by Rick Shelley
"We head for home now?" Lesh asked. I nodded. "Back to Arrowroot?"
"That's where Parthet is due to meet us." I recalled the feeling of danger there, but I had to go to Arrowroot. "We'll stay on this side of the isthmus as long as we can, try to get south of the swamp before we turn west." The elflord might be confused further by that-assuming that we had confused him at all. Dorthin, Varay, and Xayber all met at the southeastern corner of the isthmus. If we couldn't convince the elflord that we were an enemy out of Fairy, maybe he would think that the Etevar were feeling him out. Setting Xayber against Dorthin couldn't hurt Varay.
We had been stopped long enough getting me taped up that the horses had cooled down and Harkane had watered them. Harkane helped me back into the saddle. The pain was still there, but I thought that I would be able to deal with it. I had to. We rode slowly for a time. The pain didn't go away, but it abated a little-or I simply became used to it. I could breathe a little more easily.
Trusting my danger sense a little more-and worried about what riding the rough terrain of the countryside would do to my back and ribs-I didn't try to keep us concealed. We rode the main road south, bold as could be. I shoved my Cubs cap in a hip pocket. Annick unbraided her hair and let it blow free. At first glance we might appear to be a young lord and lady of Fairy out with servants.
Shortly after we started riding again, I felt the questioning presence again, but more lightly than before. The elflord hadn't yet identified us as his irritant. I forced my mind as blank as possible, like before, and the presence passed.
A little later, Harkane moved his horse up next to mine. "You've made it past the dangerous stage," he whispered softly. "You have the magic of the Hero working to mend your wound. By the time we get home, it should be only a memory."
"I hope you're right," I said. "And I hope we don't come up against anything serious before then." We had a lot of Fairy to cross before we could reach Varay and even temporary safety.
Near sunset, we left the road and moved into the hills to find a campsite that would shelter us but not bottle us in. I settled on a flat ledge halfway up a gentle slope, with trees on three sides. There was running water below. We refilled our drinking bags and let the horses get their fill before we moved them up to the campsite. We didn't unsaddle the animals, though, and we unloaded only what we absolutely needed for the night. It was too likely that we would be on the run before morning.
Despite the way I was hurting, I might have felt less nervous riding by night and hiding by day if not for the warning that darkness couldn't hide us from elves and the corroborating evidence that even a half-elf like Annick could see almost perfectly in the dark. Giving ourselves the inconvenience without the advantage was pointless.
Annick was full of vigor when we made camp. Her eyes and face had an excited look that might have seemed feverish in other circumstances. She looked younger, fresher. I wondered if she got some tangible physiological benefit from killing, if the addiction was physical as well as psychological. I had intended to complain about the way she had acted during the fray, but I held back. It's not just that I didn't feel up to an argument. I guess I had given up. She gave no indication that she was looking for reformation, so the aggravation would have been pointless.
"What will you do when this fight is over?" she asked me. Harkane and Lesh were already settling down to sleep. I was sitting propped up against a tree trunk, as comfortable as I was likely to get. The pain did seem to be fading somewhat. Maybe Harkane had been right. In any case, I wasn't feeling quite as bad as before.
"Which fight? We haven't started the real battle yet," I said. Dusk hadn't quite fled into darkness.
"After you beat the Etevar."
"I haven't started to think past that. I know what everyone expects, that I'll stick around and play prince and occasional Hero. Become King of Varay someday." That was a gloomy thought. I wasn't stodgy enough to play Prince Charles or loose enough to be randy Andy. But I couldn't see going home to play with computers at the moment either. It was difficult to think of computers as real just then. "I don't know what I'll do. Maybe go back to my world and do some traveling."
Annick stared at me. I was uncomfortable about it, especially knowing that she could see me better than I could see her in the growing night.
"What will you do when you've killed all the people you've spent your life hating?" I asked.
She shrugged. "I'll find something if that time ever comes."
"You think it'll be that easy?"
Annick didn't answer.
The attack came while I was still awake, still on sentry, but that didn't help. For once, my danger sense didn't scream soon enough. The Elflord of Xayber had finally located us, and the gap between my danger warning and his assault weren't enough to let me do any more than whip the claymore off my shoulder and get it out in front of me. It was pure luck that I was already on my feet. I had decided that I had better get up and move around a little to keep from getting stiff. Then it came.
There was no direct physical attack.
My mind was suddenly in the grip of an incredible power-a psychic bearhug. There was intense pain at the start, worse than the pain in my back had been at its worst, and then a feeling of utter helplessness. I struggled against the force and the void behind it. I fought to open my eyes, scarcely aware that I had closed them in the first onslaught. I blinked and found myself standing on a featureless plain that was unbroken to the horizon in every direction. It was a gray nothingness. There wasn't even real ground beneath my feet, just an unidentifiable, almost undetectable surface. I was standing alone with just the elf sword. I turned slowly, sword at the ready. My back didn't hurt-I noticed that right away-but my danger sense was running up and down my spine. The general message was something like: Holy shit, are you in for it now! As if I needed a prompter to tell me that.
"Okay, Xayber, come on out and let's get this over with. Time for all good rats to come out of their holes." Bravado. Also a poor choice of words. Huge rats started rising right out of the ground-something like Claymation. The rodents were the size of the goat I had killed, and nearly transparent, their innards right there for me to see. They came at me as if I were the pie-eyed piper. All I could do was hack at them with the elf sword and hope that I ran out of rats before I ran out of strength. My back didn't hurt, but I didn't feel particularly chipper either.
"Okay, what's the next act?" I asked when the stream of rats finally dried up.
A giant face appeared in the distance, in what passed for a sky in that gray void. It was an oblong face with pale complexion, black hair, thin mustache, and short goatee, haughty-looking beyond words. I don't suppose the resemblance was really all that close, but it made me think of that three-view portrait of Cardinal Richelieu that seems to be in all of the history textbooks. The face stared at me. When the mouth moved, I heard the words as if they were spoken right in front of me.
"You're the one who dares challenge me? What a disappointment. I had hoped for something more diverting."
"Divert your head up your ass where it belongs," I said. And, for a moment, that's exactly what I saw. When that image faded, it was replaced by a more complete version of the face atop a normal-looking body-as normal as any eight-footer can look. The elflord was only ten feet away from me, and armed much as I was. His claymore fit him better than mine fit me.
"Okay, you got that trick down pat," I said. "Now try this one. Drop dead."
He didn't oblige this time, though. It was too much to hope for. I moved my sword back and forth in front of me and started whistling that strange melody again as I advanced toward the elflord. There was no place to run, so I decided that I might as well act as if I weren't unduly worried about the elflord. The music seemed to give him an instant's pause before he brought his sword up and came to meet me. The battle tune he whistled was different from mine, but it was just as eerie.
I didn't know what the connection was between the whistling and the elf sword,
but I had figured out that they were linked.
The elflord made the first attack, bringing his sword overhead as he stepped forward-stomp the lead foot ahead, then drag up the other foot. I met his blade and pressed to his left. We disengaged and came at each other the same way again. I pressed to his right this time, trying to feel him out. There were a few more tentative, probing passes, then the fight shifted gears rapidly, heating up in a hurry.
This time it was real fencing, not the hurried hackwork my earlier encounters had been. The practiced routine brought its own sort of comfort. We fought at reach. We fought corps a corps. The long swords smashed into each other in combination after combination, at every possible angle, the shock of impact jarring my wrists and sending signals of pain all the way up arms that soon started to feel like lead weights. That was different from my earlier fights with Dragon's Death too. Before, the sword had seemed almost weightless. After a few minutes this time, I could feel the full weight of the claymore. Maneuvering the sword, parrying the elflord, got harder. I met each of his attacks with less leeway, less leverage. It wasn't hard to project the outcome. Soon I would miss a parry and the elflord's blade would slice through me the way I had sliced troll and dwarf with Dragon's Death.
I had to find an edge if I wanted to get out of the duel alive. I would have liked to slip a hand grenade down the front of his tights, but I didn't have a grenade handy and I couldn't be sure it would work if I did.
Something.
I followed a parry with a quick step toward Xayber, and our blades locked at the guard.
Surprise! Xayber hadn't been expecting me to close like that. He could have rested his chin on top of my head… if he had leaned over a little. He was that much taller than me. His sword pressed in and down on mine. His weight pushed forward, trying to force me to step back. He had the weight, but my being two feet shorter gave me a slight advantage in leverage the way we were locked together.
Then the elflord disappeared from sight. I could still feel the pressure of his sword and body, but I couldn't see him. I could still see myself, an image of myself, standing a little beyond, holding the elf sword at an angle, hilt on the ground, point angled toward my gut. I saw myself fall on the blade, saw the point spring out of my back-about where I had been injured before-at the center of a fountain of bright red blood. The vision multiplied until I could see hundreds of copies of myself in all the phases of committing suicide. Miniatures, drive-in-movie-screen size, everything in between, over and over and over. Then the pictures started to strobe-again, over and over. I squeezed my eyes shut and pressed against the invisible elflord. When I opened my eyes again, he was back-grinning. He gave way and we went through another short passage at reach. I didn't feel quite as drained as before. The sideshow had given me time to catch my second wind.
Then the elflord changed himself into a copy of me and I dueled with myself. The absurdity of that gave me a lift.
"Gee, I even get to costar with myself," I said-or grunted, one word at a time. "Think of all the movie stars who never got to try a dual role."
The elflord returned at that, but he wasn't grinning any longer. We continued to fight, going one way and then the other. My whistling got louder, more intense. So did his. It seemed to give us both new strength. Seeing him nonplussed did me worlds of good too, but that and the "new strength" were both relative. The fight was beginning to get to me.
"So. You're more than you appear to be." Xayber forced a disengagement and stepped back out of reach of a lunge. I brought my sword up in a salute and tried to spread a grin across my face. From the reaction I got, I guess it worked.
"You don't recognize my magic?" I don't know what brought that comment out of me, but I loaded it with obviously mock surprise. "You must be slipping. Shall we have another go? I think it's time Xayber belonged to a lord more fit to hold it." I took two quick steps toward him and lunged at his throat. He backed out of reach again, brought his sword up to his face, and vanished. The gray and the light went with him. I collapsed across Lesh.
15 – Coriander
Lesh woke noisily when I fell on him, and that woke the others. I was so wiped out that I couldn't move, not even an arm. Limp, exhausted, turned inside out, I could scarcely mumble answers to the questions that Lesh and Annick fired off. On top of all that, my back was hurting again-worse than ever. Falling across Lesh hadn't helped.
Annick guessed what had happened. "He's been caught by the elflord. We've got to get him away from here as fast as we can."
That sounded good to me, but the three of them had to do all of the work. It's a good thing we had unloaded only the essentials. I was baggage, useless, as if I didn't have a bone or muscle left-Dorothy's Scarecrow with his stuffing ripped out. The others even had to hoist me into the saddle and tie me in place. When we rode out, Harkane was at my side to make sure I didn't fall. He held the reins of my horse.
Annick led the way with her night vision. Harkane and I were close behind her, and Lesh rode rear guard. For the first hour-maybe longer; time was a nebulous abstraction for me just then-I was scarcely conscious, maybe not even "scarcely" part of the time. There wasn't much difference between being unconscious and being whatever it was the rest of the time. Perhaps there was less pain while I was completely out of it. But memories of my duel with the elflord haunted me constantly, night-mares that weren't stilled by waking, and it wasn't until later that I started to make any sense of it at all.
The duel with Xayber was real. I could have died during it even though I never physically left our camp and the elflord never physically entered. That was why my wound didn't hurt during my duel. My body wasn't physically involved. It must have remained just standing in place while the fight went on. I could have died wore at my mind through the night. There was no question whose magic was more powerful. In my short time as Hero of Varay I had come to rely on my new ability to sense danger, but the elflord had almost completely negated that puny talent as an offhand prelude to his attack. His magic had barely begun when mine ended. The elf sword was a bonus, pure luck. It as the only thing that let me survive the duel. The sword had its own magic, and drawing the weird battle tune from me was only a small part of it.
"You did right good, lord," Harkane whispered-sometime during that blurry night ride. "You survived the elflord. That means you beat him. Your father never faced a duel like that inside the elflord's domain, where he's most powerful."
I didn't feel like a winner. At that point, I wasn't even sure that I felt like a survivor.
I puzzled over the suicide sequence at length, once I started spending more time conscious than not. The only explanation that came close to making sense was that the elflord didn't think he could kill me by magic alone, and since he wasn't physically present, all he could hope for was to make me kill myself. I was guessing on insufficient evidence, though. I didn't know why he might have thought that his magic alone wouldn't suffice-because he thought I was an elf or because he knew I was Hero of Varay, or whatever. There was a chance that he wasn't certain just who I was. But if he caught me again, his ignorance probably wouldn't matter. He'd come close enough the first time.
Gradually, I started to get my wits back. Instead of feeling totally sapped and snapped, I just felt exhausted. The pain in my back and side settled into place again, throbbing as steadily as my heart. We stopped to rest the horses. I think it was the second time, but it was the first that I was really aware of. I almost managed to dismount by myself. When we got ready to ride again twenty minutes later, I didn't have to be tied to my saddle. But Lesh and Harkane did have to help me mount.
"What happened?" Annick asked after we started riding south again. She rode at my side long enough to hear my semicoherent tale. I needed quite a while to tell it. I ate a little beef jerky and drank a lot of water along the way. That helped.
"I was right, it was the elflord," Annick said when I finished.
"We have to be out of Fairy before he comes for me again. There's no
way I could survive that a second time."
"I think we'll be south of the swamp by dawn," Annick said. "Do you want to turn east and try to stay hidden in the forest again?"
"Trees won't hide me from him." I may have shuddered at that. We rode on for a few minutes before I continued talking. I had to do some thinking, and rational thought came hard.
"Let's just make the best speed we can, straight south-unless he sends troops after us. And we're not going straight to Arrowroot. That's too dangerous." Particularly with me useless for combat. "We'll try Coriander instead. We can get in and out of your uncle's castle quickly from there." Or from Basil, if it came down to that, I thought. I told Annick about the feeling of danger I had had when we first left Arrowroot, before she joined us. I didn't want to head into that without knowing what was behind it.
"I guess I should react to that," Annick said. "My mother and my uncle are there." She paused, then added, "But I don't feel any of the things I should. Does that shock you?"
I didn't say anything.
"There'll be fighting at Arrowroot, right?" she asked.
"Probably. The elflord has obviously found some magic that works inside Varay, at least as far as Arrowroot." That was another complication. If Arrowroot was under active attack, I wouldn't be able to take soldiers from there to fight the Etevar, and the entire foray into Xayber might be wasted.
"Coriander faces Xayber too," Annick said. "The danger might be there as well."
"Maybe, but maybe we won't be expected to head there."
We rested for a couple of hours just after dawn, near the edge of the forest. I managed to sleep most of that time. When I woke, I felt stronger even though my back and side still hurt. Annick rebandaged my wound and said that it had been bleeding again.
"Probably from when I fell on Lesh after the duel with the elflord," I said, and she nodded.
When I had new tape on, I managed to get up and walk around a bit. I wasn't up to anything strenuous yet, but I thought I would be able to take care of routine. Annick had caught several plump fish while I slept. I've never liked sushi, but I ate my share of the raw fish. There was no time for a fire, and I wasn't ready to chance even one of Lesh's "guaranteed smokeless" fires yet.
