the valley, and across the dried-up river bed to the main road through the province. If I was going to approach the city, I didn’t want to do it from the direction of the fortress, where my friends were. Better to approach from the opposite side to keep the enemy from realizing what we’d achieved so far.

  As I went, I practiced my Hidden Burrow technique. It could be invaluable in future fights or for getting past opponents unobserved, but for that, I needed a better understanding of how it worked—how far it could take me, how fast, whether I could tell what was on the ground above.

  It turned out that it was a good thing I’d practiced, as the technique had some limitations. I couldn’t use it on hard stone or anything more dense than packed dirt. The range was short; the magic forced me back up if I went more than 30 yards. And accuracy was limited; I seldom appeared exactly where I’d been aiming for. And it all came at a high cost in Vigor, as the technique burned through my reserves of power.

  Tahlis had made it look so easy that I’d been thinking this was an answer to half the challenges I faced. In reality, it was going to be more of something to use when I really needed to either conceal myself or sneak up on an enemy. Still, I was determined to become more accurate and increase my range, but that was going to take a lot of training.

  I burst out of the ground one last time in a shower of sand and found myself standing in a familiar spot. I was on the approach to the sand-sunken village where we had defeated Targin and his forces. The same place where I had last confronted Mahrai and her towering golem.

  I considered the last time I’d seen her, arguing with Targin before she stormed off back to the city. There was more to her than just another follower of the Cult of Unswerving Shadows, and I suspected she was far from committed to the dark values of the Straight Path. Shadiy had also alluded to the possibility, so I wanted to at least speak with Mahrai before I would have to kill her on the battlefield.

  Many other opponents wouldn’t have been spared like this, but we needed someone on the inside. Lord Ganyir was unpredictable at best, and Tahlis was probably certifiably insane. Even so, I imagined Mahrai might have her own problems, but a mole was always a complex person, no matter how much you wanted them to be otherwise.

  “What do you think of Mahrai?” I asked, not out loud but in the mind voice I used to talk to my spirit weapons.

  “I think that she’s a fearsome threat,” Nydarth replied. “But you have the tools to overcome her now that you’ve combined earth with other powers.”

  “He’s defeated her golem before,” Yono said. “He can do it again.”

  “I don’t mean to defeat her,” I said. “I think there might be more to Mahrai than just another evil Augmenter set on terrorizing the people around her. I wonder if we could get her to change sides, bring all that power to the right path.”

  “That’s very sweet,” Nydarth said. “But that woman is a threat, pure and simple. Anything she’s done to imply otherwise is just lulling you into a false sense of security so that she can stomp you down into the ground. Fight her, incinerate her, and move on.”

  “That doesn’t feel like an honorable approach.”

  “Sometimes, honor lies in ruthlessly separating right from wrong.”

  “I believe that you’re being too harsh,” Yono said, her voice a gentle murmur.

  “Oh, really?” Nydarth asked. “Do you know something about Mahrai that we don’t?”

  “I know mortals. I know that the reality they move through isn’t set in stone. It ebbs and flows like the sea as new experiences change them and their way of seeing the world. That means that there is space within them for a change, for the better of the worse.”

  “They have to choose to change,” Nydath countered. “I don’t see that in Mahrai. She is as immovable as the earth beneath the Swordslinger’s feet.”

  “I can move the earth,” I said with a smile. “It’s called Ground Strike.”

  “What Nydarth fails to appreciate,” Yono said, “is the ebb and flow. She’s too set on the way of fire, a pure cleansing heat instead of a flowing, soothing current. But I have seen people like this before. There is a chance that Mahrai fears Saruqin or has some misguided loyalty toward him. That could be forcing her hand against the people of Hyng’ohr City.”

  Yono’s words gave me hope, and in the darkness of the night, as I walked past the graveyard where we had buried the fallen initiates, I needed that hope. I needed to believe that any of us could be redeemed for our mistakes.

  The road carried me through the Vigorous Zone, out of the desert, and into the ramshackle slums that sprawled between the city walls and the docks. At last, I approached the main gates of Hyng’ohr City. They were firmly shut, but torches burned on the battlements above. As I approached, someone peered down at me.

  “Hello there!” I shouted and waved. “Can you please let me in!”

  “Why in all the hells would I do that?” the guard responded. “You could be anyone, maybe one of those dissidents and heretics we’ve been warned about.”

  “I’m part of the army that was sent to fight them,” I said. “Look, you can see my uniform.”

  The guard flung a torch from the battlements. It landed in the road in front of me, scattering sparks and creating a small pool of warm light.

  “Step closer,” he said. “Let me see.”

  I walked into the light cast by the torch and displayed my Hyng’ohr robes.

  “What are you doing here then?” he asked. “Shouldn’t you be besieging the Sunstone Temple?”

  “That’s why I’m here. I’ve got news from the front. I need to find someone reliable to take it to Saruqin.”

  “News for Saruqin? All right, I’ll open the gates. But you come in quick; I want to get this safely shut again.”

  There was a rattle of chains and a rumble of counterweights moving within the wall. One of the gates swung open a couple of feet, and I went through before the gate slammed shut again.

  Two guards came running down the stairs to the left of the gate. One looked like the man I’d spoken to a moment before. Two more stepped out of the squat guardhouse at the base of the wall and came to join us. All carried long-bladed spears and wore uniforms that included panels of hardened leather armor.

  “What’s the word for Saruqin?” one of the men said. “I’ll take it up to the palace.”

  “I spotted him,” the guard off the wall said. “I should take the news.”

  I looked at this little band of squabbling soldiers. “Shouldn’t there be more of you here? In case the city’s attacked.”

  “Not with half the army out on campaign,” a guard said. “Most of the rest are in bed.”

  Another guard sneered at me. “This one says he has news for Saruqin, but I don’t believe him. He talks funny.”

  I’d tried my best to mimic the Gonki accent, but it seemed I’d failed.

  The same guard prodded me in the ches
t. “He’s got some strange weapons, too.”

  I’d considered stashing them somewhere before getting to the gate, but I didn’t want to be without them if things turned violent. I also didn’t want anyone to stumble upon them and claim the most valuable items I owned.

  The group of guards were growing more nervous, and it seemed they were a second away from attacking me. I figured I’d give them a little show before they actually set their weapons on me.

  I took off the turban from around my head, and with it the hanging strip of cotton that had cast my face into shadow.

  “If the others are sleeping, isn’t it your bedtime yet?” I asked.

  They looked at me in confusion, then one of the guards’ eyes widened.

  “Isn’t that the Swordslinger?” he asked.

  “Quick, raise the alarm!”

  One of the guards ran toward the guardhouse, where a brass alarm bell hung from a chain over the door. I channeled Vigor and launched a Magma Burst. The orb of molten earth hit the bell before he could reach it. The metal melted and rained down in thick, glowing drops.

  All four drew their weapons. They looked nervously at each other, waiting for someone else to take the initiative.

  “Imagine the reward we’ll get for capturing the Swordslinger,” the one off the wall said. “Our advancement on the Straight Path is guaranteed.”

  “Yeah.” Another of them grinned and hefted his warhammer. “Let’s cut off his arms. Saruqin won’t be needing those.”

  “I want his sword.”

  “I get his trident.”

  These were men set on the Straight Path, so I had no qualms about taking them down. They’d thrown in their lot with the cultists. They would get what they deserved.

  I let the Vigor flow through me again. The guards were tightly clustered to defend each other, so it was easy to catch them all in a single Mud Entrapment. They sank into the mud up to their knees, and their attention immediately left me as they strained to drag themselves free.

  I walked up to the edge of the mud in front of the nearest guard. He looked up and raised his club as I brought the Sundered Heart around, but his parry was too slow. I easily brought my blade in underneath it and sliced his belly open. He fell face-forward into the mud.