by Victor Milán
Without a glance back to where her old friend was conducting what was almost certainly his final stand, Zaranda started down the stairs.
Taking time to aim, Stillhawk shot down three more archers. He was struck four times in return. He backed toward the doorway, hoping to shoot from its cover.
An arrow laid open the right side of his forehead. He reached the door, slipped around and out of the line of fire. At once he discovered that he stood on a tiny platform in a great cavern, and that he was out of arrows.
He plucked one from his breast, nocked it, and swung out into the doorway. Guardsmen ran toward him. He shot the foremost, pulled another arrow from his body. As if to replace it, several more hit him.
He shot two more blue-and-bronzes. The survivors got smart and went to one knee to improve their aim. Hit half a dozen more times, Stillhawk had to lurch back.
His legs were rubbery, head light from loss of blood. Only the pain and his fierce determination not to let Zaranda down kept him alert. He tore yet another arrow from his flesh, nocked it, drew back the string, and swung out into the entryway once more.
A sword whistled right to left and chopped the elven longbow in half.
A small and ugly man confronted him. He had ginger mustachios, bandy legs, and a prominent, fleshy nose. Crackletongue hung in his heavily gloved hand, and the curved blade glowed as if white-hot, signifying the nearness of evil.
Stillhawk dropped the useless halves of his bow and drew his long sword.
“So you’re the ranger,” the shorter man said in a sneering voice. “You look more like a pincushion to me.”
He advanced. Stillhawk backed away slowly, warily, till a foot came down with the heel on emptiness.
“Nowhere left to run,” the flamboyantly mustached man said. “Shall we try blades, or will you just jump?”
Giving the ranger no chance to answer, the man thrust at his right eye. Stillhawk’s wrist twitched. Long sword caught saber and knocked it aside.
Shaveli Sword-Master raised his eyebrows and took a step back. “Not bad,” he said, and pressed the attack again.
He was devilishly quick. Crackletongue darted like a blue-white flame, but Stillhawk, wounded nigh death as he was, knew how to parry by the slightest rolls of his powerful wrist. He kept the crackling blade away from his flesh.
At last Shaveli snarled in exasperation, “Have done! I have no more time for you!” He feinted for Stillhawk’s knee, then thrust again for the eyes. When the ranger knocked his blade up, he reached forward, grabbed a handful of the arrows still jutting from Stillhawk’s chest, and twisted.
Stillhawk cried out in pain. Shaveli ran him through the heart. For a moment the ranger glared defiance at his tormentor. Then the light went out of his eyes, and his head lolled loose upon his neck.
Gently—so that the larger man would not slip over the edge, carrying the magic blade with him—Shaveli lowered Stillhawk’s corpse to the platform. He braced a foot against the ranger’s rib cage and pulled his weapon free.
“Friend Shaveli,” a familiar voice called from the far side of the door, “bide a moment.”
The Sword-Master spun, and his eyes grew wide.
Gasping from exertion and fumes, the two women reached the bottom of the many-switchbacked stair. Lava bubbled almost at their feet. The blazing heat from it seared the exposed skin of the faces and hands.
“There.” Chen pointed ahead. Smoke streamers coiled through the air before them, half-visible, making their presence known mostly by the way they stung the eyes. “A little door, perhaps a hundred paces on. It’s open.”
“You must be able to see in the dark like a gnome, “Zaranda said, coughing.
The girl smiled hugely and nodded. “I always do well at night,” she said. “Darkness doesn’t bother me.”
Heat and brimstone made Zaranda’s head spin, and her stomach sloshed with nausea. Her legs were as unsteady as dandelion stalks. Raising her boots from the black stone floor, polished to glassy smoothness by unguessable generations of feet, was like trying to lift the planet Glyph, rings and all. Her arms obeyed no less reluctantly, as though she were trying to move underwater—no, through a medium much denser than water.…
“Zaranda,” Chen said, voice rising toward panic. “I can’t move!”
Zaranda forced her head around. It felt like trying to turn the head of the famed Fallen Idol, which lay in the river at the bottom of the gorge to which it gave its name.
The monster that called itself Armenides stood on the last switchback, thirty feet above. Its eyes glowed yellow. Its bull head grinned at them despite the hideous smoking gash across the left side of its face. Many of its limbs were cropped or missing, but it seemed in small danger of running out of them.
“Zaranda,” it said, “dear Zaranda. Always more presumptuous than wise. Did you really think to pit yourself against the will of L’yafv-Afvonn? He’s what lies behind that door: the One Below, the Whisperer in Darkness—the nexus of the crisis, and the origin of storms. He is the One who rules the night; he has brought forth the darkling hordes of his own substance. He has made hideous the dreams of the miserable wretches who infest Zazesspur, and soon he shall make their realities even more so. I am as an ant beside his power and malice. And you—you are less than ants to me.”
He laughed, and the sound of his laughter filled the cavern and made the lava seethe and pop with redoubled fury. Zaranda fought to move, to fling her sword at him, or even a defiant gesture. But she could no more control her body than she could that of Elminster in his tower half a continent away. She and Chen were trapped inside the monster’s will.
Shield of Innocence could not move his legs. That was all right. His arms were more than strong enough to drag him along the floor. And lying on his belly kept his viscera inside. Mostly.
The stink of brimstone tore at nostrils more sensitive than any human’s. He ignored it, as he ignored the pain and growing weakness. His small blue eyes shone with the purity of his purpose.
A shape lay sprawled before him on the tiny square of stone poised above fire and blackness: Stillhawk the ranger, dead.
Shield’s eyes brimmed with tears. “O Torm,” he gasped, “grant that I have not come too late!”
Gently he lifted the forester’s head and cradled it against his ruined breast.
“Well,” Armenides said, still in that horribly cheerful voice, “it seems I control the two of you. What shall it amuse me to do?”
Shaveli and nine or ten short-bow-armed guardsmen stood ranked on the stairs above the false Ao priest—well above, for even they feared to approach so monstrous a being. To perfect her misery, Zaranda saw Crackletongue’s distinctive blaze sprouting from the Sword-Master’s fist. Contact with the magic sword should have inflicted painful injury on a man as devoted to evil as the torturer. Evidently his black leather gauntlets insulated him from harm. He saw her eyes fix on him, stuck out his tongue obscenely far, and wiggled the tip.
“I know,” the fiend declared. “I shall make you walk into the lava, one by one. Now, whom shall I do first? Ahh, but of course—the redheaded chit!”
Eyes great, face pale as bleached linen beneath her freckles, Chen turned and took a slow step toward the river of molten stone. “Randi!” she moaned through clenched teeth.
Shield of Innocence took the bloodstained amulet from about his neck and laid it on Stillhawk’s unmoving breast. “O Torm,” he prayed, “O True and Brave, please listen! Your dog begs you, do not let this soul slip out of the world. No one is truer and braver than he, and we have—”
He coughed up blood. “We have not enough hands to fight the evil that waits below. I know … I have not served you long enough to earn the power to bring him back. And I won’t ever, for this day I die, Lord. But please … please give him back his life, for his sake, for those poor brave women down there, for this whole world.”
Tears streamed down his cheeks. “Good Torm, I beg you!”
A shimmer in the s
tinking air before him. A tiny point of radiance, intolerably bright, expanding to a miniature sun. The brilliance dazzled his light-sensitive eyes, threatened to burn them out, yet it filled his soul with warmth and peace such as he had never known.
Shield of Innocence, a voice said in his mind, who well have justified your name: you alone of mortals on this world have I addressed through all the ages, and you alone shall I so address. Torm hears you, and through Him, I hear.
My name has been taken in vain. You have chosen to redress this evil, knowing what the cost would be. So be it: your wish is granted.
The light flared, expanded, enveloped Shield so that it seemed he would be consumed by it, as by the heart of a sun. Then it went out.
The ranger opened his eyes.
“O Torm!” the orog wept. “O Ao All-Father, I thank you!”
Stillhawk shook his head and moaned softly. Shield? he signed.
“I am here. Live now. Your strength is needed.”
You are a true paladin, the human signed. In silent song shall I honor your name forever.
Painfully, Stillhawk raised his right hand. The orog’s claw engulfed it, and they gripped each other tight. Zaranda? the ranger signed.
“Below. She needs your strength. You cannot rest yet.”
Shield—
The great orc dragged himself to the precipice edge. Below him, dizzyingly far, he saw the fiend standing triumphant upon the landing—and below that, Chen walking step by excruciating step to her own destruction.
He raised himself on his mighty arms, drew his legs beneath him, forced them to lift his bulk off the stone by sheer will. For a moment, he teetered on the verge.
“Ahh!” cried Stillhawk, unable to make his tongueless mouth form the word no.
Shield of Innocence spread his arms and dived into emptiness.
“Hmm,” the monster said. “There’s something strange about this one, something I can’t quite put my finger on. Oh—I forgot.” He held up a pincer and clacked it. “No fingers anymore. Foolish me.”
Chen raised her foot and held it poised above the yellow-glowing lava. A bubble popped. Liquid rock struck the sole and sputtered there, raising a stink of burning leather.
“Care to test the waters first, my child?” the fiend asked. The girl pointed her toe like a dancer. It descended toward the lava.
“Zaranda,” the girl said, “I’m sorry I don’t have the strength to fight him—”
“No!” Zaranda screamed.
Like a vast bat, a shadow swooped down from above. The outflung arm of Shield of Innocence struck the back of Armenides’s neck.
“Die, monster!” the orog roared as his hurtling mass swept the fiend from his perch. Both plunged into the lava with a splash of white-hot fluid.
The spell of compulsion broke like a glass jar smashed against a rock. Zaranda lunged forward, grabbed the back of Chen’s blouse, and yanked her from the brink. As they sprawled on the stone flagging, yellow-glowing gobbets splattered the place where the girl had stood.
Zaranda picked herself up onto her knees. “Oh, Shield,” she said. A single tear rolled from her eye.
Zaranda hugged Chen fiercely. The girl lifted her head. Her eyes flew wide. “Randi!”
Zaranda’s head snapped round. Shaveli jumped lithely down from several steps up and stalked forward. Chenowyn leapt to bar his path, holding her knife both-handed before her.
The Sword-Master twitched Crackletongue back and forth. The blade hummed with energy. “Get her out of my way,” he said. “You know what I can do to her.”
“Chen,” Zaranda said, “no. This is between him and me. You can’t fight him.”
The girl stepped back and lowered her arms to her sides. Then she drew herself to her full height and took a deep breath. The air around her wavered, and her eyes began to glow red.
“Chen?”
Shaveli cocked an eyebrow at the redhead. “Interesting. Are you trying to muster some magic against me, wench?” He jerked a thumb up over his shoulder. “Not wise.”
The half-score of guardsmen aimed drawn bows at Chen from the steps. “Any spell she casts at me,” Shaveli told Zaranda, “will make her spring many leaks. Can’t you clear the amateurs from underfoot? I’ll give you a fighting chance.”
“Chenowyn, please,” begged Zaranda, who had never seen the girl’s eyes actually glow before. “He’s right. Whatever wild talent you can muster now will only get you killed without helping me. Stand back and let me dispose of this filth.”
Chen’s red hair stood up from her neck. Yellow sparks played through it. Then she slumped, and the fires died from her eyes and the lightning from her hair. She drew back from between the two.
Shaveli laughed. “Bold words from one who so recently submitted to my caresses.”
“Don’t flatter yourself, Shaveli. A man who has to let a whip do his fondling for him is less than half a man, no matter how big a blade he swings.”
Shaveli snarled and thrust forward in a long, liquid lunge. Zaranda danced aside, whipping out long sword and parrying dagger. Shaveli stamped his boot, cried, “Ha!” and aimed a lightning wrist cut at Zaranda’s temple. She barely got her own sword in the way; sparks from Crackletongue’s blade showered her, lodged in her hair, and made wisps of stinking smoke.
“A noble blade you carried, Countess,” the Sword-Master said. “Too much so for the likes of you.”
He flicked the blade at her face. She threw the long sword upward to parry. Crackletongue whipped round and scored a deep gash transverse down her right thigh.
He came on, magic blade weaving a tracery of light before him. With all her skill and speed, Zaranda managed to keep the stolen blade from her vitals, though it pinked her time and again, making her sword arm run with slippery blood, opening a cut in her right cheek. She was handicapped by the knowledge that she dared not allow Crackletongue to take her blade edge-on; fine though the weapon Duke Hembreon had lent her was, its steel could not withstand the magic saber’s bite.
He maneuvered her until she stood with her back to the lava river. Then he pressed, stamping and shouting, cutting and thrusting. When she felt heat that threatened to burn through the backs of her trouser legs, he feinted high and then slid forward, thrusting for her belly.
Crackletongue’s tip jabbed to within an inch of her skin, but she managed to hack it aside. The shining sword looped around and, with a ringing clang, lopped off her blade a handspan from the hilt.
Shaveli saluted her with a flourish of the magic sword. “So, Countess, shall we dance? Or will you take another step back? The lava is kinder, I promise you.”
She threw the ruined sword at his face.
He caught it effortlessly with his left hand. She jumped at him, grabbed his sword wrist, and plunged her parrying dagger hilt-deep into his belly.
“Yes,” she hissed into his pain-contorted face. “Let’s dance.”
His lips peeled back from bloody teeth. “The dance has just begun,” he gritted. He reached across himself with his left hand, grabbed the wrist of the hand that held the dagger, and forced the blade back out of his body.
Zaranda felt her wrist being turned until the dagger pointed at her own body. She was taller than the Sword-Master, but his strength was greater than hers. Inexorably the dagger point was forced toward her flesh.
Sorceress and swordswoman as she was, Zaranda had found little time in life to study unarmed combat. Still, in her travels, she had gleaned a trick or two from the hand-fighting arts of distant Kozakura.
The dagger tip touched her stomach beneath her breastplate’s lower edge. Shaveli smiled a ghastly smile and pushed harder.
In grappling the Sword-Master, Zaranda had moved several feet away from the lava. Now she shifted her left-hand grip from the man’s wrist to Crackletongue’s hilt and cast herself onto her back. Her not-inconsiderable weight drew the Sword-Master along. As he fell onto her, she put a boot in his stomach. Then she pulled with her arms and pushed with her lon
g, strong leg.
Shaveli flew over her head. She twisted Crackletongue from his grasp as he passed. With a despairing wail, he pitched headfirst into the lava.
Zaranda rolled over and sat up. “At last,” she said, “you’ve found yourself a willing embrace.”
Something moaned past her ear and went into the lava three feet in front of her. She gasped as molten-stone droplets seared her cheek. The bowmen on the steps above were drawing bead on her.
One screamed and pitched forward off the stair. He landed with a whump on the stone beside the lava and lay still. An arrow jutted from his back.
His comrades turned to stare upward. Zaranda’s gaze followed. “Stillhawk!”
The ranger stood at the top of the stair, legs braced, a short bow in hand. He plucked an arrow from his breast, nocked, drew in one smooth motion, and shot a second guardsman through the forehead.
The blue-and-bronzes cried out in consternation. Some shot back, others forsook bows for blades and ran up the stairs. None had any attention to spare for Zaranda and Chen; shooting with almost elven speed and accuracy, Stillhawk could drop them all unless they found a way to deal with him.
The women ran toward the doorway, piled through it, and came up short.
It was a great round bubble of a cave, ill lit by a smattering of torches in sconces hammered into the rough walls. By the far wall rose a glittering mound of treasure: gems, jewels, golden idols with gemstone eyes, a seeming infinitude of coins—silver, platinum, gold. Lying in the midst of the wealth, as in a nest, was a mass of glistening gray flesh almost thirty feet around.
From the mass protruded things—beings. Duergar, drow, orcs, humans—they seemed to grow from the substance of the thing. Some showed as no more than bumps on the surface; others were all but fully formed. Three tentacles, each as thick around as Shield’s torso, reared from the obscene bulk, bearing great-toothed jaws. Three eyes mounted on impossibly delicate stalks weaved above the mass.
