The Dark Glory War (15 page)

I looked over, but the elf was gone. I gingerly made my way down the stairs I’d defended. I passed a dozen bodies, ignoring feeble whimpers or bubbling of shallow breaths. The sheer stink of blood and gibberer and waste, where dying creatures lost all control of bladder and bowel, was enough to gag me. I swallowed my rising gorge back down, then started to slip in a pool of blood as I crossed the temple floor.

A strong hand caught me by the back of my mail and held me up. I glanced at the elf. “Thank you.”

He nodded, then looked at the trail of bodies strewn on the stairs. “Good work.”

“Work, yes. Butchery, not warfare.”

The elf arched an eyebrow at me. “A butcher would have died in the doorway. The warrior in you learned to defend the stairs.”

“How did you know?”

“Read the sign. You defended the door at first and were chased off.” He coughed into his left hand. “You did well. You will have my name first. I am Resolute.”

I stared at him for a heartbeat, surprised by his name. The elves I’d heard of, in stories, in songs, all had names that were long and kind of curved around in the mouth. Rondelcyn or Arianvelle, Simsaran, and Winfellis. Resolute, given what little I knew of elves, just wasn’t an elven name at all.

Resolute folded his arms over his broad breast. “You have a name?”

“Yes, sorry. Hawkins, Tarrant Hawkins. I—we—are from Valsina.”

The elf reached out and flicked a finger against the temeryx feather I had tied to my moonmask. “Decoration?”

“I earned it.”

“Indeed?”

“With my friends.” I pointed off to where everyone was emerging from behind the breastwork. “Come on.”

Walking over there I noticed several things. The first was that far fewer of our company had survived than I would have expected. Heslin’s left arm dangled uselessly from his shoulder and all the bandaging in the world couldn’t hide the funny angle of his forearm. Lord Norrington and Nay walked as if they were asleep on their feet. One of Heslin’s apprentices had survived and four of the soldiers.

Leigh sat on the temple floor, his hands clutching the golden sword’s crosshilt. He’d bowed his head forward so his crown touched the flat of the blade and his chest heaved. As I drew closer I could hear him sobbing, and the sound tightened my throat, too.

Lord Norrington crossed to Leigh and knelt beside him. They spoke in hushed tones and Leigh nodded once. His father patted him on the back of the head, then slowly stood and walked toward me. “You are unhurt?”

“Couple of bruises, nothing serious, my lord.” I nodded toward Resolute. “I’d have been a gibberer meal if not for him.”

Lord Norrington pulled off a bloody gauntlet and extended his right hand. “Kenwick Norrington. Thanks for saving him.”

Resolute took Lord Norrington’s hand in his. “I once met a Marlborough Norrington of Oriosa.”

“My father’s elder brother.”

“Dead now?”

“Ten years, at least.”

The elf nodded slowly. “I am Resolute. Who is the boy with the sword?”

Lord Norrington half turned toward Leigh and smiled. “He’s my son, Bosleigh.”

“Oh.” The elf’s comment came flat and heavy.

I frowned. “Why, what’s the matter?”

“Nothing, unless that blade is the one I think it is.” Resolute shrugged. “If it is, well, it is a tragedy for someone to be the walking dead so young.”

I shuddered and suddenly felt the cold, sticky wetness of the blood soaking my clothes and spattered across my face. I stank of death and any euphoria that my survival might have sparked in me died with Resolute’s statement. I looked around the temple and saw doom and death and pain. Somehow Leigh’s tears struck me as the most appropriate reaction to all we’d been through.

I walked over to him, with Lord Norrington and Resolute following me. I stepped over a beheaded gibberer and reached out for Leigh. My right hand trembled even before it touched him, but his sobs flowed up my arm and tightened my chest. I dropped to my knees beside him, threw an arm over his shoulders, and touched my forehead to his left temple.

“We have survived this, Leigh. We will continue to survive it.”

His helm grated against mine as he turned to look at me with one red-rimmed eye. “I know. Slay or be slain, and we slew.”

“Lots and lots, yeah.” I squeezed his shoulders. “We’ll get through this. It’s over, there’s no need for tears.”

Leigh chuckled once, his chest heaving with the effort. “You think I’m crying because of this slaughter?”

“Aren’t you?”

“No.” He twisted to face me and clutched the sword to his chest. “My tears come because, my dear friend, it was all so perfect. Each cut, each parry. I knew where their attacks were coming from and I had a legion of options open to me. It was magnificent, Hawkins, more than I could have imagined. More than I could have dreamed of and now it’s over. I cry because I will never know that sort of perfection again.”

“Oh. I see.” I reared back onto my haunches, then stood. I didn’t exactly hear glee in his voice, but close—and no regret at all. He sat there, Aurolani blood dripping from him, streaking his face, remembering, recapturing all he’d done. I felt a chill run up my spine, then reached down and hauled him to his feet.

Leigh looked at his bloody backtrail and nodded slowly. Without saying anything he turned at looked at his father as Lord Norrington and Resolute joined us.

The elf held a hand out. “The sword.”

Leigh’s eyes narrowed and he hugged the blade tighter. As he twisted away from Resolute, I got my first really good look at the weapon. The golden blade ran straight from a simple gold crosshilt for about two-thirds of its length. The last third of it tapered down into a very sharp point, though the point itself had been thickened to aid in punching through mail with a lunge. Worked along the blade were odd symbols that consisted mostly of loops, curves, coils, and hooks. The hilt itself had been wrapped in leather that had been dyed purple and the round pommel cap housed a purple stone that sparkled with a rainbow of colored specks at its heart.

“Bosleigh, let him see it. He does not want it, he merely wants to identify it.”

“Yes, Father.” Leigh turned back and extended the blade toward Resolute. “Do you know it?”

The elf studied it wordlessly. His silver eyes had no pupils, so it was difficult to tell where he was looking. He twisted his head this way and that, suggesting to me that he was reading the sigils right-side up then upside down. As he was doing this I noted that one of the tattoos on his right forearm seemed to be written in a very similar script.

Resolute’s head came up. “Where did you get it?”

Leigh pointed back down along the trail of bodies he’d left in his wake. “There.”

“Show me.”

Leigh started off and we followed. “I had gone back here looking for other entrances. I went down these stairs and along a passage I saw a symbol I recognized.”

As Leigh pointed to the wall I saw the symbol used to mark a Fledgling’s entrance to a Phoenix Knight meeting hall. Given how bricks had been set in the wall, cracks in the mortar precisely mimicked the symbol we’d been taught. I glanced over at Lord Norrington, fully expecting him to signal me to turn a blind eye, but he did not.

Resolute peered closely at the wall, then pulled out a small poniard and used the sharp blade to scrape away more mortar from a brick running beneath the horizontal line. His excavation outlined the brick completely. “You touched this brick?”

“Yes.”

The elf pressed his hand against it. A little further down the passage a portion of wall withdrew into the ceiling. The three of us followed Resolute into a moderate-sized chamber. In it we found a stone bier that had the lid shifted around to lie across the foot of the enclosure housing a skeleton.

Leigh pointed to the lid. “I didn’t touch it. It was this way when I found it. The skeleton was holding the sword against its chest. I just felt a need to pick it up. When I did, I knew what I had to do. I stalked from here and started killing gibberkin.”

Resolute blew dust from the sarcophagus lid, then ran his fingertips over the runes incised into it. “A mystery ended.”

Lord Norrington looked at the runes, but shook his head. “I can’t read it. Would you care to explain?”

The elf pulled himself up to his full height, which meant his hair brushed the chamber’s ceiling. “Behold Atval’s last ruler. Baron Dordin Ore. He distinguished himself in battle because of a magickal sword of great antiquity. He believed himself invincible, believed he could slay dragons. Hedid get one …”

My jaw opened. “So he was the reason Atval refused to pay the tribute? He made the dragons destroy Atval?”

“He did, or that blade did.” Resolute pointed to the sword. “The script, normally the sigils are bilaterally symmetrical— one side mirrors the other. Here they do not, allowing them to be read as one thing one way and another the other way. Ascending from the hilt it reads ‘hero,’ but descending it reads ‘tragedy.’ ”

Leigh’s lower lip quivered. “What does that mean?”

“This blade has a long history. It has various names—but Temmer is the most common one. It’s said that, aeons ago, a mortal hero—an elf, an urZrethi, a man, it doesn’t matter who—came to theweirun of a volcano and asked it to fashion a sword that would make the hero invincible in battle. Theweirun cautioned that for such a blade to exist, a fearful price had to be paid. The hero said he would pay it, and theweirun created Temmer. When drawn, the wielder is invincible in combat.”

Lord Norrington somehow kept his voice even. “And the price?”

“The sword consumes the wielder.” Resolute’s words came so matter-of-factly that it took a moment for me to understand the serious difficulty they implied. “He is as good as dead now.”

Leigh’s father brought his head up. “The blade willkill him? He’ll die, absolutely? The legend says that?”

“That is one way the tales can be read. All agree, though, that the last battle will break the wielder. He will be destroyed. Physically, mentally, emotionally, it doesn’t matter, he will be crushed. Your son will not survive his association with the blade.” Resolute turned and pointed at the blade. “It is yours now, Bosleigh Norrington. You accepted it. You blooded it. It is yours until it destroys you.”

Lord Norrington sighed heavily, his shoulders slumping a bit. I felt my stomach folding in on itself and looked at Leigh, expecting to see horror filling his expression.

Leigh smiled almost placidly, drew the sword he’d carried from Valsina, and slid Temmer home in its place. Though I would have sworn Temmer was a good handspan longer than his other sword, it fit the scabbard perfectly. “There are Aurolani forces about in Oriosa. I think it is good this weapon is no longer hidden. The cost be damned.”

I rested a hand on my friend’s shoulder. “Leigh, didn’t you hear what he said?”

Resolute watched Leigh closely. “If the tales are true, the others knew of the bargain they made before they accepted the blade. Perhaps your ignorance and innocence will shield you.”

“Perhaps.” Leigh shrugged carelessly, stroking the blade’s hilt with his hand. He smiled, then headed back out of the chamber. “With Temmer in my hand, we’ll exact a great blood toll from the Aurolani. Compared to that, the cost of using the sword is nothing.”

The rest of us followed him in silence.

In the temple we freed our dead from the mounds of gibberkin. We sorted through everything, recovering what weapons and other useful items we could find. We would send the personal effects of each soldier back to his family, so we packaged them up separately. Once the bodies had been stripped, we piled them together and Heslin’s one surviving apprentice, Shales, used a spell to burn them.

We also sorted through the Aurolani bodies. I tugged the throwing weapon Resolute had used on one vylaen from its skull. The device consisted of two-inch-long blade segments broken off Aurolani longknives, welded to a central hub. The blades were razor sharp, and the blood-grooves down their middle had been filled with a dark substance I took to be poison.

I carried it over to where he knelt among the gibberkin he’d slain. He looked up at me, his hands never pausing as he scalped a gibberer. “You needn’t have.”

“I thought you might want it.”

He shook his head and moved to another body to scalp it. “I’ll make more from the longknives here. Leave it. I want them to know Resolute was here.”

“How did you come to be here?”

He shrugged. “I spend my time hunting in the Ghost Marches. I cut across sign of creatures heading south. I trailed them. Ambushed some, found others. A week ago the pace picked up, they started coming for Atval. I followed.”

“Why the scalps? Collecting them for a bounty?”

“A bounty? No, I have no need for such.” Resolute bent to his work, cutting across the brow and along over the ears. He ripped the scalp back, then trimmed it at the base of the skull with a single stroke. “I have use for them. You can take yours.”

I glanced back at the pile I’d killed. “Maybe. I have a question for you.”

“Another one?”

I looked at him and nodded. “What you did with that gibberer from the garden … the tattoo on your arm, it looked like Fesyin’s Mark.”

Resolute stabbed his poniard into a gibberer corpse to hold it, then touched the tattoo I mentioned. “Fesyin’s Mark; yes, it is something like that. Your Fesyin, she’s but a pale shadow of some things older and darker. I am from Vorquellyn, and without a homeland to pledge myself to, I have chosen other patrons.”

His chin came up. “And what I did to that gibberer was magick. That gibberer, according to the clan tattoo on his lower lip, was born on Vorquellyn. He was bound to the island, which gave me a link into him. He was mine to use. I sent him after his leader.”

“But you’re a warrior. A warrior can’t use magick.”

“Perhaps not ahuman warrior. I am under no such restriction.”

He waved me away with a flick of his left hand. “Go away, Hawkins. See to what you must so we can vacate this place. If dragonsare coming, we want to be well away before they get here.”

Despite being bone-weary and sore, we gathered our horses and led them out of Atval before the sun rose. Despite being greatly discomfited by his broken arm, Heslin agreed with Resolute’s suggestion that the dragons’ prohibition about allowing anything to take up residence in Atval meant people might have been able to spend at least a full day there before triggering reprisals. After all, allowing people to travel through the city and to see the destruction would go a long way to letting the story of the city spread far and wide.