Sword Play

by Clayton Emery

  “That’s the beauty of a crisis! You have no choice!” Despite her begrimed state, Sysquemalyn chuckled, delighting in conflict. Sunbright couldn’t reconcile her with the soul-dead loser whose head he’d almost removed. She meant to say more, but suddenly pushed him forward. “Stop them!”

  The hordes of lemures faded from Sunbright’s vision as he beheld a new menace urged on by the screaming pit fiend. Bounding from the very feet of the monster came four or five imps or … Words failed the barbarian. They looked like armored knights, if the armor were made of dried leather, and were studded with tall spiral horns, high arching bat wings, and spikes along their arms and legs. The wings obviously were vestigial, for the fiends jumped in great bounds like manic grasshoppers. Where they landed they crushed lemures by the handful, so yellow gore marked their taloned feet.

  All five had been thrown into the battle against the sole living beings in the chamber. Sunbright had time only to shout, “Greenwillow, back to back!” before they were involved in the fight of their lives.

  The lemures never fell back, and more were crushed as the imps crashed upon them almost at Sunbright’s feet. Two attacked immediately.

  The monsters used no finesse, just brute strength in a headlong charge. Huge brown leather hands studded on the back with bony spikes opened to tear off the barbarian’s head. Resisting the urge to fall back, Sunbright countered with an equally brutal assault. He’d wrapped both hands around Harvester’s haft and tucked it under his right armpit. Now he lunged, straight and true, praying his hobnails didn’t slip in the sea of yellow ooze upon which they battled.

  Up close, the imp’s face was a blank mask of leather stippled with spikes no longer than a fingernail. The eyes were blank holes, and when it opened its mouth, the black cavity showed nothing, as if the head were hollow. Sunbright intended to find out. Crowding the monster, he felt the horny hands brush his topknot and clasp shut. But he’d struck.

  Harvester’s widened point jammed into the beast’s gaping mouth, struck leather on the far side, and split it. Cranking the pommel, grunting with the effort, the barbarian felt the hook tear as he yanked back toward his gut. Harvester’s barb jerked loose, snagging on the creature’s lower jaw where a lip would have been.

  By now, Sunbright was taking punishment from a score of spikes. One leather-clad arm raked across his shoulder, splitting skin with jagged spikes like the teeth of a giant garfish. The other arm slammed him alongside the neck, and he had to hoick his head to the left to keep his windpipe from being shredded.

  But at the same time, he twisted Harvester again and pushed, straining sideways. With the hook in the jaw acting as anchor, he scored a deep gash from the imp’s slash of a mouth halfway around its neck. With a heave, he sliced its head half off.

  Barging in so close he felt white bone spikes ping his chest, the barbarian shoved to drive his sword down the thing’s throat, then levered the opposite way.

  Like gutting a deer, he peeled the imp’s head off.

  Only a flap of leathery skin remained at one side of the neck, and the heavy horned head toppled down behind its shoulder. A dry stink like shorn metal welled up from within the fiend, and Sunbright wondered if that represented its spirit, if beings here had them.

  Headless, blinded, the imp staggered, stepped back, piled up questing lemures against the back of its knees, and crumpled atop them.

  “Sunbright, help!”

  He’d almost forgotten Greenwillow guarding his back. He found her on her knees, pressed down by the sheer weight of an imp she’d skewered through the chest. The hilt of her slim sword was wedged between spikes, but the fiend simply flailed at her with horned hands like hard-swung morning stars.

  “You have to tear them open!” Sunbright yelled. Unable to dive past the whirling arms, he opted to lunge. Harvester’s spread tip rammed through the leather hide directly beside the shank of Greenwillow’s sword. “Cut the other way!”

  Veteran of a hundred battles, Greenwillow understood instinctively. Bracing with her knees, she put her slim muscles behind the bright edge of the keen blade. Sunbright plied his heavy hand-forged blade—fine quality, but no match for elven true-steel—to yank away from the elf’s cut.

  Neat as sawing a tree, the imp came apart in the center. The same brassy stink gushed out as its top half toppled behind its rear end. The tall horns struck sparks from the stone floor.

  Yet three more imps crowded in, smashing lemures aside to kill the human and elf. Sunbright stifled a groan of exhaustion and despair. Already, his hands and arms and legs were trembling. Blood ran down his forearms and dripped to the ashy ground. More wet redness ran down his shirt from his aching neck where spikes had gouged a furrow in his shoulder. He was torn in a dozen other places, and Greenwillow, always pale, was almost as white as the bony creatures around them. Worn to the nub, they’d surely lose when these charging imps reached them.

  Yet he fought on as an imp darted forward to grab him. Showing intelligence, this creature reached in low and tried to snag its target’s ankle to pull it out from under him. The barbarian slammed Harvester straight down like a crowbar into the armored, studded arm. But perhaps the imp had considered that. By the ghastly red light and infernal smoke, Sunbright saw the free hand snatch at him—and found that Harvester was fetched up in the thing’s other arm. The blade was suffering the same as its master, and even the hook’s inside edge, usually as keen as a fish knife, had worn dull. As Sunbright tugged to rip the edge through tough leather, the studded hand closed on his calf and yanked.

  The world whirled as Sunbright flipped and crashed on his back. Only his thick topknot saved his head, but he received a solid crack. And even before he could shake his head to clear it, the armored fiend jumped on him.

  The barbarian’s breath shot from his lungs as giant, heavy studded feet thumped his chest. He smelled a whiff of dust and musty-bear odor as his vest was crushed to him. He fought for air as the imp wrapped two leathery hands around his throat and squeezed and pulled. The thing even smelled of hot leather, like horsehide gloves hung near a fire to dry. It was a question whether he’d be choked or have his head torn off. Flailing with his right hand, he managed only to whap Harvester against the beast’s thick hide. He couldn’t get purchase to strike. The world went dark and spinning, and he knew his time was running out.

  In a desperate burst of fury, he curled and convulsed into a ball, managing to hook a foot in the fiend’s crotch. It had no genitals to break, but the toehold would do. Straining until he thought his heart and head would burst, Sunbright braced his back and kicked straight up.

  He was lucky, he knew, for the imp had been overbalanced. His throat and chin suffered as the leathery hands were dragged off forcibly. Then the imp toppled onto its head, half-wedged in a crack, and Sunbright could painfully crawl away-not that there was any safety to crawl to.

  Wheezing, rubbing his raw throat, Sunbright glimpsed Sysquemalyn and Candlemas standing together a dozen feet off, eyes closed, right hands raised and touching. He thought that queer behavior for a battleground, but supposed it to be some secret mental communication between wizards. And so it proved, for within a few seconds they jumped apart and clapped their hands together.

  Meanwhile, a studded imp clawed at Greenwillow. Lurching, still gulping rank air, Sunbright fended it back with the point of Harvester …

  … and a studded arm snugged around his throat. Another imp had seen a weak spot and copied the first. Black wings fluttered as the raven, swooping in from on high, bated the imp’s face, without effect.

  Throttled, fishhook-sharp barbs lodged against his throat, the barbarian fought panic as he kicked away from one imp to drive back the other. But the hold on his neck only tightened, until he thought the spikes would puncture the underside of his jaw. Greenwillow screamed once, then higher, near panic. Kicking and jumping to keep close and relieve the pressure, Sunbright snapped Harvester over his head, trying to slash the fiend’s face. A bony-encrusted arm
as hard as a barnacled bollard beat Harvester aside. Desperate, the barbarian switched positions and shoved the sword down between his own legs, praying he could chop a leg from the imp. But he only succeeded in slicing himself.

  He wouldn’t escape this choke hold.

  “By M’dhal’s sansevil!” roared a voice. “Protect this man, the living from the dead!”

  With a tearing wrench, the imp was ripped loose from Sunbright and bowled backward. The barbarian fell, choking, rubbing blood from his shorn throat. Greenwillow, also bleeding in a dozen places, crawled toward them. Vaguely, Sunbright had the sense that some magic had knocked the fiends back. And through a red haze, he noticed an invisible circle surrounding them, as if a tornado had erupted, blowing away their enemies but sparing them.

  Protecting them was Candlemas, who didn’t look like a funny fat man anymore, for his upraised hands crackled, and lightning coursed down both sides of his body, so that his beard bristled and his clothes were as fuzzed as a scared cat’s back. He bellowed again, not to the barbarian and elf, but to the gods and sources of magic. “Karsus, grant me strength! Foul things, feel the bite of Tolodine’s killing wind!”

  Instantly, a howling, shrieking, keening, whirling song of death ripped the air, left them breathless, made the pit fiend in the distance howl in rage. Lemures, imps, skeletal warriors, all were churned, battered, shoved hither and thither. Some blew one way, some the other, so they collided and collapsed and thumped together, as if sixteen errant winds fought to wipe them from the earth. Fiends tumbled like grass before a hurricane. But up on the bluff, the pit fiend was conjuring too. A red mist was rising around it and blowing contrary to all the winds to envelop them. The fiends it touched were tinged red as if dipped in blood. Sunbright didn’t care to imagine what it would do to the living.

  But before the awful red wind could reach them, Sysquemalyn shrieked, “By Quantol! By Smolyn! By Gwynn the Vampire and Hersent’s Sigil! Trebbe, heed me! I command you—move us!” And she clapped her hands like a god.

  Cavern, monsters, smoke, pit fiend. Before Sunbright’s eyes, all vanished.

  Within an eye-blink, the barbarian was sprawled on a dirt floor surrounded by dirt walls. There were only humans and the elf here, no fiends in sight.

  He scrambled to his feet, instinctively making sure of his grip on Harvester, then groaned as he cast about.

  “That was no escape! This is hopeless!”

  Chapter 16

  Sunbright waved his free hand and sword.

  “This is still the Nine Hells! I was trapped in here before! These tunnels change as soon as you turn your back! There’s no escape this way!”

  “Hush, fool!” Sysquemalyn was up, though shaky-legged, and she pulled at Candlemas’s sleeve to rouse him. The podgy mage rolled clumsily, as if drunk. “This is as far as I could gate us!”

  “What’s wrong with him?” Greenwillow gave up wiping blood from her wounds and helped. Her clothes were more red than green and black.

  “He suffers from conjuring in a foreign land,” the red-haired mage snapped. She looked tired and wretched, her eyes sunken and encircled, her proud red hair lank and lifeless. “We’re too far from the reservoir of dweomer amassed by our patron, Lady Polaris.” It was a sign of her desperation that she eschewed any insults for the lady. “We’re drawing magic from afar. The local magic is corrupt, the wrong color.… Never mind! Why explain to ignorant groundlings? Help me move this bucket of lard.”

  Groaning, the halt helping the lame, human and elf got Candlemas to his feet. The bedraggled raven, its tail feathers charred along the ends, limped and hopped along, as exhausted as its master. Sunbright levered his shoulder under the mage’s arm. Sysquemalyn left them to it, then snapped fire on her fingers to better light their way. “Follow me. I think I can get us out. I built this place, after all.”

  “No, dear, you didn’t.” Candlemas was awake and coherent. Despite his fatigue, he argued with his old rival. “The pit fiend said no, and it ought to know. You simply plagiarized—”

  “Belt up, Candy-Ass!” snapped the mage. “All right, if I didn’t exactly build it, at least I know what I stole and where it leads!”

  But waving her flaming hand around, she hesitated, searching both ways. In one direction the tunnel curved up to a hump, then probably dropped. The other direction curved, so she led that way. But when they’d plodded a hundred feet, the dirt floor dropped away abruptly.

  Looking backward, they saw that the tunnel now curved up as steep as a chimney. Greenwillow sighed. “I was in a place that shifted every minute too.”

  Sunbright still propped a sagging Candlemas on his shoulder. “Perhaps we should rest here,” the barbarian suggested.

  “Aye,” groaned the mage. And collapsed.

  All together, like four children frightened in the woods, they huddled against one cold wall of the tunnel, feet stretched straight out in front of them. Sunbright propped Harvester across his lap, ready to fight if need be, but he had to fight his own urge to nod off. To keep busy, he dug a whetstone from a pouch and honed his blade. The edge was as dull as a butter knife from chopping bodies as if they were cordwood. Too, he straightened his clothing and tackle as best he could, but everything was so crusted and stiff with dried blood it was like one great mass. Oddly, he still wore his bearskin vest, and his body stank sharply within it, but despite the heat he couldn’t divest himself of it, for he needed its scant protection as armor.

  Greenwillow tested her sword’s edge, found it to be as sharp as ever, so she only scrubbed the blood and ichor from it. She croaked, “Can either of you mighty mages conjure us some water?” The very word made Sunbright’s throat constrict as if he’d swallowed desert sand. He’d had a waterskin once, long ago, but had lost it somewhere.

  “One definition of hell is eternal thirst,” groaned Candlemas. “But I’ll see if I can locate any.”

  Holding his head in both hands, the tired mage muttered under his breath. Sunbright heard the name “Zahn” repeated. But nothing happened, and after a while Candlemas sat back against the wall. “There’s none to be found. I’ll have to transmute some.”

  “That’ll cost us dearly,” put in Sysquemalyn.

  “If we’re to squabble, we’ll need wet tongues.” Even tired, the bearded man could joke about their foolish rivalry. “Now … Mistress Elf, if I might borrow your breastplate?”

  Wondering, Greenwillow loosened the straps to shuck her black boiled-leather armor. The act brought a whiff of her natural fragrance to Sunbright. Like himself, he knew she was sweaty and rank as a hard-ridden mare, but he drank in her scent as if she smelled of wildflowers.

  Candlemas laid the breastplate facedown, scraped sand and dust from the tunnel floor and trickled it into a pile, like a child playing in a sandbox. He muttered half to himself, “Funny, at home I could conjure an ice storm with one hand. But let’s see if Proctiv’s the arch-mage he was rumored to be.”

  And laying his hands on the sandpile, he whispered a rhyming enchantment that went on and on. Sweat came to his dirty brow, and his head began to swing a slow circle. When his revolving had made him dizzy, he made a final call, bent his head swiftly, and spat on the sand.

  It turned into water.

  Greenwillow gave a chirp of delight, Sunbright whooped, and even Sysquemalyn snorted approval. One by one, careful not to spill, they put their lips to the water and slurped. Conjured in hell with impure magic, it was brackish and bitter and scanty, but never had Sunbright tasted anything better, not from all the rushing waterfalls in the highlands. Even the raven croaked in appreciation as it pecked up the last drops with a knobby purple tongue.

  “So magic’s good for something.” Greenwillow rubbed her dry face and tried to smooth her filthy hair. “I wish we had a barrel of it to wash in.”

  “You’re lovely even when dirty,” quipped Sunbright. Then he was acutely embarrassed by the blush that overcame him and the elf-maid.

  With a sigh, Candlemas chan
ged the topic. “Magic’s done us more harm than good lately. If I hadn’t agreed to this foolish wager with Sys, none of this would have happened.”

  “It was my fault,” replied the red-haired mage. “I kept trying to top you—and the Whiny White Weasel, may I someday peel her putrid face from her skull— and things got out of hand. There are wards I could have set, protections I should have triggered to warn me, but I didn’t bother. And you’ve all suffered for it.”

  “The world suffers for it,” Candlemas corrected. “You forget that up above—or outside or wherever—all of Toril and the Netherese Empire is beset by the vile spawn of these Nine Hells. I reckon that pit fiend could conjure a thousand times that number of creatures to beset us, except most are currently running amok through field and forest. Perhaps this twisted tunnel is the safest place to be these days. Who knows but the world and empire are doomed.”

  “Everyone makes mistakes.”

  Three people turned to stare at the fourth: Sunbright, who’d made the strange pronouncement. The barbarian was surprised himself.

  “I should think you would be the most enraged,” replied Candlemas.

  “Aye,” added Sysquemalyn in a low voice. “You’ve been deceived frightfully. I’ve … many of us have …”

  She didn’t need to finish, for they all knew. Sunbright had been tricked into a dragon’s lair, lured with lust and love by the false Ruellana, confronted by a lich, and cast into hell. But he dismissed it all with a shrug.

  “It’s just simple truth. People questing for something higher, whether greater magic or just to be a shaman, make mistakes along the way. Sometimes the gods smile and excuse them. Other times, they pay dearly. Certainly I’ve made my share of blunders on this adventure. If I’m forgiven, then I need to forgive others their errors. And so far our mistakes haven’t killed us.”

  Sysquemalyn raked at her dust-clotted hair. “I’ve certainly learned a lot about mud men. I judged you wrong, manling. Very wrong.”