Bladedancer

by Michael Wallace

  She opened her eyes to find Kozmer still meditating, but the other three sohns watching her, apparently having approached while her presence was elsewhere.

  “There’s something downstream,” she told them. “Demons or some other force, purposefully blocking me. Overseers, maybe.” She gestured across. “It will be easier to start here. Easier crossing, easier fighting on the opposite bank than down by the dam.”

  “Yes, but how will we get across?” Katalinka asked.

  “We aren’t going to cross. Only me.”

  “Does this mean you can fly?” her sister asked.

  Narina sighed, thinking of that momentary sensation of wings and wind and flight.

  “No, that’s not the plan. I’m going to run for the bank and jump as far as I can. The three of you will give me a sowen push.”

  “Will that work?” Katalinka asked.

  “I don’t know, probably not. Maybe I’ll make it halfway. I’m a fast swimmer—I’ll only be in the boiling water a few seconds. The demons will be surprised, and that will buy a few seconds. Time enough to heal my burns before they attack.”

  “Wouldn’t it be easier to go back upstream?” Miklos said. “Find a place to ford, then cross?”

  Narina shook her head. “There’s a canyon wall. Impassable. I’ll never make it back down here.”

  “So you’ll fight alone,” Kozmer said from the darkness behind. He levered himself to his feet with his staff, groaning as he did so. “And if you falter and need to retreat?”

  “You’ll be strengthening me from here. It won’t be necessary.”

  “But if it is?” he pressed. “Say you’re injured. Burned. Weakened. How will you get back across? You won’t be strong enough to jump into the boiling water a second time. And you can’t flee downstream—there are more demons in that direction. You can’t go upstream because of the canyon wall, as you pointed out.”

  “I want into the fight,” Sarika said. “I won’t be deprived of my revenge.”

  “You’ll have a chance,” Narina said. “Eventually.”

  “I agree with the firewalker,” Katalinka said. “We all cross, or none of us do. That way if you’re injured, we have a chance to get you out of there.” She put a hand on Narina’s arm, and the gesture sapped her resolve. “Sister, it’s too dangerous alone.”

  Narina shrugged out of Katalinka’s grasp with a frown. “We don’t have the luxury to worry about danger.” She was growing frustrated. The longer this discussion went on, the more her nerves frayed, knowing the demons were gradually growing stronger. “I have to get over there now.”

  “Maybe she dies,” Miklos said. “Maybe a demon swallows her and she burns alive. She’s still our best chance. Let her go—we’ll help as much as we can, but it’s her fight to win or lose.”

  “Thank you,” Narina said. “I think.”

  Kozmer, Katalinka, and Sarika still looked unhappy with the decision—each for different reasons, she knew—but they relented, and the companions set about discussing the details of the assault, as well as testing the limits of the other three’s sowen. They had mastery all the way across the lake, but none could reach the caldera on the ridge. Once Narina charged up the hillside, she’d be on her own.

  They descended the hillside to the relatively flat stretch leading down to the steaming lake. Narina closed her eyes and imagined herself as a crow. Let the air lift her aloft when she jumped, and with one huge leap she could make it halfway to the far shore. She’d be scalded, but the others could minimize the damage. They were already gathering power behind her.

  “We’re ready when you are,” Kozmer said.

  She took a deep breath, touched the hilts of the dragon blades, and nodded. “Ready.”

  “Be careful,” Katalinka said. Worry twisted her voice and made it thin. “I don’t want to lose you.”

  “You won’t.”

  Narina broke into a run.

  Chapter Ten

  Something stirred on the far shore as Narina ran down the hillside toward the lake. It moved among the demons working along the canals, disturbing the auras of the lava and the hardened volcanic rock. She couldn’t sense the demons’ own auras, but the sudden, almost jerky shift in their surroundings told her that she’d been detected.

  Several of the monsters turned toward her with glowing eyes. An overseer opened his mouth and belched fire, and the whip he’d been using to lash at his slaves thickened and twisted in his hand like a snake made of flames.

  Before all of this started—her father’s death, the curse, the fights with enemies—she’d been able to jump eight feet into the air to perch on the tallest stone in the training ground. Her horizontal jump was capable of crossing thirty feet with a good running start.

  Those distances had multiplied as her power had grown, and she thought she could cross more than a hundred feet of the lake before splashing into the dark, steaming water. From there, it would be a hasty swim for the far shore before she was boiled alive.

  Where she would find the demons waiting for her. They were already scrambling down the slope to meet her at the water’s edge. Katalinka gasped from behind; she must have spotted the danger.

  “Narina!” she cried.

  But Narina was running as hard as she could, body tensed to jump, with the sowen of her companions at her back like a hard wind. It was too late to stop now. She reached the edge of the lake and took a terrific leap toward the other side.

  Wind, lift me up. Let me fly.

  The sowens of her friends were like strong hands beneath her. Her body was light, yet strong and flexible, like a bird’s wings. She soared higher and higher, and she looked down in stunned amazement as the lake shrank beneath her, and the faces of her friends turned upward, mouths agape. Her arms were outstretched, and she half expected to see them turn into wings.

  But they were only her own arms, buffeted by the wind as she started to come down, well past the midway point of the lake. Either way, her leap was going to carry her all the way across the lake and drop her onto the far shore.

  More than a dozen demons had already gathered to greet her, with more dropping buckets of lava and running down the hillside to face her. Others cracked through the crust of the lava canals, as if they’d submerged to refresh their heat between work shifts. They crawled out, dripping, slaves and overseers alike, and shook off droplets of lava while they hurried to join their companions.

  Narina dropped faster now, and she braced herself to strike the ground. Her jump was even longer than she’d thought, and she sailed over the heads of the demons crowding the shore. Her sowen seemed to have slowed time itself, and the gaping demons could only turn with exaggerated motions to follow her progress. She landed with a thump, rolling to blunt the impact, and came up with swords in hand. The blades gleamed with a white, almost spectral light, illuminating the darkness and drowning the orange fire of lava.

  She charged the demons at the lakeshore, most of them still turned away from her. They had clustered in a tight knot, ready to set upon her as she climbed out of the water, but were in a terrible position to be attacked from the rear.

  An overseer, more alert than the rest, whirled about, whip brushing the water, which hissed and boiled at its touch. It reared back and flicked fire at her, but she ducked beneath the lash and came up with her right sword plunging into its body at the groin. The blade tore a gaping hole as she ripped it up and out. Squirming guts spilled out like snakes made of molten metal.

  Her other blade blocked a swinging club from a demon on her left, even as she was still removing the first blade from the overseer’s belly. She faced this new threat and sliced off one of the demon’s arms at the wrist. It fell back with a snarl of pain and rage.

  She’d already killed or disabled two overseers, and most of the remaining enemies were lesser demons. These smaller creatures had once sent fear into her heart, but now seemed no more of a threat than common spearmen of the plains. She ducked claw swipes and bent away from s
napping jaws as she cut and hacked her way through their ranks. Her relentless attack forced them against the lakeshore and knocked them into the water, one after another. The water boiled as they struggled to get free.

  No sooner had she destroyed the first company of demons than she was forced to turn about to face a fresh wave of attackers. Her sowen began to slip from the effort, but then Katalinka’s sowen touched her from the opposite bank, strengthening her, and she raced into battle against the newcomers. Miklos, Kozmer, and Sarika reached across to hold the initial demons in the water, and their furious cries faded as they died.

  These new demons weren’t ready for her speed and agility, nor the lethal cut of her twin dragon blades. White light sliced through limbs and torsos, leaving behind a pile of smoldering corpses as she advanced. When she’d reduced them to a handful of crippled survivors, she blasted through them and charged up the hillside to engage with a third crew advancing from their works with tools and crude weapons in hand. They were strung out along the trail, and she killed them one by one until they’d suffered the same fate as the first two groups.

  A dark patch of hillside had concealed a fourth cluster of demons, what seemed to be a work crew that had been chipping at the surface of a canal to keep the lava flowing, and these demons now emerged from the gloom with eyes glowing and fire flaring from their skin. They were so close Narina was caught by surprise, and one of them seized her wrist before she could get away. Her sleeve caught fire and her skin burned as the monster pulled her toward its jaws.

  The demon lost its arm for the affront. A split second later, it lost its head. Then it was another massacre as she tore apart the slaves while looking for their master. She found the overseer, killed it.

  Narina had been standing on the demons’ path, which they’d bathed in lava to keep hot for the workers, and her feet were scalding, but somehow not sustaining lasting injuries. Neither had the fiery whip lash left a serious wound. Damanja must have taken abilities from Lujza when the crowlord killed the rogue firewalker, and Narina had in turn liberated those abilities when she killed the crowlord. Still, the heat was unpleasant, and she leaped from the trail to heal a slash across her belly while looking around for the next demonic attack.

  There was none. The battle was already won. Voices called across the lake, urging her to return, but Narina hesitated. She eyed the lava canals, three of them completely hardened over, the fourth pulsing with heat. She could follow the canals to their source easily enough, or she could hide here and pick off demons as they came to investigate their stalled work.

  Or what about the new caldera itself? Could she go up top and wreck it? Prevent the demons from digging within its protective cone to open a new volcano? No, that was unnecessary. Without fresh lava to heat them, the demons within would cool and harden and the threat would be eliminated naturally.

  More important was finding whatever dark presence she’d sensed at the head of the lake, blocking her sowen. Perhaps another mass of demons. She’d kill them and continue up the canals toward Manet Tuzzia. Eliminate the demonic threat for good if she could.

  And so she ignored the shouts of her companions on the opposite side of the lake and trotted along the surface of the coolest of the three lava canals. It had hardened into a flat surface with only the occasional ripple to remind her that it had once been liquid.

  The air seemed to be cooling, and she was relieved to have a respite from the heat as the canals gradually lifted above the lakeshore. Soon, she was approaching the end of the lake, and the canals carrying lava from above were bending away from the lake and subsequent river below to curve south, higher into the mountains toward their source.

  Here the water roared as it passed over the top of the plug of rock and churned into the canyon below to once again become the familiar river. Behind the volcanic dam lay the deepest part of the lake, but the steaming water from higher up had cooled until it was merely lukewarm.

  But that wasn’t all. Between the lake and the canals lay the presence she’d detected earlier, and when she left the canals to go down and investigate, she was surprised to find a circular pool of lava roughly thirty feet across, fed by a small channel of molten rock that descended from the main canals on the hillside. She approached the pool cautiously, wary of demons lurking nearby, but saw nothing in the surrounding darkness. However, bubbles burped from the pool, as if something lurked below the surface.

  Probing with her sowen only revealed more of that void that had baffled her vision earlier. She was convinced there were demons resting below. Perhaps this was where the overseers rested so they could be fresh and hot enough to carry on their work.

  “Narina!”

  She almost didn’t hear Katalinka’s cry above the roar of the waterfall spilling over the dam, but her sister’s voice was strengthened by sowen. Narina reached out with her own and discovered her four companions standing on the opposite side. They must have tracked her sowen as they continued down the road.

  She cupped a hand to her mouth and called back. “Go downstream. Find a way to cross. Travel all the way to Hooffent if you have to. Find me at the foot of Manet Tuzzia.”

  They didn’t seem to get it all, and she had to shout a second time, using her sowen to boost her voice. Narina waited until she felt them groping down the canyon for a way up and around the destruction along the road before she turned back to the circular pit of lava. Someone had dug this for a reason, and whether or not there were indeed overseer demons at the bottom, she intended to destroy it before she moved on.

  The air was definitely cooler now, as if her efforts had already strengthened the dragons who’d retreated to the high mountains in the face of relentless demonic pressure. That worried her, too. Let the monsters sleep in their frozen lakes, sending storms with their dreams. With any luck they were wounded and incapable of anything more than a cold wind and a scattered storm or two.

  Still, she was glad for the cooler air, which stiffened her resolve as she concentrated her sowen on gathering lake water. The lava pool wasn’t far from the shore; this shouldn’t be taxing. She soon raised a bulge of lake water and gave it a final jerk. It jetted skyward like a fountain under pressure, and water sprayed down, drenching not only the pool of lava, but her head.

  Water vaporized to steam when it struck the lava. When the spray finally ended, little seemed to have changed, and so when she attacked again, she struck the smaller ditch feeding it. This smaller canal was only about two feet deep, and she drenched it repeatedly until the surface hardened into rock, the magic that had kept it flowing no match for the cool water of the lake. Once the pool was isolated, she brought down another spray of water. The water hissed and steamed, and when it had boiled off, the angry, bubbling orange was fading to red, like a dying sunset that would soon bring nightfall.

  There, that should do it.

  Suddenly, the surface bubbled with fresh intensity, and jets of gas vented with such a stench that Narina covered her mouth and nose to avoid choking on it. An enormous fist, three feet across with glowing white claws, burst from the lava and groped for the edge of the pool. A long, crocodile-like head broke the surface. Then a second head.

  While she watched with horrified fascination, the rest of the two-headed demon dragged itself from the pool. It was twenty feet long, with eyes like black coals, its body a dull, glowing red, while the insides of its twin mouths crackled with blue fire. The heads cocked in her direction, and it came slithering toward her like a giant, scaly lizard. Smoke and sparks spewed from its nostrils as it gathered speed, and the mouths opened as if to roar when it was nearly upon her.

  The smoke and sparks served as a warning, and Narina braced herself with her sowen even as she was drawing her blades. As the demon reared on its back legs to show a belly studded with black obsidian scales, it spewed blue fire. She crouched behind her sowen shield, and the fire blasted around her. When the demon stopped, the air was shimmering with heat and she felt like she’d been scorched by th
e hot coals of the temple forge.

  The demon slammed down with its body, and she dropped to one knee, lifted the dragon blades up, and prepared to let the monster impale itself with the weight of its body. But the scales were too hard, and her blades slid off. It pinned her to the ground.

  Narina gave a heave with her sowen and kicked her legs, which lifted the demon enough to let her slide free, even as it tore at her with its claws. A painful burn stretched along her neck and the backs of her hands, while what remained of her shirt sleeves smoked, scorched nearly to the point of bursting into flames. She took another hack at the demon’s scales as she regained her feet, but again its armor deflected the blow, and she nearly lost her head to a quick snap from one of the two jaws.

  The creature scuttled after her as she retreated, three legs on each side of its body, moving with a twisting, almost serpentine-like movement. It was forcing her backward with its heads snapping at her face, and soon had her so turned about that the lava pit was at her rear. Any farther, and it would drive her into the pit, where it could drag her down and finish her off.

  She crouched as it reared back for another lunge, and leaped into the air just out of range of a double attack from its heads. A hot blast of stinking breath blew her hair back from her face and singed her eyebrows as she flew overhead. She landed on its back and shoved down with her swords with all her strength. The tips severed spiny protrusions and punctured its hardened carapace. The demon shrieked and bucked in an attempt to throw her clear. She held on, her sowen protecting her from the heat while she shoved and twisted the blades to force them deeper into the monster’s body.

  When she finally dragged them out and leaped clear, the animal was bleeding a black, smoking, tar-like blood and trying to crawl back into its lava pit. She shoved one blade into the leftmost head and impaled it to the ground, then hacked at the other until she’d cut through its neck. The severed head flopped like a dying fish, while the impaled head belched smoke and leaked more tar from its nostrils as it cooled and died.