Nancy Berberick - Stormblade

Saved for my crowning ceremonies, he thought, where I will thank them for bringing me the Kingsword, then cut their hearts out for seeking to keep it from me. To the dragon he said nothing, only shrugged. Darknight raised its head, its great fangs dripping, its breath stinking of its recent kills. “Lord?”

Realgar held himself perfectly still, though his skin crawled to have the dragon’s fangs so near his neck. “You guard them at my command. It should be reason enough.”

The dragon contented itself with imagining how pleased Verminaard would be to hang the sword on the wall of Pax Tharkas’s throne room above the skull of this arrogant lordling.

Realgar smelled victory the way a wolf smells prey. It was near and he only had to leap to catch it. His assassins stalked the other thanes, lesser wolves but as hungry. Darknight curled its tail tightly around its flanks and stretched its lipless mouth in silent laughter.

These stalkers, too, would be denied their prey until Realgar gave the word to feast. That word would not be given until Hornfel was dead. The dragon watched as Realgar, his captives forgotten, held the sword up to the flame again, watched his eyes track the light down the edges of the blade. Crimson light and glittering, it splashed like the shadows of blood across the dwarf’s hands.

The Hylar would die soon, fallen to Realgar’s dark schemes. Aye, coward, the dragon sneered, you kill your great enemy in the dark and the shadows, secretly with a sword’s blade through the back. Do you really think that the deaths of lesser folk, achieved in the light and before the eyes of whoever remains in this wretched kingdom, will prove your courage?

Realgar sheathed the sword with slow, almost ceremonial motions. He turned back to the dragon, a strange, knowing smile on his lips. “You hear my thoughts, do you, Sevristh?”

Darknight stretched its wings with preening grace.

“Aye, you hear them and that’s good. Keep listening. I’ll need you to fly once more before this is done, and it will likely be that I can’t call you any other way.”

Wings settling tightly over its sleek ebony flanks, the dragon snaked its tongue, flickering, around the edges of its fangs. “Oh, aye, Lord. I am, as always, yours to command.” Darknight watched him leave, listened to the confident voice of his thoughts, and found not even the smallest trace of doubt in his plans or in the dragon’s intentions. He was thinking about a high kingship and the dark road leading to his goal.

Well and good, Darknight thought, using his own phrase. It ran the edges of its claws scraping along the stone floor and nuzzled the half-eaten carcass of the dwarven guard and imagined that the bones it snapped between its powerful jaws were Realgar’s.

The air of the cavern that Hauk had come to think of as his sanctuary was charged with mad Isarn’s excitement. Stammering and gulping, the swordcrafter tried desperately to speak. The dark hair on the back of Hauk’s arms lifted as it would in the charge of an approaching thunderstorm. A chill of loathing crawled up his spine. Isarn’s efforts to control his excitement made his face writhe and contort so that he could barely force an intelligible word past his lips.

Hauk got his legs under him and sat, putting his back against the stone wall of the cave that was their sanctuary. “Easy and slow,” he whispered.

“Tell me again.”

“The lad. The elfmaid. The lad.”

Hauk didn’t know how to answer. He didn’t know what Isarn was trying to tell him. Yet, for all the panic he saw in the dwarf’s eyes, he thought the swordcrafter was more clear-minded than he’d been in days.

“Tell me,” he said again. For the sake of uncovering Isarn’s information, Hauk made his own voice as gentle as he could, trying not to communicate his own urgency. He didn’t know how long it would be—a matter of moments or an hour—that Isarn would remain sane enough to talk.

The pattern of the dwarf’s lucid moments had gradually changed over the time they’d been in hiding. The light in his eyes was sometimes sharp and focused for greater lengths of time, but at less frequent intervals. When he was mad, he trod a frantic, pacing path around the cavern. Then he reminded Hauk of a sparrow caught in a closed barn, fluttering to find escape, battering himself against the walls. Nothing could calm him but some inner word from himself.

When he was sane, as he seemed to be now, his eyes were as quiet as shady pools under a stream’s banks. His hands were at rest, his pacing not even a thing he remembered. Then, he would sit beside Hauk, speaking in low tones as one would to a friend who had been long ill but looks now to recovery.

His solicitous care did not make Hauk want any less to kill him. The ranger was not thinking of killing now, though he could and did, still long for it.

Isarn drew a long, steady breath. He leaned forward, his eyes eager, and Hauk feared that the eagerness would precipitate another one of the dwarfs frantic pacing fits of insanity. “Stormblade has come home!”

Hauk sat perfectly still and almost didn’t breathe.

“Listen,” Isarn whispered, “listen to me. The masterblade is here. The Kingsword is back in the heart of the world where it was born!”

Hauk still didn’t move.

“Do you hear me?” Isarn’s hands worked in quick, jerky motions, scrubbing and scrubbing. The stillness of the pool was about to be shattered.

“I hear you,” the ranger whispered.

Ranger-girl, he thought, little barmaid! He’s found you! Ah, gods, no! He’s found you!

“Aye, back where it belongs, back with me, who gave it heart and life. Back with me for the thane. Aye, the thane, the king who will be. Returned with the lad.”

His heart filled with fear, Hauk asked a quick question. “What lad?”

“The boy, the boy I trained. The boy. Young Stanach.”

“An apprentice?”

“Aye, aye, the lad. And a girl, dressed as an elf and tall as one. But no elf she! No. A fire-haired girl with jade eyes.”

Isarn screamed as Hauk grabbed his wrist. A fire-haired girl with jade eyes had carried Stormblade to Thorbardin! His ranger-girl, his barmaid!

“Tell me about the girl! Tell me!”

The dwarf pulled back, but a rabbit might as well have tried to pull back from a wolf’s jaws. Squirming, he gasped something, a panting that Hauk didn’t understand.

“Tell me!”

“Realgar,” he cried. Fear shot through Hauk like the lightning’s strike. He ground the bones of the dwarf’s thin wrist in his grasp. “Realgar has them! Realgar—has my sword and the lad and the elfmaid who is no elf maid!”

“Where?”

“In derro tunnels. In hiding.”

“Why?” Hauk snapped. “Tell my why!”

“I don’t—I don’t know.”

“Take me to them, old one, or I’ll snap your wrist like a twig.”

It was never much of a battle. There was that in his eyes which lead Hauk to think that Isarn’s surrender was planned. He understood suddenly that the old dwarf wanted him to retrieve his precious Stormblade. Anger, like fire, seared through Hauk. His ranger-girl, his barmaid had been taken. He didn’t stop to think why he thought of her as his now. Perhaps because she had, for such a long time, represented the only thing Realgar had not taken from him. It didn’t matter. He’d find Isarn’s Stormblade for the girl’s sake.

Stanach stared into empty darkness, listening to the rumble and gusting of the dragon’s breath. Like a small echo of the dragon’s breathing, he heard Kelida’s shuddering sigh. Unmoving, as she had been since they’d been brought to this place, the girl lay huddled beside him. His eyes on the dragon, Stanach moved his hand slowly to the side. He slipped his fingers around her wrist and tried to feel her life-beat. Slow and steady as it was, it did not ease Stanach’s fear. Realgar’s sleep spell was taking far too long to wear off.