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Authors: Ed Greenwood

BOOK: Dark Warrior Rising
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The elder priestess turned away. “Now get up off your knees and get over here, right by the altar. If you've driven her mad, I'll be needing your mind to put her into, while I go in and try to mend the damage.”
“
My
mind? What will that do to me?”
The Revered Mother's gaze was dark and direct. “Well, now. That's something you'll just have to wait a few moments to learn, isn't it?”
Lord Evendoom Loses His Temper
To Olone I pray on bended knee
That never again shall these eyes see
Wrath so deep, deadly and storm-mighty
As Lord Evendoom's latest fell frenzy.
—from the old Talonar ballad,
“Lord Evendoom's Revenge”
O
rivon, if you don't mind my asking,” Taerune murmured, after they'd walked briskly for what seemed a very long time in deep darkness, “when did you ever have the chance to learn our hidden ways?”
“At about the same time as you were … losing your arm,” the fire-fist replied shortly. “I—sorry. I know no gentle way to say that.”
They went on together in silence for a few strides before Taerune said, very quietly, “There
is
no gentle way to say that.”
Silence fell between them again, and they walked on in it for a much longer time before Taerune asked, “This is the Hidden Gate, isn't it?”
“So a spellrobe told me—and a dying Maulstryke, too. They should both be just ahead of us, now, so: slow and quiet, Lady Evendoom.”
“Taera,” she murmured. “Call me Taera.”
“
Quiet,
Lady Taera,” he growled, giving her flank a gentle tap-tap with the coiled lash. She kept silent, and when he muttered, “Stay here,” double-tapped his thigh with her hand, by way of reply.
Orivon drew the largest of the Nifl blades they'd salvaged—Faunhorn had borne a larger, grander one, a spellblade, but he'd left it
untouched, as Taerune had pleaded—and took his trusty hammer into his other hand. Then he skulked forward, in a slow and careful crouch.
The tunnel—huddled bodies and all—was just as it had been when he'd last seen it. He stood just inside the door, peering and listening, for a long time, but saw nothing—and heard nothing more than two long, distant horn blasts, calling the raudren home. At last he risked going a little farther, to where he could be seen, but also see all around the tunnel mouth.
Nothing but the sprawled, silent bodies. Orivon listened to nothing for a long time before he turned and went back to his longtime tormentor.
Taerune was sitting in the tunnel, staring at the stump where her arm had been. She looked up quickly at his approach, hand going to the sword she'd laid on the tunnel floor—but then relaxed, her hand going back to cupping her other elbow.
“The way is clear,” Orivon told her. “I want you to stay close beside me; I'm going to one of the clefts to recover some blades and tools I brought from the Rift. I'll bundle them in this spare cloak, and tie them into a bundle with the lashes.”
Taerune nodded.
“You know where we're coming out, right?”
She nodded again.
“Good. So from the clefts, where do we head, to get out into the Dark?”
She shrugged. “Dozens of tunnels will take us there. Some are usually guarded, but now—who knows? When we're in the cleft, I'll point them out to you. You choose.”
Orivon nodded, and they went forward together—walking slowly, Taerune a little ahead to give both of them room to swing swords freely. She paused by the open door and looked back in a silent questioning, and Orivon nodded and came up close behind her. If the Nifl noticed the point of his sword was almost touching her back, just where it met her behind, she gave no sign of doing so.
They came out into the great cavern that held Talonnorn, darting glances this way and that, but though the half-ruined Eventowers loomed dark behind them and they saw a distant darkwings with a rider on its back flapping across the huge cave, this little corner of Talonnorn seemed deserted.
Thankfully Orivon plunged into the cleft, clawed aside the stones he'd so carefully arranged, and bundled the swords and tools into the
spare cloak. “Watch the entrance, behind me,” he growled, busily knotting lashes.
“Orivon,”
Taerune replied, warningly, and he spun around.
The local landscape was deserted no longer. Standing in the entrance to the cleft were a dozen warblades: a spellrobe; a Nifl-she wearing robes that bared her charms to every eye, in a lusty display that contrasted oddly with her coldly haughty expression; and an older Nifl rampant clad in black, who wore a cruel smile on his handsome face.
“Hello, little Nameless bitch,” he drawled. “My, you're even lovelier than when you were Taerune Evendoom. It would have been frowned upon to force myself upon my own niece, but now … I'm going to
enjoy
this.”
“
Are
you, Uncle Valarn?” Taerune asked, her question a biting challenge.
He laughed and drew his sword with a flourish; it kindled instantly into a ruby-red glow. Taerune touched her Orb and hissed something—and lightnings were suddenly leaping among the warblades like dancing snakes.
They avoided Valarn, the spellrobe, and the priestess of Olone altogether, and seemed to do no harm to the grinning, advancing warblades.
Valarn laughed again. “You're
that
much a fool, Taerune? To think we go into battle unprotected against lesser magics? Could it be that you fight unprotected? Oh, yes, of
course
you do; how forgetful of me! A pity you can't forget that missing arm for an instant, isn't it?”
Sword and hammer in hand, Orivon stepped past Taerune, curling his lip and saying to her contemptuously with a wave of his hammer in Valarn's direction, “
This
is a pureblood House Nifl?”
Valarn gave him a momentary—and withering—glance, and drawled one dismissive word: “Human.”
Orivon replied, his voice an exact mimicry of Valarn's tone: “Niflghar.”
Valarn stiffened and spat, “Slave!”
Orivon shrugged. “Slave-keeper!”
The warblades were only three strides away from Orivon now. “I weary of this,” Valarn said dismissively. “Kill him. Disarm the former Lady Taerune, and prepare her for me—across that rock will do.”
Then the leaping lightnings playing harmlessly around the Talonar changed—and warblades stiffened and screamed as their own swords and armor twisted and grew spikes in all directions, butchering them where
they stood. The spellrobe and priestess shrieked as their metal rings and belt buckles did the same, severing most of their fingers and stabbing through their bellies. Even Valarn swore and shook a hand that shed fingers—and their rings, turned into vicious stars of bladed metal—as he did so.
“No, of
course
I don't think you go into battle unprotected against lesser magics, Uncle,” Taerune said sweetly, watching everyone but Valarn die. “However, yes, I
do
know you're a fool. I have since I was old enough to mewl, as you like to put it.”
Orivon stalked forward, and Valarn snarled and turned to flee. Orivon threw his sword—but it struck something unseen just before it would have bitten into the back of the Nifl's knee, and was hurled aside in a storm of sparks.
“His spellblade protects him,” Taerune murmured. “Orivon, leave him to me. Please.”
Orivon took one look at her face and stepped aside.
“Thank you, my Dark Warrior,” she murmured, striding past him. She didn't seem to see him stiffen and give her a dark look; her hand was at her throat, fingers on the Orb.
It flashed once, and Valarn's quickening flight suddenly stopped. He was hurrying just as much, but going nowhere, walking—and then trotting—in place.
Then he looked back at her, scowled, and slashed all around himself with his glowing sword—and stumbled forward again, almost falling.
By then, Taerune was almost upon him, striding swiftly, no sword in her hand—the hand that was busy at the buckles of her leathers. “Why, Uncle,” she said, “don't you
want
me?”
When he whirled around with a snarl, she pulled open the front of her leathers.
“Well?” she asked, challengingly. “Don't you?”
Taerune swept leather back off one shoulder, baring it, then the other, in a long, steady tug that bared her down to the waist. Her fingers dipped lower as she tossed her head, long hair swirling. “Uncle?”
Valarn snarled,
“Bitch!”
and swung his spellblade viciously. Orivon launched himself forward in sudden horror, sprinting and shouting—there was
no way
the he-Nifl could miss slicing her open!
Thorar, she's chosen
this
way out!
“
Nooo!
Taera,
no
!”
Spellblade and Orb flashed in unison, the sword raced through the
space where Taerune's arm was missing and plunged into her, she threw back her head and screamed, the sword sliced on through, she turned as metallic all over as the blade was, the sword came out the other side of her and swept on, trailing silvery blood—and Taerune lunged forward, embraced Valarn, and bit his mouth, hard.
Valarn's arms flew up and started to flail, his spellblade whirling away to bounce and singingly clang its way to a skirling rest, on tumbled stones.
He went silvery, too, and made a sort of sobbing sound in Taerune's arms.
And then she arched over backward and threw herself away, kicking off from him as she went, metallic no longer. Orivon had just time to fling away sword and hammer and catch her in his hands, in an awkward collison that took them both to the stones, bouncing and winded.
Valarn Evendoom staggered back, agonized face raised to the unseen cavern ceiling above, and started to
really
scream. Smoke curled up from him as the metal melted into him, cooking him alive.
And then, cooking him dead.
Orivon watched him blacken, fall, and die, and swallowed down sudden nausea.
Then he realized that Taerune was lying face up on his stomach, in his arms, as unmarked as if that sword had never sliced through her. And he realized something more: just which smooth parts of her he had hold of—and snatched his hands away as if he'd been burned.
Taerune twisted her head around and grinned up at him, making no move to rebuckle anything. “That reminds me: We haven't brought along any food.”
After a long, breathless moment of staring at her in astonishment, Orivon burst into shouts of laughter.
 
 
“Firstblood of the House, Secondblood of the House,” the steward intoned formally, “I present to you Lord Erlingar Evendoom.” He bowed deeply and withdrew, sealing the door. It caught cold and silent fire in his wake, to signify he'd activated the wards that bound the chamber into absolute privacy.
“Yes, Father?” Jalandral drawled. “Is all this grandeur truly necessary? Or is this something
else
Maharla's enjoying shoving down your throat?”
“Be still,” Lord Evendoom snapped, in a coldly, venomously furious voice that drove Ravandarr into cowering openly and made even Jalandral flinch. “Know that I am beside myself with rage. Over the losses we have suffered, and even more because of, yes, our Eldest and her aims and decrees. I would tell the both of you what I truly think of you, and spend far longer bellowing to the very spires of our castle what I think of
her
—but I lack the time for such trifles.”
He started to pace, his grand cloak billowing out behind him, the great voice that dominated any chamber and tamed assemblies regaining its dire thunder. “The Eventowers can be rebuilt, and I can raise flesh-rending magical fields to defend the breaches in its walls and cloak it against flying attackers until that time. However, I find myself in personal peril. To avoid being executed for allowing the honor of our House to be so stained, I must dramatically avenge all slights to that honor—and that means eliminating my maimed, mad, and disloyal daughter.”
“Taerune?”
Ravandarr burst out, too incredulous to keep silent.
“Taerune,” Lord Evendoom confirmed gravely, “though the Eldest has now cast her out and made her Nameless. She alone did murder in our innermost chambers, spilling the blood of kin.”
“What?” Jalandral raised an elegant, disbelieving eyebrow. “Taera? What lie of Maharla is this?”
“No lie,” their father thundered, “and you risk your own necks—even here, with the wards up—for saying so. Ardranthra, Nelvune, and Qellarla lie dead on the altars of Olone right now, bound for the crypt; the rite is called for feasting-time. Ravandarr, you shall attend with me, in full mourning garb.”
“Taerune killed … ?” Ravandarr said haltingly, staring at his father in horrified disbelief. Lord Evendoom, glaring hard at his Firstblood, never even glanced at his younger son.
Jalandral sighed theatrically. “Which means I must be attending to some errand or other, probably involving the bloodthirsty, vengeful, and very public slaying of dear Nameless Taera, yes?”

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