Iron and Blood (23 page)

Right.

They were heading down another corridor now, and Tyvian noted a particular smell in the air—­metallic, semisweet, sticky. Blood. A huge quantity of blood—­it grew in strength with every pace the group of soldiers took in its direction, to the point where Tyvian was having difficulty imagining what terrible event could possibly produce that much of the stuff. There was another scent in the air—­an acrid, foul stench, also very familiar. Brymm—­definitely brymm, or at least pure Fey energy, and a
lot
of it. So much, again, that it was making Tyvian nervous. What the
hell
was Sahand up to with that power sink? Just how terrible was his plot, after all?

The soldiers in front of Tyvian were getting nervous, too. There was some muttering among themselves that he wasn't close enough to hear, but the body language was clear enough—­they knew where they were headed and that they weren't supposed to go there. They came to the top of a broad staircase that dropped about fifteen feet to a wide arch. A pair of soldiers were guarding this arch, and they held up their hands to stop the oncoming group.

“Oi, Farrut—­no passing, you know that!” one of sentries yelled.

Farrut—­the group's sergeant, evidently—­put up his hands. “Yeah, I know—­we got word of Reldamar down this way, though. You seen anything?”

The sentries both shook their heads. “Nah—­nothing but that stink. Gallo came by, but it was on His Grace's orders, right? Didn't get in the way.”

Farrut nodded at the wisdom of this.

Tyvian saw where all this was going long before it got there—­they were going to turn around, which meant he needed to beat a hasty retreat. He started back the way they'd come but hadn't gone ten paces before he heard voices ahead of him—­more soldiers, coming this way! He looked to his left and right—­nowhere to hide, at least not that he could see. Turning back, he saw the group he had been following heading his way, too. He was trapped.

The two groups of Dellorans met at about the center of the corridor, and their lights ilLumenated Tyvian, his saber drawn, at about the same exact time. “Hello, gentlemen—­I believe you're looking for me?”

 

A
rtus had no idea what had happened to Hool, but he knew wherever he was headed was trouble. Even he could smell the blood in the air now, and it made him uncomfortable. The corridor he was following emptied into a large hall with a partially collapsed roof—­a crack in the ceiling was admitting a bit of dying sunlight, and that was it. So it was just about nightfall—­Artus realized suddenly it was the first time he'd known what time it was since . . . since whenever he got here. It couldn't have been more than a day, could it?

Focus, Artus.

Though the lighting was poor, Artus could make out several entrances and exits to the hall. Behind him, he could hear the group of Dellorans closing in at a half run, so he didn't have time to consider his route very carefully. He took the closest side-­corridor he could and hid in the shadows until the group passed. When they headed down a different way, he breathed a sigh of relief.

“Quiet down!”
a man bellowed from somewhere in the dark—­Artus thought it came from deeper in the hall he was hiding in. He heard the crack of a whip, and someone screamed; a woman's voice.

Holding the Delloran broadsword tightly in both hands, Artus stalked down the corridor, step after step, eyes straining against the dark to see something that would tell him where the sound was coming from. He hadn't gone very far when he saw the orange glow of an oil lamp flickering from a lopsided arch. Backing up next to it, he hazarded a peek around the corner.

He saw about a half-­dozen wretched looking ­people chained together on a long bench. Over them stood a fat, bald Delloran, a whip in his hand and a heavy wool cape draped across his round shoulders. His arms were bare, too, and covered by a lattice work of scars. Artus had seen scars like that before, in some of the darker corners of Ayventry—­you got those from knife fighting, and most ­people didn't live long enough to get more than a few.

The knife-­fighter had his back to Artus, and he was snarling and cursing at the prisoners in front of him. There were four women and two old men, and all of them looked as Hortense had—­starved, terrified, and resigned to their fates.

“No more whining about food!” the knife-­fighter barked, “or I'll gut the lot of you freeloading whores!” He waddled then, crablike, to a wooden stool set before a small table and took up a half-­eaten loaf of bread. Leering at the women, he took a big bite and chewed, humming to himself as though the hard bread were the finest meal he'd ever eaten.

Saints, Artus thought again, where does Sahand find these ogres?

The next thought came tight on the last one's heels:
Artus, you're going to have to kill this man to save those ­people.

His stomach twisted again. He tried to think of another way, but his experience with the kind of soldiers Sahand employed reminded him they couldn't be reasoned with and wouldn't balk at stabbing a kid to death for fun. He couldn't expect Hool to show up
every
time he was about to be murdered either.

And he couldn't just leave them here. He was beginning to identify this as a character flaw.

Artus shifted his grip on the stolen broadsword—­his palms were sweaty, despite the cold. He took a deep breath to try and calm his dancing heart. It would be easy—­the easiest thing ever. He had the element of surprise.
Just run in, hit him in the head with sword, and bam, that's it.
He tried to imagine how much blood there would be or what kind of sound it would make. He reminded himself that he was doing it to protect innocents, and that Hann would understand. He could be a soldier—­it was in his blood. All the men in his family had been soldiers.

Artus counted to three in his head and, with a whooping cry he hoped was terrifying, charged the knife-­fighter. The big man's blue eyes seemed to pop out of his head at the sight of Artus, sword held high, running for him. The Delloran stood, put up his hands, and then Artus brought the sword down with all his remaining strength.

The blade sheared off the man's fingers on his right hand, but it missed his head. Instead, it dug itself into the side of the man's neck and moved a full six inches across his torso, only to wedge itself somewhere in his rib cage. Blood spurted in all directions and the man keened pathetically as he contemplated his mangled hand. Then his eyes rolled back in his head and he fell backward with a crash, upsetting the table and stool and knocking the oil lamp to the floor. Artus's face felt wet and warm; he figured he knew why. While he stared at the dead man, he wiped his face absently with his shirt. His whole body seemed to tremble at once. “Saints.”

“Who are you?”

Artus blinked and found himself looking at a woman old enough to be his mother. “I . . . I . . . my name is Artus and I'm here to rescue you.” He immediately felt himself blush. What a stupid thing to say.

“The keys! Get the keys, boy!” one of the other women yelled, pointing at the key ring on the dead Delloran's hip.

Artus found himself staring at the body again. “Weird . . .” he said to no one in particular, “he was the first Delloran I've seen who wasn't wearing armor.”

As Artus fished the keys off the man's belt, one of the women spat in the direction of the man's face. “He said it made him hot, the pig.”

Artus handed the keys to the prisoners and they began to undo their chains. “Did any of you know a man named Hortense?” he asked. “He had a daughter here but the Dellorans took her away. I'm looking for her.”

The woman who had asked him who he was shook her head and sighed. “Gone, boy. Sold off, dead, or worse. Poor lamb.”

Artus blinked—­he didn't know how to react to that. Now what did he do? “But . . . I promised her father . . .”

The other prisoners were heading out the door without even bothering with good-­byes. They looked like rats scampering out of a cupboard. One of the old men snorted at Artus before shuffling into the dark. “Forget her, sonny—­it's every man for himself now.”

The woman patted Artus on the cheek and kissed him on the forehead. “Hann bless you, Artus. Wish I had a son like you. Damned cowards, the lot of them.” Then, with a sad smile, she vanished through the doorway.

“Great.” He sighed. “Now what?”

T
he key to successfully fighting multiple armed opponents was to
stop
fighting multiple armed opponents as soon as humanly possible. There were three typical solutions to this: killing them quickly, disarming them quickly, or running someplace where they couldn't all get you at once. Tyvian was currently exercising the third of these options.

He had lost track of the number of turns, twists, chutes, and winding stairs he'd plummeted down or scampered up; he had no idea where he now was. He knew two things, though—­he was down to three or four men behind him, which was a great improvement over eight—­and the smell of blood and brymm was getting stronger. He hoped very much this was because he was closer to its source and not because of whatever Sahand was doing. He had a sneaking suspicion, though, that it was both.

Tyvian squeezed through a crack in a wall through which a flood of orange light was pouring. He found himself up on a narrow ledge ringing the top of a massive circular chamber. The floor was a complex and asymmetrical pattern of orbs, crystals, and mageglass prisms, all radiating out from a central pool perhaps ten yards in diameter that frothed and bubbled with a thick, hot crimson liquid. Beside it, completely naked and inscribed from head to toe in burning orange runescript, stood Banric Sahand, chanting in a booming voice. Tyvian was dumbfounded by what he saw—­a ritual of some kind involving artifacts and magecraft he'd never heard of, let along seen before. “Kroth.”

The soldier behind him scuffed his foot along the ledge at the last second, affording Tyvian enough notice to parry a thrust from a broadsword that might have speared his spine. Their blades still engaged, the soldier moved as though to lock them together. In his exhausted state, Tyvian knew better than to put himself corps à corps with a larger opponent, so he disengaged and withdrew two paces, careful to keep both feet planted on the narrow ledge.

The soldier took a wild thrust at his forward leg. Tyvian lifted it clear and slammed it down on top of the man's sword before he could recover. His weapon pinned, Tyvian whipped his saber in a quick cut to the only part of the man's face that wasn't armored—­his chin and lips. Blood spurted from the soldier's mouth and he moved a hand to block his bleeding face. Tyvian followed up with a sharp pommel strike to his temple, knocking the man him off the ledge, to crash to the unforgiving stone floor some twenty feet below.

Behind that soldier, though, there was another . . . and another . . . and another . . . and another still, squeezing through the crack. “Kroth,” Tyvian swore again. It seemed he hadn't lost as many as he'd hoped.

The next fellow had a short spear and a shield, and he jabbed it at Tyvian's face, backing the smuggler up. This one was more cautious than the last, and Tyvian couldn't find an opening. He beat the spear's shaft away, recalling how
Chance
would have cut straight through the hardened wood like it was a daisy stem. Tyvian wondered if there were any way off this ledge besides falling—­one didn't seem to present itself.

“Hyah!” the Delloran yelled, and lunged. The spear nearly took Tyvian in the throat, but he parried it aside at the last second. That let him get inside the man's guard, and grabbing hold of the Delloran's spear-­hand, Tyvian turned on the spot and flipped the man over one shoulder with more power than he thought he had in him at the moment. Another Delloran crashed to the floor below.

Another Delloran squeezed through the crack.

“Kroth's bloody Kroth-­spawned teeth!” Tyvian's heart was pounding and his situation was not improving. The next man had a battle-­axe and a mean, snaggle-­toothed grin. “How much is Sahand paying you for this, honestly?”

Below, Sahand completed his chant with a final, guttural syllable. He slapped a hand on the surface of the roiling bloody pool, and for a split second Tyvian thought the world might have just exploded. A cataclysmic roar shook the air itself, so loud it blurred Tyvian's vision and caused his breath to catch in his throat. He and all the Dellorans on the ledge put their hands to their ears as the masonry around them quaked and rumbled, as though being rung like a giant bell. Through his half-­open eyes Tyvian could see a fiery red streak of energy sizzling from the pool, through several of the focusing apparatuses, and then in a massive, burning line of power down the primary corridor entering the chamber. The heat and power of the thing blew him back against the wall as though hit with a gust of hurricane wind, and then he fell forward, stumbling on the ledge. Tyvian flailed around to find purchase but found none.

THWUMP!

Tyvian's fall was broken by the corpse of one of the men he had just recently tossed off the ledge. He landed on his ribs and felt at least one of them crack with a white blaze of pain, but was otherwise not seriously harmed. He rolled to his knees, trying to suck air in through his deflated lungs, and cast about for his saber.

He found it, and thanks to the ring as much as anything, pulled himself to his feet. He pointed the blade around him, expecting attack, but found none. All of the Dellorans who had risked stepping out on the ledge had fallen, just like him. They didn't have any of their compatriots to break their fall, though, and lay in broken heaps around him—­some injured, some dead.

His ears were still ringing, but he heard Sahand's harsh laugh and turned to see the Mad Prince walking around the edge of the pool toward him. Tyvian moved the opposite direction.

“So, Reldamar, I take it that you have refused my offer, then?”

Tyvian had no idea what he was talking about, but nodded anyway. “Is it that obvious?”

Even naked, Sahand possessed a kind of confidence that Tyvian felt unnerving. The man probably hadn't been in a room where he wasn't the most dangerous being there in, well, decades. “Surely you don't expect to stop me? What would be in it for you?”

“This is the old power sink, isn't it?” Tyvian asked, trying to stall, eyes casting for a likely escape route. “Gods, Sahand—­what have you done to it?”

Sahand stopped walking. Tyvian noted the Mad Prince was now standing in a veta inscribed in the floor and connected by lines of sorcerous script to various other crystals, prisms, and focusing devices. “I have made a weapon, Reldamar. A weapon so potent no one will dare oppose me.”

Of course—­a weapon. Tyvian knew he was creating a weapon—­he had basically told the League as much, but . . . but
this?
“You're using the ley lines, aren't you—­the Trell line that runs through Freegate, Galaspin . . .”

“ . . . and Saldor, very good. The very lines of energy that network the world together I will use as conduits for my new weapon.” He nodded to the pool. “When the Fey energy I have banked in this sink is released, it will send a wave of power down the Trell Valley that will be sufficient to destroy half of Freegate, shatter Galaspin's walls like matchsticks, and set Saldor ablaze.”

Tyvian's heart felt still and cold. “You'll kill tens of thousands of ­people . . .
hundreds
of thousands. Hann's boots, man . . . it's . . .”

Sahand grinned like a tiger. “Spare me, smuggler. I long ago stopped heeding the objections of small-­minded men. Today I crush my enemies, tomorrow I make my demands—­that is all that really matters. Now,” he put his hands over the churning waters of the pool, “I have been distracted long enough. Gallo, if you would . . .”

Tyvian looked over his shoulder to see the hulking, armored bulk of Gallo closing in on him, his vicious falchion in his hand, an expressionless fish-­eyed stare fixating on him. Tyvian had seen how much damage Hool inflicted on the life-­warded Gallo no more than twenty-­four hours ago, and here he was, good as new. Tyvian backed away and then fled from the chamber. Behind him, he heard Sahand's guttural chant begin anew as well as the rhythmic clank and constant wheeze of Gallo in pursuit.