The Warlord's Legacy (27 page)

Blood washed over her hands, and Mellorin felt sick. She gritted her teeth, swallowed hard against the bile that threatened to choke her, and continued to dodge, and to parry, and to kill.

K
ALEB LIFTED BOTH HANDS
above his head, but this was clearly no surrender. Flames blossomed from his palms, not in a sweeping wave as in the depths of Theaghl-gohlatch, but pouring in torrents to the earth. They swirled away to either side, sweeping across the soil and igniting sunbaked grass. A wall of roaring fire sketched a rough circle around the center of the camp, preventing the bulk of the company from entering the melee. One or two attempted to leap through the crackling barrier, assuming they could pass with only a painful singeing—and were reduced to blackened bones by the heat and hunger of the unnatural conflagration. Roasting flesh, burning grasses, and a faint whiff of brimstone combined in a choking miasma that rose more slowly and more stately than the screams of the dying.

Satisfied that the barrier would hold so long as he maintained his
concentration, Kaleb glanced about him. Jassion was cutting a swath through the soldiers, reaping them like wheat, though a few rents in his hauberk and trails of blood leaking down his sides served as ample evidence that this particular crop had blades of their own. Mellorin largely held her own, though the sheer press of enemies was forcing her slowly back, step by step. The sorcerer was impressed, despite himself. He’d known the girl had the potential to be good, had cast his spell so she might survive long enough to reach that potential—but the ease with which she’d acclimated to his magics suggested a budding
greatness
.

It was something else about her worth cultivating, definitely. Time to see how that cultivation was progressing.

This next bit
—Kaleb braced himself—
could hurt if I’m wrong
.

The torrent of fire still cascading from his hands, feeding the blazing wall, Kaleb took a step nearer Mellorin and aimed a blast of flame over her head. The mercenaries fell back, shrieking as hair and beards ignited, and the young woman smiled her thanks.

A smile that fell from her face as though it, too, had melted. For when Kaleb hurled fire her way, a gap had opened briefly in the fiery bastion. The footsteps of a mercenary pounded across the earth behind him, but he pretended not to hear. He saw Mellorin tense, begin to move his way, and only then did he look behind …

T
HE LAST OF THE INTERVENING WARRIORS
slumped at Jassion’s feet, and the baron stood face-to-face with Captain Losalis. The one gripped Talon rock-steady in both hands; the other had produced a crescent-shaped saber and raised the knife-edged shield before him.

“My lord,” Losalis began, “stop! I swear I didn’t—”

But Jassion was already lunging, and though he
heard
the words, the pounding in his ears and the fire in his mind had long since rendered him incapable of
listening
.

With nigh supernatural grace, Losalis ducked beneath the first slash and swung the saber in a brutal cross-cut. Jassion’s chain took the blow without parting, and the blade left only a light scoring on the steel, but
the impact doubled the baron over, ribs aching, struggling for breath. Losalis raised his shield-hand high and brought it brutally down, an axe as deadly as any executioner’s, but Jassion allowed himself to tumble left, turning his pained collapse into an awkward roll. He staggered upright and parried another slash as Losalis pressed his attack, refusing Jassion the moment he needed to recover.

Losalis was better than he; of that, even in the midst of his murderous fury, Jassion had no doubt. But he held Talon, and that would have to make the difference.

Again he parried, and again—first saber, then shield. Only the unnatural speed of the Kholben Shiar allowed him to bring the massive blade in line, and even so he found himself retreating. Gradually, he allowed his parries to rise ever higher, leaving himself open for another slash. Mentally he braced, girding himself against the pain to come.

Maybe Losalis recognized the trap for what it was, or perhaps he simply knew that his saber couldn’t penetrate his foe’s armor. Rather than delivering another bruising blow to Jassion’s ribs, as the baron had hoped, the mercenary swung at his legs.

Desperate, Jassion dropped to his knees lest he find himself crippled. The blade indeed rang against chain and Jassion brought his right elbow down, briefly pinning the saber to his side. That was as he planned; being on his knees rather than his feet, as Losalis raised the shield overhead once more, was not.

Swiftly as he could given the awkward posture, Jassion swung the Kholben Shiar upward even as Losalis brought his brutal shield down. And indeed, Talon’s infernal magics made all the difference. With the hideous squeal of rending metal, the shield—and a small portion of the flesh to which it was strapped—pinwheeled away to land in the dust.

Losalis screamed in agony. Jassion fell sideways and rolled across the earth, taking the mercenary’s saber with him. He kicked at the ground, spinning on his back, whipping Talon around him.

Leather, flesh, and bone parted before the Kholben Shiar and Losalis, now silent as his body convulsed in shock, tumbled to his back, both feet severed at the ankles.

The baron staggered up once more, ignoring the pounding agony in his chest, raised Talon one last time—and Losalis, former lieutenant of the Terror of the East, suffered no more.

“K
ALEB
!” M
ELLORIN SHRIEKED, SPRINGING
toward him even as she recognized that she couldn’t possibly reach him in time.

The sorcerer was fast, spinning to meet the man who had burst through his faltering flame. He
almost
dodged, so that what would have been a murderous thrust through his chest instead sliced along one arm, spraying drops of blood to boil away in the roaring fire. Again he shifted the angle of his magics, and the warrior who’d dared attack him fell to earth in a burning heap of human wreckage.

But that distraction allowed Ulfgai to close. He’d crept around the edges of the battle, drawing ever nearer the man who was holding their reinforcements at bay. Tears clouded the vicious barbarian’s eyes as Losalis fell, and his entire body twitched in apparent desire to hurl himself at Jassion, but no. Clearly he knew that, with the sorcerer down, he and his men could overwhelm the enemy, and
then
he would have his vengeance.

The southerner raised a wedge-shaped axe, prepared to dash Kaleb’s brains across the earth …

And shuddered with the impact of Mellorin’s falchion. Fur-lined leathers absorbed most of the blow, and Ulfgai was already turning to swat aside this nuisance when she drove the point of her dagger into his gut.

Ulfgai coughed, staining his beard with blood, and Mellorin forced herself to twist the knife in the wound. The fingers clasping that axe trembled but did not drop the weapon.

Whether he would have had the strength left to kill her, Mellorin never knew. Kaleb appeared behind the mercenary, and his hands were now empty of fire. They closed, instead, upon Ulfgai’s shoulder, and shoved the weakened southerner back into the flames.

“I can open us a path,” he said tiredly to his companions. “And with
the grasses burning, it should be a few moments before the rest of them realize that they’re just facing normal flames, now, not magic. We’d best be gone by then.”

Mellorin helped her uncle, who couldn’t seem to stand upright, to mount his horse, and then the wounded sorcerer to do the same. She wondered, briefly, why the beasts hadn’t panicked, whether this was more of Kaleb’s magic or simply that the ring of fire permitted them nowhere to run.

Kaleb unleashed one last burst of flame through the grassfire, hoping to scatter—if not to slay—any mercenaries on the other side. Then, suppressing the flame as easily as he’d summoned it, he carved them a path to freedom. The pounding of hooves was lost in the roar of the fire, and the frustrated screams of the warriors beyond.

T
HEY MADE A COLD CAMP
, far from the roadside. Hours of hard and painful riding had probably averted pursuit, but they weren’t about to take that for granted.

Jassion, his ribs wrapped tight, muttered and grumbled as he struggled to find a position in which he might sleep. Kaleb, arm neatly bandaged, crossed the camp to kneel before the young woman, who was sitting on a stump and gazing off into the distance.

“Mellorin?” he asked gently.

“I didn’t … Kaleb, I’ve never …”

Carefully—giving her every opportunity to pull away, to ask him to stop—the sorcerer took her hand. “I know,” he told her. “You know what else you did?”

She stared blankly.

“You saved my life.” He turned her hand over, brushed a light kiss across her knuckles. “Thank you, Mellorin.” Then, hesitantly, he leaned in and placed another soft kiss on her cheek. He smiled at her as he rose, pretending not to notice the sudden flutter of her pulse in her neck, and returned to his own blankets.

Yes
, he decided with a grin that absolutely did not mean what Mellorin doubtless thought it did.
That worked out just fine
.

T
HE CORRIDORS OF THE
H
ALL
of Meeting felt a lot more claustrophobic than they had mere minutes prior. Irrial could have sworn the walls were actually closing in, the doors transforming into prison bars. Not even the carpet muffled the tread of the soldiers who pressed in from all sides, reverberating in unison, the inexorable march of time itself.

She knew the plan—such as it was—for they’d both acknowledged the possibility of capture, but damn it all, if Corvis didn’t act soon, she wasn’t going to wait for him!

Two guards strode before her, broad shoulders and hauberks blocking her view of the hallway, while the other four marched behind. Irrial didn’t need to look, for she could feel their looming presence, and the skin between her shoulder blades twinged nervously at the thought of those brutal crossbows.

Corvis walked beside her in a peculiar slouch, shoulders slumped and head hanging. He lurked at the corners of her vision, where detail blurred like moist watercolor, and she thought she saw his lips moving.