Focus, Artus.
Though the lighting was poor, Artus could make out several entrances and exits to the hall. Behind him, he could hear the group of Dellorans closing in at a half run, so he didn’t have time to consider his route very carefully. He took the closest side-corridor he could and hid in the shadows until the group passed. When they headed down a different way, he breathed a sigh of relief.
“Quiet down!” a man bellowed from somewhere in the dark—Artus thought it came from deeper in the hall he was hiding in. He heard the crack of a whip, and someone screamed; a woman’s voice.
Holding the Delloran broadsword tightly in both hands, Artus stalked down the corridor, step after step, eyes straining against the dark to see something that would tell him where the sound was coming from. He hadn’t gone very far when he saw the orange glow of an oil lamp flickering from a lopsided arch. Backing up next to it, he hazarded a peek around the corner.
He saw about a half-dozen wretched looking people chained together on a long bench. Over them stood a fat, bald Delloran, a whip in his hand and a heavy wool cape draped across his round shoulders. His arms were bare, too, and covered by a lattice work of scars. Artus had seen scars like that before, in some of the darker corners of Ayventry—you got those from knife fighting, and most people didn’t live long enough to get more than a few.
The knife-fighter had his back to Artus, and he was snarling and cursing at the prisoners in front of him. There were four women and two old men, and all of them looked as Hortense had—starved, terrified, and resigned to their fates.
“No more whining about food!” the knife-fighter barked, “or I’ll gut the lot of you freeloading whores!” He waddled then, crablike, to a wooden stool set before a small table and took up a half-eaten loaf of bread. Leering at the women, he took a big bite and chewed, humming to himself as though the hard bread were the finest meal he’d ever eaten.
Saints, Artus thought again, where does Sahand find these ogres?
The next thought came tight on the last one’s heels: Artus, you’re going to have to kill this man to save those people.
His stomach twisted again. He tried to think of another way, but his experience with the kind of soldiers Sahand employed reminded him they couldn’t be reasoned with and wouldn’t balk at stabbing a kid to death for fun. He couldn’t expect Hool to show up every time he was about to be murdered either.
And he couldn’t just leave them here. He was beginning to identify this as a character flaw.
Artus shifted his grip on the stolen broadsword—his palms were sweaty, despite the cold. He took a deep breath to try and calm his dancing heart. It would be easy—the easiest thing ever. He had the element of surprise. Just run in, hit him in the head with sword, and bam, that’s it. He tried to imagine how much blood there would be or what kind of sound it would make. He reminded himself that he was doing it to protect innocents, and that Hann would understand. He could be a soldier—it was in his blood. All the men in his family had been soldiers.
Artus counted to three in his head and, with a whooping cry he hoped was terrifying, charged the knife-fighter. The big man’s blue eyes seemed to pop out of his head at the sight of Artus, sword held high, running for him. The Delloran stood, put up his hands, and then Artus brought the sword down with all his remaining strength.
The blade sheared off the man’s fingers on his right hand, but it missed his head. Instead, it dug itself into the side of the man’s neck and moved a full six inches across his torso, only to wedge itself somewhere in his rib cage. Blood spurted in all directions and the man keened pathetically as he contemplated his mangled hand. Then his eyes rolled back in his head and he fell backward with a crash, upsetting the table and stool and knocking the oil lamp to the floor. Artus’s face felt wet and warm; he figured he knew why. While he stared at the dead man, he wiped his face absently with his shirt. His whole body seemed to tremble at once. “Saints.”
“Who are you?”
Artus blinked and found himself looking at a woman old enough to be his mother. “I . . . I . . . my name is Artus and I’m here to rescue you.” He immediately felt himself blush. What a stupid thing to say.
“The keys! Get the keys, boy!” one of the other women yelled, pointing at the key ring on the dead Delloran’s hip.
Artus found himself staring at the body again. “Weird . . .” he said to no one in particular, “he was the first Delloran I’ve seen who wasn’t wearing armor.”
As Artus fished the keys off the man’s belt, one of the women spat in the direction of the man’s face. “He said it made him hot, the pig.”
Artus handed the keys to the prisoners and they began to undo their chains. “Did any of you know a man named Hortense?” he asked. “He had a daughter here but the Dellorans took her away. I’m looking for her.”
The woman who had asked him who he was shook her head and sighed. “Gone, boy. Sold off, dead, or worse. Poor lamb.”
Artus blinked—he didn’t know how to react to that. Now what did he do? “But . . . I promised her father . . .”
The other prisoners were heading out the door without even bothering with good-byes. They looked like rats scampering out of a cupboard. One of the old men snorted at Artus before shuffling into the dark. “Forget her, sonny—it’s every man for himself now.”
The woman patted Artus on the cheek and kissed him on the forehead. “Hann bless you, Artus. Wish I had a son like you. Damned cowards, the lot of them.” Then, with a sad smile, she vanished through the doorway.
“Great.” He sighed. “Now what?”
The key to successfully fighting multiple armed opponents was to stop fighting multiple armed opponents as soon as humanly possible. There were three typical solutions to this: killing them quickly, disarming them quickly, or running someplace where they couldn’t all get you at once. Tyvian was currently exercising the third of these options.
He had lost track of the number of turns, twists, chutes, and winding stairs he’d plummeted down or scampered up; he had no idea where he now was. He knew two things, though—he was down to three or four men behind him, which was a great improvement over eight—and the smell of blood and brymm was getting stronger. He hoped very much this was because he was closer to its source and not because of whatever Sahand was doing. He had a sneaking suspicion, though, that it was both.
Tyvian squeezed through a crack in a wall through which a flood of orange light was pouring. He found himself up on a narrow ledge ringing the top of a massive circular chamber. The floor was a complex and asymmetrical pattern of orbs, crystals, and mageglass prisms, all radiating out from a central pool perhaps ten yards in diameter that frothed and bubbled with a thick, hot crimson liquid. Beside it, completely naked and inscribed from head to toe in burning orange runescript, stood Banric Sahand, chanting in a booming voice. Tyvian was dumbfounded by what he saw—a ritual of some kind involving artifacts and magecraft he’d never heard of, let along seen before. “Kroth.”
The soldier behind him scuffed his foot along the ledge at the last second, affording Tyvian enough notice to parry a thrust from a broadsword that might have speared his spine. Their blades still engaged, the soldier moved as though to lock them together. In his exhausted state, Tyvian knew better than to put himself corps à corps with a larger opponent, so he disengaged and withdrew two paces, careful to keep both feet planted on the narrow ledge.
The soldier took a wild thrust at his forward leg. Tyvian lifted it clear and slammed it down on top of the man’s sword before he could recover. His weapon pinned, Tyvian whipped his saber in a quick cut to the only part of the man’s face that wasn’t armored—his chin and lips. Blood spurted from the soldier’s mouth and he moved a hand to block his bleeding face. Tyvian followed up with a sharp pommel strike to his temple, knocking the man him off the ledge, to crash to the unforgivin
g stone floor some twenty feet below.
Behind that soldier, though, there was another . . . and another . . . and another . . . and another still, squeezing through the crack. “Kroth,” Tyvian swore again. It seemed he hadn’t lost as many as he’d hoped.
The next fellow had a short spear and a shield, and he jabbed it at Tyvian’s face, backing the smuggler up. This one was more cautious than the last, and Tyvian couldn’t find an opening. He beat the spear’s shaft away, recalling how Chance would have cut straight through the hardened wood like it was a daisy stem. Tyvian wondered if there were any way off this ledge besides falling—one didn’t seem to present itself.
“Hyah!” the Delloran yelled, and lunged. The spear nearly took Tyvian in the throat, but he parried it aside at the last second. That let him get inside the man’s guard, and grabbing hold of the Delloran’s spear-hand, Tyvian turned on the spot and flipped the man over one shoulder with more power than he thought he had in him at the moment. Another Delloran crashed to the floor below.
Another Delloran squeezed through the crack.
“Kroth’s bloody Kroth-spawned teeth!” Tyvian’s heart was pounding and his situation was not improving. The next man had a battle-axe and a mean, snaggle-toothed grin. “How much is Sahand paying you for this, honestly?”
Below, Sahand completed his chant with a final, guttural syllable. He slapped a hand on the surface of the roiling bloody pool, and for a split second Tyvian thought the world might have just exploded. A cataclysmic roar shook the air itself, so loud it blurred Tyvian’s vision and caused his breath to catch in his throat. He and all the Dellorans on the ledge put their hands to their ears as the masonry around them quaked and rumbled, as though being rung like a giant bell. Through his half-open eyes Tyvian could see a fiery red streak of energy sizzling from the pool, through several of the focusing apparatuses, and then in a massive, burning line of power down the primary corridor entering the chamber. The heat and power of the thing blew him back against the wall as though hit with a gust of hurricane wind, and then he fell forward, stumbling on the ledge. Tyvian flailed around to find purchase but found none.
THWUMP!
Tyvian’s fall was broken by the corpse of one of the men he had just recently tossed off the ledge. He landed on his ribs and felt at least one of them crack with a white blaze of pain, but was otherwise not seriously harmed. He rolled to his knees, trying to suck air in through his deflated lungs, and cast about for his saber.
He found it, and thanks to the ring as much as anything, pulled himself to his feet. He pointed the blade around him, expecting attack, but found none. All of the Dellorans who had risked stepping out on the ledge had fallen, just like him. They didn’t have any of their compatriots to break their fall, though, and lay in broken heaps around him—some injured, some dead.
His ears were still ringing, but he heard Sahand’s harsh laugh and turned to see the Mad Prince walking around the edge of the pool toward him. Tyvian moved the opposite direction.
“So, Reldamar, I take it that you have refused my offer, then?”
Tyvian had no idea what he was talking about, but nodded anyway. “Is it that obvious?”
Even naked, Sahand possessed a kind of confidence that Tyvian felt unnerving. The man probably hadn’t been in a room where he wasn’t the most dangerous being there in, well, decades. “Surely you don’t expect to stop me? What would be in it for you?”
“This is the old power sink, isn’t it?” Tyvian asked, trying to stall, eyes casting for a likely escape route. “Gods, Sahand—what have you done to it?”
Sahand stopped walking. Tyvian noted the Mad Prince was now standing in a veta inscribed in the floor and connected by lines of sorcerous script to various other crystals, prisms, and focusing devices. “I have made a weapon, Reldamar. A weapon so potent no one will dare oppose me.”
Of course—a weapon. Tyvian knew he was creating a weapon—he had basically told the League as much, but . . . but this? “You’re using the ley lines, aren’t you—the Trell line that runs through Freegate, Galaspin . . .”
“ . . . and Saldor, very good. The very lines of energy that network the world together I will use as conduits for my new weapon.” He nodded to the pool. “When the Fey energy I have banked in this sink is released, it will send a wave of power down the Trell Valley that will be sufficient to destroy half of Freegate, shatter Galaspin’s walls like matchsticks, and set Saldor ablaze.”
Tyvian’s heart felt still and cold. “You’ll kill tens of thousands of people . . . hundreds of thousands. Hann’s boots, man . . . it’s . . .”
Sahand grinned like a tiger. “Spare me, smuggler. I long ago stopped heeding the objections of small-minded men. Today I crush my enemies, tomorrow I make my demands—that is all that really matters. Now,” he put his hands over the churning waters of the pool, “I have been distracted long enough. Gallo, if you would . . .”
Tyvian looked over his shoulder to see the hulking, armored bulk of Gallo closing in on him, his vicious falchion in his hand, an expressionless fish-eyed stare fixating on him. Tyvian had seen how much damage Hool inflicted on the life-warded Gallo no more than twenty-four hours ago, and here he was, good as new. Tyvian backed away and then fled from the chamber. Behind him, he heard Sahand’s guttural chant begin anew as well as the rhythmic clank and constant wheeze of Gallo in pursuit.
Tyvian couldn’t get very far before darkness and the pressure his broken rib put on his lungs was too much, even for the ring, to ignore. He skidded to a halt, propping himself up against a pillar, and turned to face Gallo.
The giant was ten paces away, a shard of illumite around his neck, his weapon at the ready. He walked toward Tyvian as though entering battle was as stimulating as strolling through a public park.
Tyvian’s arms shook, his legs shook, the tip of his saber wavered in the pale light. There was no way he could fight a monster like Gallo, but he also couldn’t outrun him. He would get one good hit, and that was all. It had to count. A spike through the heart wouldn’t slow him, a stab through the leg wouldn’t bleed the bastard out, and no amount of slashing or stabbing of his stomach or arms or shoulders would do much good. There was one thing that he could hit, though, that no amount of pain tolerance or sorcerous death-warding would protect.
When Gallo was three paces away, Tyvian lunged for his eyes. The bulky warrior wasn’t expecting this—probably didn’t think Tyvian had the speed left in him or the skill to pull it off—and his guard was too slow. All it took were two precise thrusts, one to either side of the grotesque wolf’s-head helm Gallo wore, and Tyvian was pleased to see the armored juggernaut stumble a pace, groaning with what amounted to the biggest expression of pain Tyvian had ever heard from him.
It was then Tyvian’s turn to be surprised—nobody managed to counterattack immediately after being blinded. Nobody, of course, but Gallo. Tyvian was too slow with his own guard to stop Gallo’s heavy-bladed falchion from cutting deeply into his side. The aim was fouled a bit by his shirt of borrowed mail, otherwise it would have cleaved the smuggler clean in two. As it stood, Tyvian fell on the ground, blood pumping through his hands as he clutched them over the ragged wound.
Gallo swung again, this time blindly, and Tyvian rolled away. With reserves of energy he never knew he had, he managed to stumble to his feet and run. He didn’t go more than ten paces before falling again, and then there was no getting up. It was dark save for the light coming off of Gallo, and Tyvian pushed himself toward the darkness, flopping and rolling as his life’s blood spilled from his guts. Each of Gallo’s heavy footsteps sounded like a death knell. He got me, Tyvian thought, the faceless son of a bitch got me . . .
Spots danced in his vision and the ring burned and throbbed with a kind of urgent, energetic power that kept his right hand pulling him along the uneven, icy floor. He wasn’t dead. Not yet. Not y
et, dammit.
Tyvian slid down some kind of fissure in the floor and flopped onto his back in another hallway. He could hear Gallo’s rasping breath above him and saw the tip of his falchion probing the mouth of the crevice through which Tyvian had slipped. “Too small, you ugly blind bastard,” Tyvian hissed, blood bubbling to his lips.
He heard Gallo move away, but knew for certain that Sahand’s monstrous henchman wasn’t going to give up that easily. He still needed to escape. He needed to find a way to heal his wounds. The pain was almost too much; he found he could scarcely think.
Tyvian kept crawling, though, his ring hand seemingly imbued with an endless strength drawn from reserves far beyond his understanding. Half-baked theories about magecraft and Lumenal energy flitted in and out of his head, but didn’t stay long.
It was then that he found Myreon’s body.
The wheelbarrow she had been in was overturned, and she lay on her back, her face pale, almost blue, snowflakes frosting her eyelashes and hair. Moonlight poured in from somewhere, and Tyvian, practically nose-to-nose with the body of his old enemy, could see her clearly.
She was certainly dead. He felt something dreadful building in him—something worse than the pain and the exhaustion, something sick and hollowing, as though his heart had been ripped out. He found himself blinking away tears. “Kroth. What . . . what a time to go soft . . .”
What was wrong with him? Myreon Alafarr was a devoted foe to everything he did or wanted to do. She had hounded him across every country in the West, ruined a half dozen of his most profitable plots, and now here they were, dying and dead, side by side—the victims of the same madman.
Tyvian held up his blood-slick ring hand and curled his lips at the humble little band. “You stupid trinket. Happy? You’ve killed me. You’ve killed us both.”
Wait . . .
Tyvian’s overworked heart leapt with a sudden inspiration. The ring! Of course! The ring could heal! Why didn’t he think about that before? Ah, yes—the bleeding to death and all that had distracted him. All he needed to do was press the thing to the injury, probably, and sort of do what he had done with breaking the chains, right?
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