Dark Vengeance (13 page)

Though
this
Hairy One had swords and daggers to spare, and knew how to use them. To make them, too, if it came to that, and—

Something hooted, faint and far-off in the endless caves. Orivon knew sounds carried strangely across the Wild Dark, but knew he'd never heard such a call before, and was fairly certain whatever was making it was a good distance away.

Which meant it wasn't a pressing problem for him yet. He wasn't making much noise of his own, for one thing. Many beasts of the Dark hunted by scent, but had to blunder into it, or into the creature making it, to “nose” prey; amid all the reek of molds and dung, yeldeth and softly drifting spores, nothing could sniff out a particular beast-smell from a cavern away.

And for all Nifl sneerings to the contrary, unwashed human-reek was among the milder stinks of the Dark.

Thrusting his fingers into his nostrils as he shouldered through the latest clinging cloud of spores, to keep from breathing them in, Orivon shouldered his way into another cavern.

The fuzzy, purple-gray spores brushed along his arms and shoulders, tumbling in velvet silence, before they almost reluctantly drifted on past. Orivon paid them no heed; he was too intent on peering warily everywhere for foes. He found nothing worse than a long-legged spider, black and barbed, that his approach had scared into urgently wanting to be elsewhere. It scuttled through a cleft on the far side of the cavern, toward a faint glow beyond.

Orivon regarded that steady radiance thoughtfully. His darksight was as strong as ever; though there was no light near that was anything like the brightness of the cavern that held Talonnorn, he could see clearly enough in this gloom.

More than clearly enough, as he crossed the spider-vacated cavern, to see that the glow was coming from markings painted on the rock walls of a passage beyond his cavern, that curved across his intended path and intersected the narrow way the spider had taken . . . a cross-passage that ran past the markings into a greater darkness. Another cavern.

Orivon halted and stood watching and listening for what seemed a long time. Silence reigned. When time began to seem to stretch, and remained unbroken by any movements or sounds, he advanced again, approaching the two markings cautiously.

They were Nifl blazons, all right, drawn in an enspelled paint that had eaten into the rock to leave behind a symbol deeply etched as well as glowing.

Not that he could read them.

Orivon smiled wryly. They were intricate marks, differing from each other, and seemed to be meaningful symbols rather than actual writing, but that meaning could be anything. “Kiss me, Olone,” as he whispered aloud, or on the other hand: drop your dung here.

They shared the glow common to all dark elven writings; he was certain these were Niflghar markings, and not all that recent. Yet not defaced or altered, either. One of them he'd seen, just once, beside a door somewhere in a back passage of the Eventowers. So was it a guide mark, a warning to “stay away,” or something else?

Orivon shrugged. The two runes, if that's what they were, had been painted side by side next to a break in the curving passage: an entrance to another cavern, beyond, in just the direction he wanted to go, if he was ever to find Glowstone.

He shrugged again and strode purposefully forward, across the curving passage and along the narrower way, into the waiting cavern beyond.

It was darker than the rest of the Dark he'd traversed thus far, as if some magic lurking within it was waging silent war against his darksight. Darker, and having its own peculiar, unfamiliar smell, as if . . . as if . . .

Something moved, just behind Orivon.

He flung himself to one side without waiting to see what it was, turning to slash in that direction with his sword.

The “something” looked like a great curved slab of rock, swinging down at him from the cavern ceiling to loom in front of his nose!

It looked as gray and hard as stone, able to break any number of swords of his crafting—and humans swinging them, too!

The forgefist ducked away—as something else that felt just as large and hard as the swinging stone slammed into his shoulder and spun him wildly aside, his own sword clattering from his numbed hand.

Diving after it to scoop it up with his other hand, Orivon caught up his steel, rolled onward as far as he could roll until he fetched up against stone—and found himself staring up at the strangest creature he'd ever seen.

Spiderlike, it clung to the ceiling above him on six long, jointed legs that seemed to stick firmly to stone, freeing its other two legs—or rather pincers; the great stonelike slabs that had swung at him—to reach down for him. They were shaped like the claws of the Ashenuldar crayfish of his youth, but those had been a waxy whitish-brown and the size of his smallest finger—and these were each as gray as rock, and larger than the door of the grandest cottage of Ashenuld!

Eyes opened above those pincers. Six of them.

“Thorar's rough mothering . . .” Orivon whispered that curse in deepening fear, as he stared at the monster's three needle-jawed, hungry mouths, and the baleful glares above each of them. Three heads, all of them bigger than his, with necks thicker and more corded with rippling, bulging-vein-laced muscles than the strongest man he'd ever seen.

It was a cave-sleeth, but far larger than any he'd ever seen before, a sleeth of the monstrous size the slaves of the Rift had sometimes whispered gory tales about, in snatched moments when their overseers had gathered elsewhere to confer about something.

It moved like lightning, darting a short distance the way many hunting spiders did, and those huge pincers reached down in smooth unison to pluck up a rock—a boulder larger than Orivon—and fling it back the way the forgefist had come, to crash and roll in a booming and clacking of rock upon rock, blocking his way out.

In the hollow where the rock had been, shattered Nifl bones shifted and slid, a deep pile of death.

Orivon muttered another curse as he backed away. Three rows of ruthless fangs grinned at him, as the cave-sleeth followed
him, advancing leisurely across the ceiling, those great pincers flexing almost playfully.

Aside from those eyes and the throats beyond those bristling fangs—and there were three of them; there was no telling if cutting one even to blood-dripping ribbons would have any effect on the others, or slow the sleeth at all—Orivon could see nowhere that his swords could pierce and harm. Most of the legs and body were armored in the same stony casings that covered the pincers.

He was going to die here. Soon, and not pleasantly, by the looks of his foe.

 

The junior Watcher of Ouvahlor's face was sickly pale, and he tried twice to speak through trembling lips before he managed to frame the words, “W-was that
Olone?
The Goddess? Or did some of the crones or Consecrated of Talonar work spells to trick Jalandral Evendoom, so that he just thought Olone was—”

Luelldar waved a dismissive hand. “Unless she manifests rather more forcefully, it matters not. Listen to the High Lord; he has already convinced himself it was the latter, or that if it was the former, Olone won't act against him. If he's right in that, he has won this test. For it seems the watching Talonar believe him, and are now obeying him where they were thinking of butchering him mere moments ago.”

Aloun was still pale. “Do
you
think it was Olone?”

The Senior Watcher of Ouvahlor regarded Aloun expressionlessly and for a long time before he nodded.

“Yes, as it happens,” he said quietly. “I have served as a Watcher for a long time, and seen Olone's work before. Yet my opinion, too, matters not. What does is what the Anointed of Coldheart—and the Consecrated of Olone, in Talonnorn—believe.”

“Oh? How so?”

Luelldar's face went on betraying nothing as he subjected Aloun to another long stare. At his gesture, in the uncomfortable heart of that stare, the whorl between them spun itself smoothly
apart, into half a dozen smaller whorls, that drifted smoothly to orbit the Senior Watcher.

Scooping one of them into his hand, Luelldar regarded it for a moment and then looked at Aloun harder than ever. “You've never seen a holy war, have you?”

 

Orivon tried to hurry across the cavern, seeking something high and solid he could stand on, to give battle where the cave-sleeth would have no room to hang above him. Hurrying was no easy matter; bones snapped and crumbled like tinder-dry fallen twigs around his boots, and beneath his hurrying feet coins and gems slid and slithered.

Nifl must have died here in their dozens, been devoured, and their treasure hoarded. Not that he had much to contribute. Orivon's right foot slipped down the length of a sword blade, plunging deep through what felt like brittle-as-eggs Nifl skulls, into more coins. The sleeth was right behind him, moving slowly with its pincers held up like a wall in front of it, almost as if it was herding him.

Or toying with him.

He found solid stone with one foot, stone that rose under his boots as he moved. Orivon clambered hastily up out of the shifting hoard, shedding bones. He was climbing along a rising shoulder of rock that thrust high up into the cavern; as he went, he shot glances over his shoulder at the sleeth, and tried to peer everywhere else the rest of the time. Surely there were other ways out of this cave; would the sleeth have taken as its lair something it could be trapped—or walled up—in?

And did the cavern—which was still damnably dark, as if some lurking enchantment here, or even the sleeth itself, was clawing at his darksight—hold any other monsters or perils? Traps he might plunge into, or get caught in?

A pincer slammed into the stone right beside him, clawing at his leg. Orivon hurled himself frantically aside, off the shoulder of
rock, rolling over to crash down into more bones and clattering metal as the pincer swung past just above him. The other pincer, as gray and large as a wall of stone, reached for him, slamming into the rock he'd been trying to climb and running out of reach just shy of where he was wallowing in a great disintegrating heap of Nifl bones, trying to regain his footing. The sleeth, it seemed, was growing impatient.

He daren't seek cover and hole up under rocks where the huge old spider-thing couldn't go; it would just wait Orivon out, or wall him in with rocks and wait for him to die. Emerging from anywhere with those boulder-sized pincers waiting for him would be greeting death with eager impatience.

He had to get out of the cavern and flee where it couldn't follow, or kill it. And it certainly wasn't going to give him time to choose where to fight it, or climb up high, or—

Three heads with fangs, six spider legs, bony plates all over its body like armor, and those gigantic stony pincers.

Not good, by Thorar.

Not good at all.

No signs that it had poison or spun webs, at least. Nor could he recall any slaves' tales about such perils. Just that the sleeth was a patient hunter, stalking prey and ferociously fighting anyone who stood up to it.

Could he try to blind some of those eyes by hurling armfuls of these old blades and bones? Not that he'd have more than one good chance, once it realized what he was trying . . .

The necks and throats were unarmored . . . but no; peering now, he could see a row of small bony plates running up to the chin of each mouth. The throats
were
armored, and the necks around that armor so thick that he'd have to hack and saw at their marbled meat for far more time than any living beast would give him. He'd helped Orl-folk butcher oxen that had slimmer haunches!

That left the mouths as its weak spot. Could his armor keep him alive inside those jaws long enough to hack and stab enough
to slay? Or would the fangs crush it, and the pincers rend him, the moment it felt pain?

There was one proverbial way to find out, as the old Ashenuldar saying put it.

Orivon snarled as his boots found solid ground again and he started to climb another rocky slope, this one much lower. Any smith knows there are many ways to fashion something, but only one “best” way out of them all.

Seeing only one way forward—and one as risky as this one seemed—did not please the forge-giant at all. Nor did his size and strength mean much against a foe that was larger, heavier, and clinging to a stone ceiling he couldn't reach, let alone stand on . . .

A pincer came at him again, and this time he dodged, swayed, and then hacked with his sword, two-handed, into the joint where the thumb met the larger, slab-of-stone rest of the hand.

It was like hacking a fire-hardened steelbark tree. His blade went in a finger-width or two, stuck, and then came free as the pincer opened, the sleeth squalled in angry pain—and the great stony limb started to flail and smash, dashing shards of stone off the rock slope an instant behind Orivon's frantic leap. The sleeth surged forward, driving its other pincer through a cloud of bone fragments and tumbling old weapons in its murderous haste, to hammer this rock and that, trying to smash a bounding, scrambling Orivon to bloody pulp.

“Ho, the coolly conquering hero comes!” Orivon shouted at it, dodging around another blunt old tooth of rock. The sleeth sprang, abandoning the ceiling to get at him.
Yes!

The forgefist ducked under that tooth of rock and then flung himself on, under the low-hanging edge of a great horn of stone that jutted out sideways into the very heart of the cavern. Landing amid snapping bones, he slid along easily in the greasy filth of deeply heaped, rotting sleeth-dung.

The sleeth swarmed after him, hissing in anger—and Orivon came charging up over the horn and right back at it, in a leap that
struck two of its heads hard with his boots, and slammed his armored crotch full into the face of its central head. He let fall his sword, snatched out his daggers, and stabbed, furiously and desperately, blinding all the eyes he could reach, through snarling forests of fangs, in a frantic frenzy that ended
just
in time.