Nancy Berberick - Stormblade

Stanach held her tightly as she wept. Over her shoulder, he saw his right arm, outlined in the red glow of his body’s warmth. His hand, bandaged in the torn strips of her cloak, lay heavy and nerveless against her back. Lifeless as it was, no light edged the place where his hand should have been.

“I’m sorry,” he whispered. “Kelida, I’m sorry.”

Kelida suddenly went stiff in his arms, then limp as though unable to bear the burden of some new grief. Her voice thick and ragged with silent weeping, she said, “I—I killed him.”

Stanach caught his breath, not certain he’d heard her correctly. He held her away, trying to see her face, her eyes, and saw nothing but a trembling red outline.

“Kelida, what are you saying?”

“I should have—I should have guarded the sword better.” Her hands, like the ghosts of red birds, covered her face. “No. I should have given it to you or Tyorl. If I’d kept it safe—if you could have brought it to your thane—” She drew a rough breath. “Oh, Stanach! If I hadn’t been such a fool about carrying it, about—about holding on to it, he’d still be alive!”

“No,” Stanach whispered. “No, Kelida, that’s not true. There’s nothing you could have done.”

“If I’d let you have the sword instead of pretending that—that because I had it, I had something of him. Oh, instead of pretending that he gave it to me because—because he cared. That he would remember me and maybe he would—”

“No!” he cried harshly.

The echo of that cry rebounded from the walls of the small cavern, thin protests. Claws scraped again on stone. Darknight rumbled deep in its chest. Yellow eyes gleamed from across the cavern. The beast didn’t move, yet Stanach was sure it was laughing.

He held Kelida’s arm with his left hand and let his feelingless right hand fall.

“Kelida, I’m sorry. Oh, gods, I am sorry! Hauk’s death—it was never a thing you could prevent.”

She swallowed hard and shook her head. “Yes, if I—”

“No,” he whispered, “no. Hauk is dead, aye, but you had nothing to do with it. Kelida, he was likely dead before we left Long Ridge.”

She drew away from him, slowly as though edging away from a suddenly drawn dagger. “But, you said …” Her voice dropped to a shuddering sigh as she groped for understanding. “No, Stanach. You said …”

“I lied. I needed the sword. I lied to you.”

She moaned softly.

Stanach leaned his head against the stone wall and closed his eyes. He didn’t say that he was sorry, though only Reorx knew that he had never in his life been sorrier for anything.

Aye, not even for the loss of the Kingsword. He couldn’t find the words for how he felt; he didn’t think they existed in any language. After a long time spent listening to the growling breath of the dragon and the stilling of Kelida’s sobs, Stanach felt her hand light on his right arm. She lifted his hand, wrapped in the rags of her cloak. Because he heard the faint whisper of her fingers passing over the bandage, he knew that she held his ruined hand.

Guyll fyr raced madly across the windswept Plains of Death. Long narrow fingers of flame charged ahead of the main body of the fire, blazing outriders bearing pennons brighter than the sun. Greedy for pillage, the fire raged through swamp and marsh, feeding on thin grasses and brittle, dry bracken.

Standing before the worktable in the Chamber of the Black Moon, Realgar watched the fire in the smooth, clear surface of the glass. A simple spell of seeing had called the vision to the glass, and like a man on a mountaintop, he watched the fire’s advance.

Well satisfied, he whispered a word as he passed his hand over the table. The scene shifted, becoming more focused and sharper. A marsh rat scuttled to ground beneath a shallow, reedy pool and died a length from its nest, its blood boiled in water suddenly heated. An emerald-headed duck caught in an airless pocket burst its lungs with a last effort to rise to flight and escape the flames.

A long-legged crane and a prowling silver fox fled the advance of a common enemy. Pitiless, the guyll fyr caught and killed them as it did every creature in its path. The once cold air above the Plains writhed under the heat of the fire’s passing. The wind, ever a lost and mad traveler across the Plains of Death, twisted the path of the flames.

To the mage, the fire appeared as a furious and deranged beast, rearing and bucking in explosive sheets of flame. The guyll fyr charged toward the foothills of the mountains, hissing over the marshes and roaring toward the fuller feast of a forest thick with sap-rich pines and panicked, fleeing wildlife.

Realgar turned away from the scenes of destruction. They wove a tapestry of lurid and violent death, but there was one thread more to be woven in order to make the picture complete. Realgar had that thread in his hands now.

Though no regular Guard of Watch had been set in ruined Northgate in many years, one had been now. The crumbled gate, useless since the ruinous battles of the Dwarfgate Wars, was unofficially sanctioned as a Theiwar holding. Realgar dropped to a seat behind the glass table and laughed. The watch was composed of Gneiss’s faithful Daewar. Faithful all, he thought. Or almost all. Anyone can be corrupted, even a Daewar guard.

One such was even now looking for Hornfel with the word that Gneiss wished to meet him on the Northgate wall. The treacherous guard would bring the message that the Daewar thane had seen the guyll fyr sweep down to set the Plains of Death ablaze. The message would rise in urgency as the false guard relayed Gneiss’s supposed anxiety about the danger to Thorbardin’s food supply.

Reluctant as Hornfel might be to enter even unsanctioned Theiwar territory, the Hylar knew that Northgate was the only place to track the fire’s progress. He’d be comfortable enough in the belief that he was going to meet Gneiss.

Only it was not Gneiss who would be waiting for Hornfel in Northgate. It would be Realgar. And Stormblade.

Realgar ran his palm along the scabbarded sword at his side.

“Aye,” he whispered, “you’ve searched long for the Kingsword, Hornfel, and you’ll find it in Northgate. You’ll see it at last and you will die on it!”

The hand of the goddess Takhisis, the Dark Queen, was extended to him. He need only reach to take it. The spark of revolution that would ignite tinder-dry Thorbardin would give life to the start of a derro reign. Realgar closed his eyes, slipped easily into the language of the mind, and called the black dragon.

Have you found the ranger?

Darknight had not. A thread of impatience drifted through the Theiwar’s mental speech. It doesn’t matter now. This will be over soon. We’ll find him then.

A thought, a command, and Realgar sent the black dragon flying for the mountaintops. Darknight would stand ready to back up his attack on Hornfel and then on Gneiss’s guards at both Northgate and Southgate. Gneiss paused in the center of the garden outside Court of Thanes. The air was thick with the scent of white dog rose and scarlet queen’s plume. He had no inclination to admire either and was uncomfortable with the gentle serenity suggested by the garden. Beyond the green boxwood borders, Thorbardin had a strange and brooding air. In that way that a city’s people have, the populace scented trouble. Though few could identify it, all seemed to be reacting to it with shortened tempers and anxious looks.

Gneiss turned to leave, taking the shortest path back to the street. When he walked past the small pond at the garden’s east border, he realized that the garden was not as empty as he’d thought it. The Outlander Tanis Half-Elven crouched at the water’s edge, idly pitching pebbles into the water.