Getting stabbed is not pleasant, and it also doesn’t typically feel like one imagines it would feel like. When a hand’s length of steel gets rammed through a chest, it first passes through skin, which hurts like fire. Then it has to scrape in past the ribs, and bone pain can wrench sobs out of the mightiest warrior. But the last is the pain from the organ, which can be surprisingly dull. Be it two inches or ten, the victim would have no idea the difference before, in this case, he drowned in his own blood.
Sieg should have ripped a gash open through Muharib, but he thought the stab had reached the bandit chief’s heart because he could feel the thumping reverberate through the handle. So he ripped it out and dove at the other bandit. He needed a fall guy after all. For the other bandit, the one who had been so comradely as to rescue him and hold his hand with the doctor, Sieg slashed the surprised man’s throat open. He had to tackle him to the floor and wrestle, putting his weight into the stab, but he ripped through the man’s throat before words could fly.
Warm blood squirted across his face, marring and muddying him again with death. Sieg rolled off and scrambled to his feet, ears tense for the pounding of feet and the cries of alarm. Those approached certainly, and they meant grown men, hardened killers, and real swords. His mind reeled with lies and stories, fabrications of wit and deceit. He needed to show them what they expected to see, and do it in a way that didn’t get his head cut off.
My crow cawed at him, because I was not so blind as he. A small aid to my pupil.
Gooseskin ran from the tips of his fingers to the back of his skull. Muharib had not fallen over. He stood where he had, one hand to his bleeding chest but already the blood had stopped. “Betrayer,” he said, coughing up red.
Muharib had been blessed by the gods, just like Sieg had. In a way, his power was far better than my pupils, for he had been able to use it for irrigation, for construction, to simplify the labor of living and create prosperity. By comparison, Sieg’s ability was nearly useless. Muharib could manipulate water. He had used it to wash away canals, shoving waves back and forth until he was exhausted or until the oasis of Tavina had reached another garden. Standing across from Sieg, he showed another use for it : recirculating his blood back into his body.
“Shit.”
His plan in tatters, Sieg sought to at least secure the kill. He darted back at Muharib, red steel darting and dashing. Leomund had been true to his promise and none of the boy’s muscles had been cut nor slashed. The blood loss had been severe, but he was well used to such anemic conditions. It was Muharib at the disadvantage, with his own life sputtering from his chest and half his mind stitching his blood vessels shut. Even with ten years more training than my pupil, the most the bandit chief could do was stagger back and take the cuts upon his arms.
The other bandits charged up the temple steps, their chain armor rattling. They were the ones that had just rescued Sieg and they brought all their weapons to the commotion. Just as the first of them ran into the firelit shadows of the temple, Sieg plunged the honor blade into Muharib’s forearm. The bandit howled as it bit through from one side to the next, but it had gone in between the two bones.
A twist and a yank ripped the weapon from Sieg’s grasp.
Disarmed, surrounded, and with Muharib still alive, Sieg suddenly needed to improvise.
Muharib pointed a bloody finger at him and screamed, “Kill him!”
Sieg ripped the cloth plugs from his nose with a gout of blood. “We’re all going to die if we don’t hand him over. The ferret knights are here in force. Two hundred of them ready to burn this place to the ground and everyone in it. They want Muharib’s head as a trophy. It’s our only bargaining chip!”
Swords pointed at him suddenly wavered with uncertainty. The bandits glanced at one another. “He did say they were knights. Is this a war?” one asked.
“Cut him down,” Muharib ordered, backing further to the altar, his own blood dripping from his arms.
That sparked a new fear in the men. One darted past Sieg. “Chief, the spirit!”
“Fuck the spirit! I’ll feed him to the spirit,” Muharib roared, ripping the honor blade out of his arm. One of his subordinates called for the doctor once more.
“Two hundred knights,” Sieg said again, fastening his eyes to one weak soul. Of the four bandits that had first arrived, one seemed to give credence to the fake warning. The problem was that man was a coward. He stood furthest from my pupil, held his sword weakly in his hand, and was nearly ready to run the other way.
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One of the bandits stepped forward, the tip of his sword pointed at Sieg’s throat. He was a thick man, with most of his head shaved clean due to burn scars reaching from his back to the crown of his head. Whatever had happened to him had also burned compassion from his eyes. “Those knights killed our friends.”
“And they’ll kill us too,” Sieg shot back.
“They may try.”
More bandits were coming. Men who had been in the camp for the day, and unarmored but still with spears in their hands. Some crowded into the temple, others remained on the steps, uncertain what to do. A general alarm began to go up, rousing everyone to alertness.
Sieg swallowed his fear as more men surrounded him with steel drawn. “I’d fight for vengeance like any of you, if there was a chance. Are we an army here? Or are we some few dozen men who know how to fight? What training do we even have? Really?”
Muharib spat on the ground. “Vassish pig. You know nothing of our ways. I should have never let you join us. Your oath clearly means nothing to you, but a Giordanan’s oath is iron. Hear me! By this honor blade, taken from my dead friend, I swear by blood that I will not rest until these killers are slain.” Then he carved a line across his chest. He cut through his shirt and skin and let the blood ooze across his chest for all to see. He wore it like the emblem of a tabard, and it enraptured the gazes of his men.
The bandit chief thrust the honor blade above his head and screamed, “I declare this a vendetta!”
Only one man in the temple did not stare in surprise at the declaration. It was the one man who wasn’t a native to the area: Sieg. While the others let out whoops and let their minds wander for a moment of excitation about the righteous war to come, Sieg bolted. Not for the door, not through the mass of armed robbers with steel pointed at him. He rolled the dice with the shadows and charged through the dark halls that didn’t have armed men blocking his way.
Lit scarcely by cracks in the stone and reflections of light, he slammed his shoulders into walls and bumbled through the darkness. He groped from stone to stone as some bandits gave chase and others scrambled to get lanterns lit.
The first to reach him found not a fleeing coward, but Sieg’s fist. He tackled the surprised bandit into the wall, bouncing the man’s leather helm off the stone. One hand went to the handle of the bandit’s sword to fight for it, and with his other he grabbed the end of the blade itself, just an inch from the tip. Judging the spot by the man’s foul breath more than sight, he wrenched the sword backwards and stabbed it into the bandit’s own throat. More blood, including some from his palm, spilled.
But he had a weapon.
“He’s getting away!” one screamed, and Sieg ran deeper into the temple. Rather than finding private rooms, solars for meditation or perhaps larders and kitchens for the living of the priests, he found stairs down. Chased by bobbing lanterns and curses, he sprinted down the ancient steps.
The men chasing him brought the light he needed. They ran with lanterns overhead and steel drawn. They practically screamed their presence out and made it all too simple. Sieg found a corner by touch and waited. The air was saturated with foul, stagnant water in the temple basement. The walls seemed to sweat as he did, running clammy lines of filth down his back as he waited.
Then he saw the first man, by weapon tip first.
Sieg dove out. The man screamed. He plunged the blade in and the man swung wildly. The bandit cut Sieg across the chin. The edge raked across the boy’s jaw but then he was in. The stolen sword caught the man in the gut and pierced through. Both of them tumbled to the ground. Every movement carved the edge deeper before Sieg could rip it free.
The boot of the second bandit slammed into his side, sending him rolling across the hall. He hit the wall, swinging his sword up just as the bandit tried to stab him. They clashed, Sieg swept his foot and brought the bandit down to his level. After that, it was a simple matter to kill him.
That was but two bandits however, and he had to get back to his feet. Freshly injured and barely able to grasp his strength. The might of the gods dwelled within his body, but not quite at his beck and call. What’s more, I had told him to not rely on it.
The bandits had brought lanterns with both of them, so he threw one back at the stairs as more men emerged, and he darted onwards with the second. Again, he found more stairs down. This time, they were the surrounding wall of a pit descending down and down to darkness with no other path. So he went down.
Dread nagged at him, whispering that the pit was beneath the altar. That he was going down to some forgotten shrine. The bandits had bled a goat to death at that altar and such sacrifice was neither common nor without reason. Whatever might have been down there didn’t matter, because a small army of bandits were after his head and he needed a way out. So down to the depths of the temple he went.
The smell of rot, that horrid mixture of ammonia, methane and disease, gagged the boy. A veritable swamp of decayed flesh waited at the bottom of the stairs. He couldn’t take one step without crunching bones beneath his feet. Even the bandits chasing after him stopped on the stairs and watched him. They called back that he had gotten to the bottom but they did not set foot upon the bodies. They did nothing to stop him from creeping down the arched tunnel that led out, where the swamp of blood and gore slowly flowed.
Evidently the river had been dammed and the city abandoned, but the ways of the city spirit had not been lost.