Once A Hero (60 page)

The round tunnel led down through the ice at a fairly sharp angle, but cracks and ripples in the surface made climbing down not as difficult as I might have thought at first. Wearing the flashdrake scabbard over my heavy coat did hinder me somewhat, but the tunnel leveled out quickly enough. It pushed on through blue shadows for a good two hundred yards. Down here, where very little sunlight could penetrate, the walls glowed azure and made our vaporous breaths a light-blue fog.

Down inside the tunnel I felt no movement in the air, which eased the chill only a little. Where my breath plumed up from within the scarf, the vapor managed to freeze on the forelock that had escaped my woolen cap. I had to be careful when blinking my eyes lest they freeze shut as well. Inside my mittens my fingers felt numb, but I kept moving them to keep them limber. Feeling colder than a corpse in my feet, hands, and buttocks, I moved deeper into that blue hell.

I stopped just beyond where the tunnel widened into a huge ice cavern. Though rendered in ice, many of the decorations and much of the architecture came from Jammaq, Columns of ice had been sculpted into bones, and countless tortured faces stared back at me through glassy walls. What I took to be gravel crunched underfoot, but when I looked down, all I could see was the pale ivory of bone fragments.

My companions entered the chamber and had the wisdom to spread out on either side, with Gena and Berengar to my left and Stulklirn to my right. We all stared at the thing lurking in the center of the cavern bowl. It hunched down on a hillock knitted of bones and had bodies in various states of disrepair scattered about it. Unblemished by rot because of the cold, the bodies looked more like dolls that had been rough-used by children at play than once-living creatures.

The thing in the middle—Tacorzi seemed to suit it more than Takrakor—raised its half-fleshed head and gave me a diamond-studded smile. "I knew you would come, Neal." A skeletal hand clicked bony fingers against the hilt of the knife still borne in a harness on its chest. "I knew you had been consigned to the same limbo as had I. Now we will both be free."

It raised the skeletal left arm, and I saw both flesh and tattered muscles dangle like fringe from the limb. The bony hand probed the gaping wound, the ancient, splintered wound, in its chest. "You killed me as I killed you, Neal. Your Elven friends saved you even as my Mistress saved me. I have waited very long for this, very long, very long. . . ."

I studied the charnel house surroundings for a moment. "I think I had the better of the resting places."

"Utility is preferable to comfort." The skeletal creature stared at me as if trying to catalog the differences between us. "Here I nest next to the bosom of my goddess, still her servant despite her cruel judgment of me."

"Your people are gone, and your empire is not even a memory in the minds of Men. You should have given up long ago."

The monster continued to peer at me. "The memories of your despair and pain still please me."

I shivered, and not from the cold. "Why did you do that to me? Why did you rape my brain? Why not take the sword and be done with it?"

Tacorzi's jaw dropped and quivered in a ghoulish imitation of laughter. "Do you not know? Khiephnaft must be won in combat or freely given to another. Back then, I could not win it by force of arms, but now I would have no such problem."

As Tacorzi spoke, its lethargy fell away. It heaved itself up and came upright, but not on legs. From the point where its pelvis should have been, I saw only a skeletal body woven of pelvises and leg bones. The creature, its leathery flesh creaking as the body shifted, rose up, and I saw the hillock upon which it had rested was really an enormous skeletal simulacrum of a snake's body.

Worse yet, curving up and over its shoulders, bony tentacles wove back and forth akin to cobras swaying to a minstrel's flute tune. Four of the eight ended in animal skulls that snapped their jaws at us and flashed fangs. Two, a wolf and a polar bear, still maintained part of their pelts. The other two were bare of flesh, and I was certain one was that of a wolf. The other, by Stulklirn's snarled reaction, could have been from a Dreel.

The other four tentacles plunged down into the tangle of bodies lying around Tacorzi's coils. With a harsh snapping sound, they bored into holes in the small of the backs of some corpses. Bodies lurched to their feet. Shambling forward, the zombi quartet oriented on Berengar and Gena. The biting heads turned their attention to Stulklirn.

I shook my mittens free of my hands—the mittens dangled from cords tied to my wrists—and drew my sword. "Leave them, it's me you want and my dagger back that I want."

The half-dead thing shook its head. "You, I already know how to kill." He brought his hands up to his face, then slashed them down and away. "I have been a long time in improving the spell. You will die now."

Beginning as a burning spark, the spell he had once before used to destroy me shot out at me. I knew I had to move, had to escape it, but even as I thought about dodging to my right, the spell shifted to track me. As it closed the distance between us, it grew from a spark to a burning cross. I heard it sizzling through the air and actually began to feel cheated out of my second attempt at life.

Suddenly Stulklirn dove in front of me, and the spell hit him full force in the chest. The Dreel howled in pain and fur flashed into an acrid, cloying smoke. As he went down, curling in on himself, I leaped up over his rolling body and slashed the rapier through the tentacle with the bear's head. The skull flew free and shattered on the ground.

Gena gestured at the ragged corpse nearest her, and its threadbare clothes immediately ignited into flame. At once the humanoid body collapsed, and the tentacle reared back as if a viper coiling to strike. The body melted and spread out, a burning mass of putrid rot and old bones, while Tacorzi repeatedly jammed the burning end of the tentacle into the cavern floor to put the fire out.

The scent of burning flesh and Dreel fur assaulted me, bringing to the charnel cavern the scent it should have had from the beginning. Gena readied another spell and cast it at Tacorzi as Berengar sliced another zombi free of its bony lifeline. I beheaded the Dreel tentacle, but the two wolves got my hip and shoulder on the left side. Their assault slackened for a moment as Tacorzi's magick met and exploded Gena's spell, and had I not been wearing thick winter gear, they would have torn me open.

As I curled my left arm around the tentacle biting me at the shoulder and started to cut at Tacorzi with my rapier, I saw Stulklirn roll to his feet. He bellowed a challenge tinged with pain, then raised his paws, crossed them, and slashed them apart in imitation of what Tacorzi had done. A reddish-yellow spark shot from his furred paws and spiraled in at Tacorzi. It struck the monster in a shower of sparks, sending a shudder through Tacorzi's body. A second later I severed the tentacle and it fell to pieces around me.

"Magick I make I can unmake!" Tacorzi cackled. His hands began all manner of arcane motions even as a cruciform design on his chest began to darken and run with rotting flesh. The tentacle Gena had previously burned battered her back against the cavern wall. As she slumped to the floor, one of the zombies managed to jump Berengar, taking him down, while the wolf tentacle gnawing at my hip managed to pull me down.

Stulklirn crushed the wolf skull with one swat of his right paw, then crouched over me. "My magick kill will."

"Not if he unmakes it." I slapped the Dreel on the shoulder. "Circle him. Think of Jarudin."

Casting my sword aside, I stood and began to run at Tacorzi. I assumed the sight of me running unarmed at him would be quite a distraction and limit his ability at concentrating on his unmaking of the quartering spell. His jaw did drop open and his hand motions slackened just a bit, but even his curiosity at my actions did not make him stop his work.

I drew both flashdrakes, cocked the talons, and thrust the handcannons at him. The fleshy half of his face raised an eyebrow, but he saw no threat. I assumed that was because he did not know what they were, but part of me feared he knew it was because, already being dead, he could not be killed again.

I pulled the triggers.

One ball exploded his left hand, spraying finger and wrist bones around before it blew through ribs and shattered the shoulder blade on its way out. The other ball shattered the Reithrese corpse-wizard's jaw. Glittering like dewdrops in sunlight, diamond teeth spun through the air.

Knowing how a toothache had destroyed his concentration before, I hoped the horror at having part of his death replayed would cause him all sorts of problems.

Surrounding the both of us, a black, white, and brindle light pattern began and ended in the outline of a Dreel. Dropping the flashdrakes, I grabbed a flailing bone tentacle and heaved on it. Tacorzi spilled forward off his coils.

Hauling for all I was worth—despite the sharp pain in shoulder and hip—I pulled Tacorzi along with me as I dove into the Dreel and the world of the Elven circus translatio.

I do not know how long it actually took for us to complete the journey to the grove east of Jarudin. We passed through hills and mountains, lakes, towns, and vales, as we flew through that opposite-landscape. I saw no one, as I had before, but my attention remained focused on Tacorzi. I do not know if anyone saw us as a ghost on our journey, but I had no doubt that if someone had, a bard would be singing about the sight soon enough.

At some point during the journey it occurred to me that the premise upon which I had based my plan could have been wrong. Before my death I would have been willing to trust my hunches, but that had gotten me dead once before. If this journey did not kill Tacorzi, I had managed to transpecate him from the frozen north to within a day's ride of Jarudin. I had no idea how fast he could travel, configured as he was, but inflicting that sort of danger on the kin of folks I'd known generations before struck me as a poor way to announce my return to the land of the living.

As we arrived in the grove, I realized the one huge mistake I had made. Having dived into the Dreel, I dived out at the other end of the trip. I landed on my left shoulder, sending pain through me, then I rolled and kept rolling. I rolled on out of the grove and in doing so saved my life.

Tacorzi did not land in much better shape than I did, but I was much smaller than he was. As his body came into the grove, it bounced off the ground and slammed into trees on the other side of the grove. That collision sheered limbs from both trees and Tacorzi. Bits and pieces or bones pelted me as they flew out from between the trees. Those that hit me tumbled on after leaving my coat stained with white powder, and a blizzard of bone dust filled the grove itself.

I let things settle for a minute and made certain I had not been hurt. Because I had no indication Tacorzi still lived, I got to my feet and walked back to the grove. A black puddle, looking like the corrupted yolk of a giant egg lay near the edge of the tree circle. Stulklirn walked around the perimeter, shaking white dust from his coat. His fur now bore a white cross on his chest, but he seemed not to have noticed the change.

I shrugged off my coat and massaged my shoulder. "Are you hurt, Stulklirn?"

The Dreel shook his head. "Hurt I am not."

"Are you certain?" I rubbed my chest reflexively. "I know what that spell did to me a long time ago."

"Dreel-friend you are, so know this you may." He pointed at what had once been Takrakor. "The gods made men to kill men. To the Dreel for prey Bok gave sorcerers." He exposed his teeth in a feral grin. "Magick they have, magick we are. This is why lifeblack has pooled."

More than the stitch in her side and the throbbing pain on her cheek, Gena felt the cold as she slowly awakened. She found herself slumped in a corner between an ice wall and the cavern floor. The fire her spell had made out of a zombi still guttered a bit, holding the azure shadows at bay, but it produced little heat. She shoved her hands into her mittens again, then found her hat and made sure to tuck the numb tips of her ears beneath the woolen band when she pulled it on.

Even though her toes and parts of her legs felt numb, she was able to move around. Her ribs ached on the right side, and her right eye had already begun to swell half-closed, but she resisted using a diagnostic spell on herself. She knew her injuries were not bad and that the greatest threat to her welfare came from the cold. Her magick could do something to ward off the cold, but if she used all her strength healing herself, she might freeze to death afterward.

She staggered to her feet and felt surprised when the little cry of pain she uttered echoed back to her through the silence. Am I alone? Panic rippled through her, but she fought it down. "This is no time to be jumping to any sort of conclusions about anything."

Gena looked first toward where the thing had been. She shivered, but less from the cold than from the memory of what Takrakor had become. She had always used the name Takrakor as something that defined evil in her mind, but Tacorzi superseded the worst. Takrakor, as she had heard in many stories, had been ambitious, and that she could understand. Tacorzi, on the other hand, remained alive while dead, maintained by a hatred for a Man he himself had slain five centuries previously. It was malignant and insane.

She saw neither the creature nor Neal, and that worried her. The Dreel appeared to be gone as well, so she drifted off to her left toward a mound in the midst of a bone-strewn mire. The stink of rotted meat almost overwhelmed her as she approached, but the struggling gasp for breath that emanated from the twisted lump in the center drew her on.

Berengar lay in the midst of what had once been a zombi or two. Viscous black fluids saturated his clothes. Deep down, where great rents had been opened in his clothes to his flesh and beyond, she saw his blood frozen bright red in his wounds. A bone-spear poked through the left leg of his thick leather trousers. One of his ears hung half bitten off, his right shoulder looked dislocated, and his left eye had more red than white in it.