“What do we do?” Elise asked as she re-seated her shield. “Back out?”
As if it heard them, the creature’s coils shifted and rolled, and the gap Ermolt had made vanished. It was replaced by a different set of coils as the creature piled itself up around them.
“Apparently not,” Ermolt said, shifting his grip on his improvised bone club. “Guess we have to fight on its terms.”
Elise adjusted her facing as the skull began to circle them once more. “Plan?”
“You block.” Ermolt set his stance. “I smash.”
“Simple,” she said with a faint chuckle. But she lowered her shield and raised her sword, as if to pummel the nearest rib again. When the skull whipped down to defend, her shield came up. She adjusted it to avoid the lower jaw coming under her guard once more. It seemed she had learned her lesson, and that lesson was that the lower fang was mere rhen away from penetrating her armor, or, at best, leaving a bruise that would take ages to heal.
Ermolt attacked as soon as the skull stopped against Elise’s shield. He brought his improvised weapon in with a cracking smack. The weapon broke apart under the impact.
But so did the skull.
The front quarter of the top jaw fell to pieces and rained down upon him and Elise as the beast recoiled.
Ermolt grimaced as he tossed aside the remaining fragments of the weapon. It would be missed. But it had done its job, trading its life for a grave wound against the creature. It was more than he could have expected from the pitted bone.
He was about to ask Elise if she could help him break off another when the bony walls suddenly contracted around them. Without warning, the ribs came together to form into solid walls that smashed the pair of them together. Elise barely got her sword above her head before she could accidentally impale Ermolt.
“Constrictor,” Elise grunted. They were both still able to breathe in shallow breaths, and Ermolt was grateful for the beast’s size. When it was coated in flesh, they would likely be crushed. But because the creature was just a skeleton, it couldn’t bring those bones closer together and so its undead strength was wasted. “I think it was playing with us this whole time.”
“I hope it was worth it losing half of its face.”
Elise smirked and rotated, trying to get some leverage to attack. But there was nothing she could do. “What’s the plan now?”
“I’m still going to smash it,” Ermolt grunted. He took a deep breath in—as much of one as he could in the tight confines of the naga’s bony coils. When he forced it out, he imagined his breath fogging in the icy air of Klav. It didn’t bring the cold. Not yet. But he could feel it. “And I’m not going to halt until it stops moving.”
Elise nodded. “I’ll cover you, then. And… I guess try to stay out of your way.”
Ermolt grinned at her for just a moment, and then opened himself to the snow.
He beckoned it, calling it to him.
For a very long moment there was no response.
But then the first snowflake fell.
Then another.
The cold rushed up his arms, making the hairs stand on end.
He struggled for a moment against the thing holding him tight. It didn’t want to move, but he made it. He wriggled his hands out in front of himself. As soon as one of them was free, his fist came down against the hard bone. He didn’t have leverage, so it didn’t do much. But he drew back and hit again. And again.
By the time his fist struck a fifth time, there was a cracking sound. Ermolt snarled at the pain that was building in his knuckles. But the snow sustained him, turning his vision to a wild world of swirling white.
Again. Again. Again.
The bony rib he targeted began to fracture.
Again. Again.
By the time the bone gave way, Ermolt was in the heart of the blizzard. He roared in triumph. He planted his hands against the bones to either side of his person and shoved down, squeezing his body out of the naga’s grip. As soon as he was free, its fractured skull snapped at him.
Ermolt laughed.
He lowered his head and turned, presenting his back. Needle-thin fangs dug into his hide armor. The fangs penetrated the first layer of hide, but were turned aside by the layers below. They failed to find flesh. And what was best was they became tangled in the armor, unable to be ripped free.
Ermolt twisted. He swung back with his elbow and smashed the broken part of the skull, sending bone chips tumbling away from the impact.
The naga reared back. But Ermolt’s armor was too tightly entangled in its teeth. While his form was heavy, it wasn’t too heavy for the creature to lift. The floor fell away as he was drawn into the air. Ermolt hammered his elbow back again, and more chips fell from the broken skull.
The naga shook his form back and forth, either trying to free itself from him, or trying to disorient him. It only enraged him more. Ermolt roared in challenge once more, pistoning his arm into the slowly disintegrating skull behind him. He felt—rather than heard—a loud crack, and a large chunk of bone fell past him.
And after it, he fell.
Suddenly free, and lost to the storm, Ermolt didn’t have much ability to think of how to deal with a fifteen fen drop. He turned over mid air and landed on his back, curled forward slightly to protect his neck. A sharp pain flashed through him, driving back the curtain of snow. It was accompanied by a thousand tiny crackles, and Ermolt realized he had landed on top of a large fragment of skull that had been affixed to his armor.
While it had likely cushioned his fall enough to avoid breaking his own bones, it still hurt. A lot. He laid there, stunned, watching the creature as he tried to catch his breath.
It was floundering.
Whatever power had held it together was starting to collapse.
Small motes of magic fell from the creature, showering down over Ermolt’s prone body.
He struggled to his feet. Slowly. Above him, the creature’s body began to sag. Its head could no longer be held upright.
Ermolt clenched and unclenched his hands, willing the snow to wash over his body and quiet the aches and pains of his landing. He stalked towards where the naga’s skull would eventually fall to the floor.
The creature tried to flinch away from his stomping approach, but it lacked the strength to make a serious attempt at escape.
It was pitiful. And pity made the snow recede.
The bottom jaws of the creature were still intact, but the top part was broken nearly to the eye sockets.
It was over.
He would easily smash through the rest of the skull. That would render it—
The creature reared up suddenly. It lunged.
Ermolt was caught off-guard, and the broken skull slammed into him.
He tried to rally his thoughts after the impact, but he was suddenly aware that he was ten fen off the ground again. There was another breath-stealing collision, and this time he was pinned between the shattered skull and the stone wall, and with surprising force.
Ermolt’s body screamed from all the aches and pains. The snow was completely gone. And there was still more fight to come. The pressure grew as the skull pushed forward, grinding him against the wall. Bits of bone broke away, but Ermolt’s body would give first. He couldn’t draw a full breath. In a moment he would lose consciousness, and a moment after that, his ribs would shatter under the pressure.
He had grown too cocky, and it would be his undoing.
There was a bellow of challenge in the air. It wasn’t Ermolt’s. He hadn’t the breath for it. With a gasp for air, Ermolt blinked his eyes open.
Elise was standing on the creature’s back, her sword raised. She ran up the arch of its neck to the back of its skull, and her sword came down. There was a scraping sound and the blade slid between two vertebrae. Elise stood and cried out in effort. She kicked the hilt of the sword and there was another crackling sound. This one wasn’t bone scratching against metal.
It was magic. And not just magic, but mag
ic breaking.
Ermolt, Elise, and the skull tumbled to the ground without any further warning. Elise landed with practiced ease, absorbing the impact with her knees and folding herself into a forward roll. Ermolt landed as well as he could, depending on the strength of his legs to absorb the landing. He hissed in pain at his complaining knees and hips.
But the skull took the fall the worst.
It shattered into a dozen pieces.
“Are you alright?” Elise asked, recovering her sword from the bony wreckage and returning it to its sheath.
Ermolt only gulped in air, coughing once or twice as his ribs protested against the forming bruises. “I’ll live,” he said, groaning. The pains in his body were mostly bruises and scrapes. There were no major injuries, although there was a throbbing knot rising on the back of his skull. “Just a mild concussion.” He shook his head. Not even that serious. Just a stiff bump.
From nearby, a shrill voice cried out. “I’m alive! I lived! I’m invincible!”
“Claus?” Ermolt called out. “You alright?”
“Oh, yes,” the voice said from the other side of the mound of bones. “I’m only bleeding profusely from my head. Absolutely perfect.”
This bold statement was followed up by the gentle sound of an old body collapsing to the ground.
Chapter Thirty-Four
Elise tried to make her way around the pile of now-inanimate bone coils, but they seemed to age right before her eyes. They crackled and crumbled, pitted bone turning to mere dust in a blink of an eye.
By the time she found the bleeding Claus, the place was filled with naught but bone chips and dust, no piece larger than her smallest finger.
The old man was collapsed against the floor next to the portal. His eyes were open but his face was covered in a curtain of blood that had been smeared across the floor and wall next to him in a somewhat grisly display of bloody handprints. It looked as if his forehead had struck an uneven edge of a tile on the floor. Perhaps he had used the wall to steady himself after rubbing blood out of his eyes, or even that he had attempted to make his way closer to the portal and the blood proved too distracting.
Claus was still alive. She could see his thin chest fluttering with breath. He was also conscious, if the roaming eyes in his head were any indication. But he seemed exhausted and injured.
“Let me see your head,” Elise said as she approached him. She half expected the old man to grab for a bit of rubble and swing it at her, all while making that horrific shrieking noise. But he helpfully tipped his head to the side to let her see the wound.
It was shallow, barely more than a cut a few rhen wide. The thin skin over his skull seemed eager to pour forth his precious blood, resulting in the huge mess around him.
“That was quite a fight,” Claus said, a bit breathlessly, as Elise knelt next to him and began to dig through her bag. “A wonder to watch, you two are. Have you folks considered careers as gladiators? I’m sure you could cover the sands in lilies with a performance half so good.”
“Gladiatorial sport was outlawed,” Ermolt said from across the room as he kicked through the bone dust of the naga’s remains. “Eighty-some years ago in the Northlands. A decade or two before that down here.”
“What? Why?” Claus grimaced, and Elise frowned as his wrinkling forehead caused his wound to bleed more freely. She extracted a poultice and bandages from her pack, and scolded Claus to keep still.
He ignored her. “Let me guess, some Lublis nobility got upset because their son wasn’t well received?”
“His name was Roswalt.” The name was said firmly, in a way that caused Elise’s head to turn. Ermolt knelt down to paw through the bone chips where the skull had been. “Roswalt Kohler. His son was killed. Everyone said it was a pure accident, but we studied the events in Celnaer Hold. My instructors didn’t mince words. The boy was outclassed, but he thought he could win if he struck to kill. His opponent panicked and killed the boy in self-defense. Roswalt financed the movement to make sure no more fathers would suffer as he suffered.”
“Of course,” Claus said, scoffing. “They wouldn’t care unless it was one of their own.” Elise leaned in and wiped away some of the blood from the wound. Now that Claus was lying down, the bleeding was staying under control. Mostly. “Just the same, if I had a lily, I would have thrown it at your feet for that performance.”
“I don’t know what that means,” Elise said as she applied the poultice to his forehead, “but thank you.” She wrapped the bandages around his head. The wound wasn’t very deep, and it was in a good place, so it didn’t require too much in the way of supplies.
When she finished, Claus looked up at her with wide eyes. “I’m sorry as well.” He gestured towards the mounds of bone dust. “For trying to make a run for it and attempting to abandon you two.”
“It’s alright,” Elise said, keeping her tone even as she returned the remaining supplies to her pack. The blood-soaked cloth she left behind. “I understand—you’re a caitiff. You’ve been running and hiding here for centuries. It makes sense that it would be your first instinct.”
“Exactly,” Ermolt added as he kicked his way through the bone dust over to them. “It’s understandable, since you’ve been locked in this giant stone tower with all sorts of monsters since before my mother’s mother’s mother’s mother first caught a man’s fancy.”
“Has it been that long?” Claus frowned up at the barbarian. “I forget. Is four generations right?” He held up a hand and his fingers twitched, as if he were using them to count. “How long do you people live?”
“No one knows,” Ermolt said with a smirk. “We tend not to die of old age.” He cracked his knuckles one at a time.
“Regardless, we just need to stick together.” Elise secured her belongings and got to her feet. She offered a hand to Claus, who took it and stood shakily with her help. “You have nothing to fear if we’re standing together against whatever guardians this Temple holds.”
“Although I would feel a lot better about it if I weren’t bare-handed.” Ermolt kicked at the bone dust again. “I was hoping to find another intact rib, but the whole thing has collapsed to nothing.”
“What about the mattock?” Elise asked, pointing to where the tool sat fastened to his felt. “Was there a reason you didn’t use it?”
She expected him to explain something about the weight or even make of the mattock rendering it a poor weapon. What she didn’t expect was a long, slow blink and a curious glance to the item on his hip. “Well. I’m going to be perfectly honest: I forgot it was there.”
Elise groaned.
“What? I was caught up in the moment!” Ermolt gestured vaguely at the pile of fragmented bones that was once the naga’s skull. “I think a little distraction is excusable.”
“Alright, alright,” Elise said, chuckling. “I suppose you have a point. And at least things went well enough without it.”
“Right.” Ermolt arched his back and rubbed his shoulder. “Just a handful of bruised ribs.” He looked down at one of his hands and held it up. The knuckles had been skinned and scraped, though the bleeding was minimal. “Perhaps a minor infection, depending on what’s in these bones.”
Elise inspected his hand and determined that a poultice and bandages would be more of a distraction than it would help. She also offered to inspect his ribs, but Ermolt waved her away. They would rest after Athala was back, and they could deal with his injuries at that time.
“We should get moving then,” Elise said, looking across the room. The inner wall here was cracked once more, showing a bare sliver of a view into the interior pit of the Temple. She wondered if the Champion made these entrances, or if they were naturally occurring. “We haven’t seen the Champion in some time, and if we hurry, perhaps we can get to the Favor before we see it again.”
“Um,” Claus said, his voice tiny. “That might be a problem.”
“How?” Elise whirled on the old man.
“If you intend t
o do anything with the Favor, the Champion must be dealt with. It is incomplete while he remains animate.” Claus nodded, fervently. “If you want to use it, he has to be killed.”
“Incomplete? How?”
“Well, not really incomplete! But inaccessible!” Claus raised his hands defensively, as if he expected Elise to lash out at him physically. “Isadon’s power animates the Champion. It’s strength, endurance, and preservation are the largest manifestations of His power remaining in the world, and the Favor is tied into maintaining it. As long as it’s tied to him, you can’t repurpose it.”
“Why didn’t you tell us this earlier?” Elise asked, crossing her arms over her chest in frustration.
“I didn’t think you’d survive this long!” He looked between Elise and the barbarian. “Can you blame me though?” His bony arms flailed around as he gestured to the Temple. “This place is a deathtrap!”
Ermolt stepped up beside Elise and sighed hard. He was likely thinking about their chances against the Champion that had already bested them twice. “Alright. Well, thank you for telling us now,” he said, but there was no warmth to his voice. “We’ll figure it out. For now, we’re ahead of him, and that’ll give us an advantage. We can wait at the Favor and prepare accordingly. Set a trap.”
Elise hesitated, and then nodded. “Right. If we can catch it unprepared, instead of the other way around, we can take advantage of what little we know.”
“The sooner we’re there, the sooner we can begin planning.” Ermolt gestured at the portal. “All together, this time?”
They both looked to Claus, who was still pressed up against the wall. He looked a little less afraid though, and he nodded emphatically. Elise reached out with one hand and looped it around his tiny wrist. Ermolt stepped up behind her and clamped a hand down on her shoulder.
Crossroad Page 24
