Paul Kemp - The Hammer and the Blade

The eunuch's eyes should have widened with pain; he should have fallen to his knees, but he did neither. Never losing his vacant smile and empty gaze, he snatched Baras's wrist with his free hand, pulled him close, and drove his knife into the underside of Baras's jaw, up through his mouth, and into his brain. Wideeyed, Baras's jaw moved up and down, as if masticating the steel. Blood poured from his mouth.

The eunuch pulled the knife free and Baras crumpled to the sand, dead flesh in a bag of chainmail, leaking crimson from the hole in his jaw. The eunuch dropped the knife, pulled Baras's blade from his own body, and turned to Nix, still smiling.

"Shite," Nix said, climbing to his feet. The blood rushed from his head when he stood and a bout of dizziness caused him to wobble. Adrenaline kept him upright. He pulled the dagger he kept in his boot, another he wore on his belt. He wanted to back away, put some space between himself and the eunuch, but he didn't trust himself to move across the sand and stay upright.

"Come on, whoreson," he said, faking a bravado he didn't feel.

Holding Baras's gory blade in one hand and Nix's hand axe in the other, the eunuch lumbered toward Nix.

Since Nix couldn't easily kill the man, he resolved to disable the eunuch's body somehow, ruin his locomotion, and then cut him to pieces.

The eunuch plodded straight for him. Nix circled laterally as best he could, trying to keep some space between them and wait for an opening.

Impatient, the eunuch rumbled forward, stabbing at Nix's chest with Baras's sword, but Nix sidestepped the stab and ducked under the eunuch's follow-up slash with the hand axe. He jabbed his punch dagger into the eunuch's knee and the big man stumbled.

"Got you," Nix said, bounding back out of reach.

The eunuch, however, surprised Nix when he halflurched, half-hopped forward on his good leg and swung a crosscut at Nix's throat. Nix ducked the swing, but in the process his own wounded leg gave out and he fell sprawling to the sand. Panic fueled him. He whirled around just in time to get his dagger crosswise of the eunuch's down stroke with Baras's sword.

The parry sent a shooting pain through Nix's wrist, but he steered the larger blade into the sand and rolled away as fast as he could. He heard the eunuch plodding after him, the crunch of sandals on the sand, and climbed to his feet. His leg nearly buckled on him again. Wincing, he held his ground. He held up his daggers as the eunuch closed.

"These are going into your eyes, slubber. You can't hit what you can't see."

No answer but the dumb smile and an inexorable advance.

As Nix prepared to die fighting, Egil appeared behind the eunuch, teeth bared, his hammer raised, blood streaming from his nose and a cut on his scalp, as if Ebenor's eye were crying tears of blood. The eunuch never turned, fixed as he was on Nix. Holding one of his hammers two-handed, Egil slammed the head of the weapon into the eunuch's skull.

Bone audibly collapsed, brain and shards of skull sprayed Nix in a gory rain. The eunuch stood upright for a moment, the eyes still vacant, the mouth still open in the dumb half-smile, all with Egil's hammer buried halfway in his hollowed-out head.

For a moment, Nix thought not even the priest's blow would fell whatever the eunuch was, but the huge man sagged to his knees, then fell face first into the sand.

And when he hit the sand and the light went out of his eyes, an onslaught of thoughts and memories exploded from the opening in his head.

Memories pelted Nix, a storm of thoughts and experiences not his own. The mental onslaught knocked him backward to the sand, left him face up to the twilight sky, screaming in pain at the setting sun. His head pounded, the pressure building in his temples to such a degree that he knew his head would soon explode in a shower of gore to rival that of the eunuch's.

He was distantly aware of Egil's screams echoing his own, the priest writhing in the sand with his hands on either side of his head as if he could hold his skull together with the strength of his arms. Jyme, too, seemed to be screaming.

Nix rolled over, the pain in his head curling him into a fetal position. He pressed his face into the sand and screamed into the granules. He felt as if acid had been poured inside his skull. He could not bear it; he could not. Images, memories, and thoughts slammed into him, rooted into his mind as if they were his own. He could not shelter himself from them. He could only writhe, scream, and endure.

Phrases thronged his mind, filling his skull, the words portentous: breeders, House Thyss of Hell, the Pact. They stuck in the forefront of his consciousness, the stars around which everything else orbited.

Of a sudden he knew that House Norristru had pacted with House Thyss of Hell. He knew, too, that to seal the Pact, the Norristru men had sacrificed their seed, cursing themselves to infertility, while the Norristru women had been made to sacrifice their wombs, cursed to annual violation by fiends. They were fertile only to a Thyss-born devil.

A fiend from Hell — it had been Vik-Thyss for the last hundred and eleven years — arrived once every two years on the night of the Thin Veil, when the walls between worlds were weakest, and violated all Norristru women of child-bearing age. Of the resulting offspring, House Thyss claimed those of fiendish appearance and House Norristru retained those who could pass as human. The alliance with Hell brought the Norristru line ever more arcane knowledge, brought them command of spirits who feared Hell's wrath should they disobey.

Nix understood that the Pact had become harder and harder to honor with each generation, as more and more of the offspring proved devilish in appearance and were taken by the Thyss. House Norristru had become less like the house of a noble family and more like a mausoleum, empty rooms filled only with memories and the horrors of the past.

Memories knifed into his brain. Nix was Rusilla, filled with measured hate.

He was lying in his bed, speaking to Rakon, who stood at the door of her chambers.

"The Pact was made by Norristru men, for Norristru men. Yet it's the women who suffer for it."

Against his will, images solidified around the words, mental pictures of diabolic violations of generations of Norristru women. He tried not to see them, tried not to understand the reality of the horror, but the images would not relent. They filled him with disgust. He did not know if they were actual memories or Rusilla's guess at what had occurred, but they were terrible enough make him squirm.

"Not this," he groaned, his mouth full of sand. "Not this."

He lay on his back in a bed, arms chained above him to the bedposts, while the scaled, hulking form of a devil pressed down on him, nearly smothering him. He gritted his teeth against the agonizing pain below his waist, at the dry, reptilian stink of the creature. He wept with shame and fear and pain as the creature drove itself into him again and again.

He was himself, remembering the dreams he'd had in the Wastes. They had come from Rusilla. She had been trying to reach him, show him what awaited her and her sister. But he had resisted and never seen. He recalled the swelling, engorged doors, the blood leaking under the jambs, the horrors occurring on the other side of the wood, the bestial sounds of lust a counterpoint to the desperate screams of pain that they hid.

He could not bear it.

"Stop!" he shouted. "Stop."

He was Rakon.

"Vik-Thyss is dead," the sylph said in its singsong voice. "His death has been in the wind for many days."

His thoughts had swirled. In his mind's eye, he saw the family's power foundering, saw House Norristru losing what wealth it still possessed, its seat on the Merchants' Council. He saw himself losing his position as Adjunct to the Lord Mayor, saw his many enemies emboldened and coming for him. Without the protection of House Thyss of Hell, he would be quickly dead and his house annihilated.