Avempartha trr-2

by Michael J. Sullivan

  The sentinel glanced at the anvil. “And I suppose one of you was planning on using the sword to kill the beast and claim the crown of emperor?”

  “Actually no,” Hadrian replied. “Getting the women and running real fast was more the plan.”

  “And you expect me to believe that? Hadrian Blackwater, the consummate warrior who handles a blade like a Teshlor Knight of the old empire. You really expect me to believe that you’re just passing through this remote village? That you just happen to be in possession of the only weapon that can kill the Gilarabrywn at the precise moment in time when the Emperor will be chosen by the one who does so. No, of course not, you are just using what is arguably the most powerful sword in the world to make a trade with an insanely dangerous, but now talking monster, for a peasant girl and the Princess of Melengar, whom you barely know.”

  “Well-when you put it that way, it does sound bad, but it’s the truth.”

  “The church will be returning to continue the trials here,” Luis Guy told them. “Until then, it is my job to make certain no one kills the Gilarabrywn who is, shall we say, unworthy of the crown. That most certainly includes thieving elf-lovers and his band of cut-throats.” Guy walked over to Theron. “So I will have that blade you’re holding.”

  “Over my dead body,” Theron growled.

  “As you wish,” Guy drew his sword and all seven seret dismounted and drew their blades as well.

  “Now,” Guy told Theron, “give me the blade or both of you will die.”

  “Don’t you mean all four?” a voice behind Hadrian said and he looked over to see Mauvin and Fanen coming up the slope spreading out, each with his sword drawn. Mauvin held two, one of which he tossed to Theron, who caught it clumsily.

  “Make that five,” Magnus said holding two of his larger hammers in his hands. The dwarf looked over at Hadrian and swallowed hard. “He’s planning on killing me anyway, so why not?”

  “There are still eight of us,” Guy pointed out. “Not exactly an even fight.”

  “I was thinking the same thing,” Mauvin said. “Sadly, there’s no one else here we can ask to join your side.”

  Guy looked at Mauvin then Hadrian for a long moment as the men glared across the ash at each other. Then he nodded and lowered his blade. “Well, I can see I will have to report your misconduct to the archbishop.”

  “Go ahead,” Hadrian said. “His body is buried with the rest of them just down the hillside.”

  Guy gave him a cold look then turned to walk away, but as he did, Hadrian noticed his shoulder dip unnaturally to his right and his foot pivot, toe out as he stepped. It was a motion Hadrian had taught Theron to watch for, the announcement of an attack.

  “Theron!” He shouted, but it was unnecessary, the farmer had already moved and raised his sword even before Guy spun. The sentinel thrust for his heart. Theron was there a second faster and knocked the blade away. Then out of reflex, the farmer shifted his weight forward took a step and performed the combination move Hadrian had drilled into him, parry, pivot, and riposte. He thrust forward, extending, going for reach. The sentinel staggered. He twisted and narrowly avoided being run through the chest, taking the sword thrust in his shoulder. Guy cried out in agony.

  Theron stood shocked at his own success.

  “Pull it out!” Hadrian and Mauvin both yelled at him.

  Theron withdrew the blade and Guy staggered back gripping his bleeding shoulder.

  “Kill them!” the sentinel hissed.

  The seret knights charged.

  Four Knights of Nyphron attacked the Pickering brothers. One rushed Hadrian, another launched himself at Theron, and the last took Magnus. Hadrian knew Theron would not last long against a skilled seret. He drew both his short sword and the bastard and slew the first Knight of Nyphron the moment he came within range. Then he stepped in the path of the second. The knight realized too late he was walking into a vice of two attackers as both Hadrian and Theron cut him down.

  Magnus held up his hammers as menacingly as he could, but the little dwarf was clearly no match for the knight and he retreated behind his anvil. As the seret got nearer, he threw one hammer at him, which hit the seret in the chest. It rang off his breastplate, causing no real harm, but it staggered him slightly. Realizing that the dwarf was no threat, the seret turned to face Hadrian who raced at him.

  The seret swung down in an arc at Hadrian’s head. Hadrian caught the blade with the short sword in his left hand, holding the knight’s sword arm up as he drove his bastard sword into the man’s unprotected armpit.

  Mauvin and Fanen fought together against the four attackers. The elegant rapiers of the Pickerings flew-catching, blocking, slicing, slamming. Every attack turned back, every thrust blocked, every swing answered. Yet the two brothers could only defend. They stood their ground against the onslaught of the armored knights who struggled to find a weakness. Mauvin finally managed to find a moment to jump to the offense and slipped in a thrust. The tip of his blade stabbed into the throat of the seret, dropping him with a rapid jab, but no sooner had he done so than Fanen cried out.

  Hadrian watched as a seret sliced Fanen across his sword arm, the blade continuing down to his hand. The younger Pickering’s sword fell from his fingers. Defenseless, Fanen desperately stepped backward, retreating from his two opponents. He tripped on the wreckage and fell. They rushed him, going for the kill.

  Hadrian was too many steps away.

  Mauvin ignored his own defense to save his brother. He thrust out. In one move, he blocked both attacks on Fanen-but at a cost. Hadrian saw the seret standing before Mauvin thrust. The blade penetrated Mauvin’s side. Instantly the elder Pickering buckled. He fell to his knees with his eyes still on his brother. He could only watch helplessly as the next blow came down. Two swords entered Fanen’s body. Blood coated the blades.

  Mauvin screamed. Even as his own assailant began his killing blow, a cross slice aimed at Mauvin’s neck. Mauvin, on his knees, ignored the stroke much to the delight of the seret. What the knight did not see was Mauvin did not need to defend. Mauvin was done defending. He thrust his sword upwards, slicing through the attacker’s rib cage. He twisted the blade as he pulled it out, ripping apart the man’s organs.

  The two who had killed his brother turned on Mauvin. The elder Pickering raised his sword again but his side was slick with blood, his arm weak, eyes glassy. Tears streamed down his cheeks. He was no longer focusing. His stroke went wide. The closet knight knocked Mauvin’s sword away and the two remaining seret stepped forward and raised their swords, but that was as far as they got. Hadrian had crossed the distance and Mauvin’s would-be killers’ heads came loose, their bodies dropping into the ash.

  “Magnus, get Tomas up here fast.” Hadrian shouted. “Tell him to bring the bandages.”

  “He’s dead,” Theron said as he bent over Fanen.

  “I know he is!” Hadrian snapped. “And Mauvin will be too if we don’t help him.”

  He ripped open Mauvin’s tunic and pressed his hand to his side as the blood bubbled up between his fingers. Mauvin lay panting, sweating. His eyes rolled up in his head revealing their whites.

  “Damn you, Mauvin!” Hadrian shouted at him. “Get me a cloth. Theron get me anything.”

  Theron grabbed one of the seret who had killed Fanen and tore off his sleeve.

  “Get more!” he shouted. He wiped Mauvin’s side finding a small hole spewing bright red blood. At least it was not the dark blood, which usually meant death. He took the cloth and pressed it against the wound.

  “Help me sit him up,” Hadrian said as Theron returned with another strip of cloth. Mauvin was a limp rag now. His head slumped to one side.

  Tomas came running up, his arms filled with long strips of cloth that Lena had given him. They lifted Mauvin, and Tomas tightly wrapped the bandages around his torso. The blood soaked through the cloth, but the rate of bleeding had lessened.

  “Keep his head up,” Hadrian ordered and Tomas cradled h
im.

  Hadrian looked over at where Fanen lay. He was on his back in the dirt, a dark pool of blood still growing around his body. Hadrian gripped his swords with blood soaked hands and stood up.

  “Where’s Guy?” he shouted through clenched teeth.

  “He’s gone,” Magnus answered. “During the fight he grabbed a horse and ran.”

  Hadrian stared back down at Fanen and then at Mauvin. He took a breath and it shuddered in his chest.

  Tomas bowed his head and said the Prayer of the Departed:

  “ Unto Maribor, I beseech thee

  Into the hands of god, I send thee

  Grant him peace, I beg thee

  Give him rest, I ask thee

  May the god of men watch over your journey.”

  When he was done, he looked up at the stars and in a soft voice said, “It’s dark.”

  Chapter 13: Artisitc Vision

  Arista did not want to breathe. It caused her stomach to tighten and bile to rise in her throat. Above her stretched the star-filled sky, but below-the pile. Like a nest, the Gilarabrywn built its mound from collected trophies, gruesome souvenirs of attacks and kills. The top of a head with dark matted hair, a broken chair, a foot still in its shoe, a partially chewed torso, a blood soaked dress, an arm reaching up out of the heap as if waving, so pale it was blue.

  The pile rested on what looked to be an open balcony on the side of a high stone tower, but there was no way off. Instead of a door leading inside, there was only an archway, an outline of a door. Such false hope teased Arista as she longed for it to be a real door.

  She sat with her hands on her lap not wanting to touch anything. There was something underneath her, long and thin like a tree branch. It was uncomfortable, but she did not dare move. She did not want to know what it really was. She tried not to look down. She forced herself to watch the stars and look out at the horizon. To the north, the princess could see the forest divided by the silvery line of the river. To the south laid large expanses of water that faded into darkness. Something out of the corner of her eye would catch her attention and she looked down. She always regretted it.

  Arista realized with a shiver that she had slept on the pile, but she had not fallen asleep. It had felt like drowning-terror so absolute that it overwhelmed her. She could not recall the flight she must have taken, or most of the day, but she did remember seeing it. The beast had lain inches away basking in the afternoon sun. She stared at it for hours, not able to look at anything else-her own death sleeping before her had a way of demanding her complete attention. She sat, afraid to move or speak. She was expecting it to wake and kill her-to add her to the pile. Muscles tense, heart racing, her eyes locked on the thick scaly skin that rippled with each breath, sliding over what looked like ribs. She felt as if she were treading water. She could feel the blood pounding in her head. She was exhausted from not moving. Then the drowning came over her once more and everything went mercifully black.

  Now her eyes were open again, but the great beast was missing. She looked around. There was no sign of the monster.

  “It’s gone,” Thrace told her. It was the first either of them spoke since the attack. The girl was still dressed in her nightgown, the bruise forming a dark line across her face. She was on her hands and knees moving through the pile, digging like a child in a sandbox.

  “Where is it?” Arista asked.

  “Flew away.”

  The princess looked up scanning the stars, no movement at all.

  Somewhere nearby, somewhere below she heard a roar. It was not the beast. The sound was constant, a rumbling hum.

  “Where are we?” she asked.

  “On top of Avempartha,” Thrace answered without looking up from her macabre excavation. She dug down beneath a layer of broken stone and turned over an iron kettle revealing a torn tapestry that she began tugging.

  “What is Avempartha?”

  “It’s a tower”

  “Oh. What are you doing?”

  “I thought there might be a weapon, something to fight with.”

  Arista blinked. “Did you say to fight with?”

  “Yes, maybe a dagger, or a piece of glass.”

  Arista would not have believed it possible if it had not happened to her, but at that moment as she sat helplessly trapped on a pile of dismembered bodies waiting to be eaten-she laughed.

  “A piece of glass? A piece of glass?” Arista howled, her voice becoming shrill. “You’re going to use a dagger or a piece of glass to fight-that thing?”

  Thrace nodded, shoving the antlered head of a buck aside.

  Arista continued to stare open mouthed.

  “What have we got to lose?” Thrace asked.

  That was it. That summed the situation up perfectly. The one thing they had going for them was that it could not get worse. In all her days, even when Percy Braga was building the pyre to burn her alive, even when the dwarf closed the door on her and Royce as they dangled from a rope in a collapsing tower, it was not worse than this. Few fates could compare to the inevitability of being eaten alive.

  Arista fully shared Thrace’s belief, but something in her did not want to accept it. She wanted to believe there was still a chance.

  “You don’t think it will keep its promise?” she asked.

  “Promise?”

  “What it told the deacon.”

  “You-you could understand it?” the girl asked, pausing for the first time to look at her.

  Arista nodded. “It spoke the old imperial language.”

  “What did it say?”

  “Something about trading us for a sword, but I might have gotten it wrong. I learned Old Speech as part of my religious studies at Sheridan and I was never very good at it not to mention I was scared. I’m still scared.”

  Arista saw Thrace thinking and envied her.

  “No,” the girl said at last, “it won’t let us live. It kills people. That’s what it does. It killed my mother and brother, my sister-in-law, and my nephew. It killed my best friend Jessie Caswell. It killed Daniel Hall. I never told anyone this before, but I thought I might marry him one day. I found him near the river trail one beautiful fall morning, mostly chewed, but his face was still fine. That’s what bothered me the most. His face was perfect, not a scratch on it. He just looked like he was sleeping under the pines, only most of his body was gone. It will kill us.”

  Thrace shivered with the passing wind.

  Arista slipped off her cloak, “Here,” she said. “You need this more than I do.”

  Thrace looked at her with a puzzled smile.

  “Just take it!” she snapped. Her emotions breached the surface, threatening to spill. “I want to do something, damn it!”

  She held out the cloak with a wavering arm. Thrace crawled over and took it. She held it up, looking at it as if she were in the comfort of a dressing room. “It’s very beautiful, so heavy.”

  Again Arista laughed, thinking how strange it was to fly from despair to laughter in a single breath. One of them was surely insane-maybe they both were. Arista wrapped it around the young girl as she clasped it on. “And here I was ready to kill Bernice-”

  Arista thought of Hilfred and the maid left-no, ordered-to stay in the room. Had she killed them?

  “Do you think anyone survived?”

  The girl rolled aside a statue’s head and what looked like a broken marble tabletop. “My father is alive,” Thrace said simply, digging deeper.

  Arista did not ask how she knew this, but believed her. At that moment, she would believe anything Thrace told her.

  With a nice hole dug into the heart of the debris, Thrace had yet to find a weapon beyond a leg bone, which she set aside with grisly indifference, Arista guessed, to use in case she found nothing better. The princess watched the excavation with a mix of admiration and disbelief.

  Thrace uncovered a beautiful mirror that was shattered and struggled to free a jagged piece when Arista saw a glint of gold and pointed saying, “There’s s
omething under the mirror.”

  Thrace pushed the glass aside and reaching down grabbed hold and drew forth the hilt half of a broken sword. Elaborately decorated in silver and gold encrusted in fine sparkling gems, the pommel caught the starlight and sparkled.

  Thrace took the sword by the grip and held it up. “It’s light,” she said.

  “It’s broken,” Arista replied, “but I suppose it’s better than a piece of glass.”

  Thrace stowed the hilt in the lining pocket of the cloak and went on digging. She came across the head of an axe and a fork, both of which she discarded. Then pulling back a bit of cloth, she stopped suddenly.

  Arista hated to look, but once more felt compelled.

  It was a woman’s face-eyes closed, mouth open.

  Thrace placed the cloth back over the hole she had made. She retreated to the far edge and sat down, squeezing her knees while resting her head. Arista could see her shaking and Thrace did not dig anymore after that. The two sat in silence.

  Thrump. Thrump.

  Arista heard the sound and her heart raced. Every muscle in her body tightened and she dared not look. A great gust of air struck from above as she closed her eyes, waiting for death. She heard it land and waited to die. Arista could hear it breathing and still she waited.

  “Soon,” she heard it say.

  Arista opened her eyes.

  The beast rested on the pile, panting from the effort of its flight. It shook its head, spraying the platform with loose saliva from its lips that failed to hide the forest of jagged teeth. Its eyes were larger than Arista’s hand, with tall narrow pupils on a marbled orange and brown lens that reflected her own image.

  “Soon?” She didn’t know where she found the courage to speak.

  The massive eye blinked and the pupil dilated as it focused on her. It would kill her now, but at least it would be over.

  “You understand mine speech?” the voice was large and so deep she felt it vibrating her chest.