The Hammer and the Blade
"He was a bunghole right from the beginning," Jyme said.
"Truth," Egil agreed.
"Did he say you two caused all this?" Jyme asked. "The curse and such?"
"I think he did," Egil said.
"Makes no sense," Nix said. "And anyone who thinks it does, so indicate."
Nothing.
"Are his sisters even cursed?" Jyme asked.
Egil pulled his hammers. "They're witches and he's a sorcerer and the deeds of witches and sorcerers seldom make sense. But we're clear of them now. We kill this eunuch and go home."
The eunuch strode purposefully toward Egil and Nix, his heavy tread leaving depressions in the sand behind him.
"Things always seem to end in blood," Nix said.
"I blame you," Egil added.
"You would."
While they readied themselves, Baras stalked up to the eunuch and grabbed him by the shoulder.
"Stop," the guardsman said. "You're not killing anyone. Jyme! Help me restrain him."
"Why restrain him?" Jyme called. "Just kill him."
The eunuch stopped, but did not turn his head to look at Baras.
"Jyme!" Baras called, still struggling with the eunuch.
Cursing, Jyme hurried down the rise.
"Enjoy," Nix said.
Jyme and Baras tried to take the eunuch by the arms, but the hulking man would have none of it. His eyes still on Egil and Nix, the eunuch started walking, dragging the two guardsmen along with him.
Baras dug in his heels, reached for his blade. "I said stop."
Without breaking stride, the huge man broke an arm free of Baras's grip and loosed a backhand that caught the guardsman flush on the side of the head. Baras went spinning into the sand and lay still.
Jyme loosed his hold and backed off, tried to pull his blade, but it stuck in the scabbard.
"Egil!" Jyme called. "Nix!"
The eunuch lurched toward him and punched him in the face. The ham fist shattered Jyme's nose and drove him to the sand.
"Strong whoreson, isn't he?" Nix said.
"We'll see," answered Egil, his hands opening and closing on the hilts of his hammers.
The priest closed his eyes in prayer, a momentary imprecation for the Momentary God, then charged. Nix hurried after as fast as his wounded leg allowed. The eunuch, seeing them coming, drew his knife.
Egil closed the distance in ten strides, sidestepped the eunuch's clumsy knife stab, and slammed a hammer into the eunuch's side. Bone crunched but the eunuch did not buckle, did not so much as groan. A punch to the side of the head from the eunuch's off hand staggered Egil.
The priest wobbled, eyes rolling, waved a hammer clumsily, and fell. The eunuch lurched forward and stomped on his head, driving his face into the sand. He straddled the priest, knife held high, and turned toward Nix.
Nix shouted and hurled his hand axe at the eunuch. It hit the huge man in the chest, sank half the depth of its head into his sternum, but the eunuch made no sign he even felt the wound. The hulking man looked down, regarded the axe protruding from his sternum, and pulled it out as if it were a splinter in his thumb. Blood seeped from the hole in his chest.
Nix bounded into blade range, sidestepped a slash from the eunuch's knife, ducked a crosscut from his own axe, now wielded by the eunuch in his other hand, and drove his falchion half its length into the eunuch's gut. Stinking gore spilled into the sand but still the man did not fall.
He dropped Nix's axe, seized Nix by the throat, and lifted him into the air. Nix cursed as he lost his grip on his falchion, leaving it sticking out of the eunuch's guts like a bloody pennon.
"What… are… you?" Nix said, barely able to breathe.
Still wearing the dumb smile and eyeing Nix through vacant eyes, the eunuch stabbed Nix in the gut with his knife.
Nix's leather jack turned the blade enough that it cut only skin, not organs, but it wouldn't turn another. Nix heaved his legs up and kicked the eunuch in the face, once, twice. The man's nose shattered, spraying blood and teeth, but he did not release his grip.
Smiling stupidly, the eunuch reached back for another stab, but before he could drive the blade between Nix's ribs, a roar from the side turned his head – Baras.
Having recovered from the punch, the guardsman bulled headlong into the eunuch, hitting with enough force to push the eunuch sideways a step, causing him to drop Nix to the sand.
The mountainous man, his face ruined, intestines leaking from his stomach, turned to face Baras. But Baras was too fast, too enraged to be stopped, and he drove his sword into the eunuch's chest and out his back. Blood showered the sand, sprayed Nix.
The eunuch's eyes should have widened with pain; he should have fallen to his knees, but he did neither. Never losing his vacant smile and empty gaze, he snatched Baras's wrist with his free hand, pulled him close, and drove his knife into the underside of Baras's jaw, up through his mouth, and into his brain. Wideeyed, Baras's jaw moved up and down, as if masticating the steel. Blood poured from his mouth.
The eunuch pulled the knife free and Baras crumpled to the sand, dead flesh in a bag of chainmail, leaking crimson from the hole in his jaw. The eunuch dropped the knife, pulled Baras's blade from his own body, and turned to Nix, still smiling.
"Shite," Nix said, climbing to his feet. The blood rushed from his head when he stood and a bout of dizziness caused him to wobble. Adrenaline kept him upright. He pulled the dagger he kept in his boot, another he wore on his belt. He wanted to back away, put some space between himself and the eunuch, but he didn't trust himself to move across the sand and stay upright.
"Come on, whoreson," he said, faking a bravado he didn't feel.
Holding Baras's gory blade in one hand and Nix's hand axe in the other, the eunuch lumbered toward Nix.
Since Nix couldn't easily kill the man, he resolved to disable the eunuch's body somehow, ruin his locomotion, and then cut him to pieces.
The eunuch plodded straight for him. Nix circled laterally as best he could, trying to keep some space between them and wait for an opening.
Impatient, the eunuch rumbled forward, stabbing at Nix's chest with Baras's sword, but Nix sidestepped the stab and ducked under the eunuch's follow-up slash with the hand axe. He jabbed his punch dagger into the eunuch's knee and the big man stumbled.
"Got you," Nix said, bounding back out of reach.
The eunuch, however, surprised Nix when he halflurched, half-hopped forward on his good leg and swung a crosscut at Nix's throat. Nix ducked the swing, but in the process his own wounded leg gave out and he fell sprawling to the sand. Panic fueled him. He whirled around just in time to get his dagger crosswise of the eunuch's down stroke with Baras's sword.
The parry sent a shooting pain through Nix's wrist, but he steered the larger blade into the sand and rolled away as fast as he could. He heard the eunuch plodding after him, the crunch of sandals on the sand, and climbed to his feet. His leg nearly buckled on him again. Wincing, he held his ground. He held up his daggers as the eunuch closed.
"These are going into your eyes, slubber. You can't hit what you can't see."
No answer but the dumb smile and an inexorable advance.
As Nix prepared to die fighting, Egil appeared behind the eunuch, teeth bared, his hammer raised, blood streaming from his nose and a cut on his scalp, as if Ebenor's eye were crying tears of blood. The eunuch never turned, fixed as he was on Nix. Holding one of his hammers two-handed, Egil slammed the head of the weapon into the eunuch's skull.
Bone audibly collapsed, brain and shards of skull sprayed Nix in a gory rain. The eunuch stood upright for a moment, the eyes still vacant, the mouth still open in the dumb half-smile, all with Egil's hammer buried halfway in his hollowed-out head.
For a moment, Nix thought not even the priest's blow would fell whatever the eunuch was, but the huge man sagged to his knees, then fell face first into the sand.
And when he hit the sand and the light went out of his eyes, an onslaught
of thoughts and memories exploded from the opening in his head.
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
Memories pelted Nix, a storm of thoughts and experiences not his own. The mental onslaught knocked him backward to the sand, left him face up to the twilight sky, screaming in pain at the setting sun. His head pounded, the pressure building in his temples to such a degree that he knew his head would soon explode in a shower of gore to rival that of the eunuch's.
He was distantly aware of Egil's screams echoing his own, the priest writhing in the sand with his hands on either side of his head as if he could hold his skull together with the strength of his arms. Jyme, too, seemed to be screaming.
Nix rolled over, the pain in his head curling him into a fetal position. He pressed his face into the sand and screamed into the granules. He felt as if acid had been poured inside his skull. He could not bear it; he could not. Images, memories, and thoughts slammed into him, rooted into his mind as if they were his own. He could not shelter himself from them. He could only writhe, scream, and endure.
Phrases thronged his mind, filling his skull, the words portentous: breeders, House Thyss of Hell, the Pact. They stuck in the forefront of his consciousness, the stars around which everything else orbited.
Of a sudden he knew that House Norristru had pacted with House Thyss of Hell. He knew, too, that to seal the Pact, the Norristru men had sacrificed their seed, cursing themselves to infertility, while the Norristru women had been made to sacrifice their wombs, cursed to annual violation by fiends. They were fertile only to a Thyss-born devil.
A fiend from Hell – it had been Vik-Thyss for the last hundred and eleven years – arrived once every two years on the night of the Thin Veil, when the walls between worlds were weakest, and violated all Norristru women of child-bearing age. Of the resulting offspring, House Thyss claimed those of fiendish appearance and House Norristru retained those who could pass as human. The alliance with Hell brought the Norristru line ever more arcane knowledge, brought them command of spirits who feared Hell's wrath should they disobey.
Nix understood that the Pact had become harder and harder to honor with each generation, as more and more of the offspring proved devilish in appearance and were taken by the Thyss. House Norristru had become less like the house of a noble family and more like a mausoleum, empty rooms filled only with memories and the horrors of the past.
Memories knifed into his brain. Nix was Rusilla, filled with measured hate.
He was lying in his bed, speaking to Rakon, who stood at the door of her chambers.
"The Pact was made by Norristru men, for Norristru men. Yet it's the women who suffer for it."
Against his will, images solidified around the words, mental pictures of diabolic violations of generations of Norristru women. He tried not to see them, tried not to understand the reality of the horror, but the images would not relent. They filled him with disgust. He did not know if they were actual memories or Rusilla's guess at what had occurred, but they were terrible enough make him squirm.
"Not this," he groaned, his mouth full of sand. "Not this."
He lay on his back in a bed, arms chained above him to the bedposts, while the scaled, hulking form of a devil pressed down on him, nearly smothering him. He gritted his teeth against the agonizing pain below his waist, at the dry, reptilian stink of the creature. He wept with shame and fear and pain as the creature drove itself into him again and again.
He was himself, remembering the dreams he'd had in the Wastes. They had come from Rusilla. She had been trying to reach him, show him what awaited her and her sister. But he had resisted and never seen. He recalled the swelling, engorged doors, the blood leaking under the jambs, the horrors occurring on the other side of the wood, the bestial sounds of lust a counterpoint to the desperate screams of pain that they hid.
He could not bear it.
"Stop!" he shouted. "Stop."
He was Rakon.
"Vik-Thyss is dead," the sylph said in its singsong voice. "His death has been in the wind for many days."
His thoughts had swirled. In his mind's eye, he saw the family's power foundering, saw House Norristru losing what wealth it still possessed, its seat on the Merchants' Council. He saw himself losing his position as Adjunct to the Lord Mayor, saw his many enemies emboldened and coming for him. Without the protection of House Thyss of Hell, he would be quickly dead and his house annihilated.
"How?" he asked.
And the sylph had told him.
"An ancient breeze in Afirion had the tale of the devil's death," the sylph said. "Vik-Thyss was slain by Egil Verren of Ebenor and Nix Fall of no god, whose names are known on earth, in the air, and to the knowledgeable in Hell. They killed Vik-Thyss while robbing the tomb of Abn Thahl."
He needed another true scion of House Thyss, no halfbreed born of human-devilish blood would do. He'd queried the sylph, and again the sylph had answered – Abrak-Thyss lived, imprisoned somewhere on Ellerth, but the sylph did not know where.
Rakon would find out.
Nix was himself again, and understanding dawned. Rakon had located Abrak-Thyss's prison in the Demon Wastes, at the sea of glass. That is what he had been looking for. And he needed the horn to free him.
Nix screamed again as more memories filled him. He was Rusilla.
She lay in her bed, her mind reaching out through the manse, her thoughts gently poking, prodding, drawing Rakon to her chambers. Her magic worked poorly at a distance, but still she reached, filling the air of the manse with a disincorporated need to see her. She simply wanted Rakon to bump into the idea and respond to it.
He was Rakon.
As he walked the halls of the manse he was possessed of a need to see his sisters, a need he didn't understand.
Nix was himself, and he understood. He understood it all, now.
He was Rusilla.
Her brother stood in the door of her chambers, his smaller form almost invisible behind the hulking form of the memory eater. She sensed his preoccupation and snuck through his mental defenses. Once in, she sifted gently through his recent experiences, touching them as lightly as a ghost, seeing them as if they were her own. She saw his conversation with the sylph, learned the fate of VikThyss.
She'd formulated rough plans on the instant, knowing she'd not get another chance at her brother while he was so distracted. She shoved thoughts into Rakon's mind as rapidly as she could.
When you find Abrak-Thyss's prison, you will need help entering it and freeing him. You should use the same tomb robbers who killed Vik-Thyss in the tomb of Abn Thahl, Egil of Ebenor and Nix Fall of Dur Follin to assist you. What delicious irony. After Abrak-Thyss is freed you can kill them in revenge for what they did. You'll use the memory eater to kill them. The eater will kill them. The eater will kill them. But only they can do it. Only they can do it. And the eater will kill them, the eater must kill them.
She'd buried the idea deep, made it as compelling as she dared, then added another.
You cannot leave Rusilla and Merelda alone in the manse. They must accompany you. You'll drug them. But you must take them with you. It's too dangerous to leave them alone. You'll tell your men they are sick, that you're seeking a cure. But you must take them with you.
But she'd pushed too far, too fast, and Rakon had sensed her mental invasion. He'd flooded his mind with foul arcana and reasserted the integrity of his thoughts. But she'd seen what she needed to see, done what she needed to do.
For the first time in years, she'd dared have hope for herself and Merelda.
Later, she'd entered the mind of the memory eater, enduring the screams of the vanishing eunuch while she shoved memories, thoughts, and images into the vacant spaces of its mind, some her own, some stolen from Rakon. She knew Rakon would drug her and Merelda, making it difficult for her to communicate with anyone. The eater would be the vessel to carry the truth, her living plea to this Egil and Nix. She hoped the memories would go unnoticed by the eater long enough to reach their target.
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She'd thought that if Egil and Nix could slay Vik-Thyss, then surely they could kill her brother and free Rusilla and Merelda. Surely they could.
But only if they were the kind of men who would feel obliged to save them.
And in that, she was taking a risk. She didn't know their hearts, couldn't know, but she had no choice.
A knife stab of pain lanced Nix's head, burning itself into his skull, and it carried a single thought.
Be that kind of man.
He was Rusilla once more.
She lay awake in her bed while Merelda slept, thinking of the frailty of her plans, thinking, too, of what awaited her and her sister if the plan failed and Rakon somehow found and freed Abrak-Thyss.