DeMacabre looked puzzled. "I instructed my daughter to advise my lord about the goblin attack. Did she not---"
Then a tiny, hairy person rocketed out of the mist at Freetrick.
There was a shriek that dopplered from excited little girl, through tea-kettle, up into enraged bat, and then stopped abruptly with a damp smack against Freetrick's armor. Freetrick looked down. The front half of his body was in shadow.
A wave of un-heat punched through him. Death energy.
"Goblin attack!" Skystarke bellowed, his wet monster's face bulging out from his unpeeling human mask like a demonic potato. "
O
-
gahs! Battle-ready!"
Freetrick, now intensely grateful for the spikes on his armor, tried to slide the goblin shish-kebab off his chest plate and brace himself for combat at the same time. More of the little hairy monsters hurtled out of the mist, aiming mostly at him. Skystarke leapt into the air and caught one in his jaws. Another blundered into an ogre's giant paws. A third—
Freetrick frantically brought his arms up, but this time there was no rewarding smack. The goblin swung under his arm, up and into the air.
Freetrick looked up and saw the furry ball spin in the air, then flip over and unhinge into a five-pointed star of claws and teeth. Freetrick tried to bring his arms up and around, but suddenly he was moving in nightmare slow-motion. The goblin, too, was not falling so much as sinking, its wrinkled face inching toward him with all the sluggish menace of a tax audit.
Freetrick's brain had sped up, but with his body still moving at normal speed. So good, he could watch the goblin peel his face off in great detail.
Another inch through air as warm and thick as asphalt. Freetrick couldn't move through the morass fast enough to get out of its way, couldn't protect himself. But he could…
push
.
Blackness blossomed in the air around him. Lightning arced across his eyes.
The mist over Freetrick thrummed like the skin of a drum head, and the goblin was suddenly accelerating upwards. There was a receding squall, a five-pointed hole punched into the mist above, and the monster was gone. Freetrick gaped upward, then screamed as another little monster smashed into his back, shoving him forward. There was a clattering up his back, like rat's feet across a tin roof.
All right then. Freetrick gritted his teeth and…
pulled.
Claws scrabbled on his back as Freetrick pulled, twisted, then, feeling foolish, simply reversed the direction of pressure and squashed the thing.
There was another tingling rush of death-energy.
"Ha!" With some effort, Freetrick pumped his armored fists over his head. This was
necromancy
. This was
power.
Eyes crackling, Freetrick swung his head around to take in the battle around him. Skystarke was darting about like a two-legged cat, the ogres were grappling with huge, indistinct shapes in the mist, and DeMacabre. DeMacabre was just standing there. Grinning.
"Hello, your Vileness!" He called, waving.
"DeMacabre, you idiot, what are you…" said Freetrick in the split second before he remembered that DeMacabre called him 'my lord.' He began to turn around.
Amorphous, black pseudopods extruded themselves from the air. Like the fingers of a giant hand, they reached out and grabbed him around the torso. They lifted.
Another necromancer! Freetrick struggled, then concentrated, and blasted his power into the fingers that held him.
They dissolved. He fell. He continued to fall.
A screaming second from a crash onto the stone floor, the hand materialized again. It tossed him up into the air, disappeared, reappeared, flicking him back and forth like a hot potato. Freetrick struck out again, but the ectoplasmic fingers never stayed in the same place long enough for him to disperse them. But if
he
pushed down…
The air vibrated again and Freetrick's fall stopped. All right. Necromancy! "Stop this!" Freetrick called, swinging around in the air to search for his attacker. The amorphous hand rushed at him again, and he swatted it away. "I don't want to fight you! Show yourself!" The hand returned, pressing in on his invisible defense. Freetrick pushed harder. "Show yourself, or I will—" Something went
pop
inside him.
The pressure disappeared and Freetrick was falling. He tried to stop himself, but his magic had stopped working. No more death energy. The ground was rushing up toward him like a…very much like the end of his life. Freetrick shut his eyes.
And opened them. He was horizontal, face down, the tip of his nose just touching the warm stone of the floor. The ectoplasmic hand was back around his body, squeezing. Then lifting.
There was a moment of dizziness. The floor swung away as if on a hinge. A dark figure rotated into view, feet first.
Boots. Iron boots of articulated plates, like the carapace of a lobster. More plates—larger and more sharply pointed—covered the knees. Iron chains hung from the waist, stretched upward to wrap around an otherwise naked chest, heavily muscled. And then more lobstered iron, rising in thorny protrusions to frame a face…a face a hell of a lot like Freetrick's.
"His Malevolence Feerborg, under the Maelstrom Despot of Skrea, Grasper of the Bolt, Lord of Pain, Terror under all Terrors, High Master of the Blood, and Soon-to-be Ultimate Fiend of the Kingdoms of Evil," DeMacabre oozed from the somewhere behind him.
Black chains slid across skin as the figure before Freetrick, his captor, bent in a bow.
"And, my lord," said DeMacabre, presumably to Freetrick, "May I present his Fiendishness the Dark Prince Feerix, the Depraved, he of the Sharpened Thumb, son of His Malevolence king Wrothborg, may the blood never dry from his hands."
The man, Feerix, straightened. He had Freetrick's narrow face, his long slanting eyebrows. His nose even hooked in that peculiar beak-like way Freetrick had always thought was his curse alone. His brother looked into Freetrick's eyes, took a step forward, and said, "
well
?"
"Uh," said Freetrick, "well, what?"
"Well attack me!" Feerix shouted. "What are you waiting for? Our respective forces lie in readiness, arrayed for battle. I have made the opening move. So break through my bonds and attack me!"
Oh. So this was some kind of Skrean ritual. For a moment he thought this was a real battle. Freetrick, shrugged against Feerix's spell. "I can't," he said. "I don't have any more death energy."
"What?" For a moment, the ferocious scowl on Feerix's face dropped, and a much more genuine look of confusion replaced it. "You mean you are…
defenseless
?"
"No-one told me I was going to have to fight a necromantic duel today," said Freetrick. "I have no idea what I'm supposed to be doing here."
"
Defenseless?
" Feerix swung to glare at DeMacabre. "This is your doing, Leech!"
"Why, my dear Dark Prince, I assure you I arrayed my forces here in this public place for no other purpose than to provide you the opportunity for your confrontation."
And now that Freetrick looked, yes, the people gathered behind DeMacabre did look distinctly array-like. So were they here to protect him from Feerix? They weren't doing a very good job of it.
"Unbe
liev
able," Feerix spat. . A red gob smacked onto the stone a bare centimeter from Freetrick's foot. Did he see it
writhing
? "I have killed
eleven
siblings, drunk deep of their spinal fluid. I do not
work
like this!"
Freetrick fought for clarity. So all these people were here to watch while… "So this is like a game? Ha ha. Nice to meet you, Feerix. Put me down now."
"I believe I shall not. No…" Feerix twisted a hand and Freetrick's legs pivoted upward. Now he was lying, as if on a bed, supported at eye-level above the floor by a cocoon of black mist. "Tempest take the rituals. We are among witnesses, are we not? I shall simply kill you now, and be done with it." The ectoplasmic fingers around Freetrick squeezed.
"Oh," said a new voice, "how disappointing. Horrendous Morrow, Feerix."
In his cocoon of necromancy, Freetrick flinched.
"Bloodbyrn," Feerix said, "I should have known you would come back to me. Here. Now. As I dangle your new lover from my clutches."
"Release him, Feerix."
"What would you give me for the favor," said Feerix, "hmm? A night in your bed perhaps? Your father's banishment? The skull throne?"
"My forbearance? Dark Prince Feerix, surely you can see that agents of father's faction outnumber your own in this place. Release the soon-to-be-Ultimate Fiend, or face our wrath."
When Feerix spoke again, it was with a slight quaver to his maniacal bellow. "You would not dare attack a member of the line of Feer!"
"If the line of Feer is so weak as to defy custom and kill a defenseless opponent, your patrimony holds no sway over my actions."
"Such a one-sided duel would hardly be the great battle we of the Vile Halls have come to expect from you, your Vileness." DeMacabre said.
Feerix rocked Freetrick back and forth as he appeared to consider this. He looked out over the other people, presumably DeMacabre's supporters. And where were Feerix's supporters? "What you say rings of evil truth, Sangboise," he said, finally. "A weak and unskilled opponent, obviously ignorant in the black arts of necromancy, would do me no service as a victim. I might as well spear lizard-men in a slave pit.
Very well!"
Freetrick was suddenly flying through the misty air. He hit the stone floor, and bounced, his armor throwing up a shower of sparks as he skidded to a halt. Dark ignobles and monsters shuffled away from him.
"I must have a worthy opponent!" Shouted Feerix.
Freetrick looked up to see the iron-girdled figure of his half brother towering over him.
"I shall teach you, I shall train you, and only then," Feerix sneered, "will I finally kill you."
***
Kendrick found the Paladin on the edge of the woods. The Chosen One of Naobel, stood under a pine tree staring at the stooped form of what at first appeared to be a tall man.
Night was approaching and the battle was over. The monsters had been killed or driven off, but not without cost. Men had died, mostly from the ranks of the Rationalist engineering corps. Died or been taken. Now, the remaining Rationalists huddled around the campfires scratching feeble runes onto their mirrors, waiting. Kendrick and the Ranger Levanick moved with purpose, however, seeking the Paladin.
As they drew closer Kendrick saw the prisoner more closely. He noted the crookedly jointed legs, the glint of scales where soft skin should have been, the eyes like volcanic glass. A lizard-man stood in chains, clothed in rough furs, shackled to the tree.
Kendrick stopped in his tracks, the smell of piss and rotted meat in his nostrils.
"Come on, boy," Levanick yanked Kendrick forward by the arm. "Do not be modest, you killed more monsters today than anyone save the Paladin himself."
"I killed so much…" Kendrick licked his lips and whispered.
"You killed well," Levanick insisted, then, to the Paladin: "Chosen. Excuse us for interrupting."
"'Tis no interruption, Ranger." The Paladin rolled his shoulders and scratched fingers through his close-trimmed beard.
"Who hast thou brought me?"