Mortal Consequences

by Clayton Emery

  “We’ll fight,” the shaman returned. “If nothing else, I can fetch wounded. That’ll keep me plenty busy. But be warned …” Standing tall against the small fire and dark horizon, he reached over his shoulder, and hauled out Harvester of Blood with a low moan. The long blade flashed yellow in the firelight. “The next time someone mentions the ears of the woman I love, or doubts her loyalty, I’ll cut off his ears and feed them to him.”

  The shaman stalked into the night.

  Knucklebones matched his long strides by half-skipping, clinging to his elbow. Her spirit sang at Sunbright’s public proclamation of love. Yet she sorrowed, too. For deep in her heart, she doubted her own loyalty.

  * * * * *

  As the sun rose blood-red on the eastern horizon, the Rengarth Barbarians roared a challenge and charged the forested slopes, their shadows running ahead.

  Straight into disaster.

  Slim black arrows flew from the forest like dragonflies, and every one of them found a target. A dozen barbarians, howling and waving their bronze and iron swords, fell before they reached the woods. More arrows whistled from close blue spruces before the tribe broke through, then they were barging under the canopy of maple and ash leaves. Dark ghosts flitted amidst trunks, elusive shapes that infuriated the screaming barbarians and faded like morning dreams. Still, like magic, arrows sped amidst the barbarians and slammed backs, buttocks, bellies, and biceps. The woods were a bedlam of noise and pain.

  Sunbright and Knucklebones had hung back from the initial charge. They’d shown loyalty in joining the tribe, but were reluctant to run mad against the dark ones defending their homeland. The pair ran up the slope after stragglers, past wounded and dead, until they reached the trees and green dawn light.

  “What now?” the thief panted. “Which way?”

  Human screams and the elven shrills resounded like thunder before rain. Sunbright shook Harvester in rage. “I don’t know! We shouldn’t even be here!”

  “Then why—”

  From the ground, a shower of leaves exploded upward. Dark forms camouflaged with greenery and berry juice stabbed with slim swords. Sunbright had a moment’s thought: Now we know how they disappear so quickly. Then he fought for his life.

  He lunged backward from a blade stabbing for his face, and batted wildly. He trod on Knucklebones’s foot and lurched. The elf’s blade kissed his neck, then flicked back to skewer his heart. The shaman knocked the steel aside just in time, lashed to kick the elf away, but the slim female warrior was too quick. Amidst berry stains and hair black as Greenwillow’s, her black eyes raged. With a deft snap of her wrist, she sliced Sunbright’s thigh, parting his long, faded shirt, then skin and muscle. Instantly the leg felt weak. When Sunbright snatched it back, it trembled.

  With no other defense, he lunged at the elf-woman. She dodged easily. He stumbled and twisted, too late, felt steel pink his kidney. He cannoned into a tree to avoid the blade. Behind, Knucklebones gasped and cursed, but before Sunbright could swing Harvester into play, steel slashed his forearm. Then the elf’s point flickered at his eyes. He might as well fight the wind.

  The shaman wrenched Harvester up as an awkward shield, but his heart despaired. Barring a miracle, they’d both be dead in seconds.

  The wild-eyed, wild-haired elf stepped back, and braced her foot for a killing blow. Sunbright swung his huge blade—

  —and a warhammer flew from the trees behind.

  The hammer smashed the elf’s jaw, and knocked her sprawling. A cleaver flung from a different direction, and smacked aside the blade of the elf pressing Knucklebones.

  Sunbright gaped. The warhammer on the turf was battered, nicked, the handle sweat-stained. And familiar. He’d carried it for years.

  He turned to see who’d thrown it, and finally found his breath.

  “Drigor!”

  Chapter 15

  Not wasting words, the old dwarf dropped a hand like a vise on Sunbright’s forearm. The shaman was towed as if chained to oxen. More dwarves swarmed, even bulled through blue spruces where Sunbright couldn’t pass. The elf attacking Knucklebones was clubbed down with axe and mattock handles. The thief was hoisted bodily over two heads, and toted down the slope like a reindeer carcass in a game dance.

  Dragged along, Sunbright tried to quell his amazement. Drigor looked the same: face wrinkled as a winter apple, bushy white beard with six silver rings braided into his mustache, queer leather tunic with shaggy hump, stained goat hide kilt, and rusty, pitchy boots. The dwarf was hung like a peddler with satchels, rope, blanket, axe, warhammer, backpack, pouches, and tools. Seven more dwarves, all younger than Drigor, thudded through the woods in heavy boots. Knucklebones squawked to be set down, but no one listened.

  They burst free of the trees and down the slope. The dwarves neither panted nor sweated, but jogged like clockwork engines. Sunbright felt like a child in the iron grip of Drigor, son of Yasur, father of Dorlas, of the Sons of Baltar of the Iron Mountains.

  The barbarian attack had been broken. Survivors limped down the slope for the prairie. Some sported black arrows, and several helped wounded companions. Sunbright demanded Drigor let go. Disregarding his own wounds, the shaman sheathed Harvester, and tended the wounded on the slopes. The dead he let lie: over a dozen in sight. Wives and husbands streamed up the slope, wailing and sobbing when they found relatives. Sunbright hoisted Peacefinger, a small red-haired woman, across one shoulder, and with Drigor’s help, shouldered Darkname across the other. At Drigor’s direction, dwarves carried others. Before long, all the Rengarth Barbarians, living, dead, and in between, retreated from the slope.

  “What madness is this?” asked Drigor. He lugged Hammerlove across his backpack. The man’s white head lolled, neck broken. “Who ordered such a foolish attack?”

  “A fool,” Sunbright answered. “We’ve a tradition of fool-hardiness going back centuries.” His bitter irony was lost on the dwarf. Sunbright needed breath to carry, but needed answers more. “Are you real, Drigor, or a dream? I left you half a world away. On the other side of the empire.”

  “We are real,” stated the literal dwarf. “We needed to find you. To warn you … to settle our debt.”

  Debt? the shaman wondered. Oh, yes, returning Dorlas’s warhammer. Dwarves took promises seriously. Sunbright sucked wind as they swished through prairie grass, waist-deep on the dwarves.

  “Warn me of what?”

  “A monster hunts you. Like nothing I’ve ever seen. Tall, thin as a sword, with a hide like ice-worn granite. And more spells than fill a grimoire. It followed you and attacked us, crying for revenge.”

  Sunbright almost dropped two carcasses. “A what? A monster? After me? Arms of Targus!” he swore. “Why?”

  The old weaponsmith shrugged under his grisly burden and said, “You made a powerful enemy somewhere. Mighty queer you don’t know it, though. I recall enemies better than friends.”

  Sunbright asked a dozen questions, learned the gory tale of the tentacles of doom and the shrieking fiend, but knew even less when he’d finished. A monster clad in flint? How was that possible? And why hate him? None of it made sense.

  Plodding toward camp with morning sun in his eyes, Sunbright asked, “How did you find me?”

  Old, crinkly eyes squinted to guard a secret. “Dwarves know the earth,” Drigor answered vaguely. “We listened for your tread.”

  A lie, Sunbright knew, mystic mumbo jumbo. Many folks had seen the barbarians enter the prairie, bound west. Hundreds of marchers left a wide track. He didn’t press. His mind whirled with enough questions.

  The sun was fully up, bright in the huge, deep sky. But a chill stained the air, a painful reminder that winter was not far off. Having failed to win a foothold on the forest, Sunbright’s tribe might be trapped on the prairie without food or shelter or fuel. Was there no place for them, now that the tundra had died?

  Which reminded him. “Thank you for saving our lives,” he said to the dwarf. “Our debt must be repaid in spades. Or
do I owe you?”

  “You owe me doubly,” the dwarf calculated. “Cholena, who had been my wife, was killed by your monster, blasted to flinders before my eyes. And three other sons of the mountain. You brought the monster upon us, and now we’ve saved your life and hers,”—he nodded at Knucklebones, still being carried aloft—“as we once saved you from yak-men in White Owl Pass.

  “My warning of the monster extinguished your debt of returning the hammer. But let’s not quibble. You can, perhaps, balance the bargain.”

  Quibble? thought Sunbright. The old miser attached prices to everything, with Sunbright sinking in debt by the minute. Wearily he asked, “Balance how?”

  Drigor stumped along, staring at the horizon, or something inside his head. “Not now,” he said. “I’ll tell you when ’tis time.”

  “Fine,” the shaman said. “I owe you.”

  Sunbright let it go. Probably he’d be dead of starvation before spring anyway, providing his tribe didn’t stone or burn him to death first.…

  * * * * *

  Sunbright dreamed.

  Greenwillow tripped from the night, dainty as a deer. Tall, black-haired, shining green and black like a lizard, ornate silver pommel swaying at her hip. As shadows crept up her frame, her face was revealed. Dour, eyebrows puckered, mouth pursed.

  That expression Sunbright recognized. Greenwillow had often been angry at him in life, but never in dreams. He asked, “What is it?” though she’d never spoken in dreams.

  “You slay my people!” Her lithe hand fell to her sword pommel.

  “They slay mine!” Sunbright protested. “They insist on war! We only seek a home!”

  “My people inhabited these woods when yours had tails!”

  “We don’t seek to usurp them!” Even in a dream, Sunbright’s voice whined. “There’s no reason—”

  “You must not slay my people!” The phantom drew her sword with a hiss. The silver blade winked and flashed in moonlight. “Kill them and you kill me!”

  The blade seemed coated with frost, and Sunbright felt its chill. Greenwillow, and her sword, never looked so real. Was it because he lay sleeping near her forest homeland? The keen steel whisked near his neck, seeking blood.

  “All right, I shan’t harm them!” Sunbright made more promises, more to break. “I wouldn’t harm anyone if I could help it! But I can’t speak—”

  Surprising him, Greenwillow lunged forward, caught his shirt, and kissed him hard. Her lips were icy, but his body stirred at her touch. She was so like Knucklebones, so vital and vibrant, yet so different, as an eagle is from a kingfisher. How were they so alike, yet so different? Who understood women, or dreams?

  When Greenwillow pulled back from the chilly kiss, one eye winked, then stayed oddly closed as she retreated. “I’ll be seeing you,” she said, then she ran into the black forest of death, or limbo, or wherever she dwelt. As she ran, she grew shorter, slighter, smaller.

  Clumsy too. No longer silent as a white-tailed deer, her feet pounded the ground. Thumps made his bones thrum. Harder came the blows, until the dream shattered.

  Someone kicked him awake. Mightylaugh in big boots laced to his knee. “Wake up!” the big man grunted. “We council!

  “About you!”

  * * * * *

  “… his idea we come here! And he’s brought nothing but death to the clans, widows and orphans who weep the night …”

  “… befriended an elf, not of our tribe, nor our race. And now we find elves here, hungry to kill us, in the very spot he directed us …”

  “… how many have fallen to the Shadow Folk? Yet he goes unharmed amidst the elves! How can this be, unless he works with them …!”

  Speaker after speaker took the talking stick and heaped the tribe’s woes at Sunbright’s feet. Accusations flew, wilder and wilder: he’d led them into the jaws of ores and elves; pretended visions of these woods; murdered Owldark in the desert to become shaman; consorted with one elf and colluded with more elves to sacrifice his own tribe; practiced magic with cold light and healing; run like a coward from battle, suffering no wounds; opposed plans for the last battle, then informed the elves ahead of time; coveted the position of war chief and so plotted to have Magichunger slain; and on and on.

  Sunbright Steelshanks sat like a stone and stared at the council fire as his name was blackened. Some speakers defended him, but not many, nor was he surprised. When a tribe suffered, they needed someone to blame, usually the shaman, who should know the will of the gods and the future. And he had led them here. Monkberry sat beside her son, holding a big hand in her gnarled one. Knucklebones held the other hand, hers cool and strong. Tears silently spilled down both women’s cheeks.

  Long into the night the council dragged. Finally it was quiet. Mightylaugh offered the stick, saying, “Would anyone else speak? Sunbright Steelshanks, will you?”

  The shaman didn’t look up from the fire, only shook his head.

  “Damn it, I will!” Knucklebones spat, leaped to her feet and, quick as a jackdaw, snatched the baton. “I’ll speak!”

  She stood defiant, clutching the stick like a fighting knife, as if to kill with it. Objections rang out: “She is not of our tribe!”

  “She is an elf!”

  “She is Sunbright’s friend!”

  But croaking Iceborn cut through the tumult.

  “Whoever has slain an enemy or born a child may speak in council. There is no custom against an outsider speaking. Long ago, when Heatherhill was chief, a man from the city came—”

  “Thank you!” Knucklebones interrupted, stamping her foot. The tribe crowded around the council fire on the open prairie. An early morning wind damp with rain hissed in the grass tops. The fire guttered as if ashamed to see its creator laid low. The thief shook the stick as she spat her words. “You miserable lot of ingrates! If you had the honor of garbage-eating dogs, you’d be ashamed! Sunbright saved all your worthless lives by his actions and sacrifices! He sat three days without food or water in the broiling sun to find the vision of this place! You wallowed in your own dung on a pile of rocks near the ash heaps of a town scorned throughout the empire, but Sunbright made you listen! To make you listen, he challenged the lot of you to combat, when there isn’t one man or woman here worth his little finger!

  “When he fought, and nearly died, you finally saw sense, and crawled off your rubbish dump to a land and sky clean and free! Sunbright recalled your traditions, promised to carry Iceborn on his own back to keep your pitiful customs alive. He fought beside you against your enemies. Look at his arms, his forehead, his knee: count his wounds! He slaved night and day, fetching water, carrying children, butchering sheep—every dirty task in camp, and never complained once, because he was glad to be home!

  “And when you got here, to this verdant land that could be a paradise, he asked only to seek truce with the elves, that no blood be shed, and you might gain a foothold. But you wouldn’t listen! And now, you lousy, stinking, pus-eating, maggoty gutter rats, you’d condemn him? Condemn yourselves, for being lazy cowards, hardheaded and hardhearted—”

  With an oath, Mightylaugh tore the speaking stick from Knucklebones’s hand, and slapped as if to break her neck. Quick as a terrier, she ducked, whipped out a knife, and carved a stripe up his arm from wrist to armpit. Bleeding, the war chief rocked back in shock.

  “She draws blood in council! It is forbidden!” shouted an onlooker.

  “Mightylaugh tore the stick away! That is forbidden by our most ancient laws!” countered another.

  “She had no right to speak! And insult us when we suffer!”

  “Sunbright’s suffered a hundred times!”

  “No truce! No cowardice!”

  “No magic!”

  Words turned to shouts, to a babble of noise. Fists flew. Men and women tussled, knocked each other down.

  Worried, Monkberry yanked on Sunbright’s hand and said, “Son, get up! Come quickly!”

  Knucklebones hoisted Sunbright by the hand. He se
emed half-dead, or frozen, slow as a crippled snake. Standing, he tottered, grabbed his forehead and squeezed. The thief bawled, “Wake up! What’s wrong with you?”

  “Drag him!” Monkberry yelled. Knucklebones helped, but Sunbright’s feet plodded clumsily, as if made of wood. No one helped or came near them. Open prairie beckoned, a slate-black sky overhead, but a red glow lighting the east. The mother repeated, “Hurry!”

  “Why? What’s—Ow!”

  A fist-sized stone bounced off Knucklebones’s back. Another stone sailed by and thumped on grass. Risking a glance, Knucklebones saw tribesfolk flocking to a rock pile at the hillock. Men, women, and children hurled rocks. Another struck Knucklebones on the back of the thigh, and she grunted. One knocked Monkberry to her knees. Several hit Sunbright with painful thuds, but though the shaman staggered, he made no sound.

  Desperate, the thief yanked Monkberry up, dragged mother and son. Stones whistled. Then one clipped Sunbright’s scalp so he crashed like a falling tree, almost trapped Knucklebones under his great frame.

  The elf-woman wept for frustration as stones pelted the ground like hail. Monkberry struggled to rise. Clambering, the thief tried to shield both with her small body. More stones hit Sunbright, and one banged Knucklebone’s forehead. Woozy, she fought to keep conscious. To collapse was to die. Another stone struck her shoulder, lamed her arm. She cried unashamedly with fury and sorrow.

  “Hold!” boomed a voice. “The next to throw dies!”

  Like a passing storm, the stones stopped. Feet thudded all around. Meaty hands like bear paws grabbed Knucklebones, Sunbright, and Monkberry, and towed them toward the dawn. The shaman’s toes dragged in the grass, marking a double trail from the dappled stones.

  Their rescuers were Drigor and his seven dwarves. The old leader leveled a crossbow at the tribe, and loosed a sizzling bolt that shattered on rocks to drive them back. Barbarians jeered, “Coward! Betrayer!” But gradually the taunts and curses died as the dogged dwarves carried all three victims far out of range, then out of sight. Four dwarves carried Sunbright spread-eagled like a sacrifice. Monkberry was toted across two shoulders like a log.