Once A Hero

by Michael A. Stackpole

I wish she had not done that. She looked too much like her grandaunt to me, which meant I kept thinking back to times Larissa and I had spent together, trying to remember if I had seen that expression or heard those words before. I did not mind drifting back into memories of Larissa, but coming out of them hurt quite a bit. Whatever resentment I built from that pain I found myself directing toward Genevera—none of which she deserved.

  Just as I realized I should not judge Berengar by the Red Tiger, I knew comparing Gena with Larissa was unfair. Genevera was very intelligent, witty, friendly, and beautiful. She compared favorably with her grandaunt, yet because Larissa was untouchable, there remained an aura of mystery around her that held her apart from me. It left her a creature of fantasy, and while I had seen Larissa under similar circumstances to those I was experiencing with Genevera, Gena's approachability helped distance me from her.

  The other factor that kept a wall between us was how Berengar acted around Gena. Though she might not have been aware of it, I had seen enough moon-eyed warriors chasing after women in garrison towns to know the look of one smitten. His deference to her, respect of her, and resentment of time she and I spent together told me just how much he thought he loved her. As is true with many honorable men, he hid his intentions so as not to complicate our mission, but I suspected when we returned to Aurium, he would make a clean breast of his feelings.

  Suitably stretched out, I drew my rapier from my baggage, raised it in a salute to Gena as had Berengar, then dropped into a low guard. I kept the point of my blade in line with his chest at heart level, with my right hand and blade hilt at waist level, just off my right hip. The blade's balance and slender tapering told me that the thrust was the most important tactic in sword fighting now, but the razored edge on the blade also suggested that it had its uses as well. Even so, the crushing, slashing attacks to which I had become accustomed and in which I had become accomplished were clearly archaic.

  I took a quick step forward, extended, and lunged, but Berengar parried me wide, then twisted his wrist and riposted to my chest. He whipped the blade away before it could skewer me, but he was fast and very steady. The parry had been strong, and Berengar recovered from his lunge before I had brought my sword back into a proper guard.

  I nodded respectfully to him. "You are very good."

  "You did not come at me hard."

  "That does not diminish your speed and your skill." I raised my sword and saluted him. "Perhaps you would be willing to instruct me in the current ways of fighting?"

  The question surprised him, but after a moment's consideration he consented and my lessons began immediately. He started with forms and guards in that first session, and over the next three weeks we progressed on up to some of the more complicated systems of fighting. The lack of spare rapiers meant we had to use sticks to simulate a second sword when we tried that form, and we likewise had to improvise bucklers from tree bark. Berengar professed a preference for sword and dagger fighting, and I could definitely see that as likely the most common sort of swordplay in an urban setting.

  When we fenced, Berengar maintained an edge, and he took great pride in remaining my master at swordplay. While he had taught me everything I knew about this new way of fighting, he had not taught me everything he knew. On the other hand, I think I learned a bit more than he expected me to pick up. I knew I had not seen him fight full out, nor had he seen all I had to offer, which made our fencing matches exciting.

  From the grove outside Jarudin, Stulklirn had taken us directly to his normal range in Irtysh. Aarundel and I, when Stulkhm joined us, postulated that a Dreel could either use the Elven circus translatio or end up in any place he knew well enough to identify inside his mind. We also discovered we did not need the chains to travel when working through a Dreel. In the same way that Shijef had taken us directly from Jammaq to Cygestolia, Stulklirn was able to take us from Jarudin to Irtysh without using any of the circuii groves along the way.

  From there we worked almost directly north. We bought more horses and what little supplies we could convince folks to surrender, then headed on our way. People appeared concerned with our traveling toward the Rimefields at this time of year less because of the weather than because Tacorzi was known to extend his range in the winter. Going north during the winter, a number of people asserted, was akin to committing suicide.

  While no one would sign on with us as a guide, everyone was willing to share stories about Tacorzi. Descriptions ranged from a pale-blue multitentacled squid-thing that waited in the snow for travelers the way an antlion ambushes its prey, to a ghoul with a legion of skeletal zombies at its beck and call. The latter suited Takrakor better than the former, but we heard about the ice-squid enough that I began to wonder if it was not one of those bone-creatures I had seen the Reithrese use at Alatun.

  Ultimately we did not need a guide, because I knew exactly where we were going. I could not have pointed it out on a map, but this close to Tacorzi and Wasp, I just knew where we were headed. Of course, knowing the creature laired in the ice caverns at the base of a smoking mountain helped a lot, especially when we crested foothills and saw the snow-clad mountain with a plume of gray smoke smearing the blue sky.

  We found the entrance to the ice cavern late in the afternoon, so we pulled back from it and made a camp a considerable distance up in a mountain valley. Not only could I get a sense of Takrakor's presence, but some of the malevolence was leaking through as well. I recalled quite well the last time I faced him, and I doubted five centuries would have diminished his power.

  "I think we may have made a mistake, my friends." I looked away from the small fire burning in our little cave as I shared my conclusion. "Takrakor was very deadly the last time we met. We should have had the Consilliarii send a troop of wizards to root him out."

  Berengar frowned at that idea. "I hardly think a powerful sorcerer would willfully lair in a hole in the ice. I agree that caution is warranted, but we are not as weak a group as you might think. You and I are formidable warriors, and the Dreel is very strong. Lady Genevera is a magick user of unparalleled skill in my experience. Could nor this malevolence you feel be nothing more than his residual hatred of you for killing him?"

  "Berengar does make sense on that point, Neal."

  "He does, Gena, but then we have to wonder what this Tacorzi is and how Takrakor got here."

  Berengar nodded. "I agree, Neal, these are questions we need to answer. Let us reconnoiter the ice cavern tomorrow. If we cannot destroy the creature we find there—if there is any creature there—we will retreat and summon more help. With the Dreel we can have more people here in a day or two."

  I frowned for a moment because Berengar had advanced the course of action I saw as most logical—if nothing else we had to see what was there. "I agree." I leaned over and pulled the saddlebag with the flashdrakes in it into my lap. "If you do not mind, Gena, I will take these with me tomorrow."

  "And I thought you more confident in your abilities with a rapier, Neal." Berengar shook his head. "You do not need those things."

  "No disrespect to you as a swordmaster, Berengar, but I will bring these for one very simple reason."

  "And that is?"

  I smiled. "I had no idea what they were when I first saw them. I'm thinking that if Takrakor is behind the Tacorzi legend, up here he'll not have seen them either. And that means, dishonorable or not, these might be just enough to surprise or distract him so we can get away from him."

  The next day dawned bitter cold, with the sky so blue that it might have been an ocean suspended over our heads. No snow had fallen in the night, and the wind had scoured the snowscape down to the hard crust. The snow's frozen skin supported us for a second with each step, then gave way, plunging us knee-deep in snow. We barked our shins on the crust with the next step, repeating the whole cycle with monotonous regularity and fair discomfort.

  The crunch of snow under my feet, and the wind's cold kiss where my scarf and hat left the skin near my eyes op
en, reminded me of my days as a youth in the Roclaws. As a child, I had always welcomed snow because it transformed the world into a wonderful playground where forts could be built and snowball wars fought. Growing into adulthood, I had seen another side to winter and did not relish the expeditions mounted to find survivors of villages swept away by avalanches. The images of stiff and frozen corpses perfectly preserved danced through my brain, and all too many of them wore my face.

  The round tunnel led down through the ice at a fairly sharp angle, but cracks and ripples in the surface made climbing down not as difficult as I might have thought at first. Wearing the flashdrake scabbard over my heavy coat did hinder me somewhat, but the tunnel leveled out quickly enough. It pushed on through blue shadows for a good two hundred yards. Down here, where very little sunlight could penetrate, the walls glowed azure and made our vaporous breaths a light-blue fog.

  Down inside the tunnel I felt no movement in the air, which eased the chill only a little. Where my breath plumed up from within the scarf, the vapor managed to freeze on the forelock that had escaped my woolen cap. I had to be careful when blinking my eyes lest they freeze shut as well. Inside my mittens my fingers felt numb, but I kept moving them to keep them limber. Feeling colder than a corpse in my feet, hands, and buttocks, I moved deeper into that blue hell.

  I stopped just beyond where the tunnel widened into a huge ice cavern. Though rendered in ice, many of the decorations and much of the architecture came from Jammaq, Columns of ice had been sculpted into bones, and countless tortured faces stared back at me through glassy walls. What I took to be gravel crunched underfoot, but when I looked down, all I could see was the pale ivory of bone fragments.

  My companions entered the chamber and had the wisdom to spread out on either side, with Gena and Berengar to my left and Stulklirn to my right. We all stared at the thing lurking in the center of the cavern bowl. It hunched down on a hillock knitted of bones and had bodies in various states of disrepair scattered about it. Unblemished by rot because of the cold, the bodies looked more like dolls that had been rough-used by children at play than once-living creatures.

  The thing in the middle—Tacorzi seemed to suit it more than Takrakor—raised its half-fleshed head and gave me a diamond-studded smile. "I knew you would come, Neal." A skeletal hand clicked bony fingers against the hilt of the knife still borne in a harness on its chest. "I knew you had been consigned to the same limbo as had I. Now we will both be free."

  It raised the skeletal left arm, and I saw both flesh and tattered muscles dangle like fringe from the limb. The bony hand probed the gaping wound, the ancient, splintered wound, in its chest. "You killed me as I killed you, Neal. Your Elven friends saved you even as my Mistress saved me. I have waited very long for this, very long, very long. . . ."

  I studied the charnel house surroundings for a moment. "I think I had the better of the resting places."

  "Utility is preferable to comfort." The skeletal creature stared at me as if trying to catalog the differences between us. "Here I nest next to the bosom of my goddess, still her servant despite her cruel judgment of me."

  "Your people are gone, and your empire is not even a memory in the minds of Men. You should have given up long ago."

  The monster continued to peer at me. "The memories of your despair and pain still please me."

  I shivered, and not from the cold. "Why did you do that to me? Why did you rape my brain? Why not take the sword and be done with it?"

  Tacorzi's jaw dropped and quivered in a ghoulish imitation of laughter. "Do you not know? Khiephnaft must be won in combat or freely given to another. Back then, I could not win it by force of arms, but now I would have no such problem."

  As Tacorzi spoke, its lethargy fell away. It heaved itself up and came upright, but not on legs. From the point where its pelvis should have been, I saw only a skeletal body woven of pelvises and leg bones. The creature, its leathery flesh creaking as the body shifted, rose up, and I saw the hillock upon which it had rested was really an enormous skeletal simulacrum of a snake's body.

  Worse yet, curving up and over its shoulders, bony tentacles wove back and forth akin to cobras swaying to a minstrel's flute tune. Four of the eight ended in animal skulls that snapped their jaws at us and flashed fangs. Two, a wolf and a polar bear, still maintained part of their pelts. The other two were bare of flesh, and I was certain one was that of a wolf. The other, by Stulklirn's snarled reaction, could have been from a Dreel.

  The other four tentacles plunged down into the tangle of bodies lying around Tacorzi's coils. With a harsh snapping sound, they bored into holes in the small of the backs of some corpses. Bodies lurched to their feet. Shambling forward, the zombi quartet oriented on Berengar and Gena. The biting heads turned their attention to Stulklirn.

  I shook my mittens free of my hands—the mittens dangled from cords tied to my wrists—and drew my sword. "Leave them, it's me you want and my dagger back that I want."

  The half-dead thing shook its head. "You, I already know how to kill." He brought his hands up to his face, then slashed them down and away. "I have been a long time in improving the spell. You will die now."

  Beginning as a burning spark, the spell he had once before used to destroy me shot out at me. I knew I had to move, had to escape it, but even as I thought about dodging to my right, the spell shifted to track me. As it closed the distance between us, it grew from a spark to a burning cross. I heard it sizzling through the air and actually began to feel cheated out of my second attempt at life.

  Suddenly Stulklirn dove in front of me, and the spell hit him full force in the chest. The Dreel howled in pain and fur flashed into an acrid, cloying smoke. As he went down, curling in on himself, I leaped up over his rolling body and slashed the rapier through the tentacle with the bear's head. The skull flew free and shattered on the ground.

  Gena gestured at the ragged corpse nearest her, and its threadbare clothes immediately ignited into flame. At once [the] humanoid body collapsed, and the tentacle reared back as if a viper coiling to strike. The body melted and spread out, a burning mass of putrid rot and old bones, while Tacorzi repeatedly jammed the burning end of the tentacle into the cavern floor to put the fire out.

  The scent of burning flesh and Dreel fur assaulted me, bringing to the charnel cavern the scent it should have had from the beginning. Gena readied another spell and cast it at Tacorzi as Berengar sliced another zombi free of its bony lifeline. I beheaded the Dreel tentacle, but the two wolves got my hip and shoulder on the left side. Their assault slackened for a moment as Tacorzi's magick met and exploded Gena's spell, and had I not been wearing thick winter gear, they would have torn me open.

  As I curled my left arm around the tentacle biting me at the shoulder and started to cut at Tacorzi with my rapier, I saw Stulklirn roll to his feet. He bellowed a challenge tinged with pain, then raised his paws, crossed them, and slashed them apart in imitation of what Tacorzi had done. A reddish-yellow spark shot from his furred paws and spiraled in at Tacorzi. It struck the monster in a shower of sparks, sending a shudder through Tacorzi's body. A second later I severed the tentacle and it fell to pieces around me.

  "Magick I make I can unmake!" Tacorzi cackled. His hands began all manner of arcane motions even as a cruciform design on his chest began to darken and run with rotting flesh. The tentacle Gena had previously burned battered her back against the cavern wall. As she slumped to the floor, one of the zombies managed to jump Berengar, taking him down, while the wolf tentacle gnawing at my hip managed to pull me down.

  Stulklirn crushed the wolf skull with one swat of his right paw, then crouched over me. "My magick kill will."

  "Not if he unmakes it." I slapped the Dreel on the shoulder. "Circle him. Think of Jarudin."

  Casting my sword aside, I stood and began to run at Tacorzi. I assumed the sight of me running unarmed at him would be quite a distraction and limit his ability at concentrating on his unmaking of the quartering spell. His jaw did dr
op open and his hand motions slackened just a bit, but even his curiosity at my actions did not make him stop his work.

  I drew both flashdrakes, cocked the talons, and thrust the handcannons at him. The fleshy half of his face raised an eyebrow, but he saw no threat. I assumed that was because he did not know what they were, but part of me feared he knew it was because, already being dead, he could not be killed again.

  I pulled the triggers.

  One ball exploded his left hand, spraying finger and wrist bones around before it blew through ribs and shattered the shoulder blade on its way out. The other ball shattered the Reithrese corpse-wizard's jaw. Glittering like dewdrops in sunlight, diamond teeth spun through the air.

  Knowing how a toothache had destroyed his concentration before, I hoped the horror at having part of his death replayed would cause him all sorts of problems.

  Surrounding the both of us, a black, white, and brindle light pattern began and ended in the outline of a Dreel. Dropping the flashdrakes, I grabbed a flailing bone tentacle and heaved on it. Tacorzi spilled forward off his coils.

  Hauling for all I was worth—despite the sharp pain in shoulder and hip—I pulled Tacorzi along with me as I dove into the Dreel and the world of the Elven circus translatio.

  I do not know how long it actually took for us to complete the journey to the grove east of Jarudin. We passed through hills and mountains, lakes, towns, and vales, as we flew through that opposite-landscape. I saw no one, as I had before, but my attention remained focused on Tacorzi. I do not know if anyone saw us as a ghost on our journey, but I had no doubt that if someone had, a bard would be singing about the sight soon enough.

  At some point during the journey it occurred to me that the premise upon which I had based my plan could have been wrong. Before my death I would have been willing to trust my hunches, but that had gotten me dead once before. If this journey did not kill Tacorzi, I had managed to transpecate him from the frozen north to within a day's ride of Jarudin. I had no idea how fast he could travel, configured as he was, but inflicting that sort of danger on the kin of folks I'd known generations before struck me as a poor way to announce my return to the land of the living.