by Dante King
The beefy woman fell back, grease and gravy misting her vision. With a thought, I summoned my Chaos Spear and lashed out at her with it. She got her axe up in time to parry, and there was a burst of silver and purple sparks as the weapons, one powered by dragon and the other by bear, came together.
Whipping the butt of my spear downward, I pinned my opponent’s foot to the floor with it. Hard. She roared in pain, and doubly so when I put all my weight on the shaft and ground her foot bones into the boards as hard as I could. Then, launching myself sideways, I spun around the still-planted spear and delivered a terrifically powerful double-footed kick to the bearmancer’s chest.
The woman flew across the hall, her feet catching on the edge of the feasting table so that she went flipping in an ungainly fashion through the air and crashed chest first into an enormous taxidermized unicorn horn that was displayed on the wall. She wheezed as the horn burst through her back, decorated in a couple of coils of her intestines.
I was already zoning in on my next target: a lithe elven bearmancer with a ratty face who was using magic to send lime-green darts spraying out from her into the crowd of panicking Vetruscans. She was standing on top of the table and cackling away like she’d just escaped the mad house.
While the Vetruscans were a warlike people in general, there were still many of them who were not, and it looked like a lot of the respected merchants and fisherfolk from the town had also been invited to this feast by the King.
These innocents were who the ratty elf bearmancer was tormenting with her magic.
I threw my spear at her as hard as I could, and it caught her right in the side. She was fired across the hall and pinned about ten yards down from where her buddy hung from the unicorn horn. I smiled grimly to myself, imagining that it was the sort of interior decor that would be greeted with the Queen’s approval.
Tapping into Garth’s mana store, I then materialized the repeating crossbow and fired a few rounds at a couple of bearmancers that were moving in on Tamsin and Saya. This caused them to take cover behind a pillar which my bolts chewed into.
I heard a shriek of pain and ducked as a bearmancer, missing her legs, flew past me and slid along the feasting table, leaving a wide slick of blood behind her. She came to halt, white-faced, and promptly had her head caved in by a heavy metal jug flourished with great skill by Hana.
Queen Frami was ahead of me, fighting with a brute of a bearmancer. Magic and fire leapt from each of their hands as they traded blows with supernatural and conventional weapons alike. Such was the force of the power they were exuding that whenever one of them parried, the other a little shockwave erupted around them, fluttering their cloth and sending loose cutlery and plates and food skittering about the floor at their feet.
It was actually a piece of this errant cutlery that almost cost the Queen her life.
Queen Frami put her foot back to steady herself against a blow from her formidable adversary and stepped on a spoon which slid her boot out from under her. Her hand shot out to steady herself on reflex, and her cleaver-like sword flew from her hand. It thudded into the wooden boards of the floor, quivering, one edge of its evil-looking blade pointed upward. The Queen went down onto one knee with a snarl of surprise.
Her enemy was on her eyepatched side now, on her blind side. Judging by the smug smile that split the enemy bearmancer’s haggard face, she knew what that meant. The brutish woman whipped a heavy mace from her belt, which looked much like a meat tenderizer, and swung it sideways right at the Queen’s temple.
The Shadow Sphere that I fired at the enemy bearmancer was a gamble and a risky maneuver, but it was the first thing that leaped to mind. The crackling ball of silver-black Chaos Magic, about the size of a golf ball, shot through the air. It zipped through the legs of some lucky fisherman who had just bravely launched himself onto the back of another one of the renegade bearmancers. It just missed the flailing arm of a Vetruscan guard—though it wouldn’t have been the end of the world if it had hit it because the arm was no longer attached to its owner’s body.
It struck the enemy bearmancer’s own arm on the downswing when the mace was all of three inches from connecting with Queen Frami’s big, crowned head. The enemy bearmancer’s arm vanished in a burst of black motes.
It was hardly a surprise, but the unexpected vanishment of a limb seemed to discombobulate the bearmancer. It threw her off balance, both figuratively and literally. Her angry eyes opened wide, and she let out a wordless cry of disbelief. The forward momentum of her swing, still being channeled through her upper body, sent her stumbling forward.
For a woman who was built like a truck and only had one eye, Queen Frami moved like a striking viper. Using her enemy’s own impetus, she grabbed the opposing bearmancer by her warrior’s braid and yanked her violently downward.
Right onto the up-facing edge of the cleaver-like sword that stuck into the ground a few feet away.
Queen Frami rammed the bearmancer’s head into the blade and it went through her eyes and took the top of her head off. Skin, bone, and flesh gave that wicked blade as little trouble as a panna cotta might have. Such was the power of the Queen’s arm that what was left of the bearmancer’s face was smashed so hard into the wooden floor that it just burst apart into pulp.
I don’t think, even after participating in as many battles, ambushes, and fights to the death as I had, that I had ever seen anyone get so dead so fast.
Queen Frami and I exchanged glances, and she patted her arm as if to ask, “That was you?”
I nodded.
Queen Frami grinned a bloody smile at me and nodded her head in return.
Well, I thought to myself as I turned back to the fray, let’s hope that one good turn deserves another. Surely a favor owed by a queen has got to be worth something?
I waded my way through the press and tangle of the fight. It was a battle the likes of which I had not taken part in before purely because, unlike all those before, I had no definite idea who my enemy was. Everyone, except my friends, looked Vetruscan to me, so I couldn’t just go ahead and cut down anyone who looked unfamiliar.
I had to wait until someone did something obvious, like try and kill me.
Speaking of which…
A ragged water nymph, with skin of aquamarine and hair like seaweed, whirled about and leveled a crossbow at me from across the body-strewn room. Her hand clenched on the firing lever, and the deadly contraption bucked in her hand. The quarrel flashed toward my chest.
I kicked out and flicked a heavy wooden chair up with the toe of my boot.
The crossbow bolt thumped into the seat of the chair as it rotated up in front of me. Then, as the chair came back down, I spun about with a dragon-powered roundhouse kick and sent the chair rocketing across the room as the nymph. The unconventional projectile crashed into her with enough force to cause the hefty bit of furniture to explode apart, breaking into kindling. The nymph was hurled backward and smashed through a side table.
I noticed then, that Renji had her back to the wall and her hands full with a couple of bearmancers who, clearly being the thinkers of the group of rebels, had taken it into their heads that the smart thing to do would be to team up and take out the Mystocean delegates one at a time.
Renji’s warhammer flickered and moved around her like something that was alive, but she was unable to find the opening that she needed to take down either one of her opponents.
My stunning harpoon caught the dwarven bearmancer behind the knee, and I yanked her off her feet with such violence that she knocked her teeth out in a spray of enamel against the floor. Her partner in crime, a tall cyclops with a single violet eye, was momentarily distracted and was rewarded with Renji’s warhammer crushing her throat. With the unthinking reflexes of a dragonmancer, Renji then raised her foot and smashed in the helmeted head of the dwarf that I had brought low with my stunning harpoon.
“Leave none alive! Leave none alive! No quarter and no mercy for the traitors!” I heard Queen
Frami bellowing from behind me somewhere, her voice discernible even over the din of the fighting happening inside the hall.
The order appeared to inject new vigor into those fighting for the Queen. A collective cry went up, and the rebels found themselves turning from the hunters into the hunted. Renegade bearmancers of all different races were dropping on every side, no matter what spells or weapons they used their bears to conjure.
Elenari used her dragon, Gharmon, to conjure vines that struck down from the rafters like cobras and ripped two bearmancer traitors off their feet, reeling them up into the shadows of the ceiling. There were a couple of brief screams, and then blood showered down over those below.
Tamsin was dealing death indiscriminately on all sides. She was picking up the weapons of the fallen, lashing out with her hands and feet, ripping the weapons out of the hands of her foes and using them against them.
I parried the blow of a vicious spiked club with the back of my forearm, noticing as I did so the amount of blood that was splashed up the walls and pooled across the floor. The smell of split guts and shit was heavy in the air.
The bearmancer attacking me with the club was a furious bitch of a dark elf with a fuzzy shock of black hair and skin as yellow as sulfur. She opened her mouth wide to hiss and spit at me, revealing a black tongue and teeth the same color as the inside of an unwashed coffee pot.
The repeater crossbow appeared in my hand, I pressed it to her bottom jaw and nailed her mouth shut. She fell with crossed eyes and a bolt in the brain.
Things were looking good for us or, at least, better than they had done when this fight broke out. However, though the Queen’s warriors were holding their own in the melee, more and more of the innocent merchants and Vetruscan dignitaries were being cornered and cut down with every passing minute.
The problem was that the rebel bearmancers, while not as powerful as dragonmancers, were still far hardier than your average foot soldier. They took longer to bring to bay, and in the time spent taking down one of the motherfuckers, there were two more that were gutting some poor brothel owner or the head of the blacksmith’s guild.
Which was why it was a relief when the three bearmancers that had so recently undergone the Transfusion Ceremony stepped in to join the party.
Dressed in the bear skin togas that they had been wearing for the Ceremony, with their red, black, and green hair slicked to their heads with rain, the three warrior women looked like folk from another age of the world.
Whether it was the fresh power flooding through their veins, or the heightened senses thanks to the enhanced link they now shared with their bears, they looked to be on some sort of natural high. Their eyes were wide with joy, their muscles rippling in their bodies. They looked like three women who had just won the lottery and come home to find a celebratory party already in full swing.
Most pertinently of all, they knew exactly who was on which side. They fell upon the renegade bearmancers like three concentrated avalanches. Limbs went flying, blood fountained through the smoky air, and screams went up like the chorus of the choirs of hell.
I saw one enemy bearmancer thrown so far out of the open door that she landed not far from the steps that led back into the village. With a fearful look back at the hall, she scrambled to her feet and fled down the steps and out of sight. I contemplated going after her but was distracted by another adversary near at hand who required my help at relieving her of her life.
By the time that I had dispatched this foe and then helped Renji take down another, the three freshly Transfused bearmancers had basically mopped up the last of the renegades who’d had the gall to bust in on Queen Frami’s celebrations.
The Queen herself was standing in the middle of the carnage—sword dripping crimson, dreadlocked hair soaked in blood, but crown still in place.
“Your Majesty,” I said, approaching her cautiously, while the last couple of enemies were hemmed in and butchered, “there was a rebel that escaped. Down the steps. toward Hrímdale.”
The Queen cast an eye toward the town. Then she spat on the floor and said, “Let her go. Let her bear the tale of what happened here.”
Things had calmed down now, the fight finishing as abruptly, almost, as it had started.
Queen Frami glanced around, making sure that no other enemies were near at hand. Then she raised her dripping sword and said, “Victory!”
The cry was taken up by all those who still had breath in their bodies.
“Victory! Victory! Victory! Victory!”
* * *
“So, Dragonmancer Noctis,” Queen Frami said, striding out of the hall to come and stand with me in the rain as I looked out over the fjord, “you saved my life.”
I exchanged a quick glance with the huge monarch and gave a little shrug. “Seemed the least I could do after you so very kindly put on such a good meal for us.”
The Queen snorted and clapped me on the shoulder.
“That’s all there was to it, eh?” she grunted. “A favor repaid?”
“There was nothing really to it at all, Your Majesty,” I said. “I’m not a political guy, as you observed. I fight for the man or woman next to me almost all of the time, and you were the woman next to me. Most people in power and the sort of individuals that need to unscrew their breeches at night, crooked as a barrel of fishhooks, you know? But you seem like a pretty straight woman. A woman who does what she thinks is best for her people. I respect that.”
The Queen made an appreciative noise in her throat.
“I’m sorry about the doors to Berserker Hall,” I said, jabbing my thumb over my shoulder. “They looked like they had stood for ages. It’s a shame that they got smashed in.”
The Queen chuckled with genuine mirth.
“The doors? Ah, Mike Noctis, those doors have been smashed in, set on fire, and pulled down many times throughout the centuries. Always they have been repaired and put back up. Today’s little scuffle will barely count in the telling of them. They have faced far worse than that. I believe they were flung into the fjord once upon a time and till they returned.”
“That’s a relief, I said drily, “you don’t want anyone coming down with anything because of a draught, do you?”
“You and your people fought very well today,” Queen Frami said after a little pause.
“I’ve had excellent training, and I have the power of my dragons,” I said simply. “They make all the difference. Well, you saw what a difference the three bearmancers that went through the Transfusion Ceremony had on the tide of the fight, didn’t you?”
Queen Frami’s smile, which had been a little fixed and flinty as she stared out at the rain-dimpled waters of the fjord, took on a little more warmth.
“I saw, all right,” she growled. “Oh yes, I saw. The results of the ceremony were… remarkable. The strength… The ferocity… The sheer raw power. Greater than I had ever been led to believe, I would say. Those buggers in the Mystocean Empire have been sitting on quite the secret all these years.”
I nodded. “The rebels will hopefully think twice before they have another crack at you. A shrewd move on your part, I think, letting that one of them escape at the end.”
“I thought that we better let our enemies have some report of the fight,” the Queen said in a dangerously happy voice. “How else would they know how badly they lost?”
“Sorry to be blunt, Your Majesty,” I said, “but can we still expect you to uphold your end of the bargain? I don’t mean to offend you, but I’ve seen my fair share of betrayal and responsibility-dodging since I came here.”
The Queen turned her one sea-gray eye on me and gave me a searching look.
“Your commanders and I struck a bargain,” she said. “Not only that, but you saved my life in the hall. I will not forget something like that. What warrior worth her metal would? I will point you in the right direction and give you as much information I can on where this thaumaturgical device might be found.”
It was hard not to get pr
etty jacked at the thought of what Queen Frami was telling me—after all, all this potential power that was up for grabs could be mine. I could, potentially, become the badass to end all badasses.
We stood in silence for a little while longer, watching the clouds overhead and enjoying the coolness of the slackening rain as it washed the blood and grime from our armor and faces and hands.
A flash of besmirched white in my peripheral made me turn my head.
Hana was standing in her blood and muck-caked gown some way away from us, her sword in her hand. She was looking at me intently with those big dark red eyes of hers.
Queen Frami saw where I was looking and smirked knowingly.
“As you said, Mike Noctis,” she said. “Things are not so different here, I imagine, as they are in the Mystocean Empire. Some things,” and her smile widened at this point, “are the same all the world over, I would wager.”
I looked from her to Hana.
“Go, please,” the Queen said. “It looks as if Hana wishes to converse with you. There are some excellent bathing pools around here, heated by the fires that burn deep under the earth. Tell her that it is my wish that she takes you to one, to clean the dirt of the fight away.”
I exchanged another look with the Queen of Vetrusca, noting the twinkle in the other dreadlocked warrior’s eye.
The woman was a card, even if he was a queen.
“A very kind suggestion, Your Majesty,” I said, respectfully bowing my head.
I walked away, heading toward the waiting figure of the shieldmaiden. Struck by a sudden afterthought, I turned and said to Queen Frami, “Your Majesty?”
“Yes, Dragonmancer Noctis?” the Queen replied.
“I like your land. I like the wildness of it. As you and I have both observed there are a lot of similarities between the two, but there is one thing that Vetrusca doesn’t have.”
“And what is that, Mike Noctis?” Queen Frami asked.
“Me,” I replied. With a grin and a bow, I walked away toward Hana.
