Extermination (Daniel Black Book 3) (48 page)

I cut the whip with a force blade, which sent most of the blood falling onto the floor. Korak slammed me into the nearest wall, using his grip on my wrist to swing me around with ease.

“Fucking smartass wizard.”

Wham!

“Hurry up-”

Wham!

“-and die already.”

Wham!

“Stop it!” Mara screamed.

“No! This little shitstain’s going down, bitch.”

Wham!

I made my force field grow spikes where he was holding it.

He bellowed in pain, and tried to let go. But the spikes had already driven themselves through his hand, ripping it apart. He punched me, and my force field collapsed.

I fell to my knees, dizzy from the wild beating. But I could still feel where my talisman was. As he raised his sword to finish me two hundred pounds of spiked iron and stone slammed into his side, knocking him away.

I tried to pin him against the wall with the implement, to give myself a moment to recover. But to my amazement he was actually stronger than my talisman’s flight enchantment. He pushed it away with his one good hand, and sent a streamer of blood flying at me from the mangled wreck of the other one. The tip of it cut a long, bloody gash across my right arm and shoulder before I managed to throw a dispelling at it.

Then it collapsed onto the floor, its animating magic blown away by my spell. Well, that was a vulnerability I could use. I climbed back to my feet, and parried a spray of little blood darts with another dispelling.

“No. Damn it, no!” Mara sobbed. “Not again. Korak, you asshole.”

Great. If she’d only help me this would be easy, but I guess she wasn’t quite ready to kill her own brother for my sake. Fine, I’d do the job myself.

With a grunt of effort, Korak broke off one of the iron spikes on my talisman and threw it at me. I’d barely started to react before the heavy lump of metal smashed into my chest, breaking half my ribs. My amulet engaged its pain block and started automatically healing the damage, but I couldn’t take much more of this. Damn, this elven body was fragile.

But I’d finally figured out how to win this.

I made my talisman grow, forming thick bands of iron that tried to wrap around Korak. He struggled, bending the bars and trying to push it way, but with only one good hand he couldn’t quite manage it. In a few moments it had him tangled up, and it was growing faster than he could damage it.

Then I just had it float up a few inches, until his feet left the ground. With no leverage there was nothing he could do to stop the artifact from growing until it formed a solid mass of iron around him, and once it was a few inches thick even he wasn’t strong enough to break out.

“You… won?” Mara said incredulously.

“Told you I could handle your brothers,” I gasped out.

“You won. You won! You beat him. Hah! Take that, Korak! I found a guy who can beat your ass, and I’m letting him fuck me! How do you like that?”

“Crazy bitch!” Korak’s muffled voice came from inside the floating mass of steel. “You think this is over? You just wait till I get out of this. What do you think mom is going to say about you fucking an elf?”

Mara sagged. “Oh, crap. He’s right. Mom’s going to kill me. Worse, she’s going to find out about you.”

My eyes went to Brand, who was watching us with the air of a man just waiting for the right opportunity.

“She’s not going to find out,” I said slowly.

Mara gave me a confused look. “How will she not find out? Even if we kill Korak, she’ll just bring him back and ask him what happened. Look at this place. It’s obvious there was a real fight here.”

“Korak isn’t going to be answering any questions,” I replied.

With a though I sent the iron prison floating across the room, to hover above the pit. Mara’s eyes went wide.

“Seriously? Shit, Daniel, Biter could kill him for real. Even if some of his soul gets away, it could take mom years to pull the pieces back together. That’s hardcore.”

“No one gets to rape my friends while I’m around,” I said. “Are you going to stop me?”

“I…”

“Mara!” Korak called. “Have you lost your mind? I’m your brother! You can’t help some faggot elf wizard kill me.”

The prison creaked ominously as he struggled, but he couldn’t break free. The thing in the pit stirred, perhaps sensing a potential meal. Six mouths on the ends of thick tentacles waved in the air, and a pair of huge armored claws began to open and close.

Mara looked down at the monster in the pit, and then up at the floating prison. She hesitated for a long moment.

“Mara! We’re family!”

Her face hardened. “No, Korak. Dad and Hel and Jormungandr are family. You’re just an asshole. Do it, Daniel.”

I made the inside of the prison sprout blades.

Korak screamed, and thrashed violently. His flesh was almost as tough as the iron of my talisman, and if it wasn’t for the reinforcement spell this might not have worked. As it was it took almost a minute to sever his Achilles tendons, and cut his right arm down to the bone. I’d wanted to sever it, but his bones proved too tough for that. Crippling it would have to do.

I made the talisman shrink back into a little ball of stone, leaving Korak dangling over the pit. He struggled wildly despite his injuries, reaching out for the edge of the pit with limbs of animated blood.

I blew them apart with a dispelling, and he fell.

Biter was on him in an instant. Mouths two feet across closed on his thigh, his shoulder, one of his arms. He howled, lashing out again with streamers of animated blood. But they glanced harmlessly off the monster’s chitinous hide, and he was running out of blood.

I realized Mara was leaning against me. I wrapped my arms around her, and she pressed herself against me. But she didn’t stop watching until Korak’s struggles finally ceased, long minutes later.

“One down,” she said softly. “Twenty-three to go.”

“Are you alright?” I asked.

“I will be. I just… it’s so weird. I hated him, you know? He was always after me. Always so convinced that I was just making him work for it. He… when I was little, he hurt me so bad…”

She choked. I just held her, not saying anything. She fought back the tears that were trying to come, and went on.

“I’m sorry. I should have helped you fight. I just couldn’t do it.”

“It’s okay,” I said. “You grew up with him. You shouldn’t have to do something like that.”

“He fucked you up pretty bad,” she complained. “You could have lost that fight.”

“I didn’t.”

“Yeah, but we’re still kind of screwed. Well, I am, at least. I can still get you out, but how am I going to explain this mess?”

“Oh, that’s easy. See, you questioned the elves and figured out they had nothing to do with the Aesir attack, just like you said before. So you escorted us off to the gate, just to make sure we didn’t stick around and get up to some kind of mischief while everyone was distracted. While you were gone Korak must have fucked up somehow, because the prisoner got loose and chucked him in the pit before making a run for it.”

She gasped. “What?”

“What do you say, Brand? I’m sure you didn’t come here without some kind of alternate escape plan. Give us five minutes after I cut you lose, and then you can make a break for it.”

Brand laughed. “You are a dangerous man, Daniel Black. Or are you truly one of the svartalfar, only pretending to be a man?”

“You aren’t really expecting me to answer that, are you?”

“But, Daniel, he’s an Aesir,” Mara protested. “You can’t expect me to just let him go.”

“Your father’s imprisonment happened long before he was born,” I pointed out. “Yes, you’re enemies, and I’m sure you’ll be trying to kill each other on the battlefield at some point. But he hasn’t personally done anything to you, has he?”

“He’s an Aesir,” she repeated. But she was just complaining now.

“Do you have a better idea?” I asked.

She sighed. “Fine. But don’t get any funny ideas, Aesir. I’m not betraying my father, and we’re not friends. I’m just using you for my own convenience.”

“Agreed. I’ve no more love for you than you have for me, daughter of Loki. But I’ll aid your little scheme, if it means a chance at escape.”

“Let’s get those elves ready first,” Mara grumbled. “And I’m not giving him freedom. You’ll have to cut him lose yourself, if that’s what you want.”

The elves wisely remained silent as we freed them and prepared to go, with Mara bitching and whining the whole time. I was pretty sure she was mostly just trying to distract herself from thinking about Korak’s death, so I let her get it out of her system. When we were ready to go I walked over to the massive wooden frame that Brand was strapped to, and looked over the setup.

“If you get a hand free you can get the rest, right?”

“If I must,” Brand said carefully. “Or you could simply cut me free with those invisible blades of yours, and I could wait for a count of three hundred.”

“They’re too heavily enchanted to cut with a force blade,” I told him. “Besides, that’s a pretty distinctive kind of magic. I’m trying to make sure the wrong people never find out I was here.”

I touched him on the shoulder. Yeah, he was pretty messed up, but his right hand was functional and he had that overwhelming natural vitality that seemed to be common among demigods. A lot of his wounds had already healed, and the broken bones in his left hand were the only thing that would really slow him down.

He also had something artificial implanted in his chest, inside the rib cage. A magic item of some kind? Interesting. Well, maybe that was his alternate way home. He wasn’t likely to tell me if I asked, so I didn’t bother. I just set the bones in his hand, and left the rest to heal on its own.

“Those bones will be fragile for a few days, so don’t try punching anything with that hand,” I told him. “Now, let’s see how strong those straps really are. Give it a good heave on three. One. Two. Three.”

His own strength wasn’t enough to break the strap that held his arm to the crossbar, especially since the position didn’t give him any leverage. But I heaved on it with my own force magic as well, and it gave an ominous creak. Then the thick wood splintered, and snapped.

There was a knock at the door.

“Oh, fuck me,” Mara groaned. “Now what?”

She stalked over to the door, and flipped up the cover on the vision slit. “What?”

A male voice drifted through, saying something about a delivery. Out of the corner of my eye I saw Brand unbuckling the strap on his left wrist.

Mara rolled her eyes. “Fine, whatever.”

She threw the bolt, opened the door, grabbed the hapless andregi on the other side by his weapon harness and dragged him into the room in one smooth motion. She threw him across the room before he even had a chance to process what he was seeing. He bounced off the far wall above the pit, and fell in.

There was an abortive scream, followed by the sounds of the monster in the pit feeding.

“Can we go now?” Mara said impatiently. “Before we get any more company?”

“Sure. Let’s go, Othvin. Good luck, Brand.”

“Good luck to you as well, Daniel. May we meet again in Valhalla.”

Ugh. Let’s hope not.

So much for a nice, clean covert mission. After that comedy of errors I was on tenterhooks the whole way back through the palace, waiting for something else to go wrong. We finally emerged onto the grounds, and I saw that morning had come while we were in the dungeon.

We took the teleporter back to town, where the streets were filled with morning traffic. By then Mara had stopped grumbling, and just led us in silence. The andregi all stopped and bowed as she passed, so we weren’t exactly inconspicuous.

Halfway through the town we encountered a giant figure coming the other way. But this one definitely wasn’t one of Mara’s brothers. She had to be seven feet tall, with a figure so exaggerated it was hard to believe it was real. Her only clothing was a grass skirt, and she seemed not to care about the way her swaying breasts drew every eye in the vicinity. Of course, the andregi all bowed as soon as they saw her.

“On your knees, worms,” Mara barked.

The elves were already bowing, so I imitated them. Down on both knees, bent over with my face an inch from the dirt. It meant I couldn’t see what was happening, but my ears still worked.

“Why hello, little Mara. Out for a morning walk?”

“Hello, Mother. I was just taking care of some business. You might want to talk to Rendall, though. We had some excitement last night.”

“Oh?” Gaea said curiously. “I had some rather nice excitement of my own last night. What was your excitement?”

“Some crazy young Aesir tried to attack the Halls of Slumber-” Mara began.

“What?!”

“It’s okay, the boys handled it. The wards worked just like they were supposed to. The damage wasn’t bad at all, and they even managed to catch him for you.”

“I see. Well then, it seems my morning may be almost as enjoyable as my evening. Oh, good news, Mara. You’re going to have a little sister soon.”