CHAPTER FIVE #3
The halls of the fortress’s central keep were eerily quiet.
All of the King’s Guard stationed in the central tower were missing from their posts, with only a few drops of blood an occasional sign of disturbance to hint at their fate.
Cann and his sons, followed by the King’s Guard who had been stationed in the east wing, padded through the silent corridors.
In the king’s suite they found the bodies of Dorian X and his valet, Marten, both unmistakably dead. Cann shared grim looks with the others. Even with the eyewitness accounts of his sons, this irrefutable proof of Sebourne’s treachery left him stunned.
“When we find him,” Cann growled softly, “he’s mine.”
His boys nodded. Together, they slipped back into the hallway and made their way to the stone steps leading to the central hall.
They found Sebourne and two of his men disposing of the body of a King’s Guard in the first hallway of the west wing.
Cann didn’t hesitate. With a speed that would have done his Elvish kin proud, he pulled an arrow from the quiver at his back, nocked it, aimed, and let fly. A second arrowed followed a split second later.
Sebourne’s two companions dropped without a sound. The Great Lord whirled, blade unsheathed and raised for battle. At the sight of Cann and his sons, Sebourne’s lip curled.
“You,” he spat. “I should have known.”
“Ta, me,” Cann snarled. “You miserable, jaffing traitor.” He thrust his bow at his son Severn. His hand dropped to the hilt of the blade sheathed at his hip, and he drew the shining blade from its scabbard.
“Traitor, am I?” Lord Sebourne snarled, baring teeth like a lyrant issuing challenge. “Because Great House Sebourne is finally standing up to that puling Fey-lover of a king?”
“Because Great Lord Sebourne is a spineless rultshart of an assassin, too cowardly to face his enemy in open battle.” Cann crossed the courtyard in a few long strides and took his battle stance, sword raised.
“I’ll face you—gladly.” Sebourne raised his sword. Torchlight glinted along the blade’s fine, gleaming length. “You killed my son. You and those Fey maggots—and that loose-legged slut you called a daughter.”
The insult to Talisa did not make Cann charge recklessly at his opponent as Sebourne had no doubt intended. Instead, all his anger, all his grief, shrank down into a hard, icy knot deep inside his core.
“Your son was a weak, spoiled bully,” he replied. “I should never have let my daughter waste herself on him. Even on his best day, he wasn’t worthy to kiss her hem.”
Satisfaction surged inside him as Sebourne’s nostrils flared.
The Great Lord swung his blade with reckless force.
Cann dodged the blow with ease and swung at Sebourne’s unprotected back.
Dervas spun sharply, raising his shield in time to deflect Cann’s blow.
He was no stranger to warfare and no easy kill, with reflexes honed by a lifetime of living in the wilds of the northern borders.
Like Cann, there were few lords who could best him.
They flowed from one masterful form to another, attacking and counterattacking with blurring speed and steady, relentless prowess. Scissor Blades. Circle of Ice. Death Drop. Ring of Fire. Shield Strike. Helm Cleaver. Neither flinched or faltered.
Cann had appreciated Sebourne’s skill a time or two in the past, and they’d spent many a day sparring together in a friendly rivalry. Right now, he heartily regretted those days. Sebourne knew him too well, knew how he attacked, defended, which combinations came most naturally to him.
But, then, he knew Sebourne, too.
He watched for the patterns that inevitably appeared in Sebourne’s fighting.
And eventually, it came. After a particularly savage series of attacks and parries, a panting, sweat-drenched Sebourne backed off into a lighter attack called Maiden’s Dance.
The series of teasing blows, though swiftly delivered, carried much less strength behind them.
They weren’t meant to kill, only to inflict numerous shallow wounds to weaken an opponent through blood loss and shake his confidence.
Cann took more of the wounds than he normally would, hoping that would encourage Sebourne to attempt his favorite next move.
And there it was. Maiden’s Kiss… the glancing blow to the face intended to lay open the cheek or blind an eye.
Not a killing blow, just a bloodletter like Maiden’s Dance, but to dodge the Kiss—which was often the instinctive response—put a fighter off-balance.
The attacker could then deliver a hard blow and a sweep of his boot across the defender’s ankle to put the defender down on his back and vulnerable to Final Point, a sword buried deep in a vulnerable throat.
Cann didn’t dodge. He spun into the Maiden’s Kiss, taking the side of Sebourne’s blade across the cheek.
He felt the sting, the warm spurt of blood as his skin split.
But helm and chain-mail coif saved him from worse injury as he spun into and under the blade, ducking beneath Sebourne’s sword arm.
Cann’s sword bit deep into Sebourne’s wrist as he went, while his left hand reached for one of the black Fey’cha strapped to his chest. He sprang up behind Dervas, dagger in hand, to deliver a slicing blow to the vulnerable back of Sebourne’s leg
Sebourne went down on one knee, his sword clattering to the courtyard’s paving stones.
Breathing heavily, Cann circled back around, kicked Dervas’s fallen sword across the courtyard, and thrust his sword under Sebourne’s chin. “You traitorous rultshart. I should kill you now.”
“Then why don’t you?” The defeated Great Lord hugged his injured hand to his chest and curled his lip in a sneer.
“Because you don’t deserve a quick death, Dervas.
Our new king, whose father you slew, will want you punished as the traitor you are.
” Cann nodded to the King’s Guard, then stepped back and sheathed his sword.
“May the gods have mercy on your Shadowed soul.” Abruptly feeling drained and hollow, Cann turned to rejoin his sons.
“I won’t need that mercy, Barrial,” Sebourne called after him. Then his voice took on a Dark edge, and he added, “But you will.”
Cann saw Sev’s eyes widen. He heard Parsis shout, “Da! ‘Ware!” just as Sev raised his father’s Elfbow, arrow nocked and drawn.
Cann spun and dropped to one knee, blade in hand, to see Sebourne lift his uninjured arm.
The cuff of Sebourne’s sleeve had fallen back to reveal a small bow strapped to his wrist.
Cann’s sword, Sev’s arrow, and the King’s Guards’ swords all pierced Great Lord Sebourne in an instant. The poison dart from the wristbow bounced off the wall behind Cann’s head and fell harmlessly to the stone pavers.
Mortally wounded, Dervas Sebourne, the last of his Great House, cried, “Gamorraz!” then toppled to the paving stones. Bright streamers of blood spilled from his nose and mouth as his pierced heart pumped the final moments of his life away.
On Seborne’s chest the round moonstone in his necklace began to glow.
“What the—?” One of the King’s Guard bent down to examine the pendant. The white stone grew brighter.
Cann had no idea what the thing was, but he knew magic when he saw it. And if the magic was Dervas’s dying gift to them, it couldn’t be good.
“Put it down!” he cried. “Get back! Everyone get back!”
His warning came too late for the guard holding the necklace.
Bright light gave way to rapidly expanding darkness.
The guard screamed in helpless terror as the growing blackness consumed his hand and arm and half his torso.
The smoldering remains of his body dropped to the ground and convulsed.
Howling shadows fell upon his twitching corpse with ravening hunger.
“Demons!” someone cried, and the Celierians scattered.
Screams erupted from all corners of the castle.
“Attack! We’re under attack!”
“Da! Look!” Severn pointed back towards the open portal behind them.
Cann looked in time to see a great, tawny cat leap from the well, a brightly garbed and veiled Feraz warrior on its back.
The warrior carried a strange urn on a chain that he spun in circles over his head.
Some sort of liquid sprayed forth, the fine droplets settling on the fleeing Celierians.
The Celierians cried out, some slapping themselves where the droplets had landed on their skin.
They slowed, stumbled a bit as if they were disoriented.
Several of them shook their heads and rubbed at their eyes.
But then, one by one, they straightened and drew their swords.
“The king! Save the king!” they cried.
And they fell upon their fellow countrymen, hacking and slashing their own people.
“Krekk,” Cann swore. They were in trouble. If the Eld took the castle from the inside, all the allies encamped around Kreppes would be geese plump for the plucking. “Sev, Parsi—to the gate!” he cried to his sons. “We’ve got to open the gate! We can’t let them take the castle.”
They raced up towards the outer courtyard and the main fortress gates, but before they could reach it, a mob of magiccrazed Celierians blocked their way.
Blades flashed and whirled. Cann and his sons were all gifted swordsmen, trained from birth by the dahl’reisen who guarded Barrial land. Blood spewed—none of it theirs—but as the droplets splattered on Cann’s face, his eyes and skin began to burn and a strange, disorienting fog came over him.
“Da?” Parsis grabbed his arm.
Parsis’s face went in and out of focus. He blinked, rubbing at his eyes with bloody hands. A strange scent filled his nostrils, warm and exotic, intoxicating. On the heels of the scent came fervor. Bloodlust. Courage and determination.
The face hovering before him changed. Shadows played across the features, twisting and reshaping them into the face of the enemy. Pale, skin untouched by sunlight, hellish black pits for eyes, evil oozing from its pores.