Master Of The Planes (Book 3) (63 page)

Quintala flung out another blast of lightning, although the strain of such ferocious spellcasting was sapping her energy more rapidly than a hike up the side of a mountain.  

Rugan’s diminished battalion had been pushed back from the crest of the low hill on which the prince had sought to make his stand.  Still in some order, the silver soldiers were curving back in a convex line as orcs to one side and horseman to the other pressed in.  Quintala’s two divisions were threatening to complete a ruinous encirclement all on their own. 

Looking over the battlefield, the half-elf’s acute eyes could make out a broad line of nomads beyond Rugan’s troops emerging at a gallop from the darkness. The late arrivals were shaping to charge up the gentle slope and fall upon the shattered silver warriors from behind.  

“Rugan!” She screeched. Flashes of magical light showed where her brother fought.  She slashed her way towards the spot but, like the end of a colourful rainbow, the closer she battled the further away he seemed. 

There was a grunt from Barnuck at her side, a note of disquiet in the barely verbal orc.  She looked up at the nomads.  Their lines were splitting as they fanned out into two halves.  A frown creased her forehead at the misdirected onslaught.  The nomads were not charging into the heart of Rugan’s almost semicircular line, they were heading for the orcs and the outlanders clustered at the line’s limits.

“What the hell are they doing?” Quintala cried, though the answer was obvious long before the nomads crashed into Quintala’s troops.

“They not our friends,” Barnuck growled readying his wolf for the charge.

“They’re nomads,” Quintala shrieked.  “All the bloody nomads are our friends.”

“Not those nomads.”

The grunts and shouts of dismay from orc and outlander leant weight to the orc’s assertion.  Barnuck snarled and growled his commands as his wolf-riders tried to reform to face this new threat.  Through narrowed eyes Quintala could see a nucleus of lancers riding within the body of the newly discovered enemy.  A tall nomad warrior with a flash of white hair in the darkness rode alongside a lean figure in dull armour.

With the nomads taking positions as fresh new wings to Rugan’s army, the hard pressed salient of the prince’s cavalry was transformed.  Far from being a defeated foe on the brink of encirclement and extinction, they became a dangerous wedge driven into the centre of Quintala’s army and poised to cut it in half.

Barnuck drove his wolf in a leaping charge at the white haired warrior, leader of these nomad traitors.  Quintala heard a shout to her right.  “You called for me sister?”  She swung round to see that Rugan’s standard was a bare ten yards away, the prince himself riding beneath it.   She flung up her arms to raise a glittering shield just in time to deflect a shock of lightning hurled by her brother.

“You’ve lost, Sister.” Rugan cleaved an orc skull with his sword as he hewed a path towards her.  “And now you get to die.”

Quintala glanced around the battle field.  Barnuck had been intercepted by the lean figure she had espied earlier, rangy limbs wielding a sword with furious strength.  “Kaylan,” she muttered as recognition dawned. The orc was holding the thief off with relative ease, but then the white haired nomad drew up on his other side with a scything scimitar and the orc’s body parted company with his head.

“You next, sister,” Rugan growled.  “You fail everywhere, at Colnhill, here, even at Listcairn you will fail your dark master.  Every task he has set you, you have failed.  I should let you live to enjoy his displeasure.”

Fury lit the half-elf’s limbs.  A soldier straying too close to her anger fell in a welter of blood as her sword swept across the narrow gap left beneath his gorget.  Rugan was close now and on every side the orcs and the outlanders were stumbling backwards, driven into retreat by the charge.  There was a cruel triumph to her brother’s words, promise of some disaster beyond defeat or even death.

Suddenly she hauled on the reins and wheeled her horse about and spurred it onwards due north.  Her sword slashed to left and right, scattering the already thinning ranks of her own troops and clearing a path for her escape.

“Sister!” a roar of foiled anger from behind her, the fizzing impact of another lightning bolt upon the shimmering shield that now hung behind her.  She cared not, she jabbed her spurs against her horse’s flank, driving her way free of the press of battle which even now was thinning into a rout.  There was a thunder of hooves behind her but she rode on and fast.  Gripping with her knees she let go the reins of her galloping horse and sketched an oval with her fingers. 

Thirty yards ahead, a portal opened in the air, an opening onto a dark battlement.  Quintala stood up in her stirrups and braced herself.  Then as her horse sailed by she leapt and flung herself in a rolling dive through the gateway she had opened.

The trolls had gone with guttural whoops into the forest, chasing after the fleeing soldiers.  Niarmit and her adversary stood alone. 

Niarmit shook her head as the smiling medusa approached, her steel blade glinting in the last gasps of sunlight.

“So,” the woman hissed.  “My trolls can’t touch you.  How intriguing.”

It was her, Dema, the abomination.  Exactly as she had been in the narrow defile in the Gap of Tandar where they had fought in the glimmer of a winter dawn half a year ago.  Now at dusk in the height of summer they faced each other again.

“You can’t be. You’re dead.  I’ve seen your body.”

The medusa smiled.  “So other people have told me.  Your mystery grows, girl.  I meet so few people who have seen me dead, and I am allowed to talk to even fewer.”

She was not exactly the same.  As the medusa drew closer Niarmit could see that her cheek was unmarked by the ragged scar she had worn at their last encounter.

“What witchcraft brought you here, Dema?”

Dema bowed a fraction.  The sparkle behind her gauze covered eyes was still fixed on Niarmit, but she held her sword insolently low.  Evidently the queen was too slight a threat for the medusa to raise her guard.

“You have the advantage of me, girl.  I have not had the pleasure before.”

“You’re dead, bitch, you should stay dead.”

Dema’s eyebrows arched behind her mask.  The two women began to circle warily around each other.  “So ungracious, girl.”  She tilted her head to one side.  “You must be able to see through that bizarre basinet,” she said.  “But I do not like it when I cannot see my adversary’s eyes.  Would you like to see mine?”  She snatched the mask from her eyes with her shield hand and before she could blink, Niarmit found the chilling blue gaze drilling into her soul.  Her blood ran cold but it did not freeze. She moved still, shielded by the protection of the Helm.

“Interesting, little girl,” Dema said as they stalked each other.  “Are you hiding a pair of pointed ears beneath that oversized helmet of yours?”

Niarmit sprang, sword swung with all the skill her ancestors could deliver. The medusa met the blade with her own and the women traded blows.  The weight of the queen’s arm forced the medusa back.  Dema gave ground with indifferent ease before the onslaught.

“You hit hard for a girl,” she said casually while her snakes hissed a more vituperative defiance. 

“You should be dead,” Niarmit spat.  “You are dead.”

Dema shook her head, catching the hilt of her sword against Niarmit’s.  They strove thus, swords locked while the snakes lunged at Niarmit’s head and shoulders. Serpent teeth skittered across the metal of the Helm and the steel pauldrons she had taken to wearing after the attack of the zombies.

Shocked that a physical attack should get so close and yet not fire the Helm’s wards, Niarmit flung herself backwards before the serpents should find the bare skin of her face.  Now it was Dema’s turn to launch an offensive, pressing the queen into cautious backpedalling as Niarmit sought to keep the medusa’s sword and snakes at bay.

“So,” Dema said conversationally.  “You have me at a disadvantage.”  She grinned as she rained another flurry of blows down on Niarmit’s shield and sword.  “Not with your sword play of course, but by the fact that you know more of me than I of you.”

“Bitch,” Niarmit spat, trying to use her shield to block the serpent strikes and her sword to counter both Dema’s blade and the sideswipes of the medusa’s own shield.

“Who are you girl?  You fight so well I think it the least courtesy I can offer that I should know who it is I am about to kill.”  Her brow creased in a moment of doubt.  “And the question is, if we have met before, why aren’t you dead already?”

“You are,” Niarmit growled.  “Six months dead and rotted in the ground.”

“I’ll have to take your word on the first, and on the second you are sadly mistaken.”  Dema’s grin twisted into a snarl as she unleashed a combination of shield and sword work that had the queen stumbling faster than her feet could shift.  She tripped over her own ankle falling to the ground.

Dema loured over her, sword raised, but Niarmit thrust an empty palm towards her and in the Domain of the Helm she heard the Vanquisher utter a word of command.  The medusa was flung a troll’s leap upwards and backwards, crashing into a tree with bone crunching force.

Niarmit leapt to her feet, bending to retrieve the sword that Eadran had made her drop, and turning to face her fallen foe.  The medusa pushed herself upright too, sword and shield still held in her hand, quite uninjured by a flying fall that would have killed an orc and even crippled an ogre.

“Again?” Dema said, as she took a circling step towards the queen.

“Is it troll blood that runs in your veins?” Niarmit gasped. 

Dema’s mouth bent in a sad smile.  “It’s a little bit more complicated than that.”  And then she charged and the clash of their swords rang out across the darkness.

Quintala’s rolling dive through the portal carried her clean across the tower top and fetched her up with bruising force against the battlements.  From an undignified position on her back she looked up at the startled orc guard, so shocked by her appearance that he almost dropped his crossbow.

“What’s the matter?” she spat from the floor.  “This is the castellan’s tower and I am the castellan.  I’m allowed to come and go as I please, aren’t I?”

The orc nodded dumbly.  Quintala staggered to her feet, glad that the top of Listcairn’s beacon tower had been wide enough to allow her for her skidding dismount.  Any narrower or less well judged and she could have flown through an embrasure between the merlons.  There would have been no good option after that, either falling through the conical slate roof to the castellan’s chamber two storeys below, or falling the tower’s full height to the castle’s outer bailey.

She straightened up, dusting down her clothes.  “You should appreciate real skill when you see it, my leathery friend,” she told the orc.

The snarl of aggression was not the response she had been expecting.  She spun round a fulsome rebuke forming on her lips to see the orc raising his crossbow to fire, not at her, but back where she had come from. She completed her half turn to see Rugan stepping through the gate onto the tower top, and behind him in the distant  battle field by the Saeth a crowd of soldiers and even that bloody thief were gathering to follow.  She’d left the fucking gate open.

She snapped her fingers in a flick of dismissal and the oval portal shrank to a point before vanishing, leaving her brother alone on the tower top.  The orc’s stuttering aim, indeed his entire body, was ruined by a princely lightning bolt to the chest.  The spell held him for an instant in an electric fire and then dropped him a singed ruin across the embrassure.

Quintala flung her own spell, but Rugan had conjured a shield in an instant.  She replied in kind, and the siblings circled the tower flinging magical energy in disparate ways, in a bid each to shatter the other’s defences.  Quintala was not sure what reserves of energy her brother had, but she knew her own strength had been much sapped by the battle she had abandoned and the portal she had opened.  She grimaced as a crack appeared in the shimmering weave of magical colour that she was sheltering behind. 

Rugan saw it too, a snarl of triumph on his lips as he stood to bombard her weakening shield with a spray of spell casting.  Quintala, cowered in desperation, eyes flicking across the bare tower for anything she could use. She reached out a hand, drawing on reserves of energy she had not dipped into in centuries, and plucked a great stone merlon from the battlements midway between her and Rugan.  With a wide sweep of her arm, she flung the stone block sideways.  The relative position of the prince and the masonry meant the stone was flying in behind the shield that Rugan had facing Quintala.  The prince saw the danger and flung himself out of the lumpen projectile’s path, but not fast enough.   He gave a great cry as the block crashed into his right arm pinning it against the battlement.

Quintala rolled the other way, abandoning her own shield and seizing the fallen orc’s crossbow.  She raised herself into a kneeling position as her brother struggled beneath the masonry.  It was a narrow shot.  There was only a small gap between the edge of Rugan’s shimmering shield and the great stone block which, both trapped the prince’s arm and blocked most of his body from view.  Quintala took quick aim and squeezed the trigger.

Her brother gave a muffled “gmmff” as the bolt struck him in the belly.

Quintala straightened up, puzzled at how abruptly the triumph faded, or how it never turned up at all. A strange numbness seized her.  This should matter more, there should be trumpets, explosions, something less prosaic than a foe trapped beneath a stone and shot with a crossbow bolt.  She should feel more than this strange emptiness, the void of fulfilled ambition.

The crossbow hung limp in her fingers.  She crossed the tower’s short diameter to face her brother.  His eyes flicked upwards at her arrival, the fingers of his left hand scrabbled at the stone which had pinned him.  Blood seeped from the bolt embedded feather deep in his gut.

“Not dead yet then, brother?”  She said.

“Sorry to disappoint,” he ground out a reply through pain clenched lips.

“It’s better this way, we need to talk.”

“A bit late for that.”

“It’s about our mother.”

His face was pale with pain or loss of blood, but his eyes shot a sharp glare in his sister’s direction.  “What of her?”

“You don’t know what he did to her do you?  What Maelgrum did to her?”

Rugan lacked either the energy or the inclination to argue.  He was concentrating on his breathing.

“He told me you see.  He told me everything. I guess I’d known, or maybe suspected.”  She glared out at the offending stars, just beginning to appear in the darkening sky.  This hurt.  It shouldn’t hurt, but it did. “When he took Liessa and her cousin prisoner, it wasn’t just hostages he wanted in order to keep Andril and Feyril compliant.  He wanted to experiment.”

She gulped.  “Living for ever wasn’t enough for him.  Having a successor like Eadran, someone he could mold in his own image, that wasn’t enough for him either.  He … he changed our mother.” She glared down at her hateful brother.  “He imbued her with his foul essence.”

Rugan blinked. She was glad he hadn’t died yet.  He had to hear this, he had to hurt as she had hurt.  “When she courted human lovers, that was Maelgrum’s doing, a sickness he laid deep within her, because he needed their seed to quicken he foulness he had implanted in her.”  Quintala looked away.  “She could not kindle a child without those men.  But the children were no more theirs than that bitch-queen you serve is the spawn of old Matteus.”

Rugan was blinking more slowly.  Quintala seized his free hand, gripping it tightly.  “Maelgrum stole their seed.  Seneschal Quintor was never my father, I am Maelgrum’s child and you are too!”

Rugan coughed, a thin trickle of blood dripped from the corner of his mouth.  Quintala shook his shoulders. “We were both born evil and born of evil.”  She sighed.  “I suspected something.  Some part of me always knew though I could not admit it, even within the privacy of my own thoughts. I had to hear from Maelgrum, to hear what he had to tell of my mother, of our mother.  He told me, he finally told me I was his daughter and then he ordered me to come here to rot and that…”  She stood up, struggling with the memory.  “And that I should leave my brother, not my half-brother, but my full brother, his son, well alone.” 

She glared down at her pale brother.  “You had a right to know, before you died, a right to know that the blood of the Royal line of Medyrsalve never ran in your veins.”

Rugan looked up at her. “I knew before,” he murmured.

“What?”

He nodded at her incredulity.

“When?” Her demand dripped with disbelief.

“Our mother told me, the last time I saw her.  When my father, her husband, the old prince died.”  Rugan coughed, the effort of remembering paining him in mind and body. “Andril had decided Liessa must return for ever to the Silverwood, that I must be freed of my mother’s cloying attention.  She spoke to me then, she told me everything of her and Maelgrum and of who I was.”

“You knew!”

Again he nodded.

“You knew what you were, you knew what I was?”

A fainter nod.

“You always knew?”  Quintala was shrieking now.  “And you never told me!”

She had only the crossbow in her hands and she swung it across his face, clubbing him into insensibility.  “You bastard,” she cried.  And then the tower trembled so hard that Quintala staggered.  She looked quickly over the battlements. The lower wider battlement level, where two guards should have stood watch, was empty and a cloud of dust was emerging through the doorway there.  She yanked open the trapdoor in the tower floor. A plume of dust met her, obscuring the narrow spiral stair which lead down through the beacon tower into the heart of the keep.

She started down the stairway and then spared a brief glance at the slumped and insensible form of the Prince of Medyrsalve.  “Forgive me brother,” she said, “but it seems I have business elsewhere.  Good-bye.”