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Knights' Attack, 6


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#1 Guest_Ananke_*

Posted 22 July 2007 - 01:25 PM

(6)

“—Did you know, my lady, how that wrongdoer addressed me this morning? By declaring that, though you were clement enough not to instantly decry me a perjurer, he must try me afore he let me again stand by his side in combat!”

Imoen, thrown out of her private thoughts, equally privately smiled: underneath Anomen’s knightly speech, Sarevok had decided to use a tactic which, employed with slightly more subtlety, had the best chance to work against him—

The indignant squire, meanwhile, spoke on, “I answered, naturally, that I owe fealty and homage but to my Lord Helm, and that only He shall Try my vigilance, when He finds me ready to face the challenge of knighthood! That unholy bastard—forgive me, my lady—replied that he had no interest in appraising my integrity, only my readiness to kill!”

Unholy bastard, Imoen thought, now that’s a good one; but Anomen Delryn was looking at her expectantly over the almost plucked pheasant, and so, she asked, “Did you hit him?”

The man blinked, frowned, scowled and grimaced; but, interestingly, did not blush. “Aye, my lady, I did…” he said slowly, “…or, at least, I tried to. When he dared me to… My patience simply…” Now, the youth’s cheeks did bloom crimson of the exact shade of his heraldic rhodelia. “…broke, and I set upon him in a most ignoble manner…”

A voice, coming from an oneiric past: Murder is chaos. Release. Anomen Delryn was not a Child of Bhaal, to the best of Imoen’s reckoning; but she rather suspected she knew what he must have felt at that particular point. She had been there, if only more so. “And?”

“And that fiend simply stood there and laughed! He said that he was satisfied that there was enough of my Lord Helm’s own in me to follow simple orders!”

“And?”

“And I,” a blush, coming on call, like some sort of a punctuation mark— “broke his nose.”

“You,” Imoen repeated, in the sudden glee of disbelieving satisfaction, “broke my brother’s nose?”

The man did not blush; instead, he looked her straight in the eye as he said, firmly, defiantly, “Aye.”

That’s what comes of too much arrogance, brother, Imoen thought. What if he had not been angry enough not to arm himself when the spell went out? You would be golden dust in Father’s kingdom now. “And what did my brother do?”

“He hit me,” sending you to ground, Imoen filled in, seeing the extremely crimson blush, “commended me on my initiative and told me to think twice before attempting it again. And then, he told me to pray.”

“To pray,” Imoen found herself repeating again. Suddenly, she was starting to see how the morning’s sparring session had come to be; Sarevok, as always, hit low.

“Aye, my lady,” Anomen replied, just as she expected and suddenly much more at ease with the conversation. “He told me to enquire my Lord Helm if He had any objection if, for the length of our travels together, he took me into his ward, in return for my allegiance. Though, of course,” he sighed, “neither he nor I could swear to our intent, not being men of honour. But my Lord Helm approved of the arrangement, as long as…” A brief hesitation.

“As long as?” Imoen pressed; there was the feeling that a great deal of anger, outcry and resentment had been suddenly glossed over, perhaps even forgotten in view of the final result. She let it pass, with the private note to remind her brother that, while, this time, he obtained the miracle he wanted, as a rule, neither second-guessing nor bargaining with gods should be attempted lightly; as he should best know.

“…as long as Anchev kept his word, and I did not stray from the path of vigil,” Anomen said, with more than a trace of his previous bitter anger; Imoen could almost hear the squire’s next words already: ‘‘Tis not fair!’ It wasn’t. Or was it? Helm would know.

The pheasants, forgotten, were lying on the ground; she started to pick them up, shaking off the feathers from her clothes, when Anomen, instead, said slowly, tentatively, “Your brother, my lady, is a… fine fighter.”

“Yes, he is,” Imoen replied, surprised by the sudden calmness of the assessment; then, weirdly curious, she asked, “Did you enjoy sparring with him?”

The man blushed. “Aye, but ‘tis not of that that I— That is, ‘tis even true that,” a pause of a missed heartbeat, “Sir Keldorn himself would not go against him but in the company of three others and also my own… But what I meant to ask you, my lady, about, is that Anchev asked me to think how I would go about slaying a dragon.”

They were supposed to talk about it themselves, Imoen remembered suddenly. “And what did you reply?”

“That… Forgive me, my lady, but I simply… don’t know. There are tales of valiant knights who slew such wyrms, but…” Suddenly, the squire looked up, straight at her. “Those friends of his—?”

“They are orcs,” she said simply, and was rewarded by an indignant, “Orcs?!”

“Yes. Don’t ask me about it. I don’t think it’s one of his better ideas. Those tales? What do they say? Anything useful?”

She interrupted at the sight of an alien vision: a small, self-conscious smile dawned on Anomen’s lips. “‘Tis, my lady, what your brother charged me to consider in his absence.”

-----


The pheasants were stewing slowly in their own sauce—Pangur had bothered to climb down from the tree and tried to put a nose and a paw into the pot they had found in the werewolf’s cave, only to be rather inelegantly smacked (Ouch!) across the offending appendages by Imoen—and quite a lot of details of dragon-slaying tales had been remembered by the time Sarevok returned. Not yet enough for a detailed battle-plan, but certainly halfway there.

Which was why, when the cat meowed, and the eagle cried, and the squire and the sister looked up to see the lone man rounding the canyon’s turn, leading by his reins a golden charger burdened with a set of armour, they were so surprised when, upon approaching them, he completely ignored the topic; and pronounced instead—without greeting, but entirely amused, “It appears, Delryn, that this is your fortunate day.”

Anomen frowned. “How so?”

“To attention, squire,” he heard, “I must look at you. Now turn around. Gracefully.”

“What?!”

“With flair, squire,” a rather bored voice replied. “The dance is, one presumes, one of the noble arts, Delryn. I am still waiting for you to prove that.”

A rather stiff pirouette, committed rather than performed to the grinding of teeth, followed; “Tolerable. Mind your feet— Yes, indeed,” the judge pronounced, “Tazok’s plate, currently the property of my soon-to-be father-in-law, will suit you just fine. Dress up, squire. To answer your question, we are going against vampires.”

The meticulously blushing object of the harassment hazarded unhappily, “Vampires?”

A rosy-haired woman currently extinguishing a fire snorted in assistance, “Father-in-law, brother?”

The target of the joint charge frowned. “Indeed, sister. My hopeful bride demands vampires’ heads in her wedding gift; this will be, I believe, the perfect opportunity for you, Delryn, to make amends for yesterday’s foolery— And this is, I believe, yours, sister.”

Three quick looks: a roll of parchment, slightly yellow and tattered on the edges, with a waxen seal, at present broken; Sarevok, completely unrepentant for having infringed the privacy of his sister’s correspondence, quickly fitting a squire’s armour; a missive, written in a red ink and a slightly slanted, old-fashioned, seriffed hand:

To Imoen, Ward of Gorion

(I am not her, Imoen thought with utter annoyance—)

Jierdan Firkraag, Fifth Baron Windspear

(—a long list of other titles, not all of which sounded particularly human—)

on the fourteenth day of Mirtul, 1369

(—yesterday, then; yesterday, Firkraag knew that they would get this far in searching for him—)

The message itself was brief:

This game is interesting, but it drags on and on. Shan’t we meet? To gain audience on my court, find the arms of Strohm III.

Imoen looked up from the scroll and, driven to the edge, asked amiably up front, “Sarevok, what in the Nine Hells is happening here?”

Quite delighted, her brother replied, without interrupting fitting his squire’s pauldrons, “Apparently, Firkraag is not the first dragon to have settled in this place, sister. Not even the first red dragon. This is, perhaps, not surprising, given the lay of the terrain… Don’t move, Delryn— You shall see for yourself, sister; and you, squire, had better consider how you would assault a fairly well-defended citadel—”

“—Candlekeep?”

“—if possible, without taking any further hints from my sister,” the tale-teller adjoined smoothly. “However. That dragon was slain by Strohm III, who, the tale has it, was wielding a dragon-slaying sword, bearing a dragon-scale shield and sporting a dragon-scale helmet as he did so.”

“And was buried here,” Imoen finished, with a deep, disconsolate sigh of understanding. “With his relics.”

“Firkraag must have learnt that after he settled here; or have settled here because he had learnt that. Whichever that was, he took offence. That is why he brought Dig Dag here—”

“Aye!” Anomen, rapidly accumulating steel plates, barged into the breach. “What is this talk of parlaying with orcs I hear? I cannot approve—”

“They were more willing to reveal intelligence than you had been, squire,” the man fitting his armour said, without much spite; and then, laughing lightly at the blush, added, “Don’t worry, Delryn. You won’t be parlaying with them. You will be going to their aid and succour.”

“What?!” This time, Anomen was not the only one to protest; “Little brother?”

“Little sister—squire,” an amused voice replied, “I thought better of you. After that dazzling deductive work you two carried out turning those muddled anecdotes into viable strategies—” Imoen looked around: Altair had the basic aquiline decency to appear slightly more ashamed than her owner, and about half as much as Anomen, “—this is, surely, obvious? A vampire came here several days ago—”

“The night shift to Safana’s daytime’s,” Imoen muttered to herself, rolling her eyes in defeat. “And her covert ally.”

A curt, civil smile. “Now, there are five vampires, preying on the orcs for blood. All used to be weakskin… human, by the looks of them, Dig Dag says.”

“But who—?” Anomen sputtered; for a moment, the siblings both watched him with identical expectant expressions; in the end, he shrugged desperately and answered his own question. “Firkraag’s tenants, aye? Garren Windspear and his children lived the closest nearby… We must go and destroy those filthy undead!” he pled, casting a woeful look in Sarevok’s direction.

“Indeed, Delryn,” the other man replied, watching his squire closely through the veneer of levity. “As I said… It is your fortunate day.”

And, seeing the youth in his bright, shining armour which fit so well his bright, shining eyes, he added, by reflex, “However. You are still ugly.”

-----


Imoen sighed. If she wanted to, she could hear Pangur’s contented purring in her head; her cat, proudly curled up next to Altair like a guardian dog next to his herded sheep, was paying her absolutely no attention as he openly ogled the eagle with dreamy cornflower eyes. Coran had lost a dryad, a werewolf and a thief in one day; her brother was getting married without even bothering to introduce her first to her future sister-in-law. The world was full of people living their lives, and leaving her behind. It was, perhaps, if one insisted, not fair. And Sarevok—

Before her, Sarevok took a few steps away from Anomen, folded his arms, cocked his head, eyed his handiwork, and asked with amusement bordering on open laughter, “Well, squire?”

No answer was forthcoming; and so, a fluent torrent of questions followed. “Too tight? Too loose? Does it chafe anywhere? Hinder you? Try to walk in it. Run in it. Make an attack. Does it feel any different—”

“‘Tis… light,” Anomen interrupted suddenly, blinking, frowning. All the previous questions and commands seemed to have completely passed him by.

“It’s the magic on it,” Imoen offered, walking around the man to inspect him from all sides, pauldrons to greaves. The armour was only slightly tarnished; she had expected much worse from something that had been in orcs’ hands. “Do you have a helmet to go with it, brother?”

The treacherous glimmer of tender admiration finally disappeared as her brother replied briskly, “Yes, sister. Here.”

“So, what’s this talk of your marriage, brother?” his sister asked calmly, taking the horned helmet from him. It was faintly magical, but, more importantly for the moment, surprisingly clean. “Why didn’t the orcs deal with the vampires themselves?”

“Apparently, sister, Firkraag forbid them. The—marriage is as good a word as any, perhaps—is Dig Dag’s vulgar attempt to fool me into trusting him.”

“I thought so,” Imoen replied as Anomen, absently, knelt and bowed his head, and she put the helmet on his head, covering his face almost entirely. “Why are you agreeing to it?”

“Because, sister, the orc may yet change his mind; and that was the only way to fool him into trusting me.”

“Hmm. What of the bride?” She took a few steps back, and would have walked into Sarevok if he had not neatly removed himself from her path at the last moment. In front of them, Anomen was getting up from the ground again—extremely slowly, as if his joints had been completely frozen and were only now thawing; or, perhaps, as if exactly the opposite were true: that his legs were so weak that he feared that, once forced upright, he would collapse. “He looks so handsome, don’t you think, brother? All he needs now is one of those big swords paladins like to play with— I know. Why don’t you give him yours to try out how it feels?”

Next to her, burning eyes promised her an eternity of torment. It was an expression which her brother had mastered to a tee. “No.”

“Why not?”

“Because the Edge of Chaos is mine, sister. Because, to forge it, Muramasa Sengo summoned demons and sacrificed—”

“Not the paladin type, then,” Imoen declared, satisfied.

There was a curt laugh. “Not really, no.”

“Then I’m sorry I asked, little brother.” In front of them, Anomen had returned to the world from his private pocket plane of utter almost-knightly bliss, and was looking at them in a wild search for something to say; and so, because she could, she told him, “You still haven’t told my brother if the armour fits, Anomen.”

“Aye, my lady… It does,” the man replied slowly, completely oblivious to the amused, self-conscious thirst with which his words were drunk in certain quarters; then, shifting his gaze between the siblings, he added thoughtfully, “But I have no sword. The Burning Earth will blind us in the darkness.”

“That’s no problem,” Imoen shrugged. “My brother will enchant your mace for a day. I’ll go pack the dinner and the things as he does it, I think. And you— Brother, what is he supposed to do?”

The response was as coolly purposeful as ever might be. “Accustom yourself to the armour and devise the best strategy to destroy the vampires, squire. Their presence here awakened the buried dead; we may have to confront shades, wraiths, mummies, ghouls, ghasts and skeletons. That is all we know. Nothing of the area, numbers, or defences. You know what your assets are.”

Under his horned helmet, Anomen opened his mouth; then, blinked and closed it, slowly.

“And mind your previous assignment, squire,” Sarevok added without much feeling; and, leaving a sister and a squire behind, headed for the inside of the cave, picking in passing a mace which to enchant.

-----


“Apparently, orcs cannot pass by the guardians of Strohm’s tomb,” Sarevok was explaining coolly as they rounded the corner of the gorge in the postprandial heat; the rest of their meal, they had packed into an earthenware jar they had found in the werewolves’ cave. It was good to have bags of holding as saddlebags, Imoen mused, especially since Sarevok insisted on those dragon scales. “That is why Firkraag wants us to—”

“To rob a tomb,” a squire currently riding a golden horse interjected crossly. “An execrable atrocity if there ever was one!”

“A fair point, squire,” Sarevok replied lightly. “The waste of our time this foray will involve certainly warrants calling it execrable, and perhaps even an atrocity. What do you propose instead?”

“To attack the dragon.”

“The dragon refuses to present himself to be attacked until we bring him the relics, squire.”

“Does it mean that we can rob his lair while he’s away?” Imoen, currently walking next to her brother in their joint attempt to improve their stamina, asked with deep interest.

“Your mercurial sense of humour, fair sibling, never fails to astound me. However. Have you never heard the proverb, ‘Never laugh—’”

“‘—at live dragons,’ brother?”

“Coined, I believe, by a halfling burglar in a position similar to our own. We must meet the dragon to extract testimony, Delryn, and the dragon knows that. Hence, we must play, for the moment, his game— The eyrie.”

Whoa. Tha’s one big sill t’sit on. Sunny, too! The chick’ll love it!

Cats and birds planning their love nests aside, Imoen was beginning to understand her brother’s uncanny apprehension. The eyrie was enormous.

-----


The canyon drew to a dead end; and where it did, over the stream which narrowed into a trickle and disappeared amid the barren rocks, there was a gargantuan outcropping; a tall sandstone ledge, high above the ground, set ablaze by the rays of the harsh midday sun. One could see an opening behind it, and that must be the dragon’s lair; the least of mercies was that there was no dragon in sight.

They all halted at the view; Altair, recalled to hand by Sarevok some time ago, was hopping nervously, and Imoen suddenly realised that both the eagle and, through her eyes, her brother had seen this yesterday already; and that, possibly, there had even been a dragon in sight then.

“Well, squire?” Sarevok asked calmly. “How do you propose to attack this particular citadel?”

There was no reply; and so, the squire was probed and prodded further. “Surely Firecam taught you the basics of strategy and tactics?”

“Sir Keldorn did,” the squire replied, stressing the paladin’s title; then, with sudden anger, added, “But ‘tis no reason to speak of them with you, Anchev.”

Sarevok shrugged. “Why not?”

“Because—” Suddenly, like a volcano or an overheated steam boiler, pulling up the horse with the reins to confront the earthbound man, the squire erupted, “—Because you killed him!” Erupted; and then, scowling under his helmet and coiled and tense in his ornate, engraved, embossed armour on the golden stallion—froze, expectantly.

It sounded almost like a plea, Imoen decided with a tight heart; yet, if it was one, it was promptly rejected. In his soiled clothes the colour of old gold; lightly intercepting Grasshopper’s reins and drawing the dancing steed to himself—Sarevok replied, “Which means, squire, that I am here and he is not. Revere your god and revere your master, Delryn, as you like; I have no need for your worship at present. Later—” A lazy, appraising look up the horse’s neck, sending the armoured man straight into an irately crimson flush, “—perhaps. If you pray. If you insist. For now, squire, I am only asking you how you would attack that place.”

A single word, fired rather than said down the stallion’s neck, “Why?”

“Because there is time.”

“Time?!”

Imoen sighed. “Anomen—”

“Sister.” This time, the growl was definitely not amused. “Delryn, must we really repeat the morning’s session? I need know how we shall attack that place.”

“Not from the front, ‘tis certain,” the squire retorted, fuming. “Unless you can grow wings, Bhaalspawn.”

There was a minimally too long silence on all the parts involved; then, “Sister?”

The sister in question said, dryly, “He can fight, dance and cook. He looks much better than you do in armour—” “Thank you, sister.” “—and, apparently, he broke your nose, although I have only his word for it; but I have no reason not to believe it. And he made a joke of you. Whatever sick test you’d been giving him, brother, you can’t deny that he passed. With flying colours, I might add,” she added, casting a meaningful look at a spot of rhodelia-coloured epidermis under a horned helmet.

There was another slightly too long, deeply startled silence; then, swiftly, as a mind recalled a forgotten, offhand remark vis-à-vis a trial, or Trials—words flowed, “Indeed, squire. My sister has the right of it; and, as a matter of fact, so do you.”

A slight pause, long enough to let the words sink in; and then, Sarevok started to narrate calmly, “A frontal assault, as you said, is impossible without wings; or a siege tower, teleportation magic, or any similar means which we do not possess. That is why we must search for a back door.”

Another slight pause, this time to ensure that the audience was listening; followed by, “Those caves, inhabited by the orcs—” Sarevok pointed in the vaguely north-eastern direction, where there were, indeed, some dark fissures in the rock side, “—connect, I am assured, both to the tomb and to Firkraag’s own place. The elimination of Bodhi’s agent, which we must effect regardless, will serve as fee for the orcs’ extended neutrality. The vampires dwell in a separate cavern. There.” Closer to the left, in the western wall of the canyon, there was a fairly large opening in the sandstone. “This will be our first target.” An inquiring look.

“‘Tis daytime,” Anomen replied, and Imoen smiled.

A curt nod. “Then, we will explore the tomb; following that, we will be almost certainly attacked by Dig Dag, who will wish to curry favour with his master—”

“If so, why shan’t we attack them first? They are only orcs.”

“An excellent question, squire. Sister?”

Imoen stirred; and trying to sound professionally adventurous again, said, “Because of the ‘almost’ part, Anomen. It’s just possible that the orcs will decide to side with us against the dragon. If my brother played his part correctly,” she added, casting a meaningful look at said brother.

He smiled. “Precisely. Dismount, Delryn. My retainer can’t be seen riding while I walk. I would have to kill you,” he added merrily.

For a moment, Anomen bristled at the moniker; but, as he was helped dismount, he said only, as if he had bitten into something bitter, “Subterfuge.” Then, sulkily, he added, “‘Tis no knightly deed to fool orcs.”

He promptly missed the oddly human flicker of a look whose target he was at this juncture, and arrived on the ground to hear, spoken curtly, equably, “Come, squire. Let me introduce you to my bride.”

For then, he balked. “Your bride, Anchev?!”

There was a cool smile. “Yes.”

“You are getting married?!”

The smile persisted. “Yes.”

The horror of sudden understanding lit up in the noble’s wide-open eyes. “To an orc?!”

The smile did not disappear. “Yes.”

“You are getting married to one of those filthy, uncouth, homicidal, untrustworthy… heathen beasts?!”

Imoen sighed. Anomen Delryn definitely belonged to a world where the word ‘marriage’ meant something, and was not just a makeshift handle for the passing of a chattel from one individual to another in an attempt to fool the other side of a temporary truce.

Next to her, her brother was clearly astonished by the force of the surprise assault: for a split second, he wavered in a half-frown, before his brow smoothed out, his eyes glimmered, and he replied, utterly amused, “Yes.”




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