Death by Cliché (33 page)

She stared dully at the guard standing above her. He grinned and kicked her, smashing her back into the wall. She tried to scream again, but she didn’t have the strength. Blood stained her eyes. Her limbs still shook in the wake of the power. There was nothing she could do to stand.

And so she didn’t.

He kicked her again, shattering a rib, then plucked her off the ground, tearing her shift further. She hung there, broken, bleeding, and stunned, staring into that wide, pitiless face. She reached vainly for her magic, but it was gone now. Burned out. Maybe permanently.

She spat blood across his face, and he grinned.

In the distance, a noise arose, the sound of leather slapping on stone, over and over again. She tried to see past the guard, but he blocked sight lines better than mountains. The slapping grew louder, faster. The guard glanced over his shoulder to see who was coming. He faced the new foe, but he was implacable. That wasn’t the same as fast.

A blade burst tip-first from the back of his neck, sending him crashing to the ground. He hit in a tooth-rattling impact, a spray of arterial blood dousing her even as the sound of the footsteps dropped in pitch, receding now.

Damico shot by in a dead run. He waved one hand without looking back.

“Can’t stay!” he shouted. “Saving the world. Forgive me!”

He rounded the corner, still in a full-out run. For several seconds, his footsteps echoed back to her.

She managed to lever the guard’s body off her legs. She needed to get out of the open hall, so she crawled to the nearest door, and pushed it open.

She screamed at what she saw.

Chapter
Sixty-Three

“Hey. If Dan Brown can do it, I can too.”

—Bob Defendi

amico had read once that a properly conditioned
Human can run down a deer. Not only was Damico not nearly that fit, but his character wasn’t either.

On top of that, the painful insubstantiability (okay, I’m bluffing, that isn’t a word) tore at him as he ran, slowing him, stopping him even, in his final push to the throne room. By the end of the run he wasn’t just exhausted, every limb rang with pain.

He stumbled the last few yards, his hands folded behind his head, allowing his lungs to fill like they’d taught him in high school football. He needed time to catch his breath. Still, with a misleadingly relaxed appearance, he rounded the corner and gazed at the throne room.

Blood and the gory remains of guards plastered the floor. To one side, Gorthander stood over Arithian, the ax bloody, the bard bloodier. In the back of the room, Hraldolf lifted two objects into the air. They were small and Damico couldn’t make them out at this distance, but they had to be the Artifacts. Wind whipped about Hraldolf. A swirling cloud of flies surrounded him.

“Hey!” Damico shouted.

Gorthander, Arithian, and Hraldolf turned to him at once. Arithian looked sheepish.

“What the hell?” Damico said.

“I—” Arithian said, but Damico was having nothing of excuses.

Arithian practically bled out. Damico needed to seize control of the situation.

“You!” he shouted, pointing at the bard. “You were supposed to stall!”

“But I was on a drink—”

“You!” Damico pointed at Hraldolf. “Don’t you know I’m the damn hero? You can’t destroy the world without telling me your evil plans.”

“But I—”

“He told them to me—”

“Shut up!” Damico managed to mask his gasps by making them into screams. People gasped when they screamed, right?

He pointed at Gorthander. “And you! Dwarves get a plus-six bonus to all resistance attempts vs. magic!”

“Oh,” Gorthander said, lowering his ax. “I forgot to add that in.”

“Dammit. Do I have to do
everything
here!?”

They all exchanged sheepish glances. Gorthander held out a hand and helped Arithian to his feet. Hraldolf shifted around, uncomfortably avoiding eye contact.

“All right,” Damico said. “That’s better. Now, where were we?”

“Dying,” Arithian said.

“Killing him,” Gorthander said.

“Destroying the world,” Hraldolf said.

Damico shook his head. His breath had returned enough for him to yell, but his heart still pounded so hard he could feel it behind his eyes. He needed a few more minutes, and he’d be right as rain. He’d be a peach. Dammit, even he was doing the clichés now.

“All right.” Damico heaved a long-suffering sigh (more gasp camouflage). “I’m gonna make my entrance again, and I want you all to be in a suitably dramatic moment when I do.”

“That
was
dramatic,” Hraldolf said.

Damico glared at Hraldolf, and the man stared back, exasperated. Damico shook his head and walked back out of the room, holding his posture until he rounded the corner out of sight… and collapsed against the wall, his chest heaving for breath.

Sounds from the room allowed him to judge their movements as he gasped. He checked his hand. It shook, but appeared solid. Good. He closed his eyes and rose to his full height. Still too tired, he stepped back around the wall and into the entrance to the throne room.

Hraldolf stood before his throne, the two Artifacts held out boldly in front of him. Gorthander and Arithian stood with their backs to the door, their weapons out. Arithian dripped blood into a growing pool. He swayed as if standing took a tremendous feat of will.

“You will not stand against us, Overlord!” Gorthander shouted.

Damico hung his head. Keep stalling. “You’ve got to be kidding me!”

“What?!” Gorthander asked.

“I look pretty impressive,” Hraldolf said.

“I’m a little light headed,” Arithian said.

“Gorthander, heal Arithian,” Damico said. “He wouldn’t be hurt in the first place if you’d read your damned character sheet. Hraldolf, good. Don’t change anything, but you’ll have a line.” He considered them, his breath finally slowing as Gorthander finished healing Arithian. “Gorthander, you say, ‘this ends here.’”

“But he
won’t
stand against us.”

“Less is
more
, Gorthander. Hraldolf, when he says that, you say, ‘but there are only two of you.’”

“Oh, and
that
isn’t cheesy?” Hraldolf said.

“We’re playing to the classics here.” Damico started out of the room.

“This ends here!” Gorthander bellowed.

Damico stopped. “Good feeling, but do you think you can wait until I leave the room?”

“Sorry.”

Damico stepped out. He finally had his breath and heart now, and he didn’t think he could stall any longer. This was it.

“This ends here!”

“But there are only two of you!”

“Three!” Damico said, rounding the corner, his sword out.

“Twenty!” The guards said, stepping out of a door in the back, still strapping on armor.

Dammit. Hraldolf had been stalling
him
.

Chapter
Sixty-Four

“So be it… Jedi.”

—Bob Defendi
(You don’t want to know what he was wearing)

raldolf smiled as the guards swarmed around his
throne, facing off with the three heroes. This was it, his moment of truth. He didn’t need to win. He only needed time to use the Artifact. He held both of them up now as the first ringing sounds of metal on metal echoed through the halls.

“Hraldolf!” Damico shouted over the din.

“Shut up!” Hraldolf shouted back.

“Don’t you want to tell me what this is all about?”

“I told your bard,” he shouted, “that’s the same as telling the world.”

“It’s Phantom of the Opera meets Moonraker!” Arithian shouted as he ducked under the arm of one of the guards.

“Huh? Never mind. It isn’t too late!” Damico shouted back.

“You aren’t convincing me!” Hraldolf said as both Artifacts hummed with power in front of him. “I’m still destroying the world.”

“I mean it’s not too late to come up with a good motivation!” Damico cried as he stumbled back under a storm of armor and weapons.

Hraldolf only watched peripherally.

“Come on. Moonraker was terrible!” Damico shouted.

“Don’t mock my pain!” Hraldolf snarled, looking directly at the fight for the first time.

The guards swirled around the three men, and Gorthander was the only one trained for a straight-up fight. He’d already killed one.

“Give me a pain I can’t mock!” Damico shouted.

Hraldolf locked eyes with his brother and spat. “You want pain? I’ll give you pain!”

With that, he gestured with the second Artifact, blotting out one of the guards and vaporizing a chunk of Damico’s clothing. The clothing disintegrated into little twisted lengths of blackened rubber.

Hraldolf frowned at the Artifact in his hand. It had unmade mountains in his prior tests. It had just annihilated a guard. Why hadn’t it worked against Damico?

But Damico hissed, pain etched on his face and Hraldolf realized it
had
worked. It hadn’t killed him with one swipe, but it had damaged him.

“Now, Damico,” Hraldolf said, brandishing the Artifact again. “I’m going to rub you out.”

Damico glanced at him, the guards rushing back in, his face pained, his breathing heavy. “What the hell is that thing?”

Hraldolf held up the rectangular block of white material. He flexed it slightly to show its rubbery give, faced the heraldic symbol on one side toward Damico. Damico’s eyes widened with horror.

“You recognize it?” Hraldolf asked, and he had to wait for his answer as the guards overwhelmed Damico.

“I’ve seen them,” Damico said.

“I don’t know what it’s called,” Hraldolf said, smelling the magnificent bouquet of the white material.

“It’s an eraser,” Damico said, too busy to peek a second time at the happy cat emblazoned on the side. “A Hello Kitty eraser.”

Eraser. How appropriate. He could ignore the Hello Kitty part. “Well, Damico, prepare to be erased.”

With that, he waved the eraser back and forth over the image of Damico and the guards in his field of vision. The first guard exploded into eraser leavings. The second collapsed, the left half of his side sloughing off into waste rubber. The movement caught Damico across the chest, rubbing away flesh and muscle, leaving him screaming, the sheen of bone gleaming through blood.