Golden Torc - 2 (23 page)

There were noises. The ravens uttered their pruk pruk calls. A broken water conduit gushed and flooded down a flight of stairs, washing clean the corpses of gray-torc soldiers and Lowlife, invaders. In a cul-de-sac near the palace of Lord Velteyn, nearly a dozen uninjured ramas in ruined aquamarine tabards huddle together, whimpering. A sound of human groans came from a porter's house adjacent to the main palace approach. Felice ignored it and walked toward the entrance of Velteyn's mansion, an iron-tipped arrow nocked and ready in her compound bow. She had many other arrows in a shoulder quiver, all with stained shafts. There had been a few stubborn grays down at the river landing determined to fight on, even though their Tanu overlords had fled; and down in the artisans' quarter, a bareneck woman had come rushing out of a devastated glasscrafter's workshop, brandishing a vitredur machete and crying vengeance on the despoilers of Finiah even as Felice shot her in the throat.

Humans were too irreligious to hold to the Truce. Long after the Firvulag and Tanu had quit the burning wreck of the city, Lowlife warriors continued to fight against those of their fellow humans who remained loyal to the exotics. Captured grays, as well as the few silvers who fell into the invaders' hands, were hustled before a guerilla tribunal where a Lowlife officer showed them an iron chisel and an iron knife and bade them choose: "Live free or die." A surprising proportion had opted for death rather than the removal of their mind-amplifying collars.

Felice entered the palace. The carrion birds were absent here, but there were flies, swift-scuttling rodents, and an appalling stench. The bodies of guards and servitors were heaped behind improvised barricades of furniture and demounted doors. Many of the defenders had died without a mark upon them, faces contorted by the mind-blasting attack of the Firvulag. Except for the buzzing of insects, the rustle and squeak of rats, and the sighing sound of wind through smashed panes of colored glass, the palace of Lord Velteyn was quiet in its ruin. The little woman in black penetrated deeper into the apartments of the Great Ones, leaping over the piled corpses of human retainers who had fought an increasingly desperate rearguard action as the invading army hunted their trapped exotic masters.

Felice came to a great open door of bronze, studded with green stones. Bodies in Lowlife buckskin and homespun mingled with those in palace livery to clog its threshold. And here, for the first time, there were also Firvulag bodies, some squat, some taller than humans or Tanu and as burly as fairytale giants; all were attired in the gold-chased obsidian armor of Pallol One-Eyes's elite corps and all had been dispatched by irontipped weapons that Velteyn's human guard had presumably wrested from the Lowlives.

Calmly, Felice pulled a spear from a dead shape-shifter and used it for an alpenstock as she climbed over the noisome mound blocking the doorway. Inside the room, which was an elaborate bedchamber reduced to a shambles by the fighting, were six bodies attired in colored-glass armor. Four men and one Tanu woman were bloodied, transfixed by iron-pointed arrows. The second woman, a gold-torc human armored in sapphire blue, bore no wounds and had presumably succumbed to mental assault.

Felice removed her hoplite helmet and set it upon a large bedside stand. On a lower shelf, incongruous in undisturbed tidiness, were a golden ewer and basin. The girl filled the basin with water and set it on top of the table. For a moment, she stood looking down at the corpse of the human woman. In death, her azure eyes showed wide pupils, oddly emphatic in a face as pale as chalk. Long chestnut hair spread on the carpet in a nimbus around the bare head; her helmet lay nearby. The slender fingers in jeweled blue-plate gauntlets were hooked over a golden torc.

Like an acolyte enacting a ritual, Felice knelt. The rigor had left the dead hands and the torc was easily freed from their grip. The knobbed front catch clicked. The girl pivoted the collar on its back hinge and slipped it from around the livid throat. Rising, she went to the basin, dipped the gold several times, and dried it upon a soft towel.

Then Felice fastened the torc about her own neck.

The reality opened to her. She uttered a piercing cry. This... so it was like this. All of it had been hidden within her, battened down and denied, so feared by the weaker ones all around her. But now open, released, and ready to be used. She went out onto the balcony of the death room. Trembling, vision partly blurred by the tears of her joy, she looked over the ruins of Finiah. There was the wide Rhine, the heights of the Vosges, High Vrazel itself on the western skyline, where King Yeochee and Sharn-Mes and the other Firvulag were doubtless still celebrating the triumph over their ancient Foe. There were the high passes she had come through alone, too late for the war, passing Chief Burke and Khalid Khan and the remnant of the Lowlife force conducting newly liberated human survivors of Finiah to the bottomland camp where they would await the judgment of Madame Guderian.

Gold warm at her throat, Felice began to laugh. The sound swelled on the wind until it reverberated over the wasted city. The ravens, shocked out of their aplomb, took wing.

2

SHARN-MES THE YOUNG CHAMPION REGARDED THE RIOTOUS scene in the Hall of the Mountain King and shook his head in humorous wonderment.

"Just look at that gang of stewed fewmets. It'll be at least three days' sleep to work off this three days' drunk. You know, Ayf, this is going to play havoc with our travel schedule. The armor and weaponry will have to be refurbished before we head south unless we want to go into the Grand Combat looking like a tatty rabble."

"There's still plenty of time." Ayfa, leader of the Warrior Ogresses, tossed off her bumper of mead and helped herself to a refill. "The lads and lasses are entitled to a celebration. It's been forty years since we've had anything worth getting drunk about. Who cares if we miss some of the prelims down at the White Silver Plain? The high-ass crowd aren't about to start any main events without us."

"I suppose," Sharn agreed, "that we do deserve a party." The two great captains were sequestered in a snug gallery that ordinarily accommodated musicians at formal feasts. But there was nothing formal about the action now taking place below them. All of the Firvulag veterans of the brief Finiah campaign, together with most of the rest of the citizenry of High Vrazel, seemed to have crowded into the royal audience cavern to cheer the unexpected victory.

Brown ale and mead and cyser and blackberry brandy fountained up from hollow stalagmites right into the waiting mugs of those merrymakers who were still on their feet. Enough pastries, meats, and other party food remained to make the oaken tables creak under the weight. One mob in front of King Yeochee's empty throne was playing a type of blindman's bluff in which the hooded female protagonist had taken the game's title quite literally. Another hilarious crowd surrounded the two heroes of the battle, Nukalavee and Skinless and Bles Four-Fang, who vied with one another to see who could create the most ridiculously obscene illusory body. Points were awarded by the cheers, jeers, and occasional retchings of the onlookers. More serious-minded revelers (and the maudlin drunks) gathered about a crookbacked goblin bard who had reached the one-hundred-sixty-fifth verse of a lugubrious ballad of doomed Firvulag lovers. Cheerier souls were concocting ingenious new stanzas to the soldiers' beloved drinking song, "A Princess Must Never Have Fleas," detailing those eccentricities that the royal demoiselle might legitimately expect to get away with.

Warriors of the walking wounded, cosseted by plump little wenches, bragged of their late derring-do. Superannuated stayat-homes muttered into their beer that the reduction of Finiah couldn't possibly compare to certain ancient affrays in which they had participated during the good old days. Queen Klahnino supervised the safe retirement of fallen celebrants, who were dragged away into alcoves and packed cheek by jowl to sleep it off. King Yeochee wandered around in bare feet and a stained golden robe, his crown tilted over one ear, kissing all of the ladies and quite a number of the gentlemen as well. Pallol the Battlemaster, still disdainful of the enterprise but always ready for a party, had succumbed to a surfeit of sidecars-another legacy of the insidious Lowlives. He lay snoring in the King's crystal grotto, his huge head resting in the lap of the resigned concubine, Lulo.

"Yes," Sharn repeated himself at length. "We definitely deserve a celebration... What do you suppose the Lowlives are up to?"

"I'll look," said Ayfa, who possessed more farsight than the majority of her race. She was a handsome creature if one overlooked the excessively developed arm muscles, a concomitant of her prowess with the two-handed sword. Her hair was apricot-colored and her broad face freckled. Like most Firvulag, she had dark, twinkling eyes. She had shed her armor and wore a rumpled kirtle and blouse of madder rose, which clashed with her hair.

"Yes, there they are. The human prisoners, or refugees, or whatever you call 'em, are installed in the old staging-area camp. But Burke and his cronies are slogging along through Ravine Pass toward Hidden Springs. They're getting rained on."

"Good," said Sharn. "Maybe it'll rust their perishing iron." He took a pull from his beaker and wiped his lips with a furry paw. "Dammit, Ayf, that's a bad business-using the bloodmetal. Unprecedented! You know, when we trapped that bunch of Tanu engineers near the smeltery, one of 'em let off a really heavy curse before he died. I can still hear it: 'The Goddess will avenge us. Accursed through the world's age be those who resort to the blood-metal. A bloody tide will overwhelm them..."

"Well, it seems to me that the curse is for the humans, not us. We'd always planned to put the Lowlives to the sword once they'd served our purposes."

"But we're only too willing to use them-and their iron-in the meantime! I hate it, Ayfa. It's a Lowlife way of doing battle, not our way. Old Pallol was bitching about how we'd surrendered our ancient honor just by fighting alongside humans... and how the iron was so obscene that it made a travesty of our whole combat-philosophy. I can't help agreeing. How can war be glorious with such an ignoble weapon? It puts the mightiest Firvulag or Tanu hero on the same level as some half-starved human pipsqueak with a compound bow. It's unfair!" Ayfa grunted. "I suppose the Tanu have been fighting

fair... with their chalikos and bear-dogs that have turned the Hunts into massacres! Or the human cavalry and charioteers in the Grand Combat who've been whipping the shit out of us for the past forty years!"

"Aaah. You women never did appreciate the fine points of chivalry!"

"No-we're willing to fight dirty to win." The female warrior served herself another great tankard of mead. "And speaking of that-did you see how the Lowlife infantry dealt with the mounted Foe in Finiah?"

Sharn acknowledged the fact with a surly nod. "Unsporting!

That's not our way."

"Screw our way. The chalikos weren't the Tanu way, either, until that human animal tamer came along... Now you listen to me, big boy. There won't be any iron weapons to help us in the Grand Combat this year, but you can bet your sweet filberts that we will adopt those new antichaliko tactics of the Lowlives. This go-around, those gray-torc troopers are in for a helluva surprise! I've already got the armorers working on the modification. Easiest thing in the world."

"It could make a difference," he conceded. "If we can get the warriors to accept it."

"I'll leave the persuasion to you," she told him, smiling. Then her expression changed. "Keep still for a minute while I go back to my farsight of the Lowlives coming from Finiah... I get a few under three hundred surviving irregulars going over the pass and maybe twice that many captives and casualties down in the Rhineside camp. Most of the refugees are barenecks... No-wait. Some are too well dressed. By damn, they've got to be ex-grays or silvers with their torcs chiseled off! Noncombatants. Maybe scientific types, special-talent artificers. Old Madame Guderian will make good use of them, you can bank on it!"

"I wonder just how loyal to her those liberated townees will be, though?" Sharn was skeptical. "The humans who craved freedom the most tended to be the newcomers and the psychos. The people who'd been here for a while settled down under Tanu domination even without being torced. A life of freedom in the wild greenwood is going to be as appealing to those easy-goers as a case of hives."

"Hush. I'm looking for Felice."

"Oh, that one. The one you'll have to take into your crew if-"

"-if she finds a golden torc and goes metapowerful. I could strangle that Yeochee for pushing the dirty work off on me! As if the Combat wasn't tough enough for us women these days... Oh-oh."

"Spotted her?"

"She's in a room of Velteyn's mansion. Wearing a torc. And she's looting a body of its glass armor. So much for Yeochee's idea. This kid is way ahead of him, making her own Combat plans!"

"Cheer up." Sharn climbed to his feet, yawned hugely, and scratched his hairy chest through the open front of his tunic. "You're rid of her, anyhow. It'll take her a while to get used to the torc. And there's no guarantee that her latent metafaculties will measure up to her nerve, in any case. Even if she did mastermind Epone's killing and help bring back the Spear, she's still only a young girl. Maybe coercing animals is the only power she's got."

Ayfa's eyes came back into focus. "Te only knows. I guess I'm just too tired now to give much of a damn." Sharn gave her a hand and hauled her up. "It's been a short war and a long party. What say we make our duty to the King and Queen and amble on home?" He gathered their black-glass armor by the straps and slung it onto his back. "Good thinking," Ayfa agreed. She clapped her companion on one shoulder and, rising on tiptoe, kissed the end of his grubby nose. "I hate to think of the overtime we're going to owe the babysitter."

3

THE GUARDIANS IN THEIR WHITE TUNICS STOOD READY AROUND the square of bare granite that had been marked off with rounded stones. There were soldiers as well this morning, in consideration of the visit of the Most Exalted Personages. Thagdal, Eadone, Gomnol, and the two brothers Nodonn and Velteyn kept well back from the vicinity of the time-portal and waited for the manifestation with the stoicism that dignitaries invariably assume when they are obliged to inspect some important but depressing activity taking place at an inconvenient hour. Pitkin the Castellan said, "It's just dawn, Exalted Ones.