Six Celestial Swords (33 page)

How could that be? How could everyone be dead?

He sighed relief when someone stirred, and did so again when he saw that it was Tarfan. “How badly are you injured, my friend?” he asked while dismounting, wondering why the dwarf was waving his hand at him as if it had caught fire.

“I’m not hurt!” the dwarf barked. “But Taya is! I’ve got to protect her! Now get on your horse and get away from here!”

“I will do no such thing.” He crouched beside the dwarf. “Where are the others?”

“On the ground, keeping low and out of the way of that madman!”

Xu Liang heard something in the near distance, like a person cry out in pain, and looked around, finally seeing the arrows stuck in the ground and in the body of a guard nearby. He couldn’t tell if he was dead. He looked unconscious. “Where is Tristus and the sorcerer who rode with Xiadao Lu?”

“The fire-spitter’s gone!” Tarfan hissed. “Ran away more scared than the rest of us! Tristus went to take down the archers that the elf forgot to count! The rest is a long story, now get the hell out of here!”

“Tarfan,” Xu Liang started in disapproval and with a little uncertainty. His next words failed to sound when he heard footsteps coming. The individual was running.

Though the mist was thinning, the increasing sunlight glared off the moist air, creating a blinding effect. Xu Liang couldn’t see who was coming and so rose with a spell in mind, prepared to buffet the individual away with the winds. In truth, he didn’t have the energy for another physical confrontation.

The silhouette of an armed man formed in the shining mist. He was strangely quiet, except for the sound of his footsteps. Whether or not he saw Xu Liang, he kept coming, his sword raised. Xu Liang uttered the necessary chant, one hand extended in front of him, and summoned the wind.

Out of the mist, the knight came. Xu Liang started to relax, seeing that it was an ally, hoping that the burst of wind wouldn’t do him too much harm.

The spell struck Tristus. He staggered back a half step, his sword arm pulling slightly back, then coming forward again as the knight continued his charge...deliberately.

Xu Liang found himself momentarily confused, facing an unexpected betrayer, or someone Tarfan had rightly suspected a madman. The knight’s features were a mockery of his once sympathetic fairness, twisted and contorted with a rage unlike any Xu Liang had witnessed before.

“He’s a berserker now!” Tarfan hollered from his position on the ground, hovering over his niece. “He doesn’t recognize you! He’s gone mad! Leave!”

In spite of the dwarf’s urging, Xu Liang called to the winds again. Tristus was coming too fast and he had no intention of leaving the others, besides. Whatever had come over him, the knight had to be stopped.

A wall of air struck Tristus, this one stronger than the first and reinforced with Xu Liang’s continued prayer. The blast halted the crazed warrior in his tracks for an instant, but he remained on his feet, leaning into the wind, shouldering against what would have leveled another man with the first strike, including the mighty Xiadao Lu. The knight’s state enabled him to endure, his strength enhanced through madness. Xu Liang maintained the wind, hoping the break in the slaughter that must have perpetuated Tristus’ unexpected condition would calm him enough to be put down. Though it was not his desire, Xu Liang would kill the knight if he had to, before he would let him finish off the others.

“A dark fury’s got hold of him!” Tarfan shouted. “He’ll kill you! He can’t stop himself!”

Then I must stop him
, Xu Liang thought, giving still more effort to the spell.

For a moment, Tristus began to lose his footing and slid backwards, but his eyes were lit with unnatural determination, and he pressed on, snarling with the strain. He inched forward, his sword held to strike when the distance between them was finally covered.

Xu Liang thrust both hands out in front of him, closed his eyes, and factored out everything but the wind.
Ancestors…hear me!

TAYA WOKE UP to a storm. She looked around groggily, her neck and shoulder throbbing fiercely, making her head and stomach hurt as well. It wasn’t raining. There was no lightning. Only the sound of the fierce winds. Why couldn’t she feel them? Her uncle was her only shelter, not nearly enough to block what sounded like a hurricane.

And then she realized it was no storm, but a spell. She could see Xu Liang, strain attacking his calm features as he worked his magic against...Tristus! Taya sat up, choking on her own voice as her head spun and her stomach surged upward.

Tarfan steadied her.

“Stop,” she murmured. “Stop them!”

“There’s nothing we can do,” Tarfan snapped, his voice breaking slightly under the stress of watching two who were supposed to be allies pitted against each other.

She wondered if he’d finally discovered some respect for Tristus, who had used his own life to shield Taya’s. She felt like her uncle had, like the moment had granted power to his swing as a new sense of camaraderie formed. Taya had been handling herself just as her uncle had taught her to. The guards were as formidable as ever and just when the enemies’ numbers began to deplete, more suddenly arrived. Arrows had fired out of the mist. Guang Ci and another guard dropped like overripe apples from an overladen branch. And then something sliced Taya, and she cried out, overcome by a form of pain she’d never felt before. Tarfan finished off his own opponent and moved to assist, halted almost literally dead in his tracks when Tristus charged onto the scene.

The knight had swung his sword in a great arc, and sliced the man who’d attacked Taya almost clean through from shoulder to waist. When the bandit failed to drop at once, Tristus let him have it again, slicing off his sword arm and finally his head before he moved onto the next victim. Taya didn’t remember much beyond that. She’d never been witness to anything like that, or like this.

“Stop them!” Taya insisted.

“I can’t! If I attack the knight, we both go tumbling into the next countryside. Or else I get shot to the horizon and he still goes at the mage. If I interrupt Xu Liang, we all get cleaved like dead meat on the butcher’s block!”

“What’s he doing?” Taya cried. “Tristus, are you crazy? Stop it!”

Tarfan put his arms around her while they watched the knight gaining ground. “Close your eyes, girl.”

“Tristus, please stop,” Taya sobbed. “Please!”

The rage wouldn’t die. The knight pressed onward, eyes on his target. He brought his sword in front of him, as if deciding it would be good enough simply to impale the mage standing in his way. The gap between Xu Liang and death grew ever smaller.

“In Heaven’s name,” Tarfan said, holding Taya as tightly as he could without crushing her.

Tristus was shoving his blade forward, finding more ease in the task as the mage’s wind finally began to weaken. The point edged past Xu Liang’s hands, up toward his chest. Taya closed her eyes.

THE WIND DIED. It had left Xu Liang. He had no more strength. He could feel the heat of the life slain upon Tristus’ blade, the blade that would shortly claim him and in the process all of his dreams of a peaceful, unified Sheng Fan.

My Empress...

The clatter of steel interrupted his final message to his oath sister.

Xu Liang opened his eyes, just as the knight—having let go his sword—dropped to his hands and knees before him, shaking in the aftermath of his unnatural rage. Tristus gasped for air until he finally had enough to keep and then he sat still, holding that breath until his weary body shuddered once more and sobs escaped.

Xu Liang was drained, dangerously near to fainting, and left with only one choice. That was to kneel in front of the very man who’d nearly killed him and perhaps in that event, everything he’d lived for as well. Xu Liang sank before the weeping knight, unable to feel anything while he concentrated on regaining his strength. Behind him, the dwarves seemed too afraid to move, and so the four of them huddled among the dead or dying, silent except for Tristus, who sobbed brokenly over his gore-stained sword.

T
WO MORE GUARDS had been lost of the seven that remained before the day’s battle. Their wounds were simply too much for the combined knowledge and skills of the group, which included no healing spells. They were wounds that could have been inflicted by the enemy, or they could have been inflicted by Tristus, who in his berserker rage, had declared everyone his enemy. No one knew. No one had seen, except the dead guards, Hu Zhong and Yuan Lan. Tristus couldn’t remember himself and no one dared to press him at the moment, uncertain as to whether or not the ‘dark fury’—as Tarfan had called it—had actually left him. He’d been left alone outside the tent, lying still—the last anyone dared to look—right where Fu Ran had left him after dragging him back from the battlefield. The knight had been barely conscious in his state of exhaustion.

Tarfan had fared the best of all of them; he was angrier than he was hurt. He’d acquired a few bruises and scrapes altogether. Xu Liang was physically uninjured, but he felt as if his mind were about to collapse in on itself, and he’d barely managed to carry himself back to the camp. He sat among the others now, unable to concentrate in the way that he needed to while they bickered and fumed.

Guang Ci, who had taken an arrow to the shoulder and been easily patched up, sat in front of Xu Liang, reaching for his sword every time a frustrated voice or arm raised too loudly or too near his master. In the young guard’s eyes, Xu Liang could do no wrong and his battle plan had been perfect, thwarted by the ineptitude of the others, including their scout, who lay unconscious on the other side of the tent.

Alere had been struck hard enough by Xiadao Lu to have the wind knocked out of him, for his skin to break, and possibly for his left shoulder blade to have cracked. It was difficult for Taya to tell beneath all the swelling and bruising. Taya herself had been sliced deep across the shoulder and required stitches. Gai Ping suffered from a dislocated shoulder, which fortunately Fu Ran was able to assist in putting back into place. Oddly enough, it was the giant who’d done the damage to the elder guard pulling him out of the way of Xiadao Lu’s magic assault. Fu Ran himself caught the edge of the spell and twisted his knee trying to escape it. The last three guards had been grazed by arrows, sliced by sword, and bruised by whatever else had been raised against them.

Bastien was simply missing. Whether he’d crawled into the mist with his wounds and died, or been burnt to ash by the pyromancer, or—though no one wanted to consider it—hacked beyond recognition by a certain berserker, no one could say at the moment. Daylight was fading and everyone was too confused or aching to search for the man. If he was alive and well enough, he would likely find his way back to camp. If not, his body would be easier to find during the day.

“This isn’t what I meant by excitement,” Taya sniffled, checking on Alere’s bandages, resisting the urge to go to Tristus, who she was evidently ashamed to admit scared her more than a little after his secret unleashed itself on everyone.

“So now it’s out,” Tarfan blurted for at least the tenth time. “The boy’s a berserker! That’s why he was booted out of the Order. He probably had a similar fit in the middle of a previous battle and started striking down his own comrades! He might have considered sharing something like that with the rest of us before he—”