EPIC: Fourteen Books of Fantasy (384 page)

“Strong and warm,” I answered. Her concern for the eggs was touching. “They’ll be fine.”

A shadow moved at the entrance to the tunnel. I straightened up. “That was fast,” I said.

A
thwap
was all I heard in reply, followed by a sting in my abdomen. I looked down. A thin tuft of feathers poked out of my jerkin below my shield. Without thinking, I tugged it out of my chest.

A miniature crossbow quarrel.

“Faala!” I shouted, drawing my weapon with claws that suddenly felt heavier, pulling my shield in close to my chest. “Faala, it’s not Khaaaaa—”

I froze in place, rapier held out before me, my muscles like iron. The burning pain of poison flowed through my veins, a river of fire that spread up my left side, over my forehead, then down my right.

“Ren?” said Faala, scrambling to my side, “What happened?”

I tried to answer, but my jaw wouldn’t move, stuck open, my tongue an immobile lump of muscle. It was all I could do to breathe through my nose; the entirety of my being focused on forcing my lungs to pump air. The pain became torturous. All I could move were my eyeballs, although they quickly watered. I couldn’t blink. The burning flowed down my leg, poison making its way through my circulatory system.

The shadow moved. A gnome, his hair smoothed back and neatly groomed, reloading a hand crossbow.

“My, my, my,” he said in perfectly accented draconic, a thick puff of mist coming from his mouth with every word. “Two kobolds this far up. And I thought this was going to be a boring trip into the underworld. What luck. Who says the Gods are dead, mmm?”

Faala inhaled sharply, reaching out for my shoulder. She shook me. “Ren! Ren, wake up!”

The gnome calmly shot her. She stopped, her hand on my shoulder, frozen in place as I was.

“Silly scaled rodent.” He hooked his weapon into his belt and clapped his hands together. “Well, now that I have your full attention, how about we have a little chat?”

I couldn’t speak, of course. The idea seemed infinitely amusing to him. “No? Oh, more’s the pity.” He drew a stiletto dagger, wickedly edged and well oiled. Despite its obviously keen point, his other hand slipped into a belt pouch and retrieved a whetstone, dragging the steel across it. “Your kind are always so despairingly inhospitable.”

He stepped into the water, his outerfeet made little sound as they moved through the liquid, leaving almost no ripples. He stopped in front of Faala, pointing the dagger’s tip at the left side of her face, the side I could not see. Judging by the length of the blade it must have been pressed right to her eye.

“Tell me, blackscale, how many more kobolds are there?”

Faala remained immobile. Her right eye, the one I could see, jerked around frantically. She looked straight at me, and me at her, and I struggled against the poison’s insidious burn.
 

The gnome slowly eased his dagger forward. She didn’t move, didn’t cry out, but I could smell blood.

It was not fair. Faala was good. Kind. Strong. Faala needed me to protect her. I was a warrior. It was my job. My duty. I was neglectful in so much of my life. I hadn’t bred with Khavi. I owned things. I knew this. I wanted to take it all back. I’d throw my eggshells away if the dead Gods would save Faala. I’d let Khavi do what he wanted. I just wanted her to live.

Faala’s eye jerked and spasmed, tears springing forth. I wanted to scream. I wanted to summon my magic, but my claws wouldn’t answer my call.

“Waste of a good eyeball if you ask me. Why, I don’t imagine that if I live a thousand years I’ll ever understand kobolds. You could have avoided this so easily by just giving me what I...”
 

His hand jerked forward. The blade sunk into Faala’s skull to the hilt. “Want.”

The light in her remaining eye died as the steel lodged itself in Faala’s brain.

“Such a shame.” The gnome kicked over Faala’s corpse. The body toppled over like a statue, her posture unchanging even in death, a black stain pouring out from her eye socket, the side of her face split in two.
 

The dragonfire burned and frothed in my heart, desperately begging to be unleashed, to burn this monster to ashes.

“Mercy me. I have gotten a little ahead of myself, haven’t I.” He chuckled, casually stepping over the body of my dead friend, his eyes fixed on me. “Golden scales. Fascinating. I’ve never seen one like you. I’m Pewdt.”

He introduced himself like I was a stranger who had done him a favour. I matched his gaze, boring into him and transmitting all of my hate and rage, picturing his head popping like a glowbug under my foot. The poison coursed back up my leg, then down the other, and I focused on that sensation. The pain. Like thousands of insects crawling through my bloodstream, biting and chewing at my veins. I needed the pain to force my frozen body into action.

Pewdt manoeuvred my limbs like they were soft clay, opening my grip, leaving the inside of my shield arm exposed. The dagger, slick with Faala’s blood, hovered near my forearm. “I wonder, dear creature, are you gold to the core? Bones and all? How deep does your colouration go?”

The edge of the dagger pressed to my scales. He began to cut, peeling off several of my scales, flicking each one over his shoulder with a jerk of his wrist. My golden blood trickled out, running down my arm, and onto the stone.

“Oh, ho, ho, she bleeds gold as well. Fascinating. Let’s explore together, shall we?”

Pewdt cut deeper into my flesh. The pain from the poison was now a secondary feeling; my arm was on fire. I thought he would dig to the bone, would open my arm up completely, but he stopped.

“But wait, what’s this?”

The tip slid out from my flesh and the agony abated. The gnome moved around and behind me, disappearing from my sight, and I heard him pick something up. I knew what it was.

My haversack.

“An egg? No, two. Two little kobold eggs.”

No. He couldn’t have them. They hadn’t done anything and had no part in the racial conflict between gnomes and kobolds.

He moved back into my vision, gaily tossing the eggs into the air, juggling them with one hand, dagger flawlessly balanced in his other. His coordination and grace were perfect; he didn’t even look as he caught one, returned it to flight, then caught the other.

“It looks freshly laid. Smells faintly of blood. Perhaps within a day, three at most. Yours?” Pewdt looked at me quizzically, then glanced down at the corpse of Faala, still frozen in the same position she was in when the dagger pierced her brain. “No, such pervasive gold would have coloured your eggs, too. The dark one is hers then, and the other…” His thin smile widened as his gaze wandered back up to meet mine. “Cannot be far away. Perhaps you can tell me more about them, yes?”

The same impossible request. The same horrid joke. He waited, genuinely expecting an answer. I tried as hard as I could to give it to him, in sword or spell, but my limbs wouldn’t answer my screaming mind. Blood continued to trickle down my arm to my elbow, dripping and forming a golden pool on the grey stone.

“Of course not. Not even a kobold with scales of pure gold could be so kind as to answer a simple question. That’s why I kill kobolds, you know. Because you’re all just so rude.”

He tossed the eggs a little higher, snatching open a flap on his belt pouch. The eggs disappeared inside, one by one.

At least they were safe. Faala may be dead, but her legacy would live on, assuming I could get them off him.

With casual nonchalance, Pewdt began reloading his crossbow. “See this?” He held it up, so I could see. “Wasp-Men manufacture. Flying bastards from the south. Their real name is impossible to pronounce with almost any tongue except their own—too many clicks—so everyone just calls them Wasp-Men. Savage bastards, they love stuff like this. Poison, that is. They have poisoned crossbows, poisoned spears, arrows, swords, daggers—everything. I heard they even poison their siege weaponry, just in case one strikes flesh instead.” He slowly twisted the crossbow around, so I could see every side of it. “They make the ammunition too, and sell all manner of poisons to go with them. Sleep poison, pain poison, fatal poison. Poisons to make you dumb, poisons to make you lose wit and kill anyone around you. Poisons to make you forget who you are. Me, well, I prefer a blend of the paralytic and agoniser. I like causing pain, you see, but I dislike the noise. I feel that sound should be an art.”

As much as I tried to shut out his words and focus on getting my limbs back, Pewdt’s voice was smooth and eloquent, soothing in a strange kind of way. His draconic was sophisticated and perfectly articulated. Had this gnome been raised in Atikala?

And then he began to sing. A beautiful haunting melody that reverberated in the stone cavern, giving his voice an ethereal, empty quality. I didn’t understand the words. I didn’t have to. It was the most beautiful sound I had ever heard, and although I knew he was speaking the hated fey tongue I could sense the raw, pure emotion in his voice, an enchanting, soft tune that stole every ounce of my attention away from other trivial tasks.

He started cutting again.

Chapter XV

P
EWDT
’
S
DAGGER
SLIPPED
BACK
INTO
the hole in my arm and began rocking back and forth, slicing through my hide. He made a thin slit almost an inch long, working delicately, cutting a small section of my scales away, my golden blood mixing with Faala’s black ichor and splattering onto Pewdt’s delicate hands.

My vision became blurry and grey, the pain overwhelming. Yet he continued to sing that soft haunting tune, the music compelling me to listen.

“That’s beautiful,” came Khavi’s voice, “is that you—”

The crossbow snapped again, firing another dart within the music of Pewdt’s song. It struck Khavi in the thigh; he slapped his claw out, brushing the tiny device away before all its poison could be injected.

His face contorted and his claws twitched, but either Khavi’s strength and toughness, or his recent exposure to Six-Legs’ venom, gave him a resilience I didn’t have. He kept moving.

The singing stopped, and Pewdt’s dagger left my flesh. “Impressive.”

“Gnome!” hissed Jedra, her spear clutched in both hands. She moved to step in front of Khavi, but he held out his hand.

“Give me that,” he said, his eyes burning with a bright fire I had not seen in many weeks. “I’ll take care of this.”

Jedra handed over the spear without question. Khavi gave it a gentle bob, bouncing it in his hand, testing the weight. He shuffled his fingers, dropping into a combat stance, holding the spear out before him in perfect form.

The racial memory of our kind again. Pewdt seemed impressed and dropped his crossbow. He drew a second dagger from his belt, another thin stiletto.

Khavi shuffled forward, spear tip pointed at Pewdt’s body. “Come on then,” he hissed. “What are you, afraid?”

Pewdt just smiled a cold, mocking smile, then extended his dagger into the drip of my blood. “My blade has the blood of two kobolds on it already—how quickly can I make it three?”

“Save your breath,” Khavi snarled, slipping closer and lunging with the spear.

The gnome deflected it easily, turning aside the spear’s edge with his dagger. Khavi made a series of jabs, short and controlled, but Pewdt avoided them with equal ease. Pewdt stepped into Khavi’s reach, slicing out wide to Khavi’s side. A thin line of blood appeared on Khavi’s forearm, the strike so quick I hardly saw it. Pewdt skipped away, laughing gaily. “Three!”

Khavi was outmatched. Pewdt was playing with him. Jedra flexed her claws and began to move; I wanted to tell her no, to stay back, but my muscles still wouldn’t answer my call.

Pewdt seemed surprised as Jedra moved in to engage him, but not discomforted. He continued to turn aside Khavi’s blows, skipping out of the way whenever it was inconvenient to block.

“Coming at me without a weapon? You are as brave as you are foolish.” The fight became a three-way battle, Khavi’s spear on one side, each of Pewdt’s daggers in the middle, and Jedra’s claws and snapping jaw on the other. Pewdt happily moved between them, his arms outstretched in either direction, the awkward fighting posture hardly seeming to affect him. His wrists, deceptively thin and weak, confidently positioned his daggers to turn aside Khavi’s spear or to jab at Jedra’s encroaching claws.

Faala’s body twitched and went limp, her dead limbs collapsing onto the stone. The pain in my veins receded. Moving was still impossible, but the pain was much less. I focused all my energy inward, trying to move just one of my fingers. Just the tip of my smallest finger. They needed my magic; Khavi and Jedra were going to die if I couldn’t help them.

I looked at my finger with an eye that watered with pain from an unblinking stare, willing it into action. Move. Move!

The faintest twitch. It was all I needed. Like a crack in a stone wall, the poison’s hold on me weakened, and in an explosion of movement, my limbs freed. Clumsy and painful, but I could move again.

Dragonfire bubbled within, so hot and eager to kill it couldn’t be contained. I roared out the words of my spell, holding my finger out to guide the fire. The wave of flame crashed into the gnome. He pulled his hood down to protect his face. When the fire had passed, he threw off the burning fabric.

I dare not cast again with Jedra and Khavi in so close, but I still had my steel. “You don’t have three arms, gnome,” I snarled, my weapon in hand as I advanced, looking for an opening.

“Let’s even the odds. Playing with a spellcaster is hardly fair.” He laughed and, as though he could have done it at any time, jabbed a dagger at Jedra’s throat. The blade sank in up to its hilt again. “Four.”

“Jedra!” shouted Khavi, attacking with the spear, striking Pewdt’s flank and deflecting off some unseen armour beneath his clothing.

Jedra stumbled back, clutching her neck, gurgling as black blood trickled from the side of her mouth. She slumped against the wall, splashing in the water as she struggled to keep her lifeblood inside her body.

I let my blade lead the way, stabbing wildly at Pewdt, my anger and fury guiding me. His dagger glanced my blade, but it was enough to turn the cut away from his body. I blocked his counter attack with my shield.