Филип Этанс - The Death Ray

Regdar held his greatsword in one hand as he bent to retrieve the dead sergeant’s shining, polished long sword. It was probably an heirloom, and Regdar quickly, silently promised himself to return it to the sergeant’s family, but he had use of it first.

“Something’s moving in there,” Regdar whispered to the others, who had gathered behind him.

He flipped the long sword over in his grip and held it out, pommel-first, to Lem, the next in line among the watchmen. Lem took the sword, admiring its gleaming blade.

“I can’t take this,” Lem whispered. “This is magical, or I’m a son of a naga.”

“Shut up and use it,” Regdar replied, putting both hands on his own greatsword. “Stay right behind me. Whatever is in there, I want you to kill it. Understood?”

Lem nodded, then exchanged a worried glance with Asil and Drahir.

“Drahir,” Regdar continued, “get up here with that lantern. Stand just behind Lem. Naull, I need you behind Drahir. Asil, stay back with Jandik and keep an eye on our exit.”

“I’m fine,” the tracker said as he staggered to his feet, leaning against the wall and wincing with pain. “That potion did the trick.”

Regdar was about to protest when the sound of a pile of rocks shifting—it could only be that—echoed from the space behind the door. He knew the time for planning and talking was over, and he stepped across the threshold into darkness.

“Go on, fools,” Vargussel murmured to the image in his mind. “Let the little one serve some function after all.”

The parchment and the spell cast on it had been a ruse—simple but effective. It hadn’t managed to kill Regdar but it was succeeding in its second mission: drawing intruders down the wrong path.

Vargussel watched Regdar slip into the shadows. The mage rubbed his hands together nervously in anticipation of the moment when The lord constable sank into a fighting stance and called out, Engaged !—whatever that meant.

The dread guard stepped up over a pile of rubble-stone, bricks, and wood piled three feet high—where one of the walls had collapsed, decades gone by. Regdar stood in a corridor that ran the length of the west end of the slaughterhouse’s basement. To the lord constable’s right was the ruin of two rooms that once served as storage but had come to be the watchpost of Vargussel’s earlier effort in the creation of a magical construct.

The dread guard had cost Vargussel dearly at the time, but it proved too stupid, too slow, and too weak for his greater purposes. It could never wield the death ray but it could pick off unwary intruders.

Regdar easily deflected the dread guard’s first attack but the construct fought on. It had no other choice, no survival instinct, no independent mind.

Vargussel sat back and watched.

Naull could see the man who attacked Regdar but couldn’t see his face. He was wearing a rusted but once grand suit of banded armor and an elaborately plumed helm with a visor that covered the whole of his face. The broadsword with which he deftly parried Regdar’s bigger blade was undoubtedly enchanted.

The man was shorter than Regdar by a hand or more, and though the armor was heavy, Naull couldn’t imagine the dark, rusted knight making the booming footsteps Regdar and other witnesses had described. Still, she’d learned not to judge a book by its cover, and she knew well enough that though he looked like a normal man, he could still be strong enough to flip over the bed. The holes in the floor had been carved with magic, and the young aristocrats had been killed magically as well.

Naull brought to mind a simple spell that she hoped might end things quickly. In the cramped, tumbledown space, Regdar was slashing at the knight with his greatsword, keeping Lem and the others back. Jandik looked like he was itching to fight but his wounds were still too painful, and he had trouble just keeping on his feet. From the others Naull could sense the same palpable feeling of relief that she was experiencing herself. They’d found their murderer and he was a man in armor, not a monster, not a godlike steel demon from some sewer-reeking hell.

Naull cast the spell, focusing all of its energy at the dark knight. She fully expected him to crumple to the rubble-strewn floor at Regdar’s feet, fast asleep, but the armored warrior didn’t oblige. To Naull it seemed as if the spell had passed right through the strange man as if he wasn’t even there.

There could be any number of reasons for that, she told herself, but still…

She felt that sense of relief and hope quickly fading back to anxiety and panic.

Regdar banged another of the strange knight’s attacks away while stepping back and to the left. He’d taken the measure of his opponent and found the dark knight strong and insistent, brave and relentless—but slow and predictable. He expected the knight to slash high at his throat with a cross-chest backhand, and that’s just what the mysterious man did.

Rather than wave his own sword in front of himself to parry the slash, Regdar crouched and let the blow pass just over the top of his head. The dark knight was momentarily unbalanced with most of his weight on his right foot and his left foot almost off the floor.

Regdar let himself fall back on his rear as he kicked out with his right foot, slamming it hard into the inside of the dark knight’s right knee.

The stranger’s right knee emitted a loud snap and collapsed, sending him sprawling in a clatter of steel onto the top of the rubble pile. Regdar was surprised that the man didn’t grunt, cry out, or make any sound at all either when his knee was dislocated or when he fell facefirst onto a pile of sharp stones and splintered wood. The dark knight’s helmet popped loose when his neck snapped at the end of the fall and before Regdar could spin up to his feet, the knight was already standing, even though he was missing a head.

The helm rolled off the pile of rubble and came to rest against Regdar’s foot but it was empty. In front of Regdar stood the knight, his weight on his undamaged left leg, his sword swinging into a guard position, and just an empty space where his head should have been.

It was no man, Regdar realized, but a suit of armor come independently to life.

The armor hacked down with its broadsword and Regdar bashed the blade away so hard the broadsword whirled out of the animated gauntlet and clattered against the ceiling before sliding to a stop behind the pile of rubble.

The animated armor turned at the shoulders, as if it still had eyes or even a head to house them, and looked for its sword. Regdar chopped into its pauldron. The force of the blow drove the armor suit down to the rubble.

It reached out a hand for Regdar’s throat but the lord constable jerked back, freeing his sword from the twisted metal of the thing’s shoulder, then punched through with the point of his greatsword into the thing’s breastplate. The wide, heavy blade sank into the space where the dark knight’s heart should have been, and the armor twitched in response, then fell still.

Regdar withdrew his blade with a tooth-rattling shriek of steel on steel and stood ready for several heartbeats until he was satisfied that the thing wasn’t going to get back up.

“Drahir,” Regdar called back over his shoulder, “take its sword.”

Vargussel was beginning to get nervous. The intruders had dealt with the dread guard too easily. He’d hoped it would kill at least one of the watchmen but Regdar hadn’t even given them a chance to fight. The young mage had wasted a spell on it, at least, and Vargussel could take that as a minor victory, but overall the construct that had cost him forty thousand gold Merchants had hardly even frightened them.

“Think you killed it, Lord Constable,” Vargussel hoped aloud. “Think that’s what came for you in your bedchamber.”