The Warslayer

by Edghill, Rosemary

  "Belegir?" Glory whispered hopefully. To her vast relief, his eyelids fluttered. He tried to draw a deep breath and coughed, whimpering with pain.

  "Where I come from, werewolves don't come out during the day," she said, forcing a bravado she was far from feeling. "Don't worry. It's dead. I killed it."

  "One of Her creatures," Belegir whispered, and this time Glory didn't have the heart to disagree. That thing she'd killed had been evil—evil in the way that terrorists and serial killers were evil; a thing that took a personal delight in cruelty, in harm.

  "I've got to get you back inside where it's safe, Bel. If that thing could of come in to the cave, I reckon it would've, so in there must be safe." Mustn't it? Please let the answer to that one be "yes." "How bad is it?"

  "I can walk," the little Allimir whispered through his damaged throat.

  Glory doubted it, but she knew she couldn't carry him, at least not far. She got to her feet, using her sword as a cane—everything was starting to hurt—and lifted Belegir to his feet.

  The Allimir were useless in a fight, but that didn't mean they weren't brave. The guts it took for Belegir to get on his feet and stay on them without complaint made Glory feel small and ashamed. His face was grey with agony, and fresh blood welled from every wound, but he made no sound. He leaned heavily on her, and the two of them shuffled the few feet to the cave mouth.

  Even that much exertion had Belegir gasping and choking for air. There was no way he could walk as far as the fountain.

  "Is this safe? Belegir—is this safe?" Glory asked urgently.

  "What?" he mumbled. She leaned him gently against the cool stone wall to take some of the strain off her own back and shoulders.

  "Is this far enough for the Oracle's magic to protect you? Are you safe here?"

  "Safe," he croaked, but she wasn't sure if he understood.

  It would have to be safe enough. Because she couldn't carry him any farther, and he couldn't walk. She lowered him gently to the stone floor, placing her sword beside him—little use though it would be to him if this place wasn't safe—and took off running.

  She had to get him back to the fountain. There was water there. Their supplies. Safety.

  The night before on her way to the Oracle's spring, she'd passed chamber after chamber stuffed full of stored tat. What were the odds that in one of them, the cart or sledge used to bring them in was still there? And if she couldn't find one quickly, she could at least make up a travois from some of the mattresses, ropes, and blankets in the sleeping rooms. They could survive here. They might go short of food, but with all that water, they could run on scant rations a few days.

  It was a long leisurely walk from the cave opening to the Pilgrims' fountain. She reached it in twenty minutes, every step jarring stars behind her eyes and making her head throb with the mother of all migraines. She stopped to drink and duck her head, rinsing the sourness from her mouth. Her shoulder was starting to stiffen, and the gashes, clotted with blood and dust, looked hot and angry even against a ripe sunburn. Her back hurt and her head and face throbbed with a dull headachy pain from the blow she had taken.

  Best broker me a miracle, then, while I'm here.

  "You hear that, Old Woman?" she said aloud, flipping her sopping braid back over her shoulder. It hit her back with a wet slap. "Dream-catcher, Oracle, whoever you want to be. You give us a fair shake. Or I'm climbing back up on that dinner-plate of yours and ripping your gizzard out, you nasty old bat!"

  It hurt to talk.

  She ran up the shallow steps to the temple, something nagging at the back of her mind. Cistern. The big cisterns in the Presence chamber. You saw how far away the Wellspring was. You want to be the one carrying bucket after bucket all that way by hand? Bet they have a wagon. Have to have.

  It didn't take her long, after all, to find it. There were only two sorts of places it could be: near the spring or near the cisterns, and she already knew what was stored near the spring. Near the Presence Chamber she found a series of rooms that were obvious storerooms, holding everything necessary to the life of a well-dressed Temple acolyte. One room held nothing other than several small flatbed carts of carved and polished and gilded oak. There was a swag of velvet-covered rope on the front, but Glory suspected the carts were mainly designed to be pushed. Their wheels were wood, bound with what looked suspiciously like gold. Each was designed so that two large square ashwood vats could be fitted into its bed, and the sides of the vats could be hung with golden buckets. Glory sighed and shook her head. All the treasure of El Dorado, but what she wanted was the cart to use as a gurney. She dragged one of them out of the room, and by dint of main force and using several words she hadn't known she remembered, got the cart itself into the Presence Chamber. Getting it around the narrow turn scraped the crust off her wound and got her shoulder bleeding again, and after that she left long smudgy red commas on every wall she staggered into. She wept, and swore, and howled in frustration, glad that there was no one to hear. But she got it done.

  She stopped at the sleeping cubbies to load the cart up with mattresses, then hauled it out onto the portico. She looked down the long flight of stairs. No sense just giving the cart a push and letting it jounce down, when it might crash to flinders at the bottom. She sighed and backed it around, holding onto the velvet rope and preparing to use herself as a brake. The cart was all wood and heavy. Fortunately the steps were wide and shallow.

  There was a tense moment near the end as the velvet rope, never designed to support the whole weight of the cart, tore free, but the cart was most of the way down the steps by that point, and all it did was bounce noisily the rest of the way down and roll gently into the middle of the floor.

  Glory sighed, shaking with exhaustion and pent-up emotion, but she couldn't stop now. Belegir was counting on her.

  She was counting on herself.

  She riffled their supplies and found the mead he'd mentioned yesterday. She took that and filled a waterskin at the fountain and added all of the blankets, loading everything on the cart, and, on inspiration, added the coil of rope that Belegir had used to lash down the pack. Then she began to push the cart through the corridor.

  Across the stone floor it was fine, and across the crushed gravel as well.

  When it reached the soft sand, the wheels stopped turning entirely. Pushing the cart became like pushing a sledge. If the sand had been any deeper, this might have been impossible. As it was, it was only nearly so.

  She didn't stop, though the struggle was a new and particular species of hell. She desperately needed to reach Belegir, not knowing whether he was dead or alive, and she was reduced to this Tantalusian crawl. She put her head down and her shoulder down and pushed, stubbornly. Her feet slid in the sand, blurring the patterns further. Any tears she might have had left were burned away by sullen fury. And she didn't stop.

  Eventually the wheels crunched across gravel, then ran free on stone once more, the lack of resistance driving her to her knees as the cart rolled fluidly away from her.

  "Belegir?" Don't let him be dead he can't be dead if he's dead I'm climbing up to the top of your magic mountain and cutting your guts out whether you're real or not you poxy bitch—

  But he was breathing, still, she could see it, and Glory whimpered in relief.

  She grabbed the water and a blanket and hurried over to him. Moistening the edge of the blanket with the water, she dabbed carefully at his swollen blood-caked face with it, then pulled the blanket up over him.

  His eyes opened slowly, then widened in fear.

  "It's okay. You're safe," Glory said soothingly. "We're going to get you back inside and get you all fixed up, and everything's going to be fine. . . ." She was blowing smoke and she knew it, though she hoped Belegir didn't. She didn't know if he'd brought along whatever passed here for a first-aid kit, but she did know she didn't know how to use it if he had. Without Belegir, she couldn't find the rest of the Allimir again, either, and she doubted any of them would come
looking for them when they didn't make their rendezvous.

  Think about that later.

  She raised Belegir carefully to a half-sitting position and offered him the waterskin. He drank, thirstily, and when he started coughing again, there wasn't as much blood as there had been before. She wanted to be hopeful, but she felt too sick and terrified to think straight. She was exhausted with pain, and wanted nothing more than to crawl into a corner and sleep until the world went away.

  "I wasn't sure—" Belegir whispered.

  "Had to go whistle up a taxi," Glory answered in Vixen's flat American drawl. "Brought the mead back with me. Figure with a bellyful of that, you won't be in a position to complain about my driving."

  Belegir smiled, painfully. The monster had hit him in the face and by now the bruises had the time to ripen; his nose and one eye were purple and swollen, distorting his face to unrecognizability. His lip was split, puffy and blackened. "Slayer, what then?" he asked.

  Glory smiled, even though it hurt. "Then we figure out who sent tall dark and hairy. And I go explain to them why they mustn't do things like that, I reckon."

  Belegir seemed to believe her—which was more than Glory did, if the entire truth be told—and when she brought him the mead, he drank until the skin was nearly empty.

  "I will sleep now," he whispered.

  "I hope," Glory muttered, easing him down again. Getting him into the cart wasn't going to be a picnic for either of them, and she didn't even want to think about the return trip.

  She waited, kneeling beside Belegir, until she judged he was about as relaxed as he was ever going to be. Then she moved the cart as close to him as she could, remembering to turn it around so it was facing the way it would need to go. She stretched, limbering up as much as she dared, and squatted beside Belegir. She got an arm beneath his shoulders and one under his thighs, pulling him gently toward her.

  I hope he isn't too broken up inside. I hope his ribs aren't cracked and one doesn't go into a lung. I hope I don't blow a disk or anything else I'm going to need.

  Then she stood up, pulling him with her in a dead lift.

  The world went white, and she couldn't breathe. She hugged him tightly against her, terrified of dropping him to the hard stone floor, of falling. Pain snaked down her spine and into her legs, wrapped her skull in a hot crown of barbed wire.

  But she did it.

  He gasped and choked, clawing weakly at her chest with the arm that wasn't pinned against her. She walked—tiny, staggering baby steps—toward the cart, Belegir cradled in her arms. She laid him down on the mattresses, leaning forward to do it and feeling every muscle she possessed tremble and scream. His legs dangled over the end, but only by an inch or two. Not enough to count.

  She took his hand.

  "That's it. That's all. That's the worst, I promise. No more. No more pain. Belegir, I'm sorry. I'm so sorry, mate. This is my fault."

  His hand tightened over hers.

  "Cinnas said—" His voice was very faint, almost impossible to hear. She leaned over. "Cinnas said . . . there was a glory in war. The worst . . . outweighed the best, but . . . without war, there were no heroes." His eyes closed again.

  Heroes.

  "Some hero," Glory muttered, in an angry shaken whisper. Her eyes stung with tears, but she was too tired to cry. She covered Belegir with three of the blankets and used a fourth to make a pillow for his head. The cart was facing the temple. All she had to do now was get it there.

  She glanced back at the cave opening. That thing—safely dead—was still out there.

  What would Sister Bernadette do?

  She'd go look for clues. There was nothing Glory could do for Belegir just now. And he deserved a bit of a breathing space before she started jouncing him back toward the fountain.

  She took a deep breath and another careful stretch, and absently scrubbed at the blood trickling down her arm where the monster's claws had gashed her. It hurt and itched at the same time—a good trick, that. She stopped and picked up her sword, and cautiously headed back outside.

  The monster was still lying there, looking horribly real in the bright light of full day.

  Crows had already been at the body, pecking and digging, and there was a black trail of insects swarming across the pine needles toward this feast of broken meats. Glory shuddered all over, but by now she was far beyond simple squeamishness. She advanced on the creature, waving and shouting hoarsely to displace the crows. At least now she could get a good long look at what she'd killed.

  A good seven feet tall and muscled like a Russian weight-lifter. Covered with greasy, rank, greyish-black fur, but wearing clothes like a person—a vest and a pair of knee-length breeches, both of plain leather, dirty and stained and worn in patches. The skin on its palms and the soles of its feet was black, calloused to grey in places. It had long curved doglike nails, though its hands and feet were human-shaped, and the nails on its hands were pointed and sharp, as if they'd been filed. It had an inhuman head, more wolflike than ursine, but with a bear's short muzzle. It had the pointed ears of a wolf, though, set wide at the edges of the high-domed skull, giving it a gnomish aspect. Its teeth were long and yellow—a carnivore's teeth, designed to tear and rend, and gulp dinner down in large steaming chunks.

  It wasn't something from the murals. It wasn't anything Belegir had described, or known to expect. It had killed Kurfan. It had turned its back on her, even though she had a sword, to go for the Allimir mage, as though Belegir represented the greater threat. Had it waited for them to come out, or had that been a coincidence? Why had the animals come out at all? Belegir'd said they wouldn't, and they had.

  Too many questions, and not enough answers.

  She didn't really want to touch it, but she knew she didn't have a lot of choice. She was looking for clues.

  She knelt beside the body, gritting her teeth, and lifted the edge of the leather vest. Nothing there. No pockets, nothing concealed.

  But in the fur on the chest, a glint of bluish light.

  She started to reach for it and thought better of it, pulling one of her Lucite "rowan" stakes from its sheath on her boot to poke the dead monster's chest with. When she did, she found it was wearing a pendant around its neck, a piece of oval glass about as long as her thumb that glowed with its own cerulean light. There was a hole bored through the top, and a leather cord ran through that. She used the stake to tease the pendant off over the creature's head, being careful not to touch the pendant itself. She might not be from around here, but by now she knew magic when she saw it. Only all the Allimir magic she'd seen was purple, so what was this aquamarine stuff?

  She dumped the pendant into the pine needles and was about to turn back to the body when she saw motion out of the corner of her eye.

  The pendant was moving.

  Slowly—you could mistake it for the settling/sliding any object would do on a slippery slope, but it was more than that—the pendant was sliding away, like a needle being pulled by a powerful magnet.

  "God's Teeth!" Glory gasped. In one smooth (and well-practiced for the cameras) motion, she hammered the resin stake in her hand down into the dirt, skewering the knotted leather cord and trapping the glowing pendant.

  "I am not cut out for this, I am so not cut out for this!" she groaned aloud. What should she do now? Sister Bernadette would sprinkle the blasphemous thing with holy water and say a few prayers, but Sister Bernie wasn't here, and Anne-Marie Campbell wasn't a real Catholic anyway (nor, for that matter, was Glory), so that was no help. She watched in horrified disgust as the pendant slowly squirmed to the end of its tether and strained southward helplessly, then turned back to the monster's body.

  What Glory did know was that she couldn't leave something like this lying around loose, but it would take her a while to come up with the proper thing to do. Meanwhile, there were other chores to finish. She went on searching the body.

  No pockets in the leather knickers either, and nothing under the leather except more
monster. She couldn't just leave the body lying in front of the Oracle's cave like an invitation to every bug and carrion-crow in the forest, either. She was going to have to move it. Somehow. Glory sighed and got to her feet, staggering just a bit with weariness. It wasn't much past ten a.m., judging by the position of the sun, and it had already been a very full day.

  She brushed herself off thoroughly, feeling imaginary and not-so-imaginary bugs crawling all over her, then used the tip of her sword to prod the monster's body over the edge of the slope. It rolled a good distance, but she'd rather have it where she couldn't see it. The heavy carpet of fallen pine needles that lay everywhere on the ground should make it easy for her to drag it at least a few yards, providing she could shift it at all.

  There's always work in the Land of Erchanen for Vixen the Slayer, she told herself with gallows humor.

  Before she followed the body down, she dug up a few handfuls of earth and used it to scrub her sword-blade as clean as she could, then slipped the sword into its shoulder-sheath again. This time, the practiced flourish took her three tries to achieve; her hands shook, and every muscle ached and protested, sending shooting aches down her arms and back. Then she went down the hill again.

  Seeing Kurfan's ruined head again made her throat ache with pity. The poor beast had done his very best for them, and died a hero's death. She went to the monster and stripped off its leather vest, then used it to lift Kurfan's head off the stump of the branch and wrap it tenderly.

  She took the dog's head and set it on the monster's chest. Let the monster be Kurfan's honor-guard across the Rainbow Bridge. That done, she dragged the head and the body as far into the woods as she could, a hundred meters or so off the edge of the trail. Bigger things than birds would find both of them soon, and in a day or two everything would be reduced to anonymous bones. It was the best she could do.

  She stood for a moment among the pines, working up the gravel to go back up the trail and start the long business of getting the cart holding Belegir down the corridor, when she became aware of a peculiarly familiar odor.