376. Bloody Fangs
A certain degree of anger could be useful in battle: it could stiffen a man’s spine, help him to overcome that gnawing, cold fear that settled low in the belly at the realization that the prospect of death was real, even likely. It could keep a losing army fighting long past the point they should have, by all rights, surrendered. But too much anger had a tendency to drown a soldier’s reason, and leave them an unthinking brute. And when that happened, you died.
So while Keri let the grief and rage he felt at Aira’s death fuel him, he was determined not to be lost in it. He did not stab blindly with his spear, but aimed every stroke at Noghis’s one remaining eye. It was both the monster’s greatest fear, and his greatest vulnerability. Keri doubted very much that, however powerful the coils of that wyrm-form, and however many words of power Noghis might have learned from his mother, any of it would do much good once his enemy was completely blinded.
And the great disadvantage of the serpentine form in which Noghis fought was that his greatest weapons were located in his head, the enormous fangs set into the vicious jaw just beneath that lone undamaged eye. Every attack the son of Ractia made provided an opening for Keri’s counterstroke to stab at that one, fatal point.
The head fell, jaws open, and Keri slid to one side, snapping the edge of his Næv’bel up as Noghis’s reptilian face shot past. The wyrm flinched away from the attack, but the enchanted steel of Keri’s weapon sliced deep into the small scales which ringed the lower portion of his eye, drawing blood. In a panic, the monsters thrashed its coils to get away, and Keri was reminded that, for all his size, Ractia’s son was neither very old, nor very experienced at war.
The form of the wyrm collapsed into blood, and Keri took the moment’s reprieve to step back and reset his stance, falling into a cautious guard with the spear held low on his left side, one hand just above his waist and the other wrapped around the haft before his chest. The guard placed him in a good position to set against a charge, or to block an attack.
When Noghis reformed, it was in his human shape, which Keri had not seen in many years – not since, as a disembodied, wandering spirit, he had come to the shores of that lonely island where Nighthawk and his son cut the heart from a wild wyrm. Then, he had been unmistakably a boy, looking hardly older than Keri’s son Rei looked now.
The man before Keri was both broader and taller, with a width to his shoulders that spoke of fitness and muscle. Some of that bulk, at least, came from armor, but not by any means all. And upon seeing the armor that Noghis wore, Keri understood immediately why he’d made the change in form.
Plate armor had fallen entirely out of fashion in Lucania. Even jousting armor, which had lingered so long as the sport itself remained popular with the nobility, was now more conversation piece than practicality. Keri, when visiting Valegard with Liv, toured the relics of the Crosbie family’s past. Arnold had pointed out the last set of jousting armor, commissioned by his grandfather for Arnold’s own father. It had been used, Arnold explained, precisely three times, and from then on only been removed from the armor stand so that it could be oiled and polished.
Among the Eld, enchanted plate had lingered for longer, for more than one reason. Keri’s own armor, originally forged for him almost fifty years ago, now, had been repaired and maintained not only because the enchantments were still good, but because he was still alive and of an age to go to war. Osku, the smith who’d headed the project, was still alive and fully capable of wielding a hammer, though these days he more often fashioned blades. The knowledge of how to make plate had not been lost, in the north, because the generations did not pass away so quickly.
Perhaps it had been an Elden smith who’d made this armor for Noghis, then, at Ractia’s direction. Some man or woman of House Iravata who had followed Calevis when that house was broken in half, who had been kept away from the front lines because of their skill, and brought up here to the moon nearly two decades ago. It would explain the brutally efficient lines of the set, and the sigils that pulsed red and orange, etched into every black plate, as well, and even into the helm, with its ‘T’ shaped opening for the eyes, nose and mouth.
Keri recognized the words of power for both iron and fire, there amongst the etchings. He was certain that if his wife had been standing beside him, Liv would have parsed the function of every individual enchantment at a glance, but he was just going to have to find out by trial and error. There were swords, as well, two of them, hanging at the hips from a double-wrapped leather belt. When Noghis drew them, Keri saw that each was about the size of a Lucanian arming sword, shorter than the rapiers that Matthew and Triss used.
Noghis settled into a stance that angled his body, so that he was side-on toward Keri, with one foot ahead and one behind, one blade low in front of him, the other held high and back. The sigils on the blades pulsed in time with those on the armor, and the air about Noghis seemed to waver. It reminded Keri of the tricks played on the eye but the high desert in Varuna, during the hottest part of the day.
“You really are afraid to lose that other eye, aren’t you?” Keri asked, allowing himself a thin smile. Anything he could do to put Noghis off balance was an advantage. “A helm might make it a little more difficult, but it won’t actually stop me.”
Noghis spit to one side. “You’re hardly even worth the trouble of me killing you,” the man shot back. “Save that it will cause your wife pain. Scourge of the North – but where were you at Nightfall Peak? I don’t recall seeing you that day.”
“No, but I saw you in the Ratn Parvat before you tucked your serpent’s tail and ran,” Keri replied. “Not many men choose two blades; it’s a difficult style to master. Let’s see whether you’ve got the trick of it or not.” He slid forward across the floor, balanced, trusting to the toes of his boots to find any scrap metal before it turned an ankle.
Once he was in reach, Keri tested the other man’s defenses with a jab at his armpit. Someone had given Noghis at least a bit of training, for he used one of his two blades to fend off the spear, then tried to close distance, to get inside Keri’s guard and into the reach of his shorter swords.
Keri used the momentum of the block to swing his spear around and slam the steel-shod butt of the shaft into Noghis’s helm. The strike rang out in a tone that filled the chamber, and it sent Noghis staggering backward, shaking his head. Keri, who’d had his own bell rung more than once when learning to fight at Mountain Home, knew exactly what it felt like, but had no sympathy.
He took advantage of Noghis’s retreat to advance, bringing the spear down from above in an overhand cut that was aimed right for the space between neck and breastplate. Noghis attempted to block the attack in the same manner he might a sword stroke, but the force of Keri’s longer weapon was more than his enemy was prepared for. The impact drove Noghis’s right hand sword down into his own armor, with another clang, and before he could react, Keri drew the spear back, sliding the edge of enchanted steel along the skin just beneath the lower rim of the helm in a draw-cut.
Stolen novel; please report.
Noghis cried out, and Keri’s blade came back to him with blood upon it. The wound wasn’t anything that was going to kill immediately, but he noticed that Noghis had neither collapsed into blood, nor immediately healed the injury.
“Running a bit short, are you?” Keri asked, lifting his spear up into what the Lucanian knights called an ox guard, with the haft parallel to the floor at about his eye level, tip pointed directly at his enemy’s chest. It was a position that made for easy parrying of swords, and the sort of leverage that a man with a blade in each hand couldn’t hope to match.
“I’ll drink yours as you die,” Noghis snarled. He lunged forward and slashed both of his swords in Keri’s direction, but he was so far out of distance that Keri hardly even had to step back. But midway through the swing, the sigils etched into the blades pulsed brighter than they ever had before, and two arcs of fire shot out in the wake of the cuts, roaring toward Keri.
He had hardly any time to react. There was no way to parry fire with a spear, so the only thing that Keri could think to do was to turn and protect his face, letting his armor take the brunt of the blast. A wave of heat enveloped him, and pain. He dropped to the floor, rolling across it lengthwise in an attempt to keep the flames from catching. The steel of his armor wouldn’t ignite, but the cloth he wore beneath it could, and he suspected even the leather straps threaded through the buckles, if things got bad enough.
He’d had to release his grip on the haft of his spear in order to roll, and when Keri came back up, he saw that Noghis had advanced. Ractia’s son had sheathed his swords while Keri was trying to be certain he didn’t burn to death, and now the man picked up the Næv’bel, gauntlets wrapped around the wooden haft.
Not the best position to be in, Keri could admit to himself. He had a belt dagger, and he drew it now in his left hand, but against a spear that wasn’t going to be a lot of help – nevermind against a wyrm, if Noghis still had enough blood in his system to shift.
“I think we’ll take this out of the fight,” Noghis said, a cruel smile on his lips. The sigils on his gauntlets flared, and the wooden haft which had served Keri for decades caught fire. Once it was burning well, Noghis cast the weapon aside, letting it roll across the floor, where it fetched up against a pile of scrap metal. Then, rather than draw his swords, he walked over to the corpse of Aira tär Keria, pulled his helm off, and set it on the ground.
Keri raised his dagger, ready to make a charge of it, when Noghis bent over, wrapped his gauntlet in the old woman’s braided hair, and lifted her off the ground.
“Stay there a moment,” Noghis told him, and then opened his mouth. His teeth were sharp, like Wren’s and like all the Red Shield’s, and they tore the dead woman’s throat out as easily as tearing parchment.
In the moment, Keri couldn’t have said whether he attacked then out of fury at what was being done to the Elder’s corpse, or out of tactical necessity – to deny Noghis the blood he needed to fight effectively. It didn’t matter.
He was nearly on the monster when Noghis pulled his face back from the dead woman’s throat, mouth red with still-warm blood, and bared his fangs. He raised his free hand, where the sigils on his vambrace ignited, and a wall of fire sprung into existence between the two men.
Keri didn’t stop.
He threw himself right through the fire, though it licked along the edges of his armor and burned every bit of skin exposed to the air. He came out the other side dagger raised, and stabbed it down at Noghis’s neck.
Ractia’s son dropped the corpse, reaching out to grab Keri’s wrist. The motion didn’t stop Keri from drawing blood, but it did prevent an immediate kill. With a dagger, Keri should have had the advantage in a grapple, but all of those enchantments turned the situation on its head. Fire gouted from Noghis’s gauntlet, and Keri’s vambrace heated so quickly that it began to grow, as if it had been just pulled off a blacksmith’s anvil.
He couldn’t help but scream at the pain from his left arm, but even that hurt. When Keri tried to suck in a breath, he found the air around them so hot that his vision blurred. The smell of cooking flesh filled his nose, and he knew that he was the source of it. He tried to punch at Noghis’s face, but the man caught his fist, and then Keri’s gauntlet began to heat up, as well.
“And here is the end,” Noghis hissed. “Your elder dead, your weapon destroyed, your very armor betraying you. Your pitifully small reservoir of mana exhausted. Left behind by your wife and your companions. She won’t even be able to recognize what’s left of you, if she somehow survives my mother. You’ll look more like a pig ready to be carved than the father of her child.”
Keri felt as if his eyes were drying out and withering in the heat, and it was all he could do to gasp hoarsely. “Who said I’m out of mana?”
Noghis’s eyes widened, but Keri cast silent and swift, with only the whisper of his intent. He’d never be the mage that Liv was, but he’d also lived with her for nearly twenty years. And this spell, the first he’d learned from his father, the one that had saved his life so many times, that had laid low so many enemies, came roaring to life now as Savel raged in sympathy at the back of his mind.
Twin bars of white light erupted from both of Keri’s hands, sucking out every last ring of mana he had left. One took Noghist through the chest, and the other utterly destroyed his unprotected head, blasting through bone and brain alike before continuing on to hit one wall of the chamber, where it left a blackened scorchmark after the spell had guttered out.
Keri collapsed to one side, taking the corpse with him. The metal was hot, and caught between agony and panic, he began to kick at Noghis with his boots when he found that he couldn't get the man’s gauntlets, clenched in death, off of him. Once he was finally free, Keri flopped across the floor, breath wheezing and whistling through his teeth.
Pulling his gauntlets off brought sobs of pain. His vambraces, however, were worse. Noghis’s enchanted gauntlets had made the steel so hot that the etched Vædic sigils, which had been sharp and clear for decades, had melted and run together, ruining the magic. His fingers trembled at the buckles, and when Keri tried to pull the left vambrace off, he couldn’t keep from letting out a scream. It felt like his very skin was tearing off, along with the armor.
When the first vambrace finally clattered to the floor, he could hardly stand to look at the ruin of his arm. What was left of the skin was blackened and charred, cracked and exposing too-red muscle beneath. The sight of it made him empty his stomach, and then Keri felt like he couldn’t get a clean breath of air until he’d pulled off his helm. The worst part of all was that, after all that, he knew he had to get the other vambrace off, as well.
After it was done, and the vambraces thrown aside, Keri lay on his back, looking up at the ceiling, with his hands half-clenched, like claws, at his sides. He felt, strangely, so cold that he couldn’t help but shiver, and for a moment the edges of his vision grew dark, as if he was looking up from at the bottom of a deep well. He’d been bleeding and hurt enough times in his life that he recognized the feeling, and the soldier in him knew that he was teetering at the edge of passing out.
It would be easier to go to sleep. If Arjun had survived, his friend would come and heal him. And if he hadn’t, Liv would come. Even if she had to freeze him in a block of ice, his wife would get him back down to Bald Peak somehow.
No one could blame him if he stopped here, could they? Killing Noghis, that would be enough by anyone’s measure, Keri was certain. And yet. Liv might be fighting Ractia right now. There was no way to know whether she was winning or losing without going to see. Keri couldn’t imagine what he might possibly be able to do to help her, in his current state, but he needed to find out.
Awkwardly, and with a gasp of pain, Keri rolled over onto his belly. Everything hurt, but if he had to crawl along the floor, at least it wouldn’t be the first time. He gathered his legs beneath him, or tried to, and reached out with his right hand. When the raw, burned flesh of his forearm touched the floor, he couldn’t contain a scream. For who knew how long after, he lay there, sobbing from the pain. Not crawling, then. He’d have to stand.
He got the sole of one boot on the ground, lurched upright, and staggered across the chamber, nearly tripping twice over, until he reached the doorway that had been frozen over with ice. It was weeping from the heat of Noghis’s magic, thin and transparent, like a pane of flawed glass with bubbles in it. Keri threw his shoulder, pauldron first, into the ice once, twice, and then it shattered, sending him falling past into the corridor.
Somewhere ahead, he could hear the sounds of battle.