Valdemar 05 - [Vows & Honor 02] - Oathbreakers (27 page)

Kethry might have looked tired, but she also looked slightly pleased.
Maybe a draw is good
—
Warrior bless, I hope so
—

Even more encouraging, the other mage looked slightly worried.

Kethry initiated the next round; throwing (literally) daggers of light at the red-robed sorcerer, daggers which he had to deflect, dodge, or absorb. He returned in kind, but he was not as good in this contest as Kethry; his blades tended to go awry. Hers never failed to reach their mark, and frequently hit.

Where they hit, they left real wounds, wounds that smoked and bled. The red mage managed to keep from being hit anywhere vital, but the daggers were taking a steady toll.

After being hit one too many times, he suddenly threw up his hands, and a wall of flame sprang up in front of him, a wall that devoured the daggers when they reached it.

The fire grew until it reached the top of the dome, cutting him off from Kethry. Arms of flame began to lick from the wall, reaching toward her.

Fighting fire with fire might not work, here, Keth,
Tarma thought, biting her lip a little.
You could both end up scorched by your own powers
—

But Kethry chose not to fight with fire, but with air; a whirlwind, a man-high tornado of milky white sprang up in front of her, sucking in those reaching arms of flame. And every time it ate one of those arms, it grew a little larger. Finally, it reached nearly to the top of the dome—and it began to move on the red-robed mage and his fiery protective wall.

Evidently the same thought occurred to the mage, for his eyes had gone white-rimmed with panic. He backed into the restraining wall of the protective dome, then began shouting and waving his hands wildly.

And a twice-man-sized
thing
rose from the barren earth behind Kethry.

No—oh no—that bastard, he had that thing hidden there; he's had this planned from the start!
Tarma recognized the krakash, the mage-construct, from Jadrek's descriptions. She started to sprint for the edge of the dome, even knowing she wouldn't be able to pass it.

Kethry turned to meet it, first making frantic motions with her hands, then groping for a blade she did not have. The thing reached for her with the two upper arms, missing, but raking her from neck to knee with its outsized talons. She collapsed, clutching herself with pain; it seized her as she fell with the lower two of its four arms. It lifted her as she fought to get free—and broke her back across its knee, as a man would break a dry branch.

Tarma heard her own voice, crying the word in anguish, but it didn't seem to belong to her.

The whirlwind died to a stirring of dust on the ground; the dome thinned to red mist, and vanished.

Tarma's mind and heart were paralyzed, but her body was not. She reacted to the disaster as she had planned, charging the mage at a dead run, while Jadrek sprinted fearlessly for the
thing.

The startled wizard saw her coming, and threw blasts of pure energy at her—spheres of blinding ball-lightning which traveled unerringly toward her, hit, and did
nothing,
leaving not even a tingle behind as they dissipated. The mage had just enough time to realize that she was protected before she reached him.

While part of her sobbed with anguish, another part of her coolly calculated, and brought Need about in a shining, swift arc, as she allowed her momentum to carry her past him. She saw his eyes, filled with fear, saw his hands come up in a futile attempt to deflect the sword—then felt the shock along the blade as she neatly beheaded him, a tiny trail of blood-droplets streaming behind the point of the sword as it finished its arc.

Before his body had hit the ground she whirled and made for Jadrek, cursing the fate that had placed mage and construct so many paces apart. The older man hadn't a chance.

As she ran, she could see that the Archivist had something in his hands. He ducked under the grasp of the horrid creature's upper two arms with an agility Tarma never dreamed to see in him. And with the courage she
had
known he possessed, came up in the thing's face, casting one handful of powder into its eyes and the second into its mouth.

The thing emitted a shriek that pierced Tarma's ears—

Then it crumbled into a heap of dry earth before she had made more than a dozen steps in its direction. As it disintegrated, it dropped Kethry into the brown dust like a broken, discarded boy.

Tarma flung herself down on her knees at Kethry's side, and tried to stop the blood running from the gashes the thing's talons had left. Uselessly—for Kethry was dying even as she and the Archivist knelt in the dust beside her.

Jadrek made a choking sound, and took Kethry into his arms, heedless of the blood and filth.

Tarma fumbled the hilt of Need into her hands, but it only slowed the inevitable. Need could not mend a shattered spine, nor could she Heal such ghastly wounds; all the blade could do was block the pain. It was only a matter of time—measured in moments—before the end.

“Well ...” the mage whispered, as Jadrek supported her head and shoulders in his arms, silent tears pouring from his eyes, and sobs shaking his shoulders. “I ... always figured ... I'd never ... die in bed.”

Tarma clenched both of her hands around the limp ones on Need's hilt, fiercely willing the blade to do what she knew in her heart it could not. “
Damn
it, Keth—you
can't
just walk out on us this way! You
can't
just die on us! We—” she could not say more for the tears that choked her own throat.

“Keth—
please
don't; I'll do anything, take
my
life, only please don't die—” Jadrek choked out, frantically.

“Don't ... have much choice ...” Kethry breathed, her eyes glazing with shock, her life pumping out into the dust. “Be brave ...
she‘enedra
... finish the contract. Then go home ... make Tale'sedrin live ... without me.”

“No!” Tarma cried, her eyes half-blind with tears.
“No!”
she wrenched her hands away, leaping to her feet. “It's
not
going to end this way! Not while I'm Kal‘enedral! By the Warrior, I swear
NO!
”

Thrusting a blood-drenched fist at the sky, she summoned all the power that was hers as Kal‘enedral, as priestess, as Swordsworn warrior—power she had never taken, never used. She flung back her head, and
screamed
a name into the uncaring, gray sky, a name that tore her throat even as her heart was torn.

The Warrior's Greater Name—

The harsh syllables of the Name echoed and reechoed, driving her several paces backward, then sending her to her knees in the dust. Then—silence. Silence as broodingly powerful as that in the eye of the hurricane. Tarma looked up, her heart cold within her. For a moment, nothing changed.

Then
everything
ceased; time
stopped.
The very tears on Jadrek's cheeks froze in their tracks. Sound died, the dust on the breeze hung suspended in little immobilized eddies.

Tarma alone could move; she got to her feet, and waited for Her—to learn what price
she
would be asked to pay for the gift of Kethry's life.

A single shaft of pure, white light lanced into the ground, practically at Tarma's feet, accompanied by an earsplitting shriek of tortured air. Tarma did not turn her eyes away, though the light nearly blinded her and left her able to see nothing but white mist for long moments. When the mist cleared from her vision, She was standing where the light had been, Her face utterly still and expressionless, Her eyes telling Tarma nothing.

They faced one another in silence for long moments, the Goddess and her votary. Then She spoke, Her voice still melodious; but this time, the music was a lament.

^*
That you call My Name can mean only that you seek a life, jel‘enedra,*
She said. *
The giving of a life—not the taking.*

“As is my right as Kal‘enedral,” Tarma replied, quietly.

Now Tarma bowed her head and closed her eyes upon her tears, for she could not bear to look upon that face, nor to see the shattered wreck that had been her dearest friend lying beyond. “Anything,” she whispered around the anguish.

“Anything.”
Tarma defiantly raised her head again, and spoke directly to those star-strewn eyes, pulling each of her words out of the pain that filled her heart. “Keth—she's worth more to me than anything. Ask anything of me; take my body, make me a cripple, take my life, even make Tale‘sedrin a Dead Clan, it doesn't matter. Because without Kethry to share it, none of that has any meaning for me.”

She was weeping now for the first time in years; mostly when she hurt, she just swallowed the tears and the pain, and forced herself to show an impassive face to the world. Not now. The tears scalded her cheeks like hot oil; she let them.

Tarma could only nod.

*It—is well,
^*
came the surprising answer.
^*
And what price your obedience?
^*

“I put no price on obedience, I will serve You faithfully, Lady, as I always have. Only let Kethry live, and let her thrive and perhaps find love—and most of all, be free. That's worth anything You could ask of me.”

The Warrior regarded her thoughtfully for an eternity, measuring, weighing.

Then—She laughed—

And as Tarma stared in benumbed shock, She held out Her hands, palm outward, one palm facing Tarma, one Kethry. Bolts of blinding white light, like Kethry's daggers of power, leaped from Her hands to Tarma, and to the mage still cradled in Jadrek's arms.

Or, possibly, to the ensorcelled blade still clasped in the mage's hands.

Tarma did not have much chance to see which, for the dagger of light hit her full in the chest, and suddenly she couldn't hear, couldn't see, couldn't breathe. She felt as if a giant hand had picked her up, and was squeezing the life out of her. She was blind, deaf, dumb, and made of nothing but excruciating pain—

Then she was on her hands and knees, panting with an agony that had left her in the blink of an eye—half-sprawled in the cold dust of the valley.

While beside her, a white-faced Jadrek cradled a dazed, shocked—and completely Healed—Kethry. Only the tattered wreckage of her traveling leathers and the blood pooled beneath her showed that it had not all been some kind of nightmare.

As Tarma stared, still too numb to move, she could hear the jubilant voice of the Warrior singing in her mind.

J
adrek blinked, trying to force what he had just witnessed into some semblance of sense. He was mortally confused.

One moment, Kethry is dying; there is no chance anyone other than a god could survive her injuries. Then Tarma stands up and shrieks something in Shin‘a'in—and
—

Kethry stirred groggily in his arms; he flushed, released her, and helped her to sit up, trying not to stare at the flesh showing through the rents in her leather riding clothing—flesh that had been lacerated a moment ago.

“What ... happened?” she asked weakly, eyes dazed.

“I don't really know,” he confessed. And thinking:
Tarma was here, and now she's over there and I didn't see her move, I know I didn‘t! Am I going mad?

Tarma got slowly to her feet, wavering like a drunk, and staggered over to them; she looked drained to exhaustion, her face was lined with pain and there were purplish circles beneath her eyes. It looked to Jadrek as if she was about to collapse at any moment.

Tarma fell heavily to her knees beside them, scrubbing away the tears still marking her cheeks with the back of a dirty hand, and leaving dirt smudges behind. She reached out gently with the same hand, and patted Kethry's cheek. The hand she used was shaking, and with the other arm she was bracing herself upright. “It's all right,” she sighed, her voice sounding raw and worn to a thread. “It's all right. I did something—and it worked. Don't ask what. Bright Star, I am tired to death!”

She collapsed into something vaguely like a sitting position right there in the dust beside them, head hanging; she leaned on both arms, breathing as heavily as if she had just run an endurance race.

Kethry tried to move, to get to her feet, and fell right back into Jadrek's willing embrace again. She held out
her
hand, and watched with an expression of confused fascination as it shook so hard she wouldn't have been able to hold a cup of water without losing half the contents.

“I feel awful—but—” she said, looking down at the shreds of her tunic with astonishment and utter bewilderment. “How did you—”