Michael Williams - Weasel's Luck

He turned to me, his eyes glowing.

“And I am never mistaken. For after your verbal gymnastics, your long nights with poetry and history and Solamnic lore, it is I who broke the code of the prophecy, not Bayard, who nursed it for a lifetime, nor Sir Robert, who pondered it like his father did and his father before him.

“I like to think that a little bit of . . . the bardic soul resides within me,” he mused, and leaned back on his throne exultantly.

“If it does, Uncle Benedict, I’d wager it is lonely,” Enid retorted.

“Silence, child,” Benedict commanded softly, almost soothingly. “For your . . . bridal time is nigh.”

From the folds of his robe he drew a dagger. It shimmered in the off-yellow light of the hall as he placed it delicately on the arm of his throne. Just as he did, the door to the Great Hall shivered and burst from its hinges. Bayard and Sir Robert stood in the doorway, swords drawn. Sir Robert’s left hand was tangled in Alfric’s hair, which he had used as a rein to guide my reluctant brother to the spot. Alfric puffed and whimpered.

“Welcome,” the Scorpion intoned ominously. “I have awaited you, Bayard Brightblade. And you . . . Sir Robert. There is time—not much time, but time enough—to take up our quarrel of four centuries. But first, let us cover a wound more freshly opened, a factional dispute of scarcely thirty years back.”

He held out his hands, palms up, and raised them slowly above his head. Its chain entwined in the fingers of his left hand, the pendulum dangled and glittered.

“Let my friends resume their quarrel. . . where your high-and-mighty Order fancies it has put all quarrel to rest,” he pronounced casually. “Let ‘generations from the grass arise and lay the curse aside.’”

Beneath me the scorpions began to scatter, the floor of the hall to shake and crack. When the attention of its master turned elsewhere, my enemy from above resumed his scrambling descent.

“Stop right there!” I threatened, trying to sound menacing, then clamping my mouth shut in the realization that the creature might be following the sound of my voice. I reached into the mist for my belt and the knife that hung . . .

Did not hang.

I remembered the windowsill through which I had entered this castle, the glitter of iron in the light of the red moon. My dagger was conveniently three corridors away, forgotten on a windowsill beyond my reach. In vain I fumbled through my pockets for anything sharp or heavy. At last my desperate hand rested on something rough, thick, and leathery.

“The gloves!” I hissed, and the scorpion creeped down the curtain, now within a foot of my one clinging hand.

I slipped on a glove, using one hand and my mouth in a movement that, given other circumstances, I’d have dismissed as acrobatic if not downright impossible. Agility had always been my strong suit, and the suit was stretched to its limit of strength there at the end of the Scorpion’s curtains. The merchant who had sold them to me had boasted of the gloves’ sturdiness, that indeed they could “stand up to a knife if they were called to do so, young sir.”

As the scorpion tested the fabric not six inches from my hand, its jointed leg strumming the rough embroidery, I reached forward and grabbed the creature with my gloved hand, gripping it as hard as I could. I heard the sound of its skeleton crackle and felt something breaking in the padded palm of my hand. The lethal tail wound its way out of my grip from between my fingers, arched and plunged harmlessly time and again into the thick, resilient leather.

For once, a merchant had not lied.

I hurled the remnants of the creature from me and watched them fall in fragments to the floor of the hall. Which was now erupting around my friends.

Through the mist and the rocks and the floor, a battalion was rising, breaking through stone and tile. Some wore minotaur helmets, the sign of the Nerakan soldier then and now. All were armed with the feared scimitars and the half-moon shield of the Western Corps, the branch of the army that had fallen to Enric, Stormhold—and to my father—thirty years back at the Battle of Chaktamir.

As the Scorpion watched calmly from his seat in the hall, his soldiers climbed out of the ground and onto their feet, trudging toward Bayard and Robert and Alfric. Moss and earth and ordure dripped from their hair, and the ivory of the bones lay bare through the yellowed, mottled flesh. The smell was that of a slaughterhouse long abandoned.

Alfric wrenched away from Sir Robert, leaving a handful of red hair behind him, and sprang out the door in an instant, only to come back shamefacedly when other noises arose from the hall—the smothered, almost bleating battle-cry of more undead soldiers.

I started my ascent of the curtain, checked for purchase on the balcony, and found a solid spot after an endless minute of pawing the air with my foot. But from that height I was powerless to help as the numbers grew against us.

Bayard and Sir Robert stood back to back so that between the two of them, they could see the entire hall and the outlying corridor. Alfric tried vainly to sandwich himself between them, but was elbowed away with the warning from Sir Robert, “Stand your own ground, boy! We need even the sorriest of swords at this pass!”

Alfric whimpered and drew his sword. Steadily the Nerakan soldiers closed in on my companions. Meanwhile, the Scorpion rose from his throne, walked to Enid’s chair, and very calmly began to untie her wrists from the armrests. Though she was obviously unnerved by the creatures the Scorpion had called from out of the ground, she was not about to swoon or scream. Instead, she fetched a blow to her captor’s chest that sent him staggering backward, and only a viper-quick grab at the girl kept her from escaping.

“Come with me,” the Scorpion said, as he dragged the struggling Enid back toward his pedestal, where the dagger sat waiting on the arm of his throne. A murmuring sea of black scorpions converged upon them, parting to form a pathway from one chair to the other.

“Up on the pedestal, my dear,” he urged.

It was then—too late, I feared, but nonetheless swiftly—that Bayard Brightblade began to cut his own path through the men of Neraka. Often urgency shackles the hand of the swordsman, but it brought Bayard to life, to a blinding swiftness. Five Nerakans fell to his sword in an instant, and it was all that Sir Robert could do to follow in the wake of the younger Knight. Alfric in turn followed Sir Robert, his face blanched, his own blade shaking in his extended hand.

All outcry, all the moans and bellows ceased. The hall was silent except for the shuffling of long-dead feet, the skittering of scorpions, and the sound of Bayard’s sword striking continually, wetly home. It was as though the Nerakans were lining up for execution. But halfway through the undead soldiers, Bayard’s path slowed, as bodies heaped upon and against bodies, as the Nerakans began to mill in front of him, as they fell back into one another and were buoyed and carried by those who approached the battle from behind them. They shrank back from him as though even having passed through death, they were still daunted by this harrowing, bright champion in front of them.

Walled off from Bayard by his legion of moving, decaying flesh, the Scorpion raised his knife.

“Wait!” I shouted, and my voice piped embarrassingly thin and shrill in the large hall. Bayard’s sword stilled, and Sir Robert stood stiffly behind him, his hand stretched toward the Scorpion in silent anguish. The Nerakan soldiers lowered their weapons and stared stupidly, lifelessly at their leader standing on the platform. For a moment the Scorpion paused. The red light of his eyes flickered as he glanced up to me. I began once again to burrow in words, to bargain for time, hoping devoutly that Bayard would think of something violent and heroic before I ran out of breath and argument.