Dark Vengeance (27 page)

Then he smiled, and added, “I do not anticipate this thinking—which is
my
budge-not-from stance—to be eagerly accepted, but in the end, accepted it must be.”

“Or—?” the Holyflame Alaedra snapped, her voice trembling with rage.

“Talonnorn will leave this temple behind,” Jalandral said quietly, “and its Consecrated can dwell within these walls enforcing Olone's holy will upon each other, but not upon Talonnorn
outside
these walls.”

“What you propose is blasphemy,” the priestess said flatly. “You show a glib ease in confusing ‘I want' with ‘the High Lord needs' or with ‘Talonnorn demands, and will inevitably have.'
You seem to think Olone is a fiction that we Consecrated invented, and now twist into justification for personal whims and a desire to dominate or rule. You forget that Olone is
real,
and speaks to us directly, and we are her slaves when she demands it. Her
willing
slaves. We serve her, and feel glory in doing so; we will not serve you. Were I you, I would go directly to the altar of this temple, abase myself, and beg Olone's forgiveness and holy guidance.”

“Guidance provided—with many conditions attached—by a helpful priestess who just happens to be standing behind that altar, yes?” Jalandral asked mockingly. “I'm sorry, Alaedra, but such clumsy tricks just don't work anymore. The crones' club can still meet to spit their spite and gossip, but Talonnorn is going to be ruled by someone else now. And if Olone doesn't like that . . . well, as the old song has it: I spit in the face of Olone.”

“Blasphemer!” the Holyflame cried, shaking and pale with rage. “To speak such words here, in this holy place! You
dare
—?”

Jalandral turned the Evendoom ring on his finger, to surround himself with yet another shielding—the oldest, deepest, and most powerful shielding than any he'd seen before first donning the ring. “Let's see her try to take control of
that,
” he murmured, not caring if she heard.

Then he looked up at Holyflame Alaedra, who had flung wide her hands to begin a spell and was glaring at him with eyes burning like flame, and told her smilingly, “You're about to be surprised at just what I dare to do, in this holy place.”

From behind him there arose sudden deep, rolling thunder that ended in a sharp, ear-bludgeoning
crash
.

The draperies there bulged out, as the top of a riven door thrust against—and then through—them. From out of that ruin came running Nifl rampants with swords and heavy goads and axes in their hands, wearing motley armor and enthusiastic grins.

Bright, fresh blood was dripping from many of the weapons.

Consecrated blood.

They shouted in glee as they flooded into the chamber, and
swept past Jalandral—who politely stood aside, indicating the priestess with a flourish—to bear down on Holyflame Alaedra.

“Endlessly arguing over irrelevancies is so, well, boring,” Jalandral drawled, watching the priestess disappear elsewhere, in the shrinking heart of a frantically generated spell-rift that hurled his fastest wildblades in all directions. The Nifl who were only a running stride or two slower sprang forward and buried their swords in the brief roiling magic of her departure, but by then they were literally thrusting war-steel through empty air.

They consoled themselves by slashing aside draperies in all directions, revealing walls of white stone and doors in plenty. Doors that were flung open before they could reach them, for furious priestesses to hurl spells through—ere the doors were slammed again.

Those spells became bursts of bright flame, explosions that hurled wildblade arms and legs in all directions, axes and broken swords clanging and shrieking off walls, the floor, and the ceiling. Jalandral winced, ducked, and hastened for the door his wildblades had forced open. The severed heads of some of them bounced and rolled beside him.

To the sound of his own hissed curses, he raced out of that chamber of death, running alone.

He hadn't expected the slaughter to be
quite
this swift and efficient. Half of his force was dead behind him, and there was no sign of the other half. Had they fallen, at the gates? Surely a few upper-priestesses could be harvested before he entirely ran out of wild-blades. After all, they—the best he could hire, out of the Araed—had obviously made swift work of butchering the guard-priestesses at the temple gates . . .

The long, straight passage was empty.

Jalandral sprinted down it in undignified haste, seeking to quit the Holy Altar of Olone before anything worse happened. He'd hoped to slay every Consecrated he could reach, until those left were too few and too cowed to do anything but obey him, once he apologized to Olone before her altar and said nice things to them
thereafter. Thus far, however, he'd met with no one in the temple higher-ranking than the Holyflame, and his little trap seemed, in the end, to have been more dramatic than effective.

Before he could reach the end of the passage, it filled with the last of his wildblades, waving their swords and looking excited—and then astonished at the sight of the High Lord of Talonnorn running toward them like a frightened child.

“
There
you are!” Jalandral cried, skidding to a halt and forcing the widest smile he could onto his face. “Come! There is much taming of Consecrated still to be done!” He beckoned them, and then started back along the passage, striding steadily this time rather than running—and hoping something would arise to distract them all before they all reached the conclave-chamber and found their cooked, dismembered fellows strewn around a dead end walled in by all those locked metal doors.

Doors that had murderous priestesses with ready spells waiting and listening behind them.

The furious Consecrated obliged, flinging open a side door in the passage and shouting, “
Blasphemers!
You spit in the face of Olone!” before they thrust their long-fingered hands out into the passage and sent crackling lightnings racing from every fingertip, in a leaping, eye-searing bright web of snarling death.

Jalandral watched all the rest of his wildblades—every last spasming, shrieking, helplessly dying one of them—cooked where they stood, lurching and convulsing as plumes of smoke billowed from their mouths and the dark, staring pits where their eyes had sizzled, popped, and run down their faces. They toppled, swords clanging, and . . . he was truly alone.

Being well ahead of his wildblades, and being cloaked in the Evendoom shields, had saved him from that particular doom.

Yet doors were opening all around him now, up and down the passage and all around the blood-spattered conclave-chamber, and grim-faced priestesses were stepping through them.

To stand just in front of the still-open doors, burning eyes all fixed on Jalandral.

Who had swiftly darted to a place in the passage where he could put his back to the wall, and now stood there uncertainly, fear rising in him as he held up hands that were starting to tremble, and stared at the rings he wore, wondering what best to unleash next.

Or whether he'd have fingers at all, a breath or two from now . . .

“Jalandral Evendoom,” a familiar voice said coldly, from a nearby door down the passage, between him and the distant temple gates. With a sigh he didn't quite manage to conceal, the High Lord of Talonnorn turned to face Holyflame Alaedra, and awaited her next words silently, putting a slight smile on his face as he gently turned another of his rings.

The tingling of its awakening magic was racing along his limbs as the Holyflame pronounced doom on him.

“Jalandral Evendoom, you are a murderer and a tyrant to your people, perhaps also among your kin, and you are a blasphemer who brings death and unholy defiance to the Altar of Olone. Heretic are you, and you shall perish on the very altar of the Goddess. Olone demands nothing less.”

With a jauntiness he was very far from feeling, Jalandral widened his smile, looked around at all of the priestesses, and said pleasantly, “Honored Consecrated, I am flattered by your attentions—but I fear I must decline. As Olone will undoubtedly tell you when you begin to ask her the
right
questions, the needs of Talonnorn must come before anyone's petty revenges.”

Pushing himself away from the wall, he started to stroll down the passage. Knowing as he did so that every last priestess around him—twoscore and ten, at least—were now swiftly working spells intended to accomplish his destruction.

Smiling tightly as he strode right past the first priestess, close enough that she could have touched him if she'd stretched out her arms fully instead of using them to shape sigils in the air as she hissed out an incantation and glared at him, Jalandral turned the second ring.

It worked instantly; he felt the intense chill along his spine as its rift opened, dark and bobbing and vaguely man-shaped. Ready to drink in every rending magic hurled at him from behind. As he strode on, it moved with him. Which meant, he hoped, all of the shieldings now moving with him would only have to face the spells of the score or so Consecrated in front of him.

Who promptly vanished as the world in front of him exploded in silent white flame, crashing again and again against his shields as spell after spell struck, failed, and slid away—and the next spell came crashing through it to shatter itself against his shields and slide away in its turn.

Crash, crash, crash. Blindly, he staggered on, hoping none of the priestesses had any enspelled knives that they could simply plunge through the shields and into his ribs as he lurched past them. Perhaps it would be wiser to stop, and wait for his vision to return and their spells to be exhausted, and—

His outermost shield, the rock-hard Evendoom shield, flickered and then was gone.

Leaving him barely time to frantically awaken his second-last ring, and no time to curse at all.

 

“Behold your slayer,” the Talonar lord snarled into the astonished Ouvahlan's face. “I am Lord Erlingar Evendoom of Talonnorn, and you are—no more!”

He jerked his deeply buried sword back out of the dying warblade, using his other hand to thrust the body back and away from him as it fountained blood, and turned to see how Faunhorn was faring in the battle. He was in time to see the most magnificent Talonar warrior he'd ever seen calmly slaying his way across the cavern that formed the heart of Glowstone, leaving most of the Ouvahlan garrison dead in his wake. Smooth and swift, Faunhorn ducked and thrust and spun, dancing his way through accomplished warriors Erlingar would have been hard-pressed to fell. Two, three; just like that.

Even as Lord Evendoom watched, another three fell, almost too fast to see the thrusts that slew them. There hadn't been much more than a dozen Ouvahlans to begin with; the rest, he feared, had already departed for Talonnorn.

Which meant . . . yes, Glowstone was now theirs. Or what little was left of it.

Erlingar stared around the ravaged trade-moot. Blood, corpses, fallen weapons, and a fire that the Ouvahlans had been feeding with the splintered remnants of old carry-chests and market stalls.

“Our new home,” he announced glumly, sketching a parody of a courtly “look ye” gesture. His pleasure-shes, Kryree and Varaeme, planted their swords and bowed to him, grinning—and so did an Evendoom warblade or two.

There were chuckles among the House warriors, and the stretchings and arm-rubbings and wearily relieved chatter that erupts in the wake of all swift victories. Someone inspected a sword cut and groaned, someone else held up some skins of wine with a crow of triumph, and—sudden silence fell.

There were Nifl in the deep shadows of the most distant reaches of the cavern, advancing slowly out of the tunnels and other caverns, beyond. Ravagers, with swords in their hands.

The Evendoom warblades caught up their swords and formed a ring around Lord Evendoom and his two shes, facing outward. Faunhorn broke off his swift inspection of Ouvahlan corpses to heft his sword and stride to confront the nearest Ravager.

And that foremost Nifl wanderer went to his knees, reversed the sword in his hand, and held it out to Faunhorn.

“All hail the new Lord of Glowstone!” he called loudly, and Ravagers echoed those words, all around the cavern.

More and more Ravagers were emerging now, a few of them kicking and spitting on dead Ouvahlans.

Faunhorn took the Ravager's sword and handed it gravely back to him. Then he turned to catch Erlingar's eye, to be sure he saw no displeasure there at the title the Ravager had given Faunhorn.

He and Erlingar exchanged disbelieving grins—and then Faunhorn peered sharply to one side, and started to frown.

Lord Evendoom looked, too, and beheld two Ravagers bending over an Ouvahlan body, busy with rope.

“What're you doing?” Faunhorn called.

“Readying this meat for a cook-spit, Lord,” one of them replied hesitantly, holding up one end of a long, rusty bar of metal.

The looks Faunhorn and Erlingar exchanged this time were more aghast than triumphant.

 

Jalandral was heartily glad the vaults of the Houses he'd humbled had yielded so many powerful rings; right now, they were keeping him alive!

His just-awakened ring had come from his own family caches, if he remembered rightly; right now, it had opened a wide rift that was filling the passage in front of him, and devouring the spells of the Consecrated as fast as they could arrive. Leaving him to blink swimming eyes and start to be able to see things again—as the ring-rift suddenly trembled, shuddered, almost forced him to the floor, and then did what it was supposed to do.

It spat out something dark and angry and much too big for the passage, that hissed in pain and anger as its emerging wings slammed against the walls and ceiling, splintered in bony ruin in confines just too small for it, and then erupted in shrieking pain down the passage as it frantically tried to lurch and scrabble its way out, tumbling priestesses broken or crushed with it.