Master Of The Planes (Book 3) (65 page)

Hepdida’s vision was going, she tried to turn her head to bend her dimming sight away from the leering face of her half-elven murderess.  “Die bitch,” Quintala cried her fingers digging into Hepdida’s throat.

There was clatter of noise, the arrival of the soul reapers perhaps, but less celestial than Hepdida had expected.

“Hello, sis.”

Hepdida forced her eyes wider, helped by the slight easing of the pressure on her throat as Quintala looked up at this new distraction.

Rugan sat slumped in the stairwell from the upper storey.  His face was strangely misshapen and his right arm was a bloody ruin, but in his left he held a wavering crossbow its aim precessing gently in the general region of his sister and her victim.

Hepdida felt the pressure of Quintala’s knees, digging harder into her arms as the half-elf prepared to spring.  But then there was the twang of a crossbow string and Quintala did leap but she fell awkwardly and Hepdida rolled free spluttering for breath.

She had to move, she had to move quickly.  But her neck was sore, her head pounding and her limbs leaden heavy.  She staggered upright.  “Quick, girl,” Rugan’s voice rasped.  She shook her head, the cloudiness clearing from her vision.  Quintala lay at an awkward angle on the floor.  The half-elf was coughing and she pushed herself into a half sitting position with her hands.  Rugan was struggling to reload the crossbow one handed.

Hepdida stumbled warily around the fallen sister.  Quintala glared at her.  The half-elf pressed her palms against the floor pushing herself backwards against the wall.  As she did so her tangled legs stretched out straight and limp before her.  The half-elf’s face was fierce in painful concentration with every scraped inch.  Hepdida glimpsed the feathered tail of the crossbow bolt sticking out from Quintala’s shoulder.  From the angle of the projectile, Hepdida guessed it must have struck while Quintala’s body had barely risen from her horizontal leer over the princess’s choking form.

“Be still, sister,” Rugan growled as the next quarrel slipped uselessly unloaded through his fingers.  

“Fear not, brother,” Quintala coughed.  “You have done for me at last.  My back is shot through and there is a gushing in my chest that says I will not last to enjoy life in a bath chair.”

“Is the abomination destroyed?”  Rugan addressed Hepdida, for the moment his sister’s pale and breathless face the lesser of his concerns.

Hepdida skirted quickly around Quintala’s motionless feet and over Gwin’s body to get back into the castellan’s chamber.  The bottle sat where she had left it on the desk.  She lifted it carefully and pulled the stopper.  One drop could start a bonfire, Quintala had said, if anything from her lips could ever be trusted.  She held the flask at arm’s length over the medusa’s body and tipped it carefully.  It was hard to judge the liquid level and before Hepdida knew it a splash of several drops had fallen on the chainmail shirt which Dema wore in death as she had in life.

Hepdida started in shock at the excessive spillage, but nothing happened.  The runny liquid merely seeped through the gaps in the chainmail, leaving clean polished links as the only sign of its passing.  Hepdida waited a second then another and was about to tip some more from the flask when flames erupted from the body, blazing as high as the timbers of the roof.  In shock she dropped the bottle and it fell and rolled on its side leaking fluid across the timbers of the foor.  She looked in horror at the liquid running between the cracks in the timber floor.

Then she fled from the room, desperately hauling Gwin’s body out of the way of the door.  The crackle of timbers from the room brought a raised eyebrow from the pale prince.  “Job done then?” he growled with a wince.

“I dropped it,” Hepdida cried in alarm.  “I dropped the bottle.”

“Best pull the door to then, girl,” Quintala breathed.  “Maelgrum’s wizard lock was designed to keep everything, including fire at bay.  From the outside anyway. It should work both ways, for a while at least.”

Hepdida needed no encouragement from the crippled traitor.  Partly driven by the magic laid upon it, partly by Hepdida’s frantic tug on the iron hasp, the heavy oak door swung closed, shutting out the roar of the flames in the chamber beyond.

The princess leapt across the stone of the landing to Rugan’s side.  “Come on, we’ve got to get you out of here.”

Up close she could see the dreadful state the prince was in.  The ugly swelling stretching from temple to jaw was the least of his injuries.  His right arm was a mangled ruin, she bit back a retch at the sight of white bone through bloodied flesh.   Blood leaked around the end of a crossbow quarrel buried in his stomach.  “I don’t think I’m going anywhere, girl,” he said.

“Come on,” she grabbed at his uninjured arm but then let it fall as the movement of his body brought a roar of pain from the half-elf.

“You get out of here, girl, just go!”  He ground the command out with something like his old fierce hostility.  “Go!”

“I’ll get help,” she started the first few steps up the stairway.  “I’ll come back.”

“Don’t,” he ordered. “Just save yourself, girl.  Someone has to keep an eye on my witch of a sister.  There is spite in her still, I am sure.”

Hepdida gulped, looking at the prince’s angry face.  “For the sake of the Goddess, go!”

She ran up the steps.  The wall was already warm to the touch of her fingers as the heat of the inferno beyond leached through the stone.  Tears were evaporating on her cheeks.

Niarmit winced at the pain of the wounds she had already suffered and in anticipation of the blow that was yet to come.  There was a snarl of rage from the medusa then a soft whoosh, a draft of air, and nothing.

Niarmit creaked open one eye, the moonlit earth of Coln forest stared back at her, speckled with the dark wet stains of her own blood.  She strained her ears to hear the sounds of her adversary.  Nothing.  She was alone.  Alone and bleeding her life out in the dirt.  She cried out in pain as she reached with her wounded arm for the crescent around her neck.  “Sanaret servum tuum carus dea,” she mouthed.  It was a delicate balance.   Invoking the grace of the Goddess was a draining experience, sucking out what little strength she had.  She felt faint, nearly fit to swoon into unconsciousness.  But if she passed out before she could stem this bleeding and knit the ruptured tissue together then death would claim her as surely as if she attempted no healing.

She grimaced with the pain that alone kept her awake.  It was cold by this forest, but she would not die, not here, not alone.  She gasped as she looked at the belly wound she had clasped her hand over.  It was high, half way between hip and ribcage and a couple of inches in from her side.  Was her child safe?  Where would the life within her lie at this point in her pregnancy.  She felt a foolish panic for not knowing. 

Then she shook her head and seized upon the crescent again drawing on the grace of the Goddess and adding a prayer for her unborn child.   When the bleeding of her wounds had slowed to an ooze she staggered to her feet, dizzy from the physical and spiritual drain than had sapped her strength. 

The Helm lay on its side a dozen yards away.  She ambled towards it, pushing the crescent back inside her jerkin.  Her fingers touched the royal ankh and she pulled that out.  It glowed a steady pink, she still had an heir, an heir that was not of her own line.  The ankh would not glow red until her child was born, if that should ever come to pass.  But which of her successors did the ankh glow for now, was it her cousin Hepdida, or her aunt Giseanne?  Niarmit dared not dwell too heavily on that thought.

She seized the Helm and set it on her head.  A clamour of voices erupted in her head.  Impatient minds plucked at her body and senses anxious to see for themselves what lay before her.  She shook off their cloying bids for control.

“The medusa is gone,” she told them.  “She just vanished.”

“The gate must have been destroyed!”  Eadran declared, his voice quelling the chatter more effectively than the queen’s.

Niarmit nodded.  “She has gone back then, into the past to keep her appointment with death.”  She allowed herself a pained smile.  “She has been denied that share in the great victory that Maelgrum promised her.”

“You are hurt,” Gregor called. 

“You need healing,” Thren said.

“I am as healed as I can be,” Niarmit told him.  “But even if Dema is gone, there is still a horde of trolls chasing the remnants of mine and Johanssen’s soldiers through this forest.  They will be a mile or more in the forest but we must help them.”  She glanced around the abandoned forest edge.  “Can anyone see a horse?  I don’t think I can run very fast.”

“Give me your hands, girl,” Eadran commanded and she let him.  She saw her fingers fan out, pointing a spray of digits at the forest edge.  White flame plumed from beneath her nails jetting into the forest in a conflagration which caught at the trees so quickly one might have thought them dried to kindling by a drought.

“Eadran, what are you doing?”  She exclaimed as a wall of fire grew along the tree line.

“I have a power over flame that makes using quick oil look like rubbing two sticks together,” the Vanquisher declared with a laugh.  “See how it burns.”  It was true, the fire was spreading into the forest interior faster than wind.

“But the trees.”

“Bugger the trees, it’s the trolls we need to destroy.  Unreliable and inflammable, the idiots have run inside a woodpile and I have the match.”

“What about the men?”  She opened her eyes in the Domain of the Helm to glare at the amused form of Eadran on his white throne.  “What about them, how will they escape the flames?”

“They have more chance of escaping the fire than they do of escaping the trolls,” Eadran said with a shrug.  He quailed a little beneath the intensity of her glare.  “I will do what I can to constrain the flame,” he said. 

“Do it!”

Niarmit opened her eyes again in the Petred Isle, her face glowing from the heat of the roaring flames.  “Forgive me Tordil,” she murmmered at the sight of the blazing deforestation.

The half-elven siblings lay slumped on opposite sides of the stone landing.  Rugan had abandoned his attempts to reload the crossbow.  Quintala lay deathly pale, only occasionally raising her hands in a weak flutter above the floor.

“So this is it then,” she murmured.

“I’m five hundred years old, sister,” Rugan gasped.  “I’m looking forward to a day off.”

She laughed at that, a painful cough that accelerated the rushing sensation in her chest.  She shook her head.  “You always knew, and you never told me.  Never.”

He shifted his shoulders in the slightest of shrugs.  “I spent over four centuries, knowing that an evil lurked within me.”  Words came with difficulty, but still her brother felt the need to speak, to share as he had never shared before.  “I watched myself all the time, trying to spy the first sprouting of his desires, of his motivations. Knowing I had no right to the throne I sat upon, that everyone who doubted me had a better reason than they could ever have known for such distrust.”

“You wanted to spare me that, brother?”  She murmured. “You shouldn’t have bothered, I felt it anyway.”

He gave a small shake of his head.  “Not to spare you no, I was too absorbed in my own worries.  Too selfish.  I should have tried to help you.  I’m sorry.”

“Tried to save me from myself eh?” she grinned.  “I think I was born to self-destruct.”

“No child is born evil.”

Quintala laughed a racking coughing laugh that specked her breath with blood.

“I’m glad you can laugh at death’s door,” Rugan snorted.

She shook her head.  “All my life I lived in your shadow, brother, and for all your many many faults you were always everyone’s favourite half-elf.  Everybody trusted you more than they trusted me.”

He tried to speak but she raised a limp hand to wave him silent.  “Even Maelgrum, even Maelgrum.  You were his favourite.  He admired your caution, he would not let me kill you.  He would not let anyone kill you.”  The amusement consumed her, though her voice was little more than a croak.

“I’m sorry, sister,” Rugan mumbled.  Shock registered in his eyes as he saw the fierce concentration on her face, her heavy arms raised for one last effort of spell casting.  “What are you doing?”

She had put her hands together infront of her, finger tips touching, and was pulling them apart to form a horizontal shape. “I was always meant to die alone, brother,” she said.  Sweat broke on her brow as Rugan hastily reached for the quarrel and crossbow.  “Good bye.”

An oval window opened in the floor beneath Rugan and with a cry of pain and disbelief, the prince disappeared through it.  Quintala let her hands fall and leant back against the wall.  Eyes half closed, breathing so shallow as to be barely noticed.  She could feel the heat of the blazing tower seeping through the stone walls and floor.  She was thirsty, so very thirsty, but at least the pain had stopped. 

Hepdida skirted round the broad battlements atop the castellan’s tower.  The thinner beacon tower rose to her right, but there was no point in going higher.  There were shouts below her.  Flames cast flickering shadows across the small courtyard.  The quick oil had set fires not just within the tower beneath her, but also spreading through the L shaped halls that filled three quarters of the keep space.  There were popping noises behind her as the slates on the conical roof cracked with the heat they could barely contain.

In the outer bailey Hepdida could see makeshift bucket lines forming, outlanders and orcs gathering by the wells, but a steady stream of figures were fleeing from the keep.  Some jumped from the top of the steps in their desperation to escape the conflagration within the confines of the fortress’s heart.

Hepdida scanned the walls of the keep, its four towers and thick curtain walls fast becoming little more than a huge stone brazier for flames that even now licked through the timbered rooves of towers and halls.  The battlement level lay ten feet below the tops of the towers. She knelt up in an embrasure to look down on that section of wall that stood between keep and bailey.  The tower at its far end, in the south eastern corner of the keep was the only one unconnected with the burning buildings.  Its stairway should safely lead down to the little courtyard and the possibility of escape.  But how could she get Rugan up here.

She started to edge back between the merlons when an orc called to her.  “Hepdida, Hepdida!”  She turned.  The creature was clad in a few scraps of orcish armour around its chest and shoulders, but the breeches belonged to an outlander scout.  Behind it lurched two more, similarly dressed.  Beneath a top half of orc garb lay the boots and trews of an outlander and a Medyrsalve lancer.

“Thom!  That’s a really shit disguise.”

The illusionist in orc’s form shook his head. “We didn’t have time to get more gear on, but don’t worry.  Everybody’s running around like headless chickens.  It wouldn’t matter if we were naked or wearing an archbishop’s robes.”  He closed the distance to the foot of the wall beneath her.  “Let yourself down, I’ll get you.”   

  “How did you set such a fire, child?” The other orc in outlander’s trousers demanded staggering with halting steps after the first.

“I need to get Rugan,” Hepdida said, turning to slip back from the stone embrasure.  But just as she did so, the roof of the tower collapsed and and a column of flame shot into the sky, scattering tiles and timbers with the force of the blast.  Hepdida was flung backwards through the stone gap and she was falling.  She felt the feathery touch of hands reaching for her and then her head hit something hard and her vision went dark.