The Sword (6 page)

“We have another mekhadadak infestation, this time starting in the master chamber above the hall,” he informed them bluntly. “Gods know if they're anywhere else, too. We'll have to do a full sweep.”

S
ome of the others swore, or started to swear. A couple of them eyed the woman in their midst and elbowed their fellow siblings to shut them up. No two looked exactly alike, although according to Saber, they were supposed to all be pairs of twins. A bit of squinting in the fading light allowed Kelly to pick out the shapes of noses and brows and chins. She discovered they all had a very similar cast in their facial features, though hair and eye colors varied from twin to twin.

Well, at least they're
trying
to be gentlemanly and polite in their language around me,
Kelly thought, wondering at the same time what a mekha-whatchamacallit infestation was and how bad it could possibly be.
Just my luck to uncover the nest personally.

“Morg, do you have a piece of chalk?” Saber asked one of his brothers.

“Always,” the one she recognized admitted, though his long, light brown hair was now down out of its knot, and the headband was gone. He dug a small white rock from one of the pouches hanging on his belt and tossed it at his brother. Saber squatted and sketched out a near-perfect circle on the surface of the largest uncracked flagstone around them, marking almost to the edge of the weeds bordering the stone. Straightening, he picked Kelly up by the ribs and set her in the middle of the smallish circle before she realized his intent.

“You will stay right here and not move until I give you leave to.
Su-bah makadi deh,
” he added as he pulled his hands away. He lifted a chalk-smeared finger and pointed at her. “Do not move.”

“What did you do?” Kelly asked warily, glad it was a warm evening. She tugged her pajama top down a little more, then folded her arms across her breasts to hide them further. Most of the other seared spots were mid-thigh or lower, and there was that rip he'd made earlier under her armpit, but that one over her ribs was embarrassingly close to revealing something she didn't want revealed. She might be borderline starvation-thin, but her endowments weren't all
that
starved-looking.

“You are in a repellent shield. So long as you stay within the circle, you will be perfectly safe.”

“What's a mekha…mekhuda—?”

“A mekhadadak is a carrion-eater, and more,” one of the other brothers informed her, the most blond-haired of the eight men. “Nasty things, too.”

“They were designed over a thousand years ago to eat the bodies of the fallen in a massive war—ecologically sound cleanup,” the one clad in lightweight, dark-dyed velvet added wryly.

“But some twisted bast—uh, impolite person of a mage,” a slender third corrected, as a fourth elbowed him sharply in the ribs, the largest one of the eight with a massive, muscled figure, “—remade some of them to seek out the living, not just the dead, and eat them. They are very efficient eaters.”

“We have enemies who would see us dead, and not just exiled,” Saber added grimly. “Though thankfully few of them. One of those enemies must have conjured a nest of them into the castle…but since we don't go into every one of the hundreds of rooms here, they apparently haven't been drawn out by our movements until now.”

Kelly thought about being attacked while she had been using the facilities and blanched a little. “Ah.”

“If she faints, I'm not catching her,” one of the brothers muttered, about as surly sounding as Saber had already proven he could get. This one had midnight black hair and a somewhat leaner figure. He didn't even deign to look her way, this darkest-haired brother.

“I'm not going to faint!” Kelly snapped, shoving her hair back from her face, then quickly refolding her arms again as several of them eyed the bare flesh of her abdomen, which had been exposed by the action. “I take it you're going to use some kind of magic to drive them out of the castle, and if I stay exactly where I am, they won't be able to get at me while you're getting them out?”

“No, we're going to drive them to the center of the castle and kill them there,” Saber corrected. He started to give the order to spread out to begin the spell-wrought driving, then eyed her. “And every other insect, spider, rodent, snake, and bug inside the actual palace, though we should leave the necessary beasts in the gardens alone.”

His gruff addition made her arch a brow. “Thank you, Saber. That's very considerate of you.”

It was growing darker and getting harder to tell if that was a slight flush on his cheeks, or if it was just a trick of the fading light. “We're behind in our spring cleaning,” he growled, obviously not wanting her to think he was being kind. He turned his attention back to his brothers. “Spread out, each man to his tower. We'll link first to set a repeller spell on the outer wall to keep anything from the outside getting in, then work our way toward the center. Drive everything into the great hall, and do not forget to assert yourself everywhere. Just in case. Open doors and so forth. Koranen, you can flame them when we get there.”

“Why can't Morg do it?” the auburn-haired brother asked, puzzled.

“Because I'm tired, and he knows it,” Morganen returned. “I have enough strength left to drive a bunch of bugs out of our home, but not enough to dispose of them today.”

“And if I burn down the Hall, and with it, the whole castle?” his auburn-haired twin shot back.

“Then I'll take it out of your hide,” Saber retorted. “Okay, everyone, spread out. And be wary when you open each door.”

“Wait!” Kelly watched as they all returned their attention to her. “Do you guys have a flashlight or something I could hold?”

“A what?” the biggest and most muscular one asked.

“A source of light?” she rephrased. “It's getting darker out here, if you hadn't noticed.”

“I'll get her one,” the auburn-haired one stated, and jogged toward the nearest wing. The others dispersed, scattering across the courtyard. Traveling, she noted, outside the massive, overgrown mansion of a building they had been inside of just a short while before. Within moments, Kelly was uncomfortably alone. There was a half-lit moon overhead, but it wouldn't be enough to banish her uneasiness at being left alone in a strange place with strange things scuttling about.

The auburn-haired one came back a couple minutes later, as she peered through the dark at the ground around her for more of those spider-not-spider things with the impossible-to-pronounce name.

“Here.” He snapped his fingers and thrust an opaque white sphere at her, just a little smaller than the size of a volleyball. It looked like the ones she had seen in that workroom she had first arrived in, but it was dark, not bright, just a plain, opaque white globe that didn't have any buttons or switches, or anything to show how she was supposed to turn it on.

“Hey! How does it work?” she asked quickly as he snapped his fingers a second time and turned to go. “And what was the snapping for?”

“I lowered and reset the wards. And you just tap it. Softly for a little light, harder for more, and twice hard and quick to shut it off—don't worry, it won't break, unless you throw it off the highest tower in the castle…though I doubt it would break even then; I'm very good at making them,” the redhead added with a hint of pride and a grin as he walked backward, away from her.

“Got it. Thank you,” she offered, but he had already turned away again, picking up into a light sprint with lithe grace across the now-deserted courtyard.

Holding the white ball in one hand, she hesitated a moment, then gave it a soft rap with a knuckle. It started glowing dimly, like a translucent glass ceiling cover wrapped around a lightbulb. Except it was a smooth sphere, with no openings for a battery or a lightbulb. The surface was smooth and glassy, but it weighed more like lightweight plastic than glass would, and yet felt solid instead of like a hollow sphere. It was a comfortable weight in the hand, actually. Even comforting, because it felt just solid and heavy enough to make a good throwing weapon.

Not that she was going to throw away her only source of light. That would require her to step outside the chalked circle to retrieve it. Since she was alone, and nothing was happening yet, Kelly experimented with the globe. After several tries, she figured out that it had roughly eight levels of light: from nightlight dim to blindingly white. The lattermost, she discovered when she smashed it as hard as she could with her fist, almost dropping it.

Hitting it twice rapidly after that left her blinking from the sudden darkness, big spots dancing in front of her eyes in an afterglow image.

As she blinked, adjusting her eyes, her ears picked up buzzing, rustling, even hissing sounds. Rapping medium-hard on the sphere, Kelly held it up over her head, turning to look at the outer wall behind her, where the noises were coming from. Things moved through the night, mostly small and fluttery, some larger and scuttly. A snake slithered past no farther than a yard from her feet, making her carefully scoot closer to the center of the chalk-mark. It was striped somewhat like a harmless garter variety, but Kelly had no idea what kinds of snakes in this world were the ones best to be avoided.
Better to be safe than sorry…

She felt sorry for the serpent, since it was probably going to get charred when it got to the center of the castle—but then something fist-sized and black surged out of the shadows, grabbed the snake in way too many limbs, and tussled with it until the curling, writhing serpent went limp. It was all she could do to keep from twitching back out of the chalk circle as the mekhawhatchamacallit slurped up the snake like it was a piece of oversized spaghetti.

It paused for a moment, tensed, and dropped something small and black and multilegged out of its back end, and then scuttled onward, vanishing out of the reach of the light within moments. Its offspring immediately pounced on the nearest beetle, devoured it almost too fast to see what it was eating, then raced on as well, following the ragged course of its parent.

At least everything was swerving away from her by a good two feet beyond the chalk circle she stood in, proof that Saber's repulsion spell was working.

Amazing. I'm standing on another planet, in another version of reality, another whole
dimension,
with a glowing magical ball in my hands, a warding spell around me, and gobbly things are eating snakes and insects on their way to a magic-made immolation on every side…Just…amazing.

It was a miracle she was taking it so calmly. Relatively. Her shadow kept shaking from the trembling of her hands, as they held the globe, and her breath hitched unsteadily as three more of those black things scuttled on by. They were remarkably fast and remarkably ugly.

The largest was the size of her head and froze her in place as it eyed her; it headed deliberately her way, then swerved at the two-foot-from-the-circle mark. It remained focused on her, too, sidestepping to keep her in view with several tiny, dark red eyes, before pausing for a long, disturbing moment on the side of the repulsion field closest to the massive castle. Finally, it moved on its way. Driven off by the protective magic the man Saber had cast around her, or more likely by whatever spell the brothers were wielding against all the icky things in their home.

The flow of creepy crawlies slowed to a trickle. Half a minute after they ended, one of the men came back through the courtyard at a slow stroll. It was the one with the hair so black, the lightglobe in her hands gave his locks only bluish highlights, nothing red. He had the same nose as Saber, long but not overly large, and the same stubborn chin, but his eyes were flat and dismissive as he glanced at her and continued walking without pause.

He was the one who had sounded about as grumpy as Saber, claiming he wouldn't catch her if she fainted. Kelly didn't yet know his name; she didn't know most of the brothers' names, for that matter. But as he passed through the brightest reach of the light, she knew she wouldn't forget him quickly. Not when his eyes were eerily as dark as his hair, surrounded by black lashes and fine black brows that were lowered slightly in a look that would have been very intimidating, if Kelly didn't think he was just concentrating on his spell-casting. Well, she hoped that was why he was frowning like that.

Clad in a black, long-sleeved tunic and equally black trousers, making his hands and his face pretty much the only things visible against the shadows of the night, the mage strolled past her. His arms were lifted, his palms facing out, a sense of energy like the looming of a storm about him, as he moved through the courtyard without a word to her. Kelly thought it was probably best not to disturb him by asking how much longer she would have to wait. The night certainly suited him; with his dramatic, contrasting coloring, she could almost picture him with fangs and a black, satinlined cape.

That thought made her choke back a quick laugh, since he was still within sight and sound of her. Clutching the lightball to her stomach, Kelly shifted her weight in the cooling air of the courtyard. It was a long wait. She eased her feet on the hard flagstone underneath her and did her best to endure the whole thing as stoically as she could, waiting for someone to return and tell her it was safe to move.

Only the moon kept her company now, besides the lightball in her hands.