Gauntlgrym (8 page)

Sylora’s hands trembled before her in nearly uncontrollable rage. She didn’t speak, of course, but Dahlia surely heard every word: This child! This impertinent elf girl! Her small breasts heaving with gasps as she tried to regain her composure, Sylora only gradually calmed and let her hands fall to her sides.

Dahlia laughed at her. “I didn’t think so,” she said, then skipped down the hall.

As she neared the keep’s exit, two corridors presented themselves. To the left lay the courtyard, where Dor’crae waited with the wagons, and to the right, the garden and her other lover.

She had picked the spot well, and knew it as soon as she came to the edge of the cliff overlooking the encampment of Herzgo Alegni’s Shadovar barbarians. They couldn’t get to her without running for nearly a mile to the south, and could reach up the hundred-foot cliff with neither weapon nor spell.

“Herzgo Alegni!” she cried.

She presented the baby in the air before her. Her voice boomed off the stones, echoing throughout the ravine and reaching beyond to the encampment.

“Herzgo Alegni!” she shouted again. “This is your son!” And she kept shouting that over and over as the camp began to stir.

Dahlia noted a couple of Shadovar running out to the south, but they were of no concern to her. She shouted again and again. A gathering approached, far below, staring up at her, and she could only imagine their surprise that the foolish girl would come to them.

“Herzgo Alegni, this is your son!” she screamed, presenting the child higher. They heard her, though they were a hundred feet down and more than that away.

She scoured the crowd for a tiefling’s form as she yelled again to the father of her baby. She wanted him to hear her. She wanted him to see.

She couldn’t quite read the look on Themerelis’s square-jawed face as she came out into the garden. The night was dark, with few stars finding their way out from behind the heavy clouds that had settled in that evening. Several torches burned in the stiff wind, bathing the area in wildly dancing shadows.

“I didn’t know if you would come,” the man said. “I feared—”

“That I would leave without a proper farewell?”

The man started to answer, found no words, and simply shrugged.

“You would make love one last time?” Dahlia asked.

“I would go with you to Luskan, if you would have me.”

“But since you cannot.…”

He started toward her, arms outstretched, begging a hug. But Dahlia stepped back and to the side, easily keeping her distance.

“Please, my love,” he said. “One moment to remember until again we meet.”

“One last barb I might stab into the side of Sylora Salm?” Dahlia asked, and Themerelis’s face screwed up with puzzlement for just a moment until the notion fully registered, replacing curiosity with a stare of disbelief.

Dahlia laughed at him.

“Oh, I will stab her this night,” she promised, “but you’ll not stab me.”

She brought her right arm forward in a sweeping motion, then flicked her wrist, uncurling her staff to its full length.

Themerelis stumbled backward, eyes wide with shock.

“Come, lover,” Dahlia teased, bringing the staff horizontally in front of her chest. With a slight move, unseen by her opponent, she cracked two joints, leaving a four-foot center section in her hands, with twin two-foot-long sections dropping to the ends of short chains at either side. Again barely moving, Dahlia set those two side-sticks spinning, both forward at first, then one forward and one backward. She began rolling the center bar in the air in front of her, dipping its ends alternately, heightening the spins of the respective sides.

“It need not be—”

“Oh, but it does!” the woman assured him. “But our love—”

“Our
lust,”
she corrected him. “I am already bored, and I’ll be gone from here for years. Come then, coward. You profess to be a grand warrior—surely you’re not afraid of a tiny creature like Dahlia.” She worked the tri-staff more furiously then, rotating the central bar in front of her and all the while keeping the two side sticks spinning.

Themerelis put his hands on his hips and stared at her hard.

Dahlia grabbed the center of the long bar in one hand and broke the rotation. As the side sticks swung back to slap against the central bar they created lightninglike bolts that Dahlia expertly directed at her opponent.

Themerelis was lifted backward by the stinging bolts, once, then again.
Neither did any real damage, but Dahlia’s laughter seemed to sting him quite profoundly. He drew his greatsword and hoisted it in both hands, taking a deep breath and setting his feet widely—just as Dahlia charged.

She leaped in, slapping Kozah’s Needle’s center bar forward and back while the side sticks extended and rotated yet again. She dropped her left foot back suddenly, pulled in her left hand, extended her right, and turned so that the spinning side stick whipped at Themerelis’s head.

No novice to battle, the fine warrior blocked it with his sword then brought the blade back the other way in time to pick off the other spinning extension as Dahlia reversed her pose and thrust.

But she rolled the leading edge back and over high, reversing her grip on the center bar as the weapon turned under. She stabbed straight ahead with the leading butt of the center bar, jabbing Themerelis in the chest.

Again he staggered backward.

“Pathetic,” she teased, backing a step to allow him to regain his battle posture.

The warrior came on with sudden fury, slashing his claymore in great swings that hummed powerfully through the air.

And he hit nothing but air.

Dahlia leaped sidelong, a full somersault that set her again to her feet, with her back to Themerelis. When the warrior pursued, thrusting his weapon at her, she whirled around and slapped his sword with the left side stick then turned the blade with the angled center bar and struck it again with the spinning, trailing right side stick, and all three sent jolts of electricity into the sword and into Themerelis.

The man fell back, clamping his jaw against the shocking sensation.

Dahlia put the staff into a dazzling spin before her again, the side sticks moving too quickly to follow. She feigned a charge but fell back instead, extending her arms fully to leave the center bar horizontal in front of her. She came forward, retracting her arms so that the bar slammed her own chest, and as it did it broke in half.

Themerelis could hardly follow the movements then as Dahlia put her two smaller weapons, each a pair of two-foot-long metal poles bound end to end by a foot-long length of chain, into a wild dance. She rolled the flails sidelong at her sides, brought one or another, or both or neither, under and around her shoulder—or one around her back to be taken up by the other hand while the other moved across in front to similarly and simultaneously hand off.

And never with a break, never slowing, she began smacking the twirling sticks together with every pass. Each strike crackled with the power of lightning.

Above them, the clouds thickened and thunder began to rumble, as if the sky itself answered the hail of Kozah’s Needle.

Finally, her fury unabated, Dahlia reached out at Themerelis with a wide swing.

She missed badly.

She missed on purpose.

Themerelis came in right behind the strike with a burst and a stab.

Dahlia never stopped her turn and continued right around, stepping back as she went to stay out of reach of the deadly blade. She came around with a double parry, her weapons smacking the greatsword one after another.

Neither, though, released a charge into the sword, something Themerelis didn’t register. The effective double block had him slowed anyway, retracting the blade, but as Dahlia broke her momentum and reversed the swing of her left hand, he came right back in.

Her parries came simultaneously, one metal rod smacking the greatsword on either side, the right lower down the blade than the left, and Dahlia released the building charge of Kozah’s Needle.

The powerful jolt weakened Themerelis’s grip even as the woman drove through the swings, and the greatsword was lost to him, spinning end over end and falling away.

He reached for it, but Dahlia and her spinning weapon blocked his way, smacking at him in rapid succession. She hit one arm then the other, again and again, and that was only when he managed to block them. When he didn’t, the stick cracked him about the chest and midsection, and once in the face, fattening his lips.

She quickly got ahead of his blocks, the weapons coming at him from any and every angle, battering him, cutting him, raising welt after welt. One strike hit his left forearm so forcefully they both heard the crack of bone before he even knew he’d been hit.

Stunned, off balance, and nearing the end of his strength, the warrior desperately punched out at Dahlia.

She dropped, turned, and swung her right arm up, looping her weapon under and around his extended shoulder. She continued her turn, throwing the back of her hip into his, bending him over her, and with a sudden yank on the entangling weapon, she flipped Themerelis right over her shoulder.

He fell flat on his back, his breath blasted from his lungs, his eyes and thoughts unfocused.

Dahlia didn’t slow, spinning circles, finally squaring up to the fallen man as she brought her hands clapping together in front of her, rejoining the central four-foot length of Kozah’s Needle. She waved the break-staff up one way then reversed, expertly aligning the side sticks and calling upon the weapon to rejoin. The instant she was holding a singular eight-foot staff again she drove one end to the ground and pole-vaulted off it high into the air, turning the weapon as she went and screaming,
“Yee-Kozah!”
to the dark clouds above.

She landed right beside Themerelis, driving the break-staff’s forward tip down like a spear into the man’s chest.

Fingers of lightning crackled out from the impact and the weapon slid through the man, clipping his backbone and pressing down into the ground.

Dahlia screamed out to the ancient, long-forgotten god of lightning again as she stood victorious, one hand holding the impaled weapon at midpoint, the other arm straight out to the other side, her head thrown back so she was looking up to the sky.

A blast of lightning coupled with a tremendous thunderstroke hit the upper tip of the staff and channeled down. Some of its burning force entered Dahlia, bathing her in crawling lines of blue-white energy, but most of it jolted into Themerelis with devastating effect. His arms and legs extended out wide, to their limits and beyond, kneecaps and elbows popping in protest. His eyes bulged as if they would fly from their sockets, and his hair, all of his hair, stood out straight, dancing wildly. A great hole was blown right through the man along the length of the metal staff that impaled him.

And Dahlia held on, basking in the power as it flowed through her lithe form.

She looked down at the gathered barbarians.

Finally she spotted Herzgo Alegni among them, moving forward through their ranks.

“Herzgo Alegni, this is your son!” she cried.