Sevenfold Sword: Champion

by Jonathan Moeller

  Or maybe he was fighting a battle. He was unhurt, the spell could tell her that much. She prayed to God that he would remain that way, that he would rejoin her soon. Perhaps when Ridmark found her, Calliande would have already rescued Gareth and Joachim.

  She doubted it would be that simple.

  Calliande walked on, from time to time calling water to her hand and drinking it. She kept hold of the Sight as well, using it to sweep the hills for danger. The Sight showed her the echoes of violence lingering over the road, the haze of the necromantic aura to the northwest.

  It also showed her the approach of a dozen orcish warriors, marching out from the road in a patrol.

  Calliande would be right in their path.

  She stopped, turned to face them, and starting casting spells over herself. The first was a ward to turn aside weapons of metal. The second was a spell to block all missiles, and if she had possessed the wit to cast it earlier, she might not have gotten separated from her sons. Part of her magical strength went to maintain the wards, but she held the rest ready to strike.

  Calliande hated using magic to kill. None of the Magistri could do it, but the Magistri only had access to the magic of the Well, and its power could only heal and defend and ward. Calliande, as Keeper of Andomhaim, could use elemental magic to call forth destruction. Healing with the magic of the Well was far more painful, but she preferred it to fighting. It was too easy to kill with magic. When Ridmark had to kill an opponent, it took the strength of his arm and his skill with a blade. When Calliande did it, all she had to do was call forth the power and concentrate.

  Perhaps she could make the orcs see reason.

  She planted her staff in the dust, turned to face the road, and waited.

  It was a short wait.

  The orcs came down the hillside, a dozen of them, armored in leather and carrying short bows, short swords at their belts. As before, each orc had a blue sword tattooed on the left his of his face. One of them spotted Calliande and shouted to his companions, and they began to converge on her. The orcish warriors lowered her bows. Likely they did not see her as a threat.

  That might change if they got close enough to see the flickering aura of the warding spells around her, though the harsh sunlight would make it difficult to see.

  “Hold!” said Calliande. “Soldiers of the Confessor, hear me!”

  The orcs slowed, watching her with suspicion.

  “I do not have any quarrel with you, not yet,” said Calliande. “I know that the Confessor sent you here to assist the Arcanius Knight Archaelon as he rebels against King Hektor. Let me pass, and I will not trouble you.”

  Several of the orcs laughed.

  “And what if we don’t want to let you pass?” called one of the orcs.

  “Then I will give you a greater quarrel than you can imagine,” said Calliande.

  This time all of the orcs laughed.

  “You three, take her,” said the orcish leader, gesturing to his men. “Make sure to gag her. I don’t want to listen to her complain all the way to Castra Chaeldon.”

  The orcs advanced, and Calliande drew together her power for a spell.

  And then something happened that she did not expect.

  Elemental magic surged before her Sight, a spell of air and wind. Calliande turned her head in surprise just as a bolt of lightning screamed across the valley and slammed into two of the orcish soldiers. It coiled around their bronze short swords and into their flesh, and the orcs’ scream was lost in the thunderclap. The blast flung the two orcs to the ground, and both were dead before the smoke started to rise from their corpses.

  The orcish warriors bellowed in fury, and Calliande turned her head.

  A warrior armored in bronze ran towards her.

  His armor was of finer quality than those of the dead humans she had seen upon the road, with overlapping plates of bronze covering a coat of leather that hung to his knees. Bronze greaves reinforced his boots, and bronze bracers protected his forearms. He wore a helm of curious, ancient design, bronze with a T-shaped slit for the eyes and nose and mouth, its top crowned with a golden plume. Calliande thought the ancient Greeks upon Old Earth had worn helmets like that.

  In his right hand was a longsword of blue dark elven steel, and small arcs of lightning twisted and snarled around his left hand.

  The man had thrown the lightning bolt at the orcs…and he had already been wounded. Calliande saw the half-scabbed cuts on his arms, noted the darker spot on the right side of his torso where blood had leaked through his damaged armor. To judge from his magical aura, he had already expended most of his strength, and it would take some time for him to gather enough power to throw another lightning bolt.

  But he was charging into the orcs anyway.

  Calliande had to help him.

  The orcs seemed to recognize the warrior in bronze armor, or perhaps they recognized that distinctive sword. It was the first weapon of dark elven steel Calliande had seen here.

  The lightning bolt had been fairly distinctive as well. There could not be that many bronze-armored warriors who threw bolts of lightning in battle.

  “It’s the Thunderbolt!” shouted the orcish leader. “The bounty is ours! Take him!”

  The orcs roared and charged the bronze-armored warrior in a mass, hoping to overwhelm him. Against one swordsman without a shield, it wasn’t a bad tactic.

  Against a swordsman aided by the Keeper of Andomhaim, it was suicidal.

  Calliande cast a spell, calling on the magic of earth and stone. The ground beneath the charging orcs rippled and folded, knocking them from their feet. The bronze-armored warrior faltered for a second, glancing in Calliande’s direction, but he seized the opening. His dark elven sword blurred, and he killed two of the orcs before they regained their footing.

  But the orcish warriors were veterans of many fights. They surged back to their feet, bronze swords drawn back to stab, and charged at the warrior.

  The warrior jumped backward.

  Calliande blinked in surprise. He soared backward a dozen yards, hurtling over the rocky ground in a shallow arc and landing upon his feet, his blue sword snapping up in guard. The Sight had shown her what he had done. It had been a minor spell of elemental air, one that had called the wind to him, and it had carried him backward.

  It was a neat trick. It also caused the orcs to charge him in a rage, and Calliande struck again, casting another spell of earth magic that knocked the orcs to the ground. The bronze-armored warrior charged forward, and he cast a spell as he did. A javelin formed of lightning appeared in his hand, and he hurled the weapon. It struck one of the orcish warriors in the chest and knocked him to the ground, and then the bronze-armored warrior was in their midst. He was a brilliant swordsman, the blade flashing back and forth as he blocked their attacks and landed killing blows. Once more Calliande knocked the orcs from their feet, and the bronze warrior finished them off, his blue blade dripping with green blood.

  Silence fell over the valley, and the bronze-armored warrior regarded Calliande in silence.

  “Whoever you are, sir,” said Calliande in Latin, “thank you for your assistance.”

  The warrior thrust his sword into the earth, reached up, and drew off his helmet.

  Calliande was surprised at how young the man was. He couldn’t have been more than twenty-five at the most. He had a strikingly handsome face, his features strong, with gray eyes and thick black hair that now stood in sweat-sodden spikes. He looked exhausted, with dark circles under his eyes, and an ugly bruise spreading across the left side of his face. The man had seen fighting, and hard fighting, today.

  Then he smiled. It seemed to light up his battered face.

  “Well, my lady,” said the warrior with a sweeping bow, “what is an Arcanius Knight for, if not to rescue fair damsels by the side of the road?”

  Calliande smiled, charmed despite her fears and the urgency of the situation. “I fear I am a little too old to be a fair damsel, but I thank you for the
words nonetheless, sir knight. And I thank you even more for your timely arrival.”

  “I think, my lady of the strange accent,” said the warrior, “you might not have needed my help at all.”

  “Might I know your name, sir?” said Calliande. If he was one of these Arcanius Knights that Rynofael had mentioned, he would know a great deal about Owyllain and the Nine Cities. He would also know exactly where to find Castra Chaeldon. “The orcs called you Thunderbolt, I think.”

  The warrior grimaced. “God and the saints, I am weary of that title. But my name is Tamlin, my lady, and I am a Knight of the Order of the Arcanii.”

  Calliande decided to tell him the truth and see how he would react. “And I am Calliande Arban, the Keeper of Andomhaim.”

  Tamlin’s brows drew together in a frown. “Andomhaim? No, that’s impossible. Andomhaim fell long ago. Who are you really…”

  He took a step towards her, winced, and clutched at his wounded side.

  Then he fell to his knees, his face going pale.

  Chapter 8: Order of the Arcanii

  Calliande cursed and hurried forward as Tamlin fell on his side.

  Just how badly had the young knight been hurt? Often, she had seen men push themselves hard in battle, taking wounds that they had barely noticed in their frenzy, only to collapse and die after the battle had been won. She didn’t want to see Tamlin die. He had rushed to her aid, knowing nothing about her.

  On a more practical level, if he died she would lose her best chance at finding a useful local guide.

  “It’s…I’m just a bit dizzy,” said Tamlin.

  Calliande helped him to sit up. “We need to get your armor off. Help me, please.”

  She set her staff next to him and helped Tamlin pull off his leather cuirass with its bronze plates. Beneath it, he wore a quilted gambeson, and the garment was drenched with blood.

  “Ah, damnation,” muttered Tamlin. His voice was starting to slur a little. “That last one must have hit me harder than I thought.”

  “Let’s get this off,” said Calliande, helping him with the gambeson.

  “Unless you have needle, thread, and a roll of bandages hidden in your skirt,” said Tamlin, his voice still slurred, “I don’t think you can do much, Calliande Arban of Andomhaim.”

  “You might be surprised,” said Calliande, running the critical eye of a physician over him. There was a nasty wound in his right side, just at the base of the ribs. It was bleeding profusely, and it was possible the blow had cracked his ribs and damaged his right lung. He had a shallow gash on his left arm, and another on his right leg, likely from a spear that had slipped beneath the edge of his armor. Lucky for him the spear hadn’t gone higher at that angle, or else he wouldn’t have been able to do anything with a woman except smile at her.

  As she examined him, Calliande noticed three things.

  The first was that he was a tremendously strong man. His right arm was a little larger than his left, as was common in right-handed swordsmen, but his torso and limbs were heavy with muscle. He had been training hard to become a warrior, likely all his life.

  The second thing she noticed was the scars.

  Tamlin had a lot of scars, so many that his torso looked like a map drawn in flesh by a drunken cartographer. She saw the marks of swords, daggers, and even bite marks. For such a young man, he had been in a lot of fights…and he had often been wounded.

  When she looked at his back, she flinched.

  Whip scars covered his back. He had been flogged at some point in his life and flogged so badly that he should have died of blood loss or sepsis.

  But the scars paled in comparison to the thing on his left shoulder.

  She wasn’t sure if it was a scar or a birthmark. It looked a little like both, but scars and birthmarks were never that shade of pale green. A tattoo? If so, why would Tamlin have a tattoo of a downward-pointing green sword on his left shoulder. And one that looked so much like the orcish soldiers’ blue facial tattoos?

  Calliande could ask him later, once she was sure that he wasn’t going to bleed out.

  She realized that he had never encountered the healing magic of the Well of Tarlion before.

  “This,” said Calliande, “is going to feel a little strange.”

  She flexed her fingers, calling magic, and white light glimmered around her hands, visible even in the bright sunlight.

  Tamlin blinked. “What are you doing?”

  He started to raise a hand to stop her.

  Before he could, Calliande put her hands on his temples and cast the healing spell. Tamlin went rigid, every one of his well-defined muscles clenching at once. Calliande knew that the healing spell often felt like getting dunked in freezing water.

  For the Magistria casting the healing spell, it meant only pain.

  She felt every one of his wounds as if they had been torn into her own flesh. The wounds in his side and leg and arm were her own, as were his cracked ribs and the damage to his lung. The bruise on his face was her own, which didn’t help her headache.

  But Calliande had done this a thousand times before, and she gritted her teeth and rode the pain. One by one she forced his wounds to close and heal themselves, and the pain faded.

  And then it was over.

  Calliande straightened up, still kneeling next to him. Tamlin collapsed to the ground with a groan, breathing hard. Calliande shook her head, shaking off the last of the pain. Healing his wounds had hurt, but it had still been nothing compared to the difficult labor she had endured with Joanna, the pain of feeling her daughter die…

  No. No, she couldn’t think about that now. She might fall to pieces again, and she could not do that while her sons needed her.

  “My God,” croaked Tamlin. He sat up and examined his wounds. Or, at least, where they should have been.

  “I was able to heal the cut on your arm and the bruise on your face entirely,” said Calliande. “The wounds on your leg and chest were bad enough that they’ll leave scars…but I don’t think a few more of those will bother you.”

  Tamlin prodded the new scar on his right side with a finger, and then looked at her and grinned. “Are you a goddess? Or an angel?”

  That was so unexpected that Calliande laughed. “There’s only one God, Sir Tamlin. And I am most definitely not an angel.”

  “I did know that,” said Tamlin. He got to his feet, and Calliande followed suit. “But…you will forgive me some poetic license, I hope. What else is a wounded man to think when a beautiful woman appears who heals him?” He grinned at her. “Dare I ask what other requests you grant?”

  She decided to ignore his flirtation. “Given that I did just save your life, I would like the answers to some questions.”

  “Of course,” said Tamlin. The smile faded as he looked around. “But I should armor myself again, and we should not linger here. Our late friends,” he glanced at the dead orcs, “will have friends of their own.”

  “Agreed,” said Calliande. “But once we are away from here, I am going to Castra Chaeldon.”

  Tamlin frowned. “Really?” She handed him the gambeson, and he pulled it on. The garment was stiff with blood, and it would start to smell foul in short order, but the leather-backed bronze armor would probably peel off his scarred skin if he tried to wear it without padding. “That is not a safe place.”

  “No,” said Calliande. “The traitor Archaelon, I assume?”

  Tamlin’s face darkened as Calliande helped him don the armor. “You’ve met him, then.”

  “Not yet,” said Calliande, “but I intend to do so.” She picked up her staff, and Tamlin retrieved his sword of dark elven steel and returned the weapon to its scabbard.

  “Might I ask why?” said Tamlin. “You will face great danger.”

  “I have no choice,” said Calliande. “I will tell you the truth, but you might find it unbelievable. As I said, I am the Keeper of Andomhaim.”

  They walked northwest over the hills, and as they did, she gave Tamlin
a brief sketch of everything that had happened since Rhodruthain had appeared before High King Arandar’s throne. Had it only been this morning? It felt as if far more time had passed.

  “Then Andomhaim was not destroyed by the urdmordar?” said Tamlin at last.

  “No,” said Calliande. “The archmage Ardrhythain of the high elves founded the Order of the Swordbearers and the Order of the Magistri among us, and they defeated the urdmordar.”

  “Interesting,” said Tamlin.

  “Do you believe me?” said Calliande.

  “I see no reason not to,” said Tamlin. “Your tale is incredible, I will admit. But I need only remind myself of the fact that I can walk upright without pain to see the proof of your tale. As you may have guessed, the realm of Owyllain was founded by Connmar Pendragon when his fleet found his way to these shores five hundred years ago. We had always thought that Andomhaim was destroyed long ago…and we had no reason to think otherwise. Nor did we have any means of learning otherwise. At least three thousand miles of ocean separate Aenesium from Tarlion, and apparently, no man living has the knowledge of the sea to traverse those miles.”

  “Why is the city named Aenesium?” said Calliande.

  “For Aeneas of the Aeneid and the Iliad,” said Tamlin. “You know the poems?”

  Calliande blinked and then understood the reference. “Yes, of course. Just as Aeneas fled the fall of Troy to found Rome, so did Connmar Pendragon flee what he thought was the fall of Tarlion to found the new realm of Owyllain.” It was an odd thought. Andomhaim was the realm of mankind, the home of humanity on this world. The thought that there might be another civilization of humanity far from Andomhaim was a strange one.