Marsheila Rockwell - The Shard Axe

Leoned’s voice rang out of the past, calm and unafraid. Accepting.

“Forget about me, Saba. Save Aggar.”

Sabira stared down at the dwarf, his green eyes at once alien and too familiar, and, remembering, made her choice.

She pulled the spear-end of her shard axe away from his throat, then quickly pivoted and thrust it deep into the meat of his thigh. Aggar howled in agony, but Sabira was already moving away. Even if the pain didn’t sever Eddarga’s hold on him for good, the injury would at least guarantee that he couldn’t get up and follow her as she charged his manipulating mistress.

The Noldrun, her mind still entangled with Aggar’s, was caught off guard by Sabira’s sudden rush. She was barely able to muster her mindblade and bring it to bear against Sabira’s furious onslaught in time. As it was, Sabira forced the duergar to abandon her high ground and landed a good hit to Eddarga’s midsection as well, smiling when her axe came away satisfyingly bloody.

But the assassin recovered quickly, and soon the two were battling back and forth across the cavern floor, trading blows and taunts, neither of them able to gain the advantage over the other.

“You should have seen your face when you realized that you triggered the trap that wound up killing your partner. That memory has kept me warm on many a long, cold night in the years since,” Eddarga said as she feinted toward Sabira’s thigh, only to change direction at the last minute and jab at the wound in the Marshal’s shoulder.

“No doubt it was the only thing,” Sabira retorted, twisting out of the way and getting in a jab of her own, the Siberys shard of her urgrosh grazing the Noldrun woman’s hip.

“Perhaps. But that’s still better than having no one to share my bed with all these years except the ghost of a man who turned his back on me. Don’t you think?”

Eddarga accompanied the verbal barb with a quick lunge to Sabira’s chest that slid off the haft of her urgrosh and nicked her under the arm. But neither the insult nor the wound caused Sabira any real pain, for she knew what Eddarga could not—that she had shared her bed with someone, a man who was definitely not a ghost and who did, in fact, love her. Probably more than she deserved.

“I wasn’t lying,” he had written.

Someone, she realized, whom she loved in turn.

That knowledge spurred her on as anger or vengeance could not. It gave renewed strength to her blows and purpose to her attack. Slowly she forced the assassin back, toward the advancing magma, the air around them shimmering with heat.

The gray dwarf risked a glance behind her and saw where Sabira was guiding her. Panic poured into her eyes and she launched herself at Sabira, her mindblade a black blur as she landed a flurry of blows. But Sabira, with a calmness that bordered on serenity, parried every strike with haft and axe and pushed the duergar back, inexorable and implacable as death itself.

“What are you doing?” Eddarga asked, alarm making her voice high and childlike. “You’ll kill us both!”

“If that’s what it takes,” Sabira agreed amiably.

“You’re mad! ”

“Aren’t we all?”

Eddarga thrust at her again, with flashy footwork designed to hide the fact that she’d angled her steps so that she would be moving mostly parallel to the magma’s edge instead of toward it as Sabira advanced on her. Sabira let her think the ploy had worked and didn’t immediately try to correct the duergar’s path. Instead, she intensified her attack, bringing her shard axe down in powerful, sweeping blows that Eddarga could not counter. And when she had the assassin in position, she pretended to tire, taking too long to recover from one wide swing.

Eddarga saw the opening and took it, jumping forward to skewer Sabira through the shoulder, her mindblade creating a second deep wound mere inches from the first.

Sabira dropped her own weapon and lunged forward, gritting her teeth against the pain as Eddarga’s blade slid through her and erupted out her back. She grabbed the duergar’s wrists with both hands, planted her feet, bent her knees, and heaved.

The assassin had been so focused on the threat of the magma, she hadn’t noticed when Sabira led her into a field of thin, needle-sharp stalagmites. So when Sabira half-lifted, half-threw her, not toward the molten rock but away from it, for an instant, she didn’t resist.

That instant was all Sabira needed to get the duergar airborne. As she left the ground, Eddarga lost her grip on her mindblade and it winked out of existence, leaving a gaping hole in Sabira’s shoulder. The assassin’s flight was shortlived and ended badly as she came down in the middle of the stalagmites, breaking several of them beneath her as she fell. But not enough of them.

One protruded from her shoulder, a mirror image of Sabira’s own wound. Another pierced her thigh, and a third, the largest, sprouted from her stomach like some obscene subterranean plant.

Satisfied that Eddarga would not be going anywhere, Sabira retrieved her shard axe, then strode over to where the Noldrun woman lay pinned to the cavern floor, a ghastly insect on display for the curious. Blood trickled from the gray dwarf’s mouth as she glared balefully up at Sabira.

Sabira felt a tickling at the back of her mind and was momentarily overcome with a strange urge to dig at her eyes. But Eddarga was too weak to sustain the mental attack and Sabira shook it off without difficulty.

“I’ll take that,” she said, reaching over to pull the dragonshard ring off Eddarga’s finger. “Just in case you decide you want to try that little trick again.”

“This isn’t over,” Eddarga wheezed.

“It is for you,” Sabira replied, raising her urgrosh above her head, ignoring the fire that lanced through her arm as she did. “I’m going to make sure you stay dead this time.”

And then Sabira brought the axe-blade down on Eddarga’s neck, a clean blow. The bald and scarred head bounced across the floor twice before landing with a small plop in the advancing magma. Sabira watched as the head caught fire and sank into the molten rock, flesh melting around black eyes that were still open and staring, sightless, into oblivion.

Sabira hurried over to where Aggar had managed to prop himself up against the base of a thick pillar, a rock feature formed when a stalactite reaching down from the roof of the cavern and a stalagmite reaching up from its floor joined in the middle. Most of their side of the cavern was filled with magma by now and all the exits had been cut off. She helped Aggar to his feet and, supporting him with her good shoulder while he limped along, they made their way to the last bit of high ground.

Once there, Sabira turned to survey the lake of molten rock that was slowly encroaching on their little island.

“Well, I guess this is it, Agg. It’s over. There’s nowhere left to go.”

Aggar, leaning heavily against her, laughed.

“Yes, there is.”

“Dolurrh?” Sabira scoffed. “That thought almost makes me wish I believed in the Silver Flame.”

“Not there,” Aggar said, twisting the last of his golden rings, one that looked newer than the rest. “Maintenance.”

Sabira’s stomach dropped into her feet like it was made of cold iron and a wave of nausea threatened to drown her. And then they were standing in the middle of a room filled with all manner of pipes, machinery, and dials.

Aggar reached over to pull a white lever marked “Risia.”

At her questioning look, he explained that he’d had the engineers construct dozens of portals to Risia, the Plane of Ice, in the tunnels and caverns below Maintenance. When the magma reached those planar doorways, it would be channeled away and never reach the city.