The Warslayer

by Edghill, Rosemary

  For once, Dylan didn't have anything to say. He didn't even criticize her delivery. Glory strode past him, sword out, stepping into the ruin.

  She wasn't sure what she was looking for—the men's room door of the Waldorf-Astoria, maybe. But there wasn't anything. She got as far as the back wall of the building, and found nothing more than a curious absence of debris. No mages, good or bad. No glowing crystals in any color, or eldritch runes, or anything in the least peculiar. Assuming she could identify, any longer, what peculiar consisted of.

  But . . .

  If Belegir had recruited Glory to aid him because he was looking for a hero and had gotten her confused with the part she played, why was Dylan here? He didn't look all that much like Sister Bernadette, assuming The Powers That Were had decided she needed a sidekick. And if they'd wanted a Bad Guy, why wasn't Romy here, not Dylan?

  Though anybody who tangled with Romy Blackburn got what was coming to them, and then some.

  She shrugged. She had no clue. But even assuming they were after Fra Diavolo instead, anyone seizing upon Dylan as a henchweasel of evil had some unhappy surprises coming. Dylan wasn't willing to exert himself that much.

  "The explanation?" Dylan demanded waspishly, when she re-emerged. He'd dropped the rein, and Fimlas had wandered away, looking for something to eat. She hurried after the pony and collected it, then sheathed her sword before returning to Dylan. She picked up her sweatshirt, trying to figure out what she was going to say. No point in trying to convince Dylan of the reality and the gravity of the situation. If Great Drathil itself couldn't convince him, nothing she could say would help. Best to stick to simple facts.

  "When I was in Hollywood, a bunch of wizards from another dimension came and asked me to save their country from this villain called the Warmother. She lives up there," Glory added, pointing toward the mountaintop. "They'd got me all confused with, you know, Vixen, but before I could sort them out, their magic went off and I ended up here. Since she's going to do the lot of us whether I help or not, I thought I'd see what I could do."

  "That's the stupidest pitch I've ever heard," Dylan said after a long pause, speaking with the surreal self-possession of the entirely self-involved.

  Glory didn't say anything.

  Another pause, then: "Are you out of your flaming little mind, dearie?"

  Glory shook her head wearily. "This isn't a pitch, Dylan. This is real life. And do you have a better explanation? Or an idea?"

  "Run like hell," Dylan said smugly.

  "Where?"

  "Well, there's got to be somewhere," Dylan said uneasily. He looked around. "Even assuming I believe your idiotic story."

  "Come up with a better one," Glory said reasonably. She turned and began to lead Fimlas back up the path toward Ivradan.

  Dylan grumbled something barely audible and followed her.

  "But look," he said, though he was forced to address this cogent argument to her back. "Even were I to accept this utterly shopworn tale at face value: why me? Galaxy Quest is hardly a fresh new idea. If someone wants a hero for their gladiatorial games, well and good, but why me? I'm a henchman, Glory, dear. Second villain and all, supporting frightener—though I must say, my Mercutio has been rather well received, and—"

  "I don't know," Glory said bluntly, stopping to look back at him. "I want to know. I reckon I'd better know. But right now, I don't." She did manage to feel a bit sorry for Dylan. He'd been dropped right into the midst of things, and that none too gently. She'd be happy to send him off to the sidelines if she could, but where? The only possible place was the Oracle.

  Maybe she could send him back with Ivradan. Who'd be worrying just now, and who would at least be easier to explain things to. She led Dylan back out of the ruined city, up the gentle rise to the edge of the forest to where Ivradan waited with the other two ponies. She only hoped he wasn't as familiar with TITAoVtS as Englor had been, or she was going to have a lot of fast talking to do to explain the presence of Fra Diavolo.

  Ivradan's eyes widened when he saw Dylan. "Mind your manners," Glory told Dylan in an undertone. "His mum's a wizard who can turn you into a hatstand if you look crosswise at him. S'okay, Ivradan," she said, pitching her voice a little louder. "He's my, um, camrado. Dylan comes from back home. Where I come from."

  Ivradan inspected the newcomer warily, taking in Dylan's wildly inappropriate but very fashionable outfit.

  "Is he a wizard?" the Allimir horse-master asked at last. Dylan smirked.

  "Not exactly," Glory temporized. But if she'd managed to kill an eight-foot-tall monster with a dull sword, who knew what Dylan might not be able to accomplish if he had to? She considered how best to explain to Ivradan that he was to take Dylan back to the Oracle with him, and how to persuade Dylan to go peacefully.

  "More of your little friends?" Dylan asked idly, pointing out across the plains.

  Glory turned and looked, and her heart sank.

  A mass of marching figures. There were a lot of them, as many as TITAoVtS would lay on for a superdeluxe big-budget crowd and battle scene, say eighty to a hundred. They were, by the most generous estimate, five kilometers away, too far to make out the individual details clearly, especially in the diffuse grey light of the overcast day. She could not even tell whether they were entirely human. But the blades of their pikes or spears or whatever they were were clearly silhouetted against the sky, and they were wearing some kind of armor, and here and there in the mass of determinedly marching figures, she thought she could see a toxic gleam of blue, as from the glow of an amulet.

  Ivradan watched them come with the worried incomprehension of a man who knows the news can only be bad, but still has no idea of what it is he's looking at.

  The marauders were heading straight toward the ruined city, which meant straight toward them. The three of them couldn't hide and couldn't fight. And their directions for running away were decidedly limited. Glory took a deep breath.

  "Ivradan," Glory said gently, "that is an army, and I reckon they'll be unkind to us if they reach us. I'm not sure we can outrun them, and if we try, we'll just lead them back to the Oracle. I'm afraid all three of us are going to have to go up the mountain. How fast can you get the pack off that pony?"

  "An army?" Ivradan abruptly went greyish under his all-weather tan. "Her army?" He swayed on his saddle-pad, causing Felba to shift uneasily beneath him.

  Glory growled a flavorful Elizabethan profanity under her breath—one that had slipped right past the Standards and Practices review board when it had made it into the script for the pilot episode—and went over to the pack-pony. She pulled at the forward cinch's double-ring closure, growling under her breath. Maybe there was some way over the mountain that didn't involve tromping down the Warmother's throat—and even if there wasn't, that was still better odds than standing here while an army of rogue bushrangers and freelance nightmares marched over them. The three of them could take the beer and whatever food they could carry with them, but the rest would have to be left behind.

  The cinch loosened, and Ivradan, bless Erchane for what backbone he did have, was there to take the weight of the sliding pack and work the second cinch free faster than Glory could have managed.

  "Can the wizard ride?" he asked, letting the packsaddle slip to the ground and worrying its waterproof covering loose.

  "Like a sack of turnips," Glory said succinctly.

  "Let Fimlas take him, then. You ride Felba, and I shall have Heddvi here." He tore through the contents of the pack with ruthless efficiency, winnowing its contents into three bags small enough for them to carry. She heard things break.

  "Do you mind if I ask what's going on?" Dylan demanded, coming over to look. The first sack was full, and Glory thrust it at him, pointing back over his shoulder.

  "That is an invading army. We are running away from it as fast as we can."

  "On what?" Dylan asked, in tones that rather suggested he knew.

  Glory looked at him.

  "No," he
said, backing away, still clutching the canvas sack. "No, no, no. I don't do horses. You remember—when that damned Adrian of yours stepped on my foot I was lame for a month!"

  Adrian the Wonder Horse had been a joy to all who knew him, but trick-horses weren't so thick upon the ground that Full Earth could afford to pick and choose, and Adrian, ham and prima-donna though he'd been, was a great big gorgeous beast, far less easy to replace or do without than any of the human cast. And he'd known it, too, more the pity.

  "Then stay here and die," Glory snapped, losing what passed for her patience. If the errant gods of whimsy wanted to supply her with missing cast members, why couldn't they have sent her Adrian? He'd have been a bit more use at the moment. "I don't have time to argue with you, and I'm not going to carry you. But I reckon you ought to know that that lot coming are probably cannibals."

  Dylan looked back toward the army. "I'll fall off," he whined, as if that made any difference to the facts.

  "Try not to," Glory advised. "And don't drop the bag. It's got your dinner in it." She hoped.

  Taking pity on him, she took one of the spare cinch straps out of the wreckage of their pack and buckled it around Fimlas, apologizing to him as she did. It would give Dylan something to hold on to, at least. The pony regarded her with wise sardonic eyes and shook its head energetically.

  She got Dylan aboard Fimlas and mounted Felba, and Ivradan handed her tote-bag up to her and passed her one of the bags of supplies and a blanket, then mounted Heddvi, not bothering to rig what passed for a bridle here. Glory dug her heels in, and the pony headed back down the path toward Great Drathil. As she'd hoped, Fimlas followed of his own accord, and the sense of urgency was enough to keep even Dylan momentarily quiet.

  The ridge cut them off from the sight of the enemy army almost immediately, though it was closer now, and Glory could hear scraps of sound carried toward them by the freakish acoustics of the ruins. A cry; something that might be part of a marching song. The most disturbing thing of all was that everything about the advancing horde wasn't alien. Although she didn't know for sure that they weren't human, they certainly weren't Allimir. And if the marauders were human, she had an even better idea of what would happen if the villains caught up with them, though it hardly mattered how dead they got, or what happened to their bodies afterward, if they were killed. Dead was dead.

  She headed Felba toward the ruined gates and the path that lay up the mountainside. On their way here this morning, Ivradan had described Great Drathil as a walled town surrounded by a ring-road and a moat used primarily for drainage and sewage purposes. Glory had reason to be grateful for that now: the moat had probably been full the night the city burned, and its presence had kept the destruction from spreading across the road, with the result that their headlong flight was reasonably unimpeded now. Glory led, urging the pony to a ground-eating trot, and Ivradan brought up the rear, making sure that Fimlas and Dylan stayed essentially together.

  She'd lost sight of the gate when they reached the ring-road, though she could see the higher bits of the path up the mountain now; a set of switchbacks leading all the way to the top. The army would be able to see it too, and probably the three of them on it, but there was literally nowhere else for them to go. They couldn't hide in what was left of the city—even retreating back into the forest wasn't a real option: if her eyes hadn't been fooling her, and those blue gleams she'd spotted were real, the magic the enemy was carrying would be enough to track the three of them down—or call them and their mounts to it, the way the monster had called Kurfan and the ponies out of the Oracle-cave.

  Glory shuddered. Maybe they wouldn't look up and see them on the mountain path. Maybe they had other marching orders. Maybe the magic of the Sword of Cinnas was more powerful than their little talismans and would shield the three of them somehow. Maybe the bad guys were afraid of Elboroth-Haden, too.

  Why do I always come up with perfectly good plans and then come up with perfectly good reasons why they won't work? She'd liked it better when she thought the Warmother was a figment of the Allimir's collective imagination.

  At last the gates that had once barred the way to the Forbidden Peak came into sight. She could imagine they'd been pretty impressive back in the day. They'd probably looked like the gates on Skull Island, the ones the natives put up to keep King Kong out of the potato salad. Allimir teenagers probably snuck out here on dark nights and dared each other to touch them, then ran off giggling. That sort of thing.

  Not any more.

  They'd been made of wood and gold and iron. The wood had been reduced to a black spray of charcoal, as if someone had thrown paint on the rocks. The gold and iron had run all together, and the iron had rusted red with the rain of passing seasons, while the gold, annealed to utter purity, gleamed as bright as if it were still molten, running in threads across the dull rusted surface of the iron. The metalwork had been softened until it had sagged like moist potter's clay in a rainstorm, melting and slumping and sliding away, pulled by the patient force of gravity.

  Then something, angry and impatient, had taken that soft hot malleable metal and forced it open, tearing it like an unbaked piecrust and crushing it against the bones of the mountain. There it had cooled, its form halfway between shapeless slag and the careful work of art it once had been.

  Glory took this in during the seconds it took her to approach the gates and make her way through them at a trot. She'd have preferred a gallop, or a flat-out run, but Dylan couldn't stay on Fimlas at that gait, and they couldn't use the ponies up now when they'd need them later. Besides, they weren't going to win this one by speed. There was no way to outrun this enemy. Only to outwit him, ill-prepared as she was for that kind of fight.

  What I need is a miracle, true enough. And this place has been running scant on those for a long time now, hasn't it?

  The path began to incline sharply upward, and the pony, no fool, slowed from a trot to a walk. Glory wasn't sure what she'd expected to see on this side of the gate, but what she did see was a wide path, narrowing as it rose up the mountain, that seemed to have been cut directly into the rock as if with God's own butter knife. It ought to have been covered with the natural accumulation of the dirt and debris of a thousand years, but at the moment it was scrubbed as bare and clean as if someone had been through here with a new broom and one of those industrial steam-jets they used to de-grime skyscrapers with. The ponies' hooves clicked on the stone as if they were walking down Bourke Street back home. Even the rock around her held no shadow of moss, no fugitive weed making its home in a handy crevice.

  Ivradan pulled level with her, and Felba took the opportunity to slow to a meditative walk. The horsemaster's face was grim, set in an expression that suggested he never expected to hear good news again.

  "What now, Slayer?" he asked in a low voice.

  "We go on. Maybe this path curves around the mountain. If we get round the side before they think to look up, we're home free."

  "We're on Elboroth-Haden," Ivradan pointed out unnecessarily.

  "Maybe the trail branches out up ahead and we can go somewhere else," Glory said soothingly. "Come on." She urged Felba into a faster walk, glancing back to make sure Dylan was still back there. He was. He looked rumpled and irritated, clinging to the cinch strap. She wasn't in the least surprised to see that he'd dropped both the bag and the blanket she'd handed him, and she was just as glad not to be able to get into any conversations with him just now. Ivradan dropped back to keep pace with him—and also, Glory rather thought, to allow her to be the first to face anything the mountain had to throw at them.

  But that left her with nothing to do but brood, and keep the pony moving. Had she made the right decision? It had all happened so fast. Maybe they could have gotten out of there on foot ahead of the villains and kept all the supplies—it occurred to her she'd just sent the three of them haring up the side of a mountain at the end of summer with nothing more than the clothes on their backs and a couple of blankets.
r />   Dammit.

  But for that matter, what was an army—or a raiding party, or whatever it was—doing coming in this direction, anyway? They couldn't be looking for Allimir. All the Allimir were out on the Serenthodial, cowering in their vardos. There were only two things in this direction.

  The Oracle.

  And the top of the mountain.

  "Oh sod and bleeding buggering bugger all," Glory groaned feelingly under her breath. What if the raiding party was going home?

  But no. She knew she was grasping at straws, but still. There'd never been raiding parties before, only the invisible something, striking under cover of darkness, that none of the Allimir had ever seen. That certainly wasn't a description of that mob the three of them were fleeing from now. Ergo, the Warmother did not, in the normal course of business, have job lots of villains heading back and forth to this particular mountaintop. So while the odds weren't against them heading in this direction, they weren't especially in favor of it, either.

  Back to Square One. And back to this being a waiting game, or as much of one as you could play while ambling up a mountainside on ponyback at a brisk clippity-clop.

  Fortunately, it was in the nature of mountain trails to curve, and eventually this one did, but unfortunately she'd been wrong about it going around the mountain. Instead, it turned at a right angle to itself and sent them parallel to the city, several hundred yards above it. Instead of sheer walls of granite on both sides of them, the one on their left was gone, and by now the trail had narrowed appreciably. They proceeded single file along an uncomfortably narrow path with a sheer cliff to their right and a sheer drop on their left, more-or-less in plain sight of anyone who cared to look up.

  But the view was magnificent.

  Beyond the burnt scar that had been Great Drathil, the vast prairie of Serenthodial the Golden stretched outward to meet the sullen sky. Somewhere out there were the last of the Allimir, counting on her to save them. The more fool they.

  Closer at hand were the enemy nightmares. They'd reached the city and were swarming over the ruins as if searching for something. She could hear them shouting at each other angrily, and wondered what they were looking for. Unfortunately for her curiosity, she still couldn't see them very well. Great Drathil itself seemed to be their goal, any how, which was some small relief.