Lady Of The Helm (Book 1) (49 page)

There was something else,
some other secret to add to the awful truth of this Helm, but before Niarmit could press the matter a hidden bell rang once more and she rammed the Helm back upon her head.

Instantly she was back in the citadel throne room, seeing through the opaque visor of the Helm as clearly as through glass.  The shadowy outline of that other throne room persisted like viewing the world through the threads of a spider’s web, but she found that the overlaid image hardened or faded as her concentration shifted from the simpering Santos to the anxious Tordil.  Looking down at herself she saw again the tattered rags of the zombie’s clothing rather than the fine cloth in which the Steward’s whims had garbed her.

“The door won’t hold my Lady,” the elf C
aptain declared superfluously as the bar at the far end splintered beneath another blow.

“What do we do
?” Hepdida’s voice cracked with supressed panic.

“Back the way we came!” Niarmit commanded.  “
When I give the word, Tordil unbar the door.  I’ll go through first. Clear the way.  Then you take Hepdida back to the hidden passageway.  She should be able to open the door even if you can’t.  I’ll join you as soon as I can.”

“Are you sure my Lady?”
the elf asked.

“Absolutely,” Niarmit lied.   She
offered a silent prayer to the Goddess not daring to imagine how the deity would view this obscene pursuit of twisted immortality, still less the disfavour that should come with her own unwitting subscription to the sacrilege.  “By the Goddess, I didn’t know,” she ended her entreaty and prepared to trust her safety to the protection of this vile heresy.

Tordil flung off the bars and
three orcs tumbled into the room.  Niarmit was on them in an instant.  The elf too swung his sword to strike one down, but Niarmit shrieked, “take Hepdida and run you fool.”

Swallowing the urge to fight normally, to hold the shield high and watchfully seek out the enemy’s weaknesses, Niarmi
t flung herself into the fray. She let the orcs circle round to surround her as she plunged  at one of them.  Whether the Goddess approved or not, the magic held.  The orc’s blows bounced off some hidden armour and the leader, who had sacrificed position for what seemed sure to be a killing thrust found that his strike did no harm and a split second later Niarmit’s stolen mace crushed the side of his head.  A second orc, seeing his sword deflected for a third time, abandoned the weapon to leap on Niarmit’s back.  There was an explosion of light and sound as the hapless creature was sent flying across the throne room, while his compatriot fell stunned into incapacity by a blast which left Niarmit, at its epicentre, quite untouched.

With the way momentarily clear, Niarmit stepped out into the corridor.   A quartet of outlanders falling upon her met a similar fate to the orcs.  The screams and shrieks of burning flesh subdued the curiosity of others long enough for Niarmit to duck out of sight through the antechamber and start sprinting along the corridors to the safety of the concealed passage.

Somebody was screaming, but when she glanced behind there was no-one there.  Yet still the screaming came, a voice calling, “he is coming, he is coming!”  She had just identified the speaker as Santos when there was an explosion of fire through all her senses and she was falling tumbling against hard stone objects that had not been infront of her a moment earlier.  And then it all went black.

“At last, the bitch stirs,” a man’s voice snarled as Niarmit returned to wakefulness.  Her ears were ringing and the stone was cool beneath her cheek.  When she tried to push herself into a sitting position a dizzying nausea nearly overwhelmed her, not helped by the acrid smell of burnt flesh which filled her nostrils.

“Move slowly, Majesty,” Santos’s voice was by her ear, his hands supported
her as she rose.  “Your wits will come back to you shortly.”

“Silence non-blood slug
.  This feeble child is at my disposal,” the same harsh voice barked.  “I will deal with your treachery shortly.”

“I did nothing, Majesty,”
the steward wailed.

“Aye,
nothing.  You told me nothing of our new arrival. That is your treason.”

At her side Santos whimpered,
and again the acrid smell of burning filled Niarmit’s nostrils.  She wondered what injury she had suffered and when the pain would come.  Slowly her vision cleared and she recognised the throne room in the Domain of the Helm.   She was slumped between two of the stone thrones at the foot of the dais, held around her shoulders by the Steward.  “I am sorry,” he was saying. “I would have told you.”

“Told me what
?” Niarmit muttered looking up at the gilded throne and its new occupant.   She could not see his face, not fully for he wore the helm.  His jaw was sharp adorned with a precisely shaved beard that came to a narrow point at his chin.  A thin straight moustache surmounted bloodless and unsmiling lips.  He wore red robes lined with fur and decorated with the head of a serpent.  However it was his hands, resting palms upwards on the arms of the throne, which drew her attention.  In their blackened and blistered skin was the origin of the smell that had assailed Niarmit’s senses.  Fresh weeping wounds which had scourged the skin through to red flesh beneath.  It must have given him unspeakable pain and yet the newcomer seemed oblivious too it.  “Your hands?” she murmured incredulously.  “Who are you?”

“
Tell her slug,” he thundered.  “It is not fit that the greatest mage the world has ever seen should have to be his own herald.”

“Of course, M
ajesty.”  Santos bobbed towards the throne’s occupant before turning back to Niarmit.   “Majesty, you are in the presence of His Majesty Chirard the third, King of the Salved, Emperor of the Petred Isle.”

“Slayer of Dragons, Curse of the Nomads, Heir to the Monar Empire, Overlord of the Eastern Lands, Patriarch of the Elves, Comissioner of the Dwarve
n race.” Dissatisfied with the Steward’s introduction, the throne’s occupant rattled off a further series of titles, his voice rising in pitch with each self-determined honour.

“Chirard,” Niarmit
murmured. “Chirard the Kinslayer, Chirard the mad.”

“Chirad the Great, Chirard the M
agnificent.” The screeched rejoinder bordered on the hysteric.

Niarmit struck.  The H
elm was the gateway between this world and hers. He had stolen it from her. She must steal it back. Seize it, wear it and remove it to return to her own world.  Once there she would never return to this hellish place until the moment of her death, when Feyril’s unwitting curse would claim her at the last.  All this ran through her mind in the instant it took her to leap to Chirard’s side.  Her hands slapped onto the steel helm fingers curling round its rim for the purchase to lift it free from the Kinslayer’s head.  But her grip never closed.  A burst of energy flung her back across the throne room at the instant her hands touched the metal.  Bruised and groaning she rose from the floor and looked at her own scalded palms while Chirad’s pale mouth widened in a roar of laughter.

“
Only he who wears the Helm can freely remove it. Now be still bitch. There are questions you must answer.”

Niarmit glanced down at her reddened palms, scorched by
the briefest contact with the Helm.  “I thought the Helm protected me from harm.”

“It protects you from the blows of our own material world and in this domain you cannot die,” Santos assured her.

“But you can still hurt and be hurt here, can’t you slug?” Chirard interrupted, prompting a fresh quake of shivering in the Steward at Niarmit’s side.

“Where are my friends?” Niarmit demanded.  “Where am I
? that is…. where is my living body.”

Chirard’s mouth twisted in a grin beneath the mask of the helm.  “You wish to see where I have stationed your feeble mortal fra
me, bitch.  Well, take a seat, enjoy the ride.”

“The thrones majesty,” Santos urged
her.   “Take your place on this throne.” 

Puzzled Niarmit sat down on a stone throne in the
front rank, facing the gilded chair occupied by her insane helm wearing ancestor.  “I don’t understand.”

“Place your hands on the armrests and close your eyes, Majesty,” Santos
gently prompted.  “Any of the Majesties seated thus can see and feel through the eyes and body of the wearer of the Helm. They can share the bridge between the planes.”

Niarmit rested her still stinging palms on the cool stone and shut her eyes. 
Instantly she was back in her own body in the fortress of Morwencairn.  At the dizzying sight that greeted her she clenched her eyes still more tightly before she realised that the harder she closed them in the domain of the helm, the clearer she saw in the world her body inhabited.

Forcing her eyes open took her away f
rom the vertiginous prospect, back to the throne room and the grinning figure of Chirard.  “Where is that?”

“A king’
s private perch, atop the temple steeple.  I always enjoyed the perspective. From there the people appear as they should, mere ants beneath my greatness. Come now, bitch, spawn of that line which murdered and disinherited me.  Close your eyes, let me show you what it means to be Emperor of the Petred Isle and wearer of the helm of Eadran.”

Reluctantly Nia
rmit obeyed and once again found herself in her own body perched atop the slender spire of the temple.  It was her body, but it did not answer to her command.  Some other will than hers held her limbs in an easy balance against the wind that whipped up from the West.  Seated on a stone throne in the hall of the Vanquisher her knee trembled involuntarily at the perilous altitude, while her body at Chirard’s disposal was unfazed by the prospect.

Niarmit yelped involuntarily as Chirard leant her forward seemingly beyond any point of equilibrium, but still she did not fall to the cobbled stones of the plaza a dizzying
distance below.  His strident voice echoed in her ears.  “Now traitor spawn, I have questions for you.  I have spent near half an hour surveying this scene, and waiting for you to wake up from the trifling shock of being un-helmed.  I should warn you that, despite the many sobriquets I have claimed or been given by my enemies and my servants, Chirard the Patient was never numbered amongst them.  So, bitch, tell me quick and tell me true, why are there Orcs crawling all over my capital?”

“Turn,” Haselrig instructed without looking up.

Obediently Udecht leant over the work bench and turned the ancient sword so that the antiquary could inspect the other side of the pommel.  Th
ere was a squawk from the corner of the room where the Bishop’s orcish escort were amusing themselves with a game of bones.  Udecht had never tried to understand the rules, nor look too closely at the bones, which he suspected might once have belonged to a human child.  However, the latest throw seemed to have resulted in a win for the lime green guard over his duller hued companion.  “Gurag strike one,” the lime one announced. “Gurag make Nakesh kneel.”

“Gurag feeble, Gurag
could not make baby kneel,” the darker orc snarled as he leaned forward and tapped his knobbly forehead. “Go on try.”

Udecht spared them a brief glance.  The constant stress of life as Xander’s prisoner had been replaced by the monotony of assisting Haselrig.  The ex-priest had been assigned the entire library as his workspace and tasked by Maelgrum with researching the bloodline magic of Eadran. 
Udecht’s lineage gave him a certain value as the only one who could handle the artefacts without being blasted against a bookcase by the enduring protection of the Vanquisher’s magic.   Warm and relatively secure, it was still a tedious existance and the guards’ occasional confrontations provided a moment of distraction, if not quite entertainment. 

The lime skinned Gurag braced himself for the strike at the grinning Nakesh, then with a sharp crack he snapped his head back and forward to crash his own uneven cranium into his colleague’s proffered head.  The crack of bone on bone was tangible and by any human standard both creatures should have been laid flat out insensible on the floor.
  As it was, Gurag gave a howl of discomfort his hands flying to rub the point of contact.  Nakesh rose with a grin.  “See, even when Gurag win, Gurag loses.  Nakesh head is thicker,” he tapped his skull again. 

“Much thicker,” Udecht murmured beneath his breath, but a moment of unfortunate silence from the others meant his private comment caught the ears of the orcs.

“What you say?” Nakesh demanded.

“He insult you,” Gurag taunted. “He say Nakesh not able to crack egg.”

“Nakesh crack more than egg,” the dark skinned orc stormed.  “Nakesh crack prayer man’s head.”

Udecht paled as the orc stepped towards him, his fellow guard grinning
widely at the mischief he had sown.

“To your post, Nakesh,” Haselrig commanded.  “The priest is
my servant, and we work on the Master’s business. You would do well not to forget that.”

“Prayer man should watch mouth,” the orc growled but he backed away nonetheless and picked up the bones for another throw.

As the orcs returned to their unfathomable game, Haselrig spared Udecht a glance.  “You should be careful, your reverence.  Those two do not enjoy this duty.  Either of them would happily tempt the other one into killing you if it meant that at least the one of them could get out of this posting and back with their comrades.”