Annihilation (34 page)

Axe in hand, Piet stood then lunged at the dark elf. The slippery drow dodged him again, quickly and easily enough that Piet thought he must have eyes on the back of his head. Undaunted, the logger swung again but sliced through nothing but air. The drow danced back, not even parrying with his huge greatsword, just stepping back, leaning to either side or backward as Piet swung again and again.

Piet finally gave up. His lungs were burning. He tried to speak but couldn’t. He wanted to run but his legs felt like twigs ready to snap—he’d already spent a long day cutting down trees. All he could do was stand there and watch the dark elf watch the demon-thing kill the rest of the men in the room.

The demon had one of the heavy oak tables in his hands—the larger two of the thing’s three hands—and was pressing Ansen, Kinsky, and Lint into the wall. Their weapons were caught between the tabletop and their own bodies. Ansen’s torch burned his face, Kinsky’s axe handle cracked his collarbone, and Lint’s spear wagged impotently from behind the table, digging deep furrows into the roof beam above him.

The men were grunting and coughing. Ansen screamed. Smoke
billowed up from his hair, and the flesh around his right eye was crisping and beginning to flake away.

“Stop it,” Piet gasped.

Neither the drow nor the demon even looked at him.

“Stop …” he moaned and was about to drop his axe when the door burst open, and five men all but crawled over each other to get into the common room.

Piet knew them all: Nedreg, the tall man from Sembia who was one of two men in the camp who’d brought a sword with him. Kem, the short guy from Cormyr who also had a sword and who hated Nedreg as much as Nedreg hated him. Raula, the only woman in the camp, had a spear she said was magical but no one believed her. Aynd, Raula’s husband, had a spear that was so warped he didn’t bother telling anyone it was anything but an old piece of Impilturan army garbage he’d found on the side of a road.

The first of the five to get into the room was the foreman of the camp: a big man named Rab who claimed to have been a sergeant in the Cormyrean army, who was on the battlefield the day King Azoun was killed. Everyone believed what Rab told them—whatever Rab told them—because everyone was afraid of him. Piet never liked Rab, but seeing him burst into the blood-soaked tavern with his greataxe at the ready was the most beautiful thing Piet had ever seen.

It was then, for no reason Piet could understand, that the dark elf finally attacked him. The greatsword moved so fast Piet could barely see it. Still, he managed to stagger back away from the blade. He tried to parry with his axe, but the dark elf never touched it. His greatsword whirled around it, flipped over it, pulled away from it.

Piet had taken maybe ten steps before he even realized he was walking. He was closer to the demon than he’d intended to go,
but the monster was still pushing against the table behind which Ansen, Kinsky, and Lint were trapped. Ansen was still screaming. The tone of his voice had taken on a more desperate, almost girlish quality, and Piet found himself wishing the man would hurry up and die. It was the only humane thing.

The other two men looked as if they were trying to scream but couldn’t. The demon-thing glanced up at the men who’d burst into the room but who were hesitating at the door still trying to understand the grim scene. The demon took advantage of their hesitation and pressed harder. Piet could see the thing’s legs tense and the sharp claws on its feet dig into the floor. Kinsky’s eyes popped out of his head, followed by a waterfall of blood. Lint coughed out a mouthful of blood, gurgled, and died. Kinsky tried to scream. The room filled with a series of loud cracking noises, and he went limp. Ansen finally stopped screaming, though he continued to burn.

Rab and the others charged at the demon. Piet wasn’t even sure they noticed the dark elf.

“Why?” Piet asked the drow, who was watching the others charge the demon. “What are you doing here? Why are you doing this? What do you want?”

The dark elf turned to him and raised an eyebrow, looking down his nose at Piet—though the human was easily six inches taller.

“What do you want here?” Piet asked again.

“Nothing,” the drow said in strangely accented Common.

Piet was aware of some motion below him—something that looked as if the dark elf had shrugged—then he felt something wet on his neck, warm liquid pouring down his chest. Piet put a hand to his throat and his fingers met a pulsing jet of hot red blood shooting in a four-foot stream from his throat. When he tried to speak, his lungs filled with blood, then his eyesight blurred.

The dark elf turned away from him, and as he died, Piet knew
that the drow would never give him a second thought. He didn’t live long enough to decide how he felt about that.

Ryld didn’t give the dead human a second thought. Five more of them had come in, and though Jeggred had dispatched the first three humans he’d encountered with minimal effort, at least one of the newcomers looked like someone who could actually fight. Ryld didn’t entertain for a second the thought that Jeggred might not be able to handle the five humans—even the one with the greataxe—but the five of them together might slow the draegloth down a bit, and that would have to do.

Ryld sheathed Splitter, and before the blade was entirely covered his feet were off the ground. He intended to jump through the window and almost made it when someone grabbed his foot. Ryld knew before he turned that it was Jeggred.

The draegloth pulled hard on Ryld’s foot, and the weapons master twisted in his grip and kicked Jeggred in the face. The half-demon’s head snapped back into one of the onrushing humans—one armed with a sword—who took the opportunity to slice at the back of the draegloth’s head. The sword tangled in Jeggred’s still-wet mane of thick white hair.

Two more of the humans came up on either side of the half-demon and jabbed their spearheads into Jeggred’s back. The spearheads sank into the draegloth’s flesh, and Jeggred let out a loud growl. He let go of Ryld, who landed on his feet, face to face with the draegloth. The humans withdrew their spears, and Jeggred and Ryld shared a look that said Jeggred wanted the human male and female with spears. The swordsman drew his weapon back to stab the draegloth from behind.

Jeggred spun away, sending the two humans with spears
scattering. The human with the sword was left facing Ryld.

“The draegloth will kill you all,” Ryld said, reasonably certain he got the Common right.

The human seemed more frightened that Ryld could speak his language than he was of the dark elf himself. That was a mistake the man wouldn’t make twice.

“Don’t—” Ryld warned as the human pulled his sword up to hack down at the dark elf.

With an impatient sigh, Ryld flicked his sword in a fast arc in front of him and took the human’s sword arm. The man staggered back, bulging eyes fixed on the blood pumping out of his stump. He looked at Ryld, made eye contact with him for the space of a heartbeat. The human seemed to be waiting for Ryld to say something, to explain why the drow had taken his arm. Humans were an odd lot.

Ryld shrugged. The man opened his mouth to speak then fell over dead.

The female human jabbed at Jeggred, and the draegloth grabbed the spear. He snapped it like a twig, and the woman backstepped away, her hands up in front of her face in a feeble attempt to fend off the half-demon.

Ryld suppressed the urge to laugh. Instead, he bent quickly and ripped the dead human’s hand off the sword. He had to break a few of the man’s fingers to get the weapon free, but it certainly didn’t matter to the swordsman anymore.

The other spearman went for Jeggred with renewed fury, his hopelessly warped spear jabbing again and again at the draegloth, who danced out of its way, toying with the man. The woman had her hands on her mouth, apparently concerned with what might happen to the other spearman. There was something about the look on her face that Ryld recognized, and in response he tossed her the dead man’s sword. She didn’t notice the blade coming at
her until it was halfway there, but she caught it just the same.

The woman met Ryld’s gaze, and the weapons master nodded at the draegloth.

“Take the dark elf, girl!” the man with the greataxe yelled to the woman.

The man with the greataxe had been barking orders all along, but Ryld hadn’t paid much attention. Hearing someone order his death wasn’t an entirely alien experience for Ryld, but there was something about the circumstances that frustrated him. He’d just tossed her a weapon … so what if he’d taken it out of the severed limb of one of her comrades?

The woman hesitated, looked at the sword as if she wasn’t sure what to do with it, then looked at Jeggred. The draegloth stepped into the man with the spear, deftly slipping past the spearhead, and grabbed the logger’s head in one of his huge, clawed hands. With a twist of the draegloth’s wrist and a bend of his elbow the human spearman’s head came free of his shoulders in a shower of blood.

The woman screamed, and Ryld was taken aback by the sound. It was soaked with emotion—a sound Ryld hadn’t heard often in Menzoberranzan. He looked at her and she met his gaze. Tears streamed down her face. She looked back at the draegloth, who was meeting the advance of the man with the greataxe.

The woman dropped the sword and ran, rushing past Jeggred and the man with the greataxe to stumble out the door. Ryld heard her footsteps recede into the night.

The weapons master longed to follow her.

Rab Shuoc was born in the Year of the Striking Hawk in the Cormyrean city of Arabel. He grew up there, the son of a city
watchman, and spent his childhood hunting rats with his friends in the back alleys and occasionally following his father on his rounds in the wealthier sections of the city. It wasn’t the slightest bit surprising to anyone who knew him when he joined the army. Rab was fiercely loyal to the kingdom of his birth and the king he admired more than anyone but his father.

He worked his way up the ranks, slowly, and was a sergeant when the ghazneths and goblins ravaged Cormyr and all but destroyed Arabel. He was nearly killed in the same battle that resulted in the death of the king, and he watched the city of his birth burned. His father was killed when part of a building fell on him. With the king and his father both dead, and no family of his own to tie him down, Rab simply walked away.

He went on to become alternately a sellsword, a tavern bouncer, an innkeeper, a weaponsmith, then a logger. He was strong and smart, so he soon became foreman. His employers paid Rab a considerable sum in gold to gather crews to go deep into some of the most dangerous places in Faerûn to find exotic woods. He quickly built a solid reputation among the lumber mill owners and loggers alike as a fair but tough leader who knew how to get the job done, and Rab always delivered.

During those hard forty-six years of life, Rab Shuoc had missed out on a lot. There had been women but never a wife and never any children. Since the war he hadn’t even had a home. He rarely worked with the same men more than one season at a time and had no real friends to speak of.

He wasn’t the kind of man who worried about his own happiness or even expected to be happy. He wanted to live, work, and be left alone.

When he stepped into his common room and saw some of his crew already dead at the hands of a dark elf and some kind of giant demon monster, he knew that if he wanted to live, he would have
to fight harder than he ever had before. It was with that thought foremost in his mind that he stepped toward the two interlopers and got started with the last thirty seconds of his life.

Raula was smart enough to run, and Rab let her go. The dark elf watched her go too, and the demon ignored her. The huge, gray-furred creature locked its blazing red eyes on Rab and advanced on him. Rab hefted his greataxe and stepped into the demon’s attack. He was aware of the drow facing him as well.

The drow came in faster than the demon, swinging his enormous greatsword in a wild, chaotic fashion. Rab was sure he could parry the uncontrolled assault with ease and he held the steel haft of his greataxe in both hands so the greatsword would bounce off it—but it didn’t.