by Ed Greenwood
Alone she stood against them, fighting grimly against endless foes who’d come charging at her out of the dust-shrouded gloom at the rear of Alauntagar’s Hall. It seemed a falling castle had failed to crush all of them.
The humans had fallen quickly. All males, they gaped at her curves—especially after she undid three buckles and let the front of her leathers fall to her belt, so they were staring at her bared and sweating self from her hips up. Astonished and distracted, they gave her an instant of hesitation here and a moment of gazing there—enough, time and again, to dart her blade in and slay them.
The gorkul cared much less for Nifl flesh, and pressed her, heavy and slow but too strong to fight snarl for snarl. So she danced, ducked, sprang this way and that like a scurrying cave-rat … and somehow stayed alive. More than once she’d ducked to pluck up a fallen blade and toss it into the face of a foe—following it with her own steel, thrusting hard. More than once she’d thought herself cornered and dead, with the tusks of some scarred gorkul or other snapping triumphantly in her face as his stinking strength bore her down—but she knew better than to try to keep hold of her blade when it meant certain death, and had more than once hurled herself away wildly, leaving a foe to overbalance and sprawl clumsily, only to dance back in and dagger him in an eye, pluck up her blade again, and tackle the next gorkul.
Yet there could only be one end to this battle. One increasingly weary Nifl-she against so many brutes. Sighing shudderingly at the end of one fray that had left her leathers sliced and too much of her blood streaming everywhere, Taerune found breath enough to shrug. They were driving her back anyway; why not seek a place she could better defend? A narrow door, a passage that bent sharply … such cramped quarters were found only in servants’ passages. And among the huge adorned chambers of the ground floor main Eventowers, all around her, such service passages existed only around and about the grand guest chambers.
Taerune fled, grunting and derisively snorting gorkul lumbering after her, seeking the dim and deserted guest chambers at the heart of the ground floor. The largest, grandest rooms in the Eventowers were all around her now; surely she’d see some house guards.
Jalandral had been crying jaunty orders to scores of Evendoom warblades back in the crowded armory hall. And most of those warblades were well-trained, experienced in battle, and eager to win—through battle-prowess, how else?—formal membership in the Evendooms rather than remaining expendable, ill-treated Nameless servants … they couldn’t all be dead!
She saw her first guards. And her second, third, and swiftly more, beyond counting: bodies lying crumpled and still, here and there. Evendoom bodies.
Lots of Evendoom bodies. Even if Talonnorn survived this attack, Evendoom would be a handful of Nifl in a ruined castle, the haughty foremost House of the city no longer.
And the Niflghar of Talonnorn had a cruel way of reminding fallen ones that they were no longer mighty, and no longer deserved to be treated as such.
Not that any of that would matter in the slightest to a dead Taerune Evendoom.
She ran on, too many hulking gorkul close behind her.
The Rift and its fallen spell-wall well behind him, Orivon was out of the smoke now. He could see a lot of carnage, but not much fighting. Yonder, a darkwings hung from the spire of one of the towers of the Evendoom castle, impaled and dripping. Far below it, at the base of that tower, lay several bodies; its rider was probably among them.
Over here, the stones were scorched by some fiery but spent spell that had left bones and ash in some spots, and heaped cooked corpses in others.
A few wounded Niflghar were crawling over distant stones, feebly seeking aid they’d probably never find. No one was standing in his path, waving a sword or anything else.
For which Orivon gave heartfelt thanks to Thorar, as he hurried over a canted stone floor he’d gazed at from afar more than once, toward the clefts he’d seen from the Eventowers.
He was almost at the cleft when someone came out onto one of the ledges high on the cavern wall. A Nifl, in robes, with two more behind him. There was no telling which of the more-than-a-handcount of tunnel mouths they’d come from—particularly as he was now lying as flat as he could, awkwardly cradling some very sharp steel. He was half on his back, so he could at least see anything that approached, and had a clear view of the long and intricate casting the spellrobes on the ledge were weaving.
It went on for what seemed a very long time, as Orivon watched and hoped by Thorar they hadn’t seen him, or just didn’t care about one lone human slave.
Then the trio let their arms fall and stood watching, obviously waiting for something to happen.
Their wait wasn’t long. A high, eerie singing sound arose from the Eventowers—and then dropped into the thunderous roar of much of its rear, tower upon tower, slumping down into tumbling rubble.
Thorar’s Thundering Fists! Orivon stared at the destruction, peering through billowing, rising dust into the depths of suddenly-torn-asunder chambers that had been deep in the center of the Eventowers moments ago. Half the castle, or more, had come crashing down in ruin, just like that!
A moment later, a bright bolt of sizzling magic sprang out of a surviving upper turret of the Eventowers to serve the ledge the same way, blasting it to flying rubble.
Yet all those towers lay as they’d fallen, and the dust was still rising. Orivon stayed where he was for quite a while, letting it billow and drift higher, before daring to roll stiffly over, find his feet and his bundle, and trudge carefully on.
His shoulders tingled, as if expecting to taste a bolt of magic at any moment—but then, if they did, he’d be too fried to feel it, would he not?
The cleft hadn’t been far off when he’d cowered down, the curving, overhanging cavern wall already looming above him. Long, tumbled stones rose to meet it; Orivon picked his way cautiously between and over them, slowing as he saw sprawled, just-slain Nifl and fallen weapons ahead, and smelled blood and death.
There was a cave or tunnel mouth in the nearest cleft! Clambering cautiously up a rock slope slick with fresh blood—the little scuttling things the Nifl called “suripth,” but slaves called “rock maggots,” scattered and scurried at his passage—Orivon peered at the dark opening. Was that a door within it, standing open? Or …
Gaining the lip of the cleft, he peered cautiously this way and that, seeking a foe. There were Nifl bodies aplenty here, heaped in front of the cavern, most clad in familiar Talonnorn war-harness. Evendoom armor, and—Maulstryke!
“Yes,” a voice that held a lot of cold malice and a little cool amusement agreed with him, from somewhere above. “Maulstryke, indeed. And here I thought you were their second wave of attack!”
Orivon sprang back, almost tumbling back down the slope, and had to claw wildly at rocks to keep from falling. Swords, a smallwork-hammer, and a pair of small tongs clattered out of his bundled breeches, as he craned his head to wildly look up and all around.
A spellrobe wearing the Black Flame of Evendoom on his breast was lounging at ease on his side with his head propped on one elbow, as if he were reclining on a guest-chamber couch with slaves attending to his every whim—but there was no couch under him, only empty air. He was smiling a cold smile, and waggling two of his fingers.
In response to those gestures, two gleaming swords were gliding forward through the air, points first, flying by themselves with no warblade gripping their hilts.
Ever so slowly, they were gliding at Orivon.
“Hairy One,” the spellrobe said pleasantly, “I am the guardian of the Hidden Gate. Which is obviously far better known than any of us suspected. I don’t know what you thought you were doing, slave, clambering up here naked with your arms full of obviously stolen swords and whatever else you could snatch, by the looks of it. But I do know what you will be doing: dying. Forthwith.”
Smiling that cruel smile, he waved his hand dismissively—and the two swords swooped, points glittering.
Right
at Orivon, who hadn’t even time to curse. Darting his hands down into his bundle, he came up hefting a sword in his left hand, and his favorite smallwork-hammer in his right.
The spellrobe laughed.
“Huh!” Taerune Evendoom gasped, bringing her blade down hard on the gorkul’s helm, and sending him staggering.
“Hah!” she added, driving her sword up between his legs from behind, and twisting to make sure it didn’t get caught on anything. The gorkul obligingly added the shriek of crowing agony, as his own stumbling rush tore him off her steel and onto a pain-wracked face-first landing on the smooth, hard tiles of the passage floor.
Grinning wearily at the shocked faces of the rest of the gorkul, Taerune turned and ran, shouldering a wall painfully in her own tired, wounded reeling. She was through the narrow places—they hadn’t been narrow enough—and out into a long passage that ran right through the Eventowers, from back to front.
There was a room a little way along here that had a down-stair opening off it, for servants to carry drinkables up from cellars below … yes, here it was, with its door standing open.
Thankfully Taerune ducked through the doorway—and found herself face-to-face with a House spellrobe gaping at her, the fire of a risen slaying-spell raging in his hand but his eyes fixed on—
Oh, yes, her bared breasts. Well, they’d obviously saved her from being blasted once more …
Taerune raised an eyebrow and snapped, “Don’t hurl that magic at me, or your life will be forfeit. You can, however, use it on the gorkul right behind me.”
It was taking the young spellrobe a long time to find something—anything—to say. Staring at her with similarly astonished delight, over the spellrobe’s shoulder, were her brother Jalandral, her uncle Presker, an older spellrobe, and almost two handcounts of warblades, most of them growing broad grins. “By the Burning Talon,” one of them muttered appreciatively.
“Rampants,” Taerune told them in disgust, ducking under the spellrobe’s arm and into their midst. “Dral, Uncle Presker,” she greeted her kin casually, buckling up her leathers.
“My, my,” Presker observed, “Olone seems determined to provide us with every form of entertainment just now. Something to drink, my dear?” He proffered a decanter, one of many that stood ready to hand.
“Don’t mind if I do,” Taerune replied. “Trust you to think of your thirsts, in the midst of all this.”
“Sister,” Jalandral drawled, holding out a half-empty dish of fried amraunt in sauce; the smell was making stomachs rumble on all sides, “we merely sought some spellrobes to bolster our next assault—and found them here. And once some of these have been unstoppered … well, you know they won’t keep!” He saluted her with an almost-empty decanter. “Nice, ah, display, by the way!”
Taerune sketched a parody of a coquettish Nifl-she’s formal dance salute, and claimed a decanter of her own.
Which was about when the young spellrobe at the door cursed, his spell roared into full flame, there were several deep, gurgling screams, and the room was suddenly full of the unlovely reek of cooked gorkul.
“Olone spew, Alandalas!” Presker coughed. “Must you?”
Whatever reply Alandalas the spellrobe might have been planning to make was lost forever in his ragged scream, as the long-claws of two gorkul met in his shoulder, plucking him off his feet and thrusting him back into the room.
“Kiss of the Goddess, Taera!” her uncle snarled, as the warblades cursed and rushed forward, hurling decanters into the faces of the foe. “How many tuskers did you bring with you?”
“Enough, Uncle. More than enough. I’ve grown very tired of killing them—alone.”
Then they were all too busy fighting for idle converse. The gorkuls overmatched the warblades greatly in size and strength, and were pushing into the room, forcing the Nifl back. Even a tusker dead with six swords meeting in him has size and weight, and when shoved from behind, as a shield, forces a way onward ere he falls. There had been three such shields already, and Evendoom now held less than a third of the small room, Jalandral cursing fervently because he had no room to ply his blades in the increasing crush.
Nigh the back wall, the senior spellrobe slapped Presker’s arm and snapped, “Shield me! Lady Taerune?”
Taerune nodded and joined her uncle, bracing arms with him in front of the spellrobe—whose name she recalled now: Raereul—as he worked a swift spell.
And the room was suddenly full of lightning.
8
“Laughing, I Put My Sword into Him”
And that, I fear, is all he had time to say
For, laughing, I put my sword into him.
—from the traditional Nifl ballad,
“How the Old Lord Died”
Orivon parried one sword with his own—it wasn’t much different than deflecting a blade tumbling at him after a Rift-burst—and smashed the other aside with his hammer, the flying blade ringing like a bell.
Then he was racing forward, charging over bodies and rolling loose stones alike. His only hope was to slay the spellrobe and trust that the flying blades died with the Nifl.
The spellrobe abruptly stopped laughing and scrambled from his indolent lounging up to his feet to begin fleeing in a scampering run on empty air.
Orivon sprang as high as he could, slashing with his sword.
Nifl grunted, all over the room, as the breath was snatched from them and every hair on their bodies sprang out as stiff as spikes. A decanter toppled and shattered loudly, in the singing instant of silence that followed—as lightnings raced everywhere, arcing from Evendoom wardshield to Evendoom wardshield, and gorkul shuddered helplessly, their eyes going dark, as the air filled with the smell of their roasting.
And then the lightnings died away, and gorkul all over the room sagged to the floor, their eye sockets trailing little plumes of smoke.
“Neatly done, Raereul,” Jalandral drawled. “You could save the House much time in the kitchens during feasts … though somehow I believe it will take even House Oszrim a long time to grow truly fond of roasted gorkul.”
Then the heir of House Evendoom frowned, peered, and pounced on a dead tusker, snatching aside a baldric. “Everyone—look you here!”
Beneath his pointing finger, seared deep into gorkul flesh, was a brand they all knew.
“The fair city of Ouvahlor,” Presker murmured. Taerune saw where the brand was, strode to another gorkul who was sprawled the right way up, and tugged aside the broad leather of its baldric.
“This one was a slave of Ouvahlor, too,” she announced calmly.
The warblades looked at the Evendooms and each other, frowning.
“They must really hate us,” one offered.
Jalandral, Presker, and Taerune Evendoom all stared at him—and burst into mirthless laughter.
“We’re winning!” Ravandarr Evendoom cried triumphantly, waving a gauntleted fist in the air as an enemy Nifl slid off his blade, slack-jawed and dead. “Winning!”
“If by ‘winning’ you mean we’re beginning to hurl these motley attackers back out of what’s left of our ruined home,” his uncle Faunhorn—an Evendoom rampant so beautiful he outshone most of the young and daringly-gowned shes of the House—said bitingly, “then I suppose that, yes, we are winning. Myself, I’d call it something less.”
Ravandarr flushed, his obsidian cheeks going pale, and turned away—only to find himself meeting the mocking gaze of another uncle: the dark and dashing Valarn, who in his youth had led the Hunt so valiantly that Olone’s priestesses had healed him of disfiguring wounds thrice. “Your first real taste of battle, youngling?” He sneered. “Mind you don’t wet yourself when they come back at us.” He pointed down the passage with his blood-drenched sword at a distant chamber where someone was using a whip viciously, making many gorkul snarl.
Ravandarr blushed again, turning even paler. “Has … has anyone seen Taera?”
Valarn chuckled. “How touching. The little rampant wants his elder sis
ter. Tell me, how often do you usually run to the loving warmth of her arms? And, ahem, her ‘more loving’ parts?”
Ravandarr raised his blade. “Do you dare—?”
“Obviously,” the most hated Evendoom purred, giving Ravandarr a dark smile. “Of far more momentary import is what you dare, bladder-wet youngling: Do you dare to cross blades with Valarn Thrice-Blessed?”
“Valarn,” Faunhorn snapped, “while we all stand in danger, such baitings are treason to this House.”
Valarn smiled lazily. “Matters of honor are never treason, brother. And I believe you’ve just insulted mine. I’ll deal with you after I end this pewling unworthy’s babblings. Forever, of course.”
Smile widening, he strolled toward Ravandarr, the legendary spellblade in his hand winking as it shed more of its wet mask of fresh gorkul blood.
“Much as it pains me to speak seriously,” Jalandral Evendoom told everyone in the room, “I must ask you to hear and heed these my orders: It just might turn out to be vital that the crones of our House learn that this attack comes from—or at least involves, and I intend to examine more dead if we get the chance—Ouvahlor. Which means some of us must survive, at least long enough to carry word to the crones. So, if we’re reduced to two, both of you break off fighting and try to get to the crones’ tower, avoiding frays if possible.” Placing a hand on his chest, he added grandly, “I have spoken!”
“Hearken to the will of Evendoom,” Presker intoned solemnly, bowing his head in the manner of a novice of Olone.
Jalandral’s swift grin was echoed by most of the warblades. “Right,” he added, “now let’s charge out of here and find more foes to slay!”
Swords held close to chests, the Evendoom rampants—and one she—rushed out of the chamber.
Raereul ran nowhere, but knelt beside his wounded fellow spellrobe. “Alandalas?”
