The Hero of Varay vm-2

by Rick Shelley

  Behind us, Xayber's son started a chant that wasn't quite his sword song. I couldn't tell what conjuring he was doing, but I hoped it would work.

  There was nothing extraordinary about the mechanics of the fight. The spears the guards carried were wood. They couldn't stand up to sword or battle-axe. And their swords were shorter than ours, and not just shorter than my claymore. Their body armor wasn't enough to make up for the deficiencies of their weapons. They all went down, most terminally.

  We retrieved our packs and went on to the shrine's entrance.

  "What's next? This eunuch you were talking about?" I asked our elf.

  "Perhaps," he replied, "or there may be other surprises. The building may have its own traps for unwelcome visitors."

  The golden doors had remained open, so we didn't have to worry about picking locks or breaking the doors down. We walked right in and stopped just inside.

  The inside of the shrine was brightly lit even though there were neither lamps nor skylights-no apparent source for the illumination. Columns ran along all four sides of the hall, different kinds of columns-round, square, fluted, smooth-setting off the outer portion of the building as a series of aisles, like the side sections of a cathedral. The central part of the shrine was one immense chamber, at least sixty feet high, one hundred and twenty wide, and maybe three hundred long… the size of a football field. The ceiling was a complex vault, but there were no central pillars to support that expanse. It was impressive.

  "You could get a Super Bowl crowd in here," I mumbled, more to myself than to my companions. I cleared my throat, then asked, "Where's the jewel?" louder.

  "Below us," the elf said. "It's in a basement or vault, something of that nature."

  "You have any idea where the stairs are?" I asked, hoping that there were stairs. We weren't equipped to mine our way through a marble floor.

  Xayber's son closed his eyes and took what seemed to be quite a time considering that. When he opened his eyes, he said, "It feels like there are several passages to the lower levels, but I can't tell which leads to the repository. In here, the magic of the defenders is much stronger than my own."

  "Another maze?"

  "In effect." If he still had shoulders under his head, I'm sure he would have shrugged them.

  "Booby traps or just blind alleys?" I don't know how the translation magic rendered those terms in the elf's language, but he didn't hesitate.

  "I can't tell. There is danger everywhere within these walls."

  I already knew that much.

  It was time for another mental coin flip. We went left, clockwise, staying out in the aisle area that girded the huge central chamber. There were echoes, and echoes of echoes, as we walked. Whenever a blade scraped against wall or column, the clang seemed magnified in the distance. It wouldn't take a supernatural talent to know that we were there. There were a lot of doorways off to the side. Most led to small side rooms. Some led to stairways, up or down, most of them up. The side rooms weren't nearly as high as the aisles or the central chamber. The building was a rectangular block on the outside, so there was a lot of room above us on the sides, maybe as many as eight or ten floors' worth.

  We checked eight doors before we found the first stairway leading down. The stairway was as brightly lit as the rest of the shrine, still without any visible source. We went down forty-three steps before we reached the bottom, and three more doors. Xayber's son didn't have any certain feelings about which, if any, of the doors might lead us to the jewel, so I started with the right-hand door. It led to more stairs, down another thirty steps.

  "It's above us now," the elf said when we reached the bottom. "Unless there's another stairway, or a ramp, leading up, this is the wrong way."

  There was a long corridor at the bottom, with a number of doors on either side. We opened each door. Some led to sleeping rooms-no beds, but with cushions and blankets on the floors. There were other rooms that seemed intended for people to spend waking time in. The corridor had a blind end, maybe halfway across the shrine, so we retraced our steps, went back up the lower flight of stairs, and tried the middle door. There was just a single room leading off of it, as bare as could be. Xayber's son said that the jewel couldn't be in there. It still felt too far away.

  When we tried the third door, my danger sense went off the scale, completely berserk, and I couldn't see the threat. Neither could the elf.

  "The jewel isn't in there," he said. "I am certain of that."

  That was a relief. And no, I didn't have the slightest urge to go in and find out what the terrible danger in that room was. I may be a certified Hero, but I am not a certified idiot.

  We went back up to the main level and continued our circuit. A little farther on, we found another stairway leading down and took it. This one turned out to be as fruitless as the first. All we did was lose time.

  On the way back up those stairs, Xayber's son shouted, "Stop!"

  We stopped and waited for his explanation, looking around, weapons out, ready to meet any threat.

  "The jewel has moved," the elf said. "It is above us now, on the main level of the shrine."

  "Someone has moved it, you mean," I said.

  "It can only be a defender, the Great Earth Mother's eunuch," the elf said.

  "Found hisself one ball, has he?" Lesh said, trying to make a joke. Nobody laughed.

  We got back to the main level and moved toward the large central chamber. As I moved around one column, I saw the defender standing in the middle of the room, with all that elbow room around and above him.

  The Great Earth Mother's eunuch needed all the room he could get. He was one big sucker, twelve feet tall and six times my weight-at least. He had a sword in each hand that made my claymore look like a toothpick. A gold chain hung around his neck with a brilliant ruby hanging from that.

  "The ruby is the right ball of the Great Earth Mother," the elf said.

  "That figures," I mumbled.

  "All you have to do is take it off his dead body."

  "I thought he was immortal," I said, sliding off my pack and drawing my sword again, while my companions made their own preparations.

  "As far as I know," Xayber's son said, "he is."

  15 – The Magnet

  I could hardly avoid the thought: One of these days I'm going to run into an immortal who really is, and I'll be up shit creek when I do. Elves were supposed to be immortal, but I had watched one die after a run-in with a dragon and I had lopped the head off of another elf-who might or might not actually be dead, depending on your definition; he was certainly talkative enough yet. Dragons were also supposed to be immortal. At least, they were allegedly unkillable by mortals. But I had finished off the one who killed the elf warrior, then another one that had been imported by the Dorthini wizard to do me in. Neither immortality was absolute, and if that seems to stretch the definition, I can't help it. Fairy and the buffer zone run by their own mutable rules of logic and semantics.

  The big eunuch waiting for me was supposed to be immortal. Maybe he was no more immortal than dragons or elves, but after all, the eunuch was alleged to be a special creation of the Great Earth Mother, engineered specifically to safeguard one of her two most prized possessions.

  He was naked but for the swords in his hands and the ruby hanging on his chest. He was totally hairless and had skin that was almost pumpkin orange. Twelve feet tall, he had to weigh more than a half ton, and very little of it looked like fat. His legs were the size of my torso. He had been very thoroughly emasculated. Not only had his testicles and scrotum been removed, he had been left with only a tiny stub of a penis. He was made eunuch, not born that way. The scars were obvious and a vivid red. His breasts were enlarged, his eyes nearly an albino pink. He looked angry. I bet he was that way all the time.

  I took a couple of steps out into the center of the shrine, but I wasn't ready to get far from the pillars. I didn't want to have too far to run when I needed cover. Lesh was off to my left, far enough away
that we wouldn't get our weapons tangled, close enough that we could both engage the eunuch at once. Harkane and Timon were behind neighboring pillars, twenty feet apart, arrows notched to bows, waiting for a signal from me before they did anything hostile.

  I tugged on my Cubs cap to make sure it was seated firmly.

  "You don't belong here," the eunuch boomed. Castration certainly hadn't turned him into a soprano-or maybe that was the soprano range of someone his size.

  "How do you know I don't belong here?" I asked, willing to delay the fight as long as possible. But the eunuch was in no mood for games.

  "What name should I carve on your tombstone?" he demanded.

  "If you don't know who I am, then you won't need my name. And I'm not about to waste a week burying you, so I don't even care to hear your name-if you have any idea what it is."

  "It is Baddassus who will kill you!" he shouted, and I started laughing my head off and couldn't control the fit.

  The eunuch roared and started whirling his sword even faster-like a Saturday Night Live parody of one of those Japanese chefs who work in front of their customers with twirling carving knives.

  "They call you Bad Ass?" I asked when my laughter finally ebbed, "Someone has a terrific sense of humor."

  "I'll show you humor. How dare you mock my name!"

  Very softly, I whispered, "Timon, eyes and throat. Harkane, try for his heart or a major artery, maybe the ones on the insides of his thighs."

  Back with our packs, Xayber's son started chanting up a spell.

  The fight started.

  Lesh and I moved farther away from the pillars as Baddassus lumbered slowly toward us. To keep a sword extended toward each of us, he had to expose his whole front to Harkane and Timon, and they started pumping arrows into him as quickly as they could. The shafts didn't seem to do much damage-a few minor, shortlived spurts of blood appeared and dried up, and each seemed to infuriate the giant eunuch that much more. He brushed at the arrows, breaking them off, then he roared again and advanced toward the pillars at the side of the shrine's main expanse.

  I moved to get in his way, and he swung one of his swords at my head. I ducked, but his aim was high anyway, and the blade bit into the marble column as if it were a rotten tree. While he was freeing that sword, and while Lesh kept his other sword busy, I ducked in to get a shot at his tree-trunk legs. My mouth was pumping out the sword song full blast as I hacked at the back of the eunuch's left knee-which seemed only slightly narrower than the columns holding up the ceiling.

  For all the good I did, I might as well have been trying to cut down a tornado with a butter knife. My blade bit into the eunuch's leg, but not deeply. I certainly didn't come close to amputating the leg, and that had been my intention. Dragon's Death had the sharpest, strongest blade I had ever seen, and I had put every ounce of my strength into the swing. It should have been enough. That blow would have cut through a foot-thick tree trunk.

  The eunuch jerked his sword free of the marble and brought it down toward my head. I twisted out of the way and feinted toward his groin.

  Baddassus brought both of his swords around to block my blade. His reflex gave Lesh an opening to move in and chop at the back of the eunuch's knee with his battle axe, the same knee I had attacked.

  "Harkane, give him a stick to piss up," I yelled, circling to force the eunuch to turn.

  Harkane's arrow found the eunuch's groin. The eunuch screamed and doubled over to jerk out the arrow. That gave Lesh and me each one hack at the back of Baddassus's knee, one slice from each side. There was blood and a wicked gash visible, but it didn't slow the eunuch at all. The muscles had to be tougher than spring steel. He started spinning, screeching a war chant, and twirled his swords at blinding speed. There was no way any of us could meet him steel to steel. His blades would either snap our weapons or knock them out of our grasp.

  Suddenly, without warning, the eunuch dropped one sword and grabbed at his groin. He bent over to look at himself, astonishment appearing on his face.

  "Hurry," Xayber's son said. "I can't hold this magic for long."

  Lesh raised his axe and hacked at the side of Baddassus's suddenly reachable neck. It was a blow that would have severed any other head, but even though the axe blade bit deeply into the neck, Baddassus hardly seemed to notice. I drove the point of Dragon's Death into the eunuch's armpit, and he dropped the other sword. But he didn't move to defend himself. He didn't turn on either Lesh or me. Instead, he grabbed at his groin with both hands-not in pain, but with surprise. The look on his face was impossible to read. Harkane came out from behind his pillar and drove an arrow through the eunuch's left temple at close range. Baddassus fell forward then and seemed to shake the entire shrine when he hit the floor.

  The next swing of Lesh's axe finally cut the eunuch's spinal cord. While he finished hacking head from neck, I retrieved the chain and the ruby. I hung the chain around my own neck to get it out of the way… after I cleaned off the blood.

  "What did you do?" I asked the elf while Lesh finished removing the eunuch's head and booted it away from the body.

  Xayber's son had closed his eyes to avoid watching the final stages of the decapitation, an understandable aversion. I turned the pack under his cage and he opened his eyes again.

  "I gave him the one thing he always wanted but could never have," he said, "an erection. How else would you deal with an immortal eunuch."

  "Lesh, leave off," I called. "Let's get out of here." Lesh had turned his battle-axe against the body of the giant.

  We hurried to get into our packs and jogged to the gold doors. I heard a mighty moan and turned to look. The eunuch's body was getting to its feet-up on one knee, then all the way up. Both hands were jerking the air in front of his groin. The head on the floor rolled over so it could watch. The head sighed in what sounded like great relief as the body spasmed and trembled in the eunuch's first orgasm. Then the eunuch got down on his knees and started crawling toward his head. We didn't wait to see if he would make it.

  Outside, we had to fight the same dozen soldiers again. They had risen-wounds still gaping but not bleeding-and formed ranks to meet us. Just the sight of them was more than I wanted to face just then. The open, bloodless wounds reminded me of the appearance of the Congregation of Heroes in the crypt below Basil. That was just how I saw them in the unnerving dream/vision/nightmare that I experienced before the Battle of Thyme.

  But I had to face these soldiers. Once more we fought. Once more we had to kill all twelve of the shrine's legionnaires, because not one of them thought to surrender or run. If they could keep rising from the dead, they had no incentive to quit. My companions and I lost too much time in the fight. As we finished off the last of the soldiers for the second time, the gold doors opened and the eunuch charged out, roaring his rage. His head was firmly, if not tidily, back on his shoulders again; there were bits hanging out that shouldn't have. He had swords in both hands. His tiny stub was dripping.

  We ran for the maze. This time we didn't waste time trying to beat the maze by the "rules." We followed passages when they were convenient, but stayed up top as much as possible. We lost ground to the pursuing Baddassus every time we had to go down into the maze to cross a passageway.

  But the eunuch wasn't very fast on his feet. At his size, every step had to send shock waves through his entire body, especially at any kind of speed. And he kept stopping to look down at himself, to touch his stub. His preoccupation gave us time to get clear of the maze and to start running for the narrow ledge around that rock shoulder at the end of the shrine's high valley. There was no way that the eunuch could get his bulk around that. But we hurried on quite a bit farther before we stopped to rest.

  It wasn't until we were out of the reach of Baddassus and had time to quench our thirst and share a quick meal that I took off the prize hanging around my neck to examine it. The gold chain weighed about four pounds, and the pretzel-sized links were soft enough to make me think they might be very near
ly pure gold. The ruby was translucent, brilliant against the light, and about the size of a pecan, held by a gold band and linked to the chain-a smooth ruby nut.

  "You're sure this is what we came for?" I asked Xayber's son.

  "I'm certain. You hold the right testicle of the Great Earth Mother in your hand."

  A relic after all, not the real thing, I thought. It was a relief… and also something of a disappointment.

  "One down, one to go," I said.

  "Don't count your balls too soon," the elf said.

  That's an easy kind of thing to say when you're in a spot like ours. And three hours later, we had a dragon after us.

  We did luck out on timing. We had just found a cave and decided to camp for the night. The dragon came over the next peak and dove straight for us. For me: that's how it felt. We got into the cave and sat with our blades toward the entrance while the dragon took its time figuring out that there was no way it could reach us. I made thankful noises about real dragons not being able to breathe fire the way fairy-tale ones do. That cave wasn't deep enough to get us away from much more than a pocket lighter's flame.

  At least the dragon didn't camp on our doorstep, so we did get some sleep. The next morning, we made a couple of hours on the trail before the dragon returned. I assumed that it was the same one, though I couldn't be positive. Dragons aren't exactly common, even in the buffer zone, and none had bothered us all the way out to the shrine.

  This time we were working our way through a narrow crevasse and we stayed put until the dragon gave up and flew on. But that dragon, or a different one, was back before sunset. This time we were out in the open with no place to hide. I didn't have much room to swing my sword, either. The shelf we were edging along was only about thirty inches wide, with a wall behind us and a sheer drop in front.