The Hero of Varay (29 page)

I took a couple of steps out into the center of the shrine, but I wasn’t ready to get far from the pillars. I didn’t want to have too far to run when I needed cover. Lesh was off to my left, far enough away that we wouldn’t get our weapons tangled, close enough that we could both engage the eunuch at once. Harkane and Timon were behind neighboring pillars, twenty feet apart, arrows notched to bows, waiting for a signal from me before they did anything hostile.

I tugged on my Cubs cap to make sure it was seated firmly.

“You don’t belong here,” the eunuch boomed. Castration certainly hadn’t turned him into a soprano—or maybe that
was
the soprano range of someone his size.

“How do you know I don’t belong here?” I asked, willing to delay the fight as long as possible. But the eunuch was in no mood for games.

“What name should I carve on your tombstone?” he demanded.

“If you don’t know who I am, then you won’t need my name. And I’m not about to waste a week burying you, so I don’t even care to hear your name—if you have any idea what it is.”

“It is Baddassus who will kill you!” he shouted, and I started laughing my head off and couldn’t control the fit.

The eunuch roared and started whirling his sword even faster—like a
Saturday Night Live
parody of one of those Japanese chefs who work in front of their customers with twirling carving knives.

“They call
you
Bad Ass?” I asked when my laughter finally ebbed. “Someone has a terrific sense of humor.”

“I’ll show you humor. How dare you mock my name!”

Very softly, I whispered, “Timon, eyes and throat. Harkane, try for his heart or a major artery, maybe the ones on the insides of his thighs.”

Back with our packs, Xayber’s son started chanting up a spell.

The fight started.

Lesh and I moved farther away from the pillars as Baddassus lumbered slowly toward us. To keep a sword extended toward each of us, he had to expose his whole front to Harkane and Timon, and they started pumping arrows into him as quickly as they could. The shafts didn’t seem to do much damage—a few minor, shortlived spurts of blood appeared and dried up, and each seemed to infuriate the giant eunuch that much more. He brushed at the arrows, breaking them off, then he roared again and advanced toward the pillars at the side of the shrine’s main expanse.

I moved to get in his way, and he swung one of his swords at my head. I ducked, but his aim was high anyway, and the blade bit into the marble column as if it were a rotten tree. While he was freeing that sword, and while Lesh kept his other sword busy, I ducked in to get a shot at his tree-trunk legs. My mouth was pumping out the sword song full blast as I hacked at the back of the eunuch’s left knee—which seemed only slightly narrower than the columns holding up the ceiling.

For all the good I did, I might as well have been trying to cut down a tornado with a butter knife. My blade bit into the eunuch’s leg, but not deeply. I certainly didn’t come close to amputating the leg, and that had been my intention. Dragon’s Death had the sharpest, strongest blade I had ever seen, and I had put every ounce of my strength into the swing. It
should
have been enough. That blow would have cut through a foot-thick tree trunk.

The eunuch jerked his sword free of the marble and brought it down toward my head. I twisted out of the way and feinted toward his groin.

Baddassus brought both of his swords around to block my blade. His reflex gave Lesh an opening to move in and chop at the back of the eunuch’s knee with his battle axe, the same knee I had attacked.

“Harkane, give him a stick to piss up,” I yelled, circling to force the eunuch to turn.

Harkane’s arrow found the eunuch’s groin. The eunuch screamed and doubled over to jerk out the arrow. That gave Lesh and me each one hack at the back of Baddassus’s knee, one slice from each side. There was blood and a wicked gash visible, but it didn’t slow the eunuch at all. The muscles had to be tougher than spring steel. He started spinning, screeching a war chant, and twirled his swords at blinding speed. There was no way any of us could meet him steel to steel. His blades would either snap our weapons or knock them out of our grasp.

Suddenly, without warning, the eunuch dropped one sword and grabbed at his groin. He bent over to look at himself, astonishment appearing on his face.

“Hurry,” Xayber’s son said. “I can’t hold this magic for long.”

Lesh raised his axe and hacked at the side of Baddassus’s suddenly reachable neck. It was a blow that would have severed any other head, but even though the axe blade bit deeply into the neck, Baddassus hardly seemed to notice. I drove the point of Dragon’s Death into the eunuch’s armpit, and he dropped the other sword. But he didn’t move to defend himself. He didn’t turn on either Lesh or me. Instead, he grabbed at his groin with both hands—not in pain, but with surprise. The look on his face was impossible to read. Harkane came out from behind his pillar and drove an arrow through the eunuch’s left temple at close range. Baddassus fell forward then and seemed to shake the entire shrine when he hit the floor.

The next swing of Lesh’s axe finally cut the eunuch’s spinal cord. While he finished hacking head from neck, I retrieved the chain and the ruby. I hung the chain around my own neck to get it out of the way … after I cleaned off the blood.

“What did you do?” I asked the elf while Lesh finished removing the eunuch’s head and booted it away from the body.

Xayber’s son had closed his eyes to avoid watching the final stages of the decapitation, an understandable aversion. I turned the pack under his cage and he opened his eyes again.

“I gave him the one thing he always wanted but could never have,” he said, “an erection. How else would you deal with an immortal eunuch.”

“Lesh, leave off,” I called. “Let’s get out of here.” Lesh had turned his battle-axe against the body of the giant.

We hurried to get into our packs and jogged to the gold doors. I heard a mighty moan and turned to look. The eunuch’s body was getting to its feet—up on one knee, then all the way up. Both hands were jerking the air in front of his groin. The head on the floor rolled over so it could watch. The head sighed in what sounded like great relief as the body spasmed and trembled in the eunuch’s first orgasm. Then the eunuch got down on his knees and started crawling toward his head. We didn’t wait to see if he would make it.

Outside, we had to fight the same dozen soldiers again. They had risen—wounds still gaping but not bleeding—and formed ranks to meet us. Just the sight of them was more than I wanted to face just then. The open, bloodless wounds reminded me of the appearance of the Congregation of Heroes in the crypt below Basil. That was just how I saw them in the unnerving dream/vision/nightmare that I experienced before the Battle of Thyme.

But I had to face these soldiers. Once more we fought. Once more we had to kill all twelve of the shrine’s legionnaires, because not one of them thought to surrender or run. If they could keep rising from the dead, they had no incentive to quit. My companions and I lost too much time in the fight. As we finished off the last of the soldiers for the second time, the gold doors opened and the eunuch charged out, roaring his rage. His head was firmly, if not tidily, back on his shoulders again; there were bits hanging out that shouldn’t have. He had swords in both hands. His tiny stub was dripping.

We ran for the maze. This time we didn’t waste time trying to beat the maze by the “rules.” We followed passages when they were convenient, but stayed up top as much as possible. We lost ground to the pursuing Baddassus every time we had to go down into the maze to cross a passageway.

But the eunuch wasn’t very fast on his feet. At his size, every step had to send shock waves through his entire body, especially at any kind of speed. And he kept stopping to look down at himself, to touch his stub. His preoccupation gave us time to get clear of the maze and to start running for the narrow ledge around that rock shoulder at the end of the shrine’s high valley. There was no way that the eunuch could get his bulk around that. But we hurried on quite a bit farther before we stopped to rest.

It wasn’t until we were out of the reach of Baddassus and had time to quench our thirst and share a quick meal that I took off the prize hanging around my neck to examine it. The gold chain weighed about four pounds, and the pretzel-sized links were soft enough to make me think they might be very nearly pure gold. The ruby was translucent, brilliant against the light, and about the size of a pecan, held by a gold band and linked to the chain—a smooth ruby nut.

“You’re sure this is what we came for?” I asked Xayber’s son.

“I’m certain. You hold the right testicle of the Great Earth Mother in your hand.”

A relic after all, not the real thing, I thought. It was a relief … and also something of a disappointment.

“One down, one to go,” I said.

“Don’t count your balls too soon,” the elf said.

That’s an easy kind of thing to say when you’re in a spot like ours. And three hours later, we had a dragon after us.

    We did luck out on timing. We had just found a cave and decided to camp for the night. The dragon came over the next peak and dove straight for us. For me: that’s how it felt. We got into the cave and sat with our blades toward the entrance while the dragon took its time figuring out that there was no way it could reach us. I made thankful noises about real dragons not being able to breathe fire the way fairy-tale ones do. That cave wasn’t deep enough to get us away from much more than a pocket lighter’s flame.

At least the dragon didn’t camp on our doorstep, so we did get some sleep. The next morning, we made a couple of hours on the trail before the dragon returned. I assumed that it was the same one, though I couldn’t be positive. Dragons aren’t exactly common, even in the buffer zone, and none had bothered us all the way out to the shrine.

This time we were working our way through a narrow crevasse and we stayed put until the dragon gave up and flew on. But that dragon, or a different one, was back before sunset. This time we were out in the open with no place to hide. I didn’t have much room to swing my sword, either. The shelf we were edging along was only about thirty inches wide, with a wall behind us and a sheer drop in front.

It was not a good place to be. I had Dragon’s Death out, but all I could hope to do was fend the dragon off for a short time. It dove at us, then had to pull to one side or the other. At least it couldn’t hover, and there was no room for it to perch on the ledge with us or really use the advantage of its claws and teeth.

“Can you make this beast think we’re a bigger dragon that it is or something?” I asked Xayber’s son.

“I can try,” he said, not bothering with a wisecrack for a change.

The dragon tried flying parallel to the shelf, trying to beat at us with the end of a wing. But it kept pulling the wing away from Dragon’s Death, so that tactic didn’t work for it either. It made a couple more passes, trying to figure out some way to get its claws into play, then it suddenly veered off, pulling for the sky with all the strength it could get into its wings. I guess our elf scored an ace.

“How long is that bastard going to dog us?” I asked when we finally got camped in a tight little cave. No one had an answer, and the cat-and-mouse game continued, day after day.

Dodging the dragon slowed our progress. Sometimes it would keep us penned up for hours before it flew off. Our food ran out, and in the buffer zone, even as far south as we were, that is almost as immediate a crisis as a dragon. But we still couldn’t hurry. We didn’t dare try the most exposed of the tricky stretches until we were certain that the dragon wasn’t close. We had gone two and a half days without eating, and another three days on extremely short rations, before we finally got back to the valley where we had left our horses and the rest of our supplies.

The dragon found us again just as we reached the high pasture and were looking forward to a badly needed meal.

“I guess we have to deal with it,” I said, resigned to the attempt. I don’t care how many dragons I had faced before, or how many I might face in the future, I don’t think a time could ever come when I would look forward to it. When you play in that league, you only get one loss. Even Roman gladiators had a shot for a thumbs-up reprieve when they lost if they put on a good show.

My companions knew the drill. We dropped our packs and spread out. The dragon circled low once, then climbed and came in for the attack. This dragon wasn’t nearly as huge as the behemoth that the Etevar’s wizard had summoned. This one might not even have been quite as large as the one I had finished off for the elf warrior on the beach up on the Isthmus of Xayber.

But it was big enough.

Timon and Harkane used all of their remaining arrows on the beast. Lesh and I had at it with our blades. Maybe hunger sapped some of our strength, but it didn’t lessen our determination. I was almost hungry enough to rip off a drumstick for lunch.

The dragon aimed for me on each pass, which was no surprise. I would move to one side or the other and swing Dragon’s Death. When the dragon turned its head to come at me, Lesh would dash close to plant the blade of his axe in whatever patch of dragon hide he could reach, then pull the blade free and get out of the way. It was slow going. I was reluctant to take the gamble that I had taken with the dragon at Castle Thyme—the maneuver that had cost the elf warrior in Xayber his life. The idea was to get the dragon used to its foe jumping to one side or the other at the last instant, then to stand still and swing the blade straight into the dragon’s snout, let its momentum rip its head open enough to make it vulnerable to the only stroke that could kill it, a deep lunge through an eye, aimed at the tiny brain in the middle of the back of the head.

The elf warrior in Fairy had died bringing down his dragon. I had come close to the same fate when I tried it at Castle Thyme. The same kind of injuries now, up in the mountains, days from help, would certainly be fatal. Parthet wasn’t close to keep me going with his magic until the healing magic of the Hero could take over.