The Sellsword (20 page)

“Prepare yourself,” said the Cavalier.

“Set aside your concerns, and trust to your sword arm,” said the Philosopher.

“It does seem a little strange,” said the Cook, but the other ghosts glared at him. Vanderjack shook his head and gritted his teeth. Star had flown in an upward-curving arc, soaring around to intercept the sivaks yet again.

“Sound your roar again!” shouted Theo above the whistling gale. “It’s already taken out two of them!”

Sure enough, the two sivaks who had been sent spi-raling away from the battle by the dragonne’s roar had not yet managed to regain control of their flight. They were plummeting toward the jungle along the slopes of
the Emerald Peaks. There was a good chance that when they hit the upper canopy of the rainforest, their bones would be pulverized and they would become part of the landscape.

The sivak commander and his wounded companion were not yet out of the fight, however. Star’s next roar was deafening, but they were ready for it, so when Theo, Vanderjack, Gredchen, and the dragonne charged them again, it was all they could do to avoid being struck by the sivaks’ wickedly serrated blades.

The sivak commander’s weapon caught Star across his front flank, cleaving through his brass scales and opening a horrible wound. Star screamed, jerking upward. Gredchen couldn’t hold on, and the momentum of the upward flight sent her end over end into the sky above the conflict. Theo had both hands on his polearm, striving to bury the spearhead in the same sivak as before. The draconian reached out a clawed hand and grasped the shaft of the weapon, using it as a lever to flip the gnome off the back of the dragonne and into the open void.

Vanderjack’s ghosts were calling out a number of options for him, all of them conservative. He was alone on the back of a wounded dragon-tiger, his two companions falling to their deaths. There were two sivak draconians, easily more adept in the air than he was, and likely the same draconians who had once destroyed his mercenary company in Southern Ergoth and were responsible for years of division between the sellsword and Theodenes. Vanderjack didn’t really want to hear conservative options.

As Star fought to remain upright, bleeding and beating at the air with his draconic wings, Vanderjack gripped the hilt of Lifecleaver with both hands, shouted
“For Southern Ergoth, you scaly bastards!” and leaped at the sivak commander.

Somewhere between leaving Star’s back and cutting the arm off the sivak, Vanderjack’s head exploded with a thundering wave of darkness.

Highmaster Rivven Cairn watched the evening rain wash away the blood on the clay surface of Wulfgar’s Horseman’s Arena.

She and Cear had returned only a few hours earlier, southwest of Willik, which she had left to the ghouls. After reporting the passage of Gredchen and Theodenes to her Black Robe agent, the highmaster decided to return to her base of operations. Wulfgar was, for all intents and purposes, home; even Cear appreciated the place. Perhaps the dragon liked it because he’d already staked his claim with fire and claw back when Rivven had flown in with her forces, driving the famous Feathered Plumes of Wulfgar into the jungle and overwhelming the city.

Another reason she had returned was to watch the fighting in the arena. There, steel and iron were set against claw and horn as humans and other races engaged in life-and-death battle with all manner of monstrous opponents. Many of the inhuman gladiators were chained and bound, in part to prevent them from leaping into the stands and tearing the spectators to pieces, but also to limit their movement and give the slave combatants a sporting chance.

It was the day before the chariot races; Rivven enjoyed the spectacle every year. They combined all the thrill of competitive racing with the brutality of gladiator combat. Weeks of bloodthirsty conflict led up to it,
with the victors earning the chance to take part in the chariot race and perhaps win their freedom.

Rivven grew up alongside gladiators. Before she became an apprentice mage, she was entertainment, a token half-breed in a pit fighter’s house in Lemish. Her owner was a thick-necked human with a wispy excuse for a beard, a man she later killed in the course of her escape. He would force her to take on one opponent after the other, sometimes in the dark of night, sometimes under the hot light of day. She learned to kill with a knife, with a sword, with her own fists. She made no friends, saw no future, until the day she understood her owner’s weakness.

Yasmut Shaad had a thing for meek and shy girls. Rivven was anything but. For twelve years, years that most humans would have grown too old for the kind of blood sport her master was making money from, her elf blood kept her body young and undeveloped. Her time in the pit hardened her, made her lean and wiry. Then she realized that her only way out would be to get close enough to Shaad to kill him. Rivven knew that she would have to feign weakness while remaining alive just long enough to use her anger.

The rain grew stronger, pounding on her helmet, collecting in bloody puddles around her boots. She was taken back to the Shaad’s pit again by the
thum-thum-thum
of the rain, which in her mind became the percussion of bucketfuls of water dumped on her from above. The blood at her feet was the blood of her last opponent, a pale human body on the ground before her with her knife in his chest. Her own chest heaved, lungs burning, and she looked up and saw the man she hated more than anything else.

Engorged with the food and wine that her killing had
bought him, Yasmut Shaad did not spare his champion even a glance. He was fawned over by a trio of curvy girls, Lemishites with rich fathers who curried favor with Shaad and his men. Rivven’s vision was blurry, a cut across her forehead bleeding into her eyes and making her face ache, as the girls draped themselves across Shaad’s lap, fed him dates and figs and other luxuries brought in across the mountains from the east. She saw how close they were to him.

Rivven knew that later that evening Shaad would come by her cell to inspect her for injuries and remind her how easily she could be replaced if she disappointed him. As Shaad’s burly thugs dragged her out of the pit and toward that cell, she fought away the fire within her heart, forced it down into a tight knot in her stomach, allowed her body to relax and subside. By the time Shaad came by, still popping figs into his mouth but alone, she was curled up in the corner of the cell, small and white.

The slave owner was visibly astonished at first. He yelled at her to get up, which normally would have provoked an angry outburst from Rivven. He would then berate her and call her names, and that would be the end of it. But that night his yelling provoked no response. His eyebrow lifted with curiosity, and he stood there for some time, watching her.

Eventually, Shaad beckoned her over, using a softer voice, perhaps to test her reaction. She knew exactly what she needed to do; she meekly looked away then slowly crawled over to the bars. In her stomach the knot of fire grew more intense, but outwardly she was cold, shivering. Shaad’s questions and inquiries were all responded to with shrugs and shakes of her head. He grinned toothlessly, an expression that sent her mind spinning into a whorl of rage. All Shaad saw was
a young girl responding to his clumsy attempts at soothing utterances with fragile acceptance.

Shaad opened the cell door and drew Rivven to him. As he sought what his base instincts demanded, Rivven saw to hers. She took the curved paring knife from his belt, the knife she’d seen him use hundreds of times to peel Haltigothian citrus fruits, and drove it into his brain.

Rivven left Yasmut Shaad twitching there in the hallway of the dungeon and ran. She didn’t stop running until she had fled Lemish, making it all the way into Estwilde. She left slavery behind, but she carried the fiery spark within her and her memory of using deception and guile to get ahead. It was that same deception and that same fire that laid the path toward her arcane studies and from there to Ariakas.

Rivven opened her eyes. She was back in Wulfgar, soaked to the bone. The arena was empty. Somebody had come and taken away all the corpses, patched up all of the living. Maybe they had seen her standing there the whole time, her helm hiding any indication that her mind had been back in Lemish. Wisely, they had left her alone.

She turned, looked up at the stands, and saw a single figure moving at a brisk pace down the central stairs to the arena floor. As he approached, she lifted her hands, palms upward, and spoke a word of magic. The arcane power rippled within her, bright and hot, and the water on her body and armor boiled away into steam. It was easy to keep dry when you were a pyromancer.

“Hello, Aubec,” Rivven said to the man.

“My lady,” the Nordmaaran aide-de-camp said, out of breath. “A message for you.”

Rivven took the folded note from Aubec, who stood
in the downpour as his mistress’s spell continued to keep the rain off her. Opening it, she looked over the contents then handed it back to him.

“We’ve got him,” she said and smiled widely behind the mask.

V
anderjack opened his eyes, seeing nothing but black.

He had a ferocious headache. He felt his neck and the back of his shaved head, felt the telltale lump, and knew that the sivak’s wingman had probably smacked him with the flat of the sword. He didn’t feel the wetness of blood, only the damp floor beneath him, which smelled like urine and rotting straw.

“Gredchen?” he said, speaking into the dark. No response. He felt around, hoping to rest his hand on something he recognized. “Theo?”

There was a moan off to his right. He couldn’t tell if it was the girl or the gnome. Then he remembered his sword.

It was gone—no scabbard, no Lifecleaver. In fact, all of his gear was stripped from him. He had the arming doublet but not Captain Annaud’s dragonarmor. He had no knife, nothing. Combined with the darkness and the horrid smell, he realized that he’d been captured and tossed in a cell.

“Gredchen? Theo?”

“Vanderjack?” came the gnome’s voice. “I might have known. Star? Star?”

“It’s good to hear your voice too, shorty,” Vanderjack said stoically. “We’re in the clink. Somehow I don’t think the big brass tiger’s with us.”

Theodenes sighed. The moan came again too, and Vanderjack knew it was Gredchen. Shifting position, he rose to kneeling, and tried to use the wall beside him to get up.

He almost collapsed from the rush of blood to his brain. “Sivaks got me in the head,” he said. “Are you all right?”

“Well, I daresay I have had better days,” Theodenes replied. “Also, I have deduced we’re in separate cells.”

“So gnomes
can
see in the dark!”

“Of course not. Don’t believe the rumors. I have deduced this because right now I am holding bars in between myself and your voice.”

Vanderjack rubbed at the short stubble where the lump on his head was. “Gredchen? You conscious?”

A weak and annoyed voice said in response, “Only just.”

“Theo and I are both here. I think we’re in the dungeons underneath Castle Glayward.”

“What makes you so sure?” Theodenes replied. “We could be anywhere.”

“I know, but based on what you two were told by Rivven Cairn, that sadistic cow’s probably got us set up for an extended stay in the baron’s castle. I know these highmasters and highlords. They like the drama.”

“If this is the dungeon,” said Gredchen, “then my memory tells me there are six cells. Three on either side of a hallway, with iron bars between each.”

“It’s a good thing I have my people’s expert senses,”
said Theodenes.

“You have big noses, if that’s what you’re talking about,” said Vanderjack.

“Extraordinary senses of smell, yes,” grumbled Theo. “But hearing, too—unless you’re in the Guild of Resonant Sonics, perhaps—which I have been employing as we talked.”

“Congratulations are in order, then?” Vanderjack said, groping his way to the bars near where he thought Theodenes’ voice was coming from.

Theo ignored him. “Gredchen and yourself are linearly arranged about me,” he said. “Which means that I am in the middle cell of a group of three.”