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Authors: Ed Greenwood

Dark Warrior Rising (26 page)

BOOK: Dark Warrior Rising
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To Taerune Evendoom, it must be, or—no! Taerune's
Orb
!
That was it! It had to be!
Yet she'd no way of linking to that Orb directly; she had to find Maharla's link and bind herself to it, without Maharla noticing …
It had been like wading in hot, stinking ooze, that slow and subtle drift through the Eldest of Evendoom's dark, nasty, raging mind, seeking the thread of magic at the center of those swirling emotions without getting noticed.
“Fight!
Kill
the Hairy One!” someone in the Waiting Warm Dark had shouted disgustedly. “Olone
drench us
!”
“Aye!” someone else snarled. “Are outlaw Nifl rampants so lonely desperate for pleasure they're cuddling
humans
now?”
But those had been the only shouts, ere eager silence had returned. No one had departed the tavern, or even taken their eyes from what they were seeing on the ceiling.
And in the wake of those angry shouts, Naersarra had found the thread she sought, and—slowly, softly—
melted
into it.
She was in it, but not yet bound to it, when Maharla had said words that echoed like thunder around her, heavy and hard, to shatter the thread.
And that was when Naersarra Dounlar needed her fabled quickness. She hissed words that were hooks to pierce and cling to the thread around her—and then finished the incantation in a glib-tongued rush, a bare instant before Maharla's mind went white-hot and powder blasted all around her, and she whimpered atop her table, trembling, and clung as hard as she knew how, throwing back her head and gasping in blind pain.
And the link held.
And the spell went on.
Leaving Naersarra shaken but able to blink swimming eyes and behold the Waiting Warm Dark around her once more. A room so full of eagerly watching Nifl that no one had yet laid hand on her, or roared out something lewd, or thrown anything.
She bent over languidly to retrieve her gauzelike shift—and then changed her mind and plucked up several drinks instead, to sip at her leisure. Their owners ignored her theft completely, intent on what was unfolding in that cavern out in the Wild Dark.
At one of the tables, the large Nifl named Munthur was still gaping, his open mouth becoming as dry as rock dust. Tarlyn's eyes were narrow with suspicion and forboding, an expression echoed more faintly in the sourness on Clazlathor's face. Imdul and Urgel just watched, now, making no judgments. Yet.
 
 
“I care not what Haraedra Nifl think of me,” Orivon said slowly. “To the Talonar, I was but a slave—a valued slave because I was good at the forge, but nothing more than a slave. I have seen nothing worse in my time in Talonnorn than what is done in the name of Olone. The constant cruelty, the … the Houses lording it over the Nifl they call Nameless, who do all the work and risk their skins daily so the crones and purebloods can stay unblemished. I was a slave, so of course they whipped me. Yet I saw more Nifl whipped than slaves, some of them struck aside with casual insolence in the streets of the Araed for no greater sin than being in the way of a Lord or Lady of a ruling House, or irritating such a personage, sometimes for no reason I could see. How is that wise, to goad those whose work permits you to stand, exalted, above them? How soon will they cast you down? In an ‘accident,' perhaps? And if a true accident
does
befall one who rules, just whose hand do they expect will aid them?”
“I never knew humans could
talk
so much,” Daruse murmured. “And all of it wiser than a priestess!”
“I never knew humans could
talk
,” Lharlak said ruefully. “When did we start teaching them?”
“I
am most impressed that you care about how things are ordered among Niflghar at all,” Old Bloodblade rumbled, peering keenly at Orivon. “I'd have thought you'd want us all dead—speedily.”
The tall, hulking human shrugged. “I hate not your race, but only a few, specific Nifl. I imagine most Nifl, when they hate, do so likewise. Even when you're taught and expected to hate those of another city, I'm sure in truth you truly hate no one who hasn't done you personal harm, or that you've been told hurt you.”
“If we take you in as one of us,” Sarntor asked, “d'you think you can possibly avoid talking so much?”
Orivon turned and said two heartfelt words in reply: “With pleasure.”
Eyebrows went up, among the Ravagers, and someone chuckled.
Someone else asked, “So do we hunt down this chains-trailing gorkul? Or is it time, and past time, to eat?”
 
 
“So, now,” said an older Nifl, slapping the table. “Is this Hairy One our doom, once he's finished mustering all the Ravagers? Or will he be just a human among them, one more ragtag misfit trying to raid us?”
“If he brings down the Houses, I care not if he's human or escaped slave or prancing Olone herself,” someone else muttered.
“Hah!” an off-duty warblade snarled. “You complain about the Houses because they provide all. Were you not standing in their shadow, as they shield and defend you, you'd be too busy fighting every Nifl in this cavern—or dying—to complain about anything! The Houses are what make us strong, so we rule the Dark and not the motherless, uncounting and uncountable gorkul!”
“The Houses make
themselves
strong,” a traveling merchant said bitterly. “You prattle about what the Talonar Houses do without ever having seen other cities, and other ways! You'll not want to hear it, warblade, as no one likes to know they've been duped, but 'tis your blade, and those of your fellows in arms, that keep Talonnorn strong! Someone must command, aye, but why
families
? And if families, why this one and not that one? Why should one blood sit thrones forever, clearly making decisions for their own gain, and retaining those thrones, rather than for the good of Talonnorn?”
“Well, but the good of Talonnorn
is
their good, too,” the warblade said triumphantly, with the air of a Nifl who's proved a point to a dimwitted opponent.
“It is if you think it is, I suppose,” the merchant responded. “To me, it seems that is not thinking, but letting the ruling Houses think for you, and believing them when they say what is good for them is good for all. When was the last time
you
lounged for days on end in bed with enslaved shes, drinking the best wine and having splendid food brought to you without waiting for the next table over to be served first, and having to lay down hard coin to get the platters to come at all?”
Several other warblades chuckled, turning from admiring Naersarra Dounlar's unclad beauty, as she sat down on her table to accept several goblets of wine and the return of various garments.
“Hah!” one of them said. “He's got you there, Larravyn!”
“As for me,” another merchant said, “I
like
this Dark Warrior. Even if he's a fool, or a human lying to us who just wants to stir up trouble so he can do harm to those who flogged him—what of it? If he does the stirring, who cares why? I want the Houses to have to start behaving, to feel themselves again beholden to the rest of us! If he was Niflghar, I'd have to worry about embracing a tyrant, come to sweep the Houses away so he could step in and treat all of us as slaves! But he's a Hairy One—there's not a chance in all the Dark he'll end up ruling us! So he can be
the hand that shakes the cauldron without ever snatching the cauldron for his own!”
“I hate humans,” another warblade put in. “They stink, and they make my skin crawl. Yet I like what that one says—and you're right: He'll be dead in less than a Turning if he ever tries to seize power. Let him talk, and muster swords, and raid the Houses. If he takes the sneer off the face of one Eldest or one Lord of a House, he'll have done us all good.”
At the next table, a listening Nifl exploded.
“I-I can't believe I'm hearing this,” Tarlyn spat, white to his very lips. “Niflghar admiring a—a
Hairy One
!”
He thrust himself upright, eyes blazing.
“Tarlyn,
listen,
” Urgel began. “I—”
“Listen to
what
? Sick love for a—a beast?”
“A
useful
beast,” Imdul snapped, his voice raised for the first time any of them had ever heard. “This firefist is a goad and blade for change, who could keep Talonar and all other Nifl unsettled, and
thinking.
If he keeps crones from the sneering certainty of their righteous and unchallenged authority, and so moves them to doing things to help Talonnorn instead of just scheming as they wait for the next Eldest to die so everyone's backside can shift one place closer to the high seat—he'll be worth any strife and fighting off Ravagers we have to do.”
He rose from his seat, too, to wag a finger and say firmly, “We need this human—we around this table, who make our livings dancing along the dark edges of Nifl society, and
all
Nifl, too, to keep the tyranny of Olone and the crones from becoming absolute, and all of us as enslaved as the humans and others we crack our whips on.”
Eyes blazing, Tarlyn hurled his goblet down on the table by way of reply, and turned amid its bouncing and clanging to storm out of the Waiting Warm Dark, snarling, “Olone take you! Olone take you all!”
 
 
Aloun had whooped his delight aloud, and was now laughing excitedly. Luelldar had said merely, “Well, now.
Well,
now,” but was sitting slumped back from his flickering whorl with a broad smile on his face. “A champion, Maharla Evendoom says—and what a grasping, overeager Eldest
she
's made. A ‘Dark Warrior,' and she makes him a
human.
Behold my puppet, ye of the Dark!”
The Watchers of Ouvahlor turned and grinned at each other, Luelldar shaking his head. Maharla's sending had faded from both their
whorls, but Luelldar's arc of lesser whorls had captured it thrice over, for later study. Where precisely was that cavern in the Wild Dark? What did any of the faces betray, as they spoke? Had Maharla revealed anything more than her bare words, by the way she said them?
Ah, but this was … delicious. Talonnorn, tearing itself apart before their eyes.
“My grand schemes unfold, so they do,” Luelldar chuckled—and was forever after grateful he'd said those words when he did, and not a breath later—at the moment when Exalted Lady of the Ice Naerbrantha burst in on them, eyes flashing in excitement.
“You heard and saw?” she almost shouted. “Senior Watcher, I demand your wisest counsel: Is this Ouvahlor's best chance to finally destroy Talonnorn?”
Wearing a smile to match what was dancing in her eyes, Luelldar said gravely, “With regret I must say, Holy Lady, no. As the Talonar priestesses of Olone claw at each other and their city slides toward strife in the streets, we must wait and watch, to see if this Dark Warrior gathers an army that can threaten Talonnorn and keep its warblades and attention occupied. The moment he does,
that
will be the time to strike at Talonnorn's unprotected backside.”
Burning the Talon
If ever the Turning comes when one proud Lord
Is so desperate-driven or plunged into fear
As to burn the Talon
Then I shall cower and weep
Mourning lost Talonnorn.
—anonymous Talonar lament,
“All Niflghar Die in the Dark”
“H
ow can she
do
such a thing, at a time like this?” Auree was pale with rage, her white lips making the dark red of the fresh sword scar down her cheek even more stark.
Drayele shrugged, and reached again for a goblet she'd already emptied.
Across the table, Quaeva saw and pulled the chime for more wine, before making a bitter answer: “She cares nothing for the Goddess or for Talonar. Blind with power, drunk on it, she thinks not a moment about how Talonnorn will be smashed and diminished—as long as she ends up with more power.”
Priestesses nodded around the table, faces pale with anger or fear—and all of them looking weary. Auree wasn't the only one bearing a scar; every one of the five Nifl-shes crowded into the curtained-off alcove of the Proud House had fled in headlong desperation from the bloodshed still raging in the temple. They owed their lives to luck, agility, and sharing
low station among the Consecrated. As near novices, they were casual targets rather than deadly foes of the most ambitious upper priestesses.
Desperation had brought them here, to a private club in the Araed they'd have scorned—and felt unwelcome in—at another time. The Proud House catered to crones of the ruling Houses of Talonnorn, and rampants were shut out of it. In all Talonnorn, it was the only refuge of Nifl-shes they knew.
“Maharla Evendoom is hardly the only crone reckless-hungry for power,” Zarele said tiredly, “not that I needed to remind you.” There was a fresh and bloody bandage on her arm, and a long streak down her flank where her robe and her skin looked melted together, her flesh frozen in clusters of bubbles that the priestess beside her, Velle, could not seem to stop looking at—though Velle's darting glances made her lips visibly tighten in nausea.
“I feel like hiding here until it's all over,” Drayele sighed. “Which may be when our fair temple is a smoking heap of rubble.”
Auree snorted. “Hide
here
? In the midst of the Holy One alone knows how many crones?”
“Better we spend our waiting hunting Maharla Evendoom,” Velle said suddenly. “I could at least take some pride in that.”
Zarele nodded, and then snorted, her mouth crooking into a wry smile. “‘Dark Warrior'! I quake, I cower, I quail!”
“A
human
! Surely she meant it as some sort of sick jest!”
“She's sick, all right,” Zarele agreed heavily. “If I'm to die, I might as well do so rending Evendoom's Eldest as drinking my lifeblood away at this table. So, does anyone know any Maharla-slaying schemes?”
The curtain parted with more violence than a young winemaid would have done to it, and the priestesses looked up, blinking in sudden apprehension.
“No, but I'm willing to help you craft some!” the unfamiliar crone standing over them said fiercely. She was tall, dark brows framing large, dark, and imperious eyes. “May I join you?”
“You've been listening to us with a spell, haven't you?” Zarele asked dully. “I
knew
it was a mistake to come here.”
“Who
are
you?” Auree asked sharply, drawing back her hand as if the empty air she was cupping were deadly fire she could hurl.
The crone smiled at her rather pityingly, shaking her head to let
Auree know she knew all battle-magic must be long spent. “Baerone am I, of House Raskshaula!”
“So, Baerone of Raskshaula,” Quaeva asked carefully, “who else on the far side of that curtain has heard our words? And why are you so eager to help us? Is House Raskshaula running low on dupes to be blamed for their next attack on Evendoom?”
Baerone's smile widened into real mirth. “No one; I want to help because I am as appalled as you are by Maharla Evendoom's oriad idea; and House Raskshaula knows absolutely nothing about this. Yet. Though if any of you shout any more loudly, someone out in yon room won't be able to help but hear you—and you know how crones gossip.”
“Oh,
yes,” several of the priestesses said, in wry unison, as the curtain parted again and two anxious-looking winemaids looked in.
“Olone's mercy, I beg,” one of them began, “we're fair run off our feet out he—”
“Just put the wine on the table,” Zarele told them without looking up, “and go and fetch more. A decanter for each of us, I'd say—including our just-arrived friend, here.” Not waiting for them to reply, she turned her head and told Baerone, “Sit down, and tell us precisely what you want to work together with us on.”
The winemaids set down their wine and hastened out, not wanting to hear one word of whatever reply the crone might make.
Baerone smiled after their swift and deft vanishings ere turning to the table, sitting down, and saying briskly, “First, we must slaughter this
dangerous
Maharla Evendoom. Then we must eliminate the most cruel of the surviving upper priestesses of your temple. Please don't misunderstand me: I'm not trying to sweep away all Consecrated—I want you to decide which of your sisters must be brought down. My intent here is to make it possible for us all to survive the fighting that you've so wisely fled from.”
Priestesses looked at each other around the table. “Will you submit to a truth-reading spell?” Drayele asked quietly.
“Of course.”
More silent looks were traded, and this time some of them were accompanied by nods.
“We are agreed,” Auree told the crone. “Welcome.”
“Start scheming,” Zarele said simply, reaching for the nearest decanter.
 
 
Erlingar Evendoom's shoulder hurt. Swimming slowly up from the drowsy dimness of a slumber somehow
heavier
than he'd felt in a long, long time, he became aware of two things: that he was slumped over in his own chair, all his weight on one arm that must be as numb as its shoulder was aching—and that excited voices were chattering in his head. Familiar voices; Nifl-shes he …
Kryree and Varaeme! But what were they—?
Never, in all the many, many Turnings of his tramping off to the depths of the Araed to take his pleasure with them—or any of the willing shes of the Waiting Kisses where they dwelt and worked—had he so much as breathed their names here, in the Eventowers. So what, by Olone's blinding beauty, were they doing
here
?
In anger, Lord Evendoom came fully awake, and found himself sitting alone in a silent chamber. Kryree and Varaeme's converse was spilling into his head from the ring by which he always bespoke them from afar, to tell them to be ready for his arrival.
He stared thoughtfully down at it now, the plainest of the massive rings he wore on every finger—the only one not adorned with a knuckle-sized gemstone. He hadn't been aware its magic could awaken without him willing it to, or carry anything to him but the replies they thought at him after he'd contacted them.
Erlingar started to frown. Across the room, a wall sculpture of polished silver spheres orbiting endlessly, silently around a central sword, had broken apart into wild orbits that flung spheres well out into the room, and back again. And this heaviness still creeping along his limbs … somehow that had the smell of magic about it, too; he could
taste
it, at the back of his throat.
What was going
on
? Letting out a sigh that was more a snarl than anything else, Lord Evendoom thrust his attention to listening to the voices of his mistresses.
They weren't talking to him … had no idea he was listening. So something
was
twisting the magic of his ring.
Kryree and Varaeme were excitedly discussing something they'd seen—something that had been seen all over the Araed, they'd just been told. Something about a Dark Warrior—a human—a champion, Maharla Evend—
Maharla?
He must have shouted that as loudly in his mind as in the room, for
the door was banging open and a warblade was looking in, sword drawn. “Lord?”
Evendoom raised an imperious hand to tell the guard to stay where he was, and keep silent, as he listened to the startled voices in his mind, asking him if he was himself.
I am Erlingar, whom you both know well,
he said firmly in his mind.
Kryree
—
Varaeme
—
what is this matter of a Dark Warrior and Maharla Evendoom? You saw it how?
A spell, it seemed, Maharla's spell, intended for crones and priestesses and seen by them all over the Araed and presumably Talonnorn. A spell that the magical wards of their pleasure-house, ironically intended to block magical prying and scrying, had captured—and were now repeating, presenting it over and over again for anyone inside the front room of the Waiting Kisses to see. Mistress Tarlarla was sending for a spellrobe right now to purge the wards and banish it, but until then there'd be no escaping this Dark Warrior, this forge slave standing in a cavern with … with …
Taerune?
Lord Evendoom's mind-shout made them cower.
Tell Tarlarla to leave those wards alone until I get there and see this magic of Maharla's! If she does not, I'll bring the Waiting Kisses down on her head! Tell her that!
Minds tremulous, they agreed, but Erlingar barely heard their reply. He was striding across the room to snatch down a spellblade he hadn't used for as long as he could remember, the dangerous one that—
“Raelaund!” he snapped at the guard. “Fetch me a score of warblades, armed and armored and in the front hall by the time I get there! I want double-strength guards on our gates, and the rest to come with me!
Go!”
“Lord!” the warblade snapped back, whirled away, and was gone.
Erlingar strode after him, and then came to a halt. Now where was the
other
really powerful spellblade, Olone damn it?
“Ice and Beauty, but I'm getting old!” he snarled. “I can't even storm out of the Eventowers properly anymore!”
 
 
Orivon had never eaten cave-sleeth before, but it was
good.
The dark, tendon-crowded meat, not just the steaming sauce the Ravagers had boiled it in and then ladled over it. Everyone had crowded around the carcass and gone to work with their daggers, Taerune clumsily with only one hand. Nearly getting the point of her dagger in his eye, dripping sleeth impaled on it, Orivon had reared back, looked for the Ravager
he'd noticed earlier with the belt bristling with forge tools, and asked if he might borrow some briefly.
“Why?” had been the blunt response.
“To fit one of my blades to the stump of her arm. In payment, I offer one of the other blades I've brought. I made them; they're good warsteel.”
The Ravager had turned and looked at Old Bloodblade, who had slowly nodded.
The sleeth had vanished down to bones in a surprisingly short time, and everyone had drunk much. There was much telling of crude tales, of ambushes in dark caverns and creeping beasts and pratfalls of blundering Talonar patrols, and then the yawns had begun. When the Ravagers started to disperse, some plucking forth sleeping-cloaks from their packs, Daruse and Lharlak were among many who were already slumped over, drunk and snoring. Old Bloodblade pointed, here and there, and Ravagers who'd drunk much less quietly went around covering their sleeping fellows with cloaks.
Ravagers, it seemed, slept by finding smooth rock, laying down a cloak in it, rolling themselves in a second cloak, and lying on the first cloak. It also seemed they fell asleep the moment they were down, still in clothes and boots.
Old Bloodblade kept standing. He was busy at his pack, unrolling and laying out tunic after tunic on a rock as tall as he was. “Wrinkle,” he muttered often. “They all wrinkle.”
Taerune stared in fascination at the badges adorning the garments. “You have tunics with the badges of
all
the major Niflghar cities?”
Bloodblade crooked an eyebrow at her. “Of course! Doesn't everyone?”
Then the Ravager with the tools came up to him. Bloodblade watched Orivon's blade traded for the loans of the tools, nodded, and then pointed at the human and then off into the darkness at a particular cave mouth. “Do your work yonder, as quickly as you can, and come back, after,” he said. “Yon cave goes nowhere, and we'll be using it for other things.”
Orivon and Taerune nodded, trying to stifle their own yawns, and headed off to the cave mouth.
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