Dross (Sphereworld: Joined at the Hilt Book 2)

by Caleb Wachter

  She strained with every scrap of power Randall’s meager right arm could generate, bringing herself up and over in a rainbow arc that ended on his forearm. Her star metal edge bite deep into the Guardsman’s left vambrace, but surprisingly did not go completely through it, even as all of her Titansand ballast flooded her tip at the moment of impact.

  He slashed blindly at Randall with the ruined broadsword but she hip-checked the blow and felt a thrill of savage glee as their new ‘kilt’ deflected the blow just as she hoped it would. She then wrenched her star metal edge free from his ruined vambrace as the Equalizer slipped from his fingers.

  “I’ll kill you for that,” the Guardsman’s hollow, metallic voice growled.

  “What…you weren’t going to…kill me before?” Randall demanded through ragged breaths as Dan’Moread launched another barrage at the ailing Guardsman.

  She drove her edge into his right pauldron after unbalancing him with a pair of feints, and she just barely managed to spin away from a vicious knee which only grazed Randall’s left hip.

  Spinning herself over in Randall’s hand, she reset her Titansand ballast into her pommel. The Guardsman lowered into a crouch, apparently intending to bull-rush them, but suddenly a hail of arrows clanged against his armor—with two somehow managing to pierce his robust casement, which even Dan’Moread found difficult to penetrate.

  She seized the momentary advantage as he hesitated, driving her tip into his left flank and wrenching sideways—hard!—after burying herself several inches into his flesh.

  For a split second before her momentum tore her free of his side, Dan’Moread thought that Randall’s nose smelled a decidedly reptilian odor—but then the world exploded into white light and her connection with Randall’s body was severed.

  Looking around dumbly from his hands and knees, it took Randall a few seconds to realize that they had been hit. His hand came to Dani’s hilt, which he instinctively grasped before blindly scrambling away from where he thought the Guardsman might be standing.

  Thankfully, no further attacks came as the muffled ‘thunks’ of repeated arrow strikes landed all around him. He looked around for the Guardsman but found no trace of him, so he decided it was time to beat a retreat.

  Once again fully in control of his body, Randall’s vision slowly returned and he crawled toward the nearby alley as fast as he could manage. It took him several seconds to reach the relative safety of the alley, but by the time he got there his vision had largely returned.

  “Dani!” he shouted, vainly attempting to overcoming the persistent deafness caused by the previous explosion. “Dani!” he repeated, but if she gave a reply he could not hear it.

  Looking out on the street, he saw that they were less than a hundred paces from the southern gate. He also so that the southern gate was literally ablaze as Federation soldiers battled strangely-dressed warriors whose statures were nearly as slight as Randall’s.

  “Ghaevlians?!” he said in disbelief after recognizing the leaf emblem on their cloaks.

  He shook his head as a sudden wave of vertigo swept over him. He needed to get out of the city as fast as possible, but the only way he could see to do that was by passing through the fierce battle taking place at the southern gate.

  He looked to the nearby city wall, which stood twenty feet high and half as thick at this particular location, and saw a guardhouse not far from where he stood.

  “You can do this, Randy,” he muttered, barely able to hear himself over the combination of deafness and din. “It’s now or never!”

  He ran out of the alley, managing to take four steps before the building to his right exploded.

  A piece of stone struck him behind the ear, robbing him of his equilibrium but thankfully not doing much more. He tried to shield his head with his left hand while keeping a firm grip on Dan’Moread in his right, and after a few stagger-steps he managed to resume his run toward the seemingly empty guardhouse.

  The door was open, and he ducked inside to find still-burning lamps filling the guardhouse’s interior with their light.

  He spotted the stairwell which presumably led to the walkway atop the wall, and after climbing the steps his suspicions were confirmed as he emerged on top of the city’s south wall.

  From this particular vantage point he could actually see the leviathan, which held what looked like part of a river boat in a massive tentacle which protruded from the giant creature’s conch-shaped ‘arm.’ The chunk of wood and metal around which that tentacle was wrapped raised up and slammed down onto one of the two remaining war machines stationed on top of the sea-ward wall.

  The metal, humanoid Federation war machine exploded in a flash of light so bright that Randall was temporarily blinded. He instinctively ducked down, and when his vision returned he looked out on the harbor and saw that the sea-ward wall upon which the Federation juggernaut had stood now featured a massive, crumbling hole—and the magical sea leviathan appeared no worse than it had prior to destroying the second of the three war machines.

  “This is insanity,” Randall whispered, turning to see that fighting had broken out twenty paces from where he now stood on top of the southern wall. He heard commotion from within the guardhouse, and he knew he had only a few seconds before he was embroiled in the melee which seemed ready to consume the entire city of Three Rivers.

  He sheathed Dan’Moread at his hip, actually cutting himself with her razor-sharp-and-utterly-insane crosspiece as he did so. After she was secured at his side, he ran to the outer wall and, without thinking—since doing so would have possibly robbed him of his nerve—he vaulted himself over the edge while keeping a two-knuckle-deep grip on the edge of the wall.

  His nimble feet found the hint of a purchase between the stones which made up the wall, and he lowered himself down just as the clatter of Federation boots filled the walkway he had just abandoned.

  He lowered himself several feet before his grip gave out on a crumbling corner of a sandstone block. Fortunately, he managed to roll with the worst of the fall and kept from injuring his legs. His left arm, on the other hand, flared with pain after he used it to break his fall.

  Above him, and massive explosion—one which was clearly magical in nature—seemed to suck the air up from where he knelt on the dirt beneath the wall. A fireball unlike anything he had ever seen erupted above him, enveloping the Federation soldiers in a roar of flame which quickly turned into an impenetrable cloud of smoke above him.

  One Federation soldier fell from the ramparts, landing nearby with a sickening crunch which had clearly been the bones of his neck snapping apart.

  Randall scrambled away from the wall as fast as he could manage, cradling his left arm as he put as much distance between himself and the city he had called home for nearly his entire life.

  What happened? Dan’Moread asked, eliciting a sigh of relief as Randall staggered in the general direction of the riverbank which was at least a half mile away.

  “Thank the Lady you’re all right,” Randall gushed, gritting his teeth as his left forearm flared with pain.

  Did we kill the Guardsman?

  “I think he got away,” Randall said as he felt an unexpected wave of nausea come over him. He collapsed to his knees and vomited all over the ground, acutely aware of the throbbing pain in his arm as the nausea blessedly passed. “We’ve got to get to the river,” he said as he regained his feet and made his way toward the river.

  He made it to the river bank on legs that felt like they were made of seaweed, and amazingly he thought he saw the Jiggling Maid’s outline in the darkness as he collapsed onto the soft grass which lined the riverbank.

  They will not stop for us unless we get ahead of them, she said. Can you run far enough to intercept them a few miles up the river?

  “I…I’m not sure,” he wheezed before steeling his nerves and re-gathering his wobbly legs beneath himself, “but I’ll try.”

  His gait was more a jog than a run, but even so he managed to gain g
round on the sluggish riverboat.

  Behind him, the battle for Three Rivers raged on long after he finally managed to flag down Rhekim and re-board the Jiggling Maid where his friends awaited.

  Chapter XVI: Fall from Grace

  3-2-6-659

  Fever was something which Rada had not experienced in years. Not since before he had become the Chosen of the Rotting God had he known the misery of physical illness, but now that his god had forsaken him he once again felt the fragility of flesh.

  His body was drenched in sweat, his wounds festered so badly that the scent of death filled his nostrils, and his mind was filled with feverish thoughts that were little more than rage bordered on all sides by despair.

  Like fever, despair was something from which Rada had thought himself permanently divorced. But as he thrashed about in the cold, dark Underworld while the fever sought to consume both his mind and body, he knew that he was no longer set above mortal man as he had been.

  A lesser man might have cried, ‘Why?!’ to whatever agents might hear his woeful laments, but Rada was not a lesser man. He would not grant his enemies—which, if he survived, would include a risen god—the satisfaction of seeing his will break from something as trivial as a fever.

  So severe was the fever, however, that he felt completely removed from his body. It was as though he was a witness to his own suffering, a third party whose duty it was to experience every iota of agony but who was denied the ability to do anything about it. In that way, he was nearly powerless.

  But he somehow managed, through extreme force of will, to focus on the sensation in his fingers. They were hot and throbbed with the rhythm of his heart, but he kept his mind anchored on their sensation for what seemed like years of incessant, unmitigated suffering.

  Then, after an interval the length of which he would not even guess at, he realized he could feel his entire hand. He flexed his fingers, weakly and without coordination at first but eventually he managed to focus his mind on the effort. Slowly, he regained control of his hand. Control of his arm soon followed, and then he even managed to move his head this way and that.

  He gasped loudly, clutching his chest and recalling the final moments of the battle with the Rotting God’s servant—the same servant which had worn his wife’s head like a mask meant to conceal the truth of its identity.

  He recalled with elation how he had managed to bring that lumbering, patchwork flesh-thing—a thing whose ‘body’ was composed of no fewer than ten different corpses—down, even though he was one-armed at the time.

  He looked over at where his arm had previously been missing, and his lips peeled back in a feral grin as the soft, green light of the Underworld showed that his new arm—which he had taken from the patchwork flesh-thing—was not completely rotten and dead.

  It was certainly less healthy than the rest of his body, but Rada’s theory had just been proven correct: he had managed to retain some small measure of the Rotting God’s physical gifts, even if the Rotting God had not wished to grant them.

  It was in that moment that Rada realized he had been played for a fool. No god worth following could make such a grievous error in failing to slaughter one who had been declared an enemy—in this case, that enemy being Rada himself. But even more damning was the fact that, not only had Rada slain the Rotting God’s agent—and, purely by coincidence, Rada had lain his dead wife to rest in the process—but Rada had then taken from that agent’s makeshift body a shard of the Rotting God’s heart…a heart which now beat, with ever-increasing vigor, deep in Rada’s chest.

  He tried to move his ‘new’ arm, which was slightly smaller than its predecessor, and failed. But pure, unadulterated agony coursed up and down that arm shortly after his failed attempt, and Rada knew that where there was pain there was hope.

  He slowly rolled over, dragging himself to his feet while using the Demon Blade he had taken from Jennin’s corpse to prop himself up.

  After drawing himself to an upright posture, he threw his head back and laughed defiantly. A god had tried to kill him and, not only had Rada thwarted that attempt, he had managed to tear a piece of that god out and keep it for himself.

  His laughter echoed through the bowels of the Underworld, but his energy faded and he was forced to conserve his strength.

  His followers were dead, that much he knew for certain. Perhaps his bitch of a wife had made the smart play and taken those loyal to her somewhere safe. If she had, he would not begrudge her that victory. He would not even waste his efforts trying to locate her, though if their paths did happen to cross he would give her the only reward befitting deserters and usurpers.

  But unless or until that happened, Rada was content to focus his entire attention on the only thing that truly mattered to the living. It was the same thing for which the dead cried out in their impotent extremity from beyond the veil. It was, in Rada’s estimation, the only thing truly worth living for:

  Revenge.

  And as the face of the Blooded whelp sprang into the fore of his mind, Rada knew precisely who would receive the bulk of his wrath.

  If the whelp had not defeated him and destroyed Ahsaytsan, Rada would have foreseen the Rotting God’s betrayal. And even if, for some unknowable reason, the Grey Blade’s foresight had been unable to predict that betrayal, Rada was supremely confident that he would have been able to defend himself at least long enough to escape.

  “You took my arm, boy,” Rada growled as the faintest pinpricks of sensation swept up his ‘new’ arm, causing his lips to peel back in a feral grin, “now I’ll take your head.”

  How his revenge would manifest, Rada did not know. He would need to secure a more potent weapon than the Demon Blade he now gripped—a blade which had taken significant punishment in the battle with the flesh-thing that had worn his wife’s head. And he would need to evade the Rotting God and its half-dead ‘minions.’

  “I will have my revenge,” he vowed before taking his first, rage-fueled and pain-filled steps toward the nearest exit from the Underworld.

  Chapter XVII: To Murkwater—and Beyond!

  Midday, 8-2-6-659

  “Thank you, Rhekim,” Randall said graciously after stepping onto the docks at the same village, Murkwater, where the riverboat captain had dropped him off the last time he had been a passenger aboard the Jiggling Maid. “As agreed,” he produced a gold bar, “the second gold bar.”

  Rhekim accepted the bar and clenched his fist tightly around it. “Where will you go?” he asked, tilting his head toward Randall’s companions: Lorie, her three children, Ellie and Yordan.

  Randall hesitated, having deliberated over whether or not to tell Rhekim their plans.

  We will need help in the future, Randall, Dan’Moread unexpectedly said. The False River is no longer dry; a riverboat captain would be a friend worth having for a Baron whose holdings adjoin the reborn river.

  “Reborn River?” Randall repeated, instantly taking a liking to the name.

  “Where is that?” Rhekim asked skeptically. “I’ve plied these waterways my whole life; I’ve never heard of it.”

  “Rhekim…what if I told you that the False River isn’t dry?”

  Rhekim eyed him suspiciously, “I heard something about that…”

  “And what if I told you,” Randall continued quietly, “that, if you were to make your way up it a few hundred miles, you’d find a seemingly impossible bridge with a small fortress on the eastern bank?”

  Rhekim’s brow lowered, “Did you know about the attack on Three Rivers, Randall?”

  “No,” Randall half-lied, “I knew that tensions were mounting between the Federation and some of the northern interests, but I didn’t know anything about that…that thing,” he shuddered as he recalled the monstrous, aquatic titan which had besieged the harbor. “But I did know about the False River being ‘reborn’,” he continued earnestly.

  Rhekim nodded slowly, “A new river would present new opportunities…and with Three Rivers besieged I won’t b
e heading back there any time soon.”

  “I can’t guarantee anything, but the owner of that bridge is…well, he’s a friend,” Randall finished somewhat lamely. “I can guarantee that whatever trade there is in the area, the Baron will look favorably on people I recommend to him. Just think about it,” Randall said, hefting the last of his retinue’s bundled belongings over his shoulder.

  “Baron?” Rhekim repeated skeptically. “How’d you end up friends with a Baron—and how in the Lady’s name did you convince him to let you use his papers?”

  Randall cocked a grin, “I hope you’ll come give us a look, Rhekim. It’s a new world up the river—and, in times like these, friends are in short supply.”

  He turned and moved to re-join his friends, leaving Rhekim to conduct whatever business Murkwater had to offer.

  I did not know you could be so persuasive, Dani said with muted approval.

  “I am a professional seducer, Dani,” he muttered before reaching the small group of half-elven women and pureblood children—children whose forebears had sufficiently diluted their Ghaevlian blood to the point that it was no longer detectable in any way.

  So you claim, she riposted, causing him to pause just before he had opened his mouth to speak with Lorie.

  After briefly glaring down at Dan’Moread’s hilt, Randall returned his focus to the former owner of The Last Coin, “Are your kids ready to travel or do you think they need a night in a proper bed first?”