She brought her urgrosh up to block the swing. Their axe-heads met with a metallic clash, and as Aggar’s trajectory took him out of range, the bit of his axe slid down the cheek of hers and across the haft of the urgrosh, slicing the back of her left hand to the bone. Then he was past her, and she was spinning around to face him while still trying to keep the Noldrun woman in her sight.
Luckily, the duergar assassin seemed content to watch her puppet at work and showed no sign of launching her own attack. Or perhaps she simply couldn’t control both Aggar and her mindblade at the same time. Whatever the reason, she remained where she’d climbed, atop a broken-off stalagmite ten feet away, and Sabira was grateful not to have to battle on two fronts at once. Especially since Aggar was proving to be a far better fighter than he’d been the last time she’d had occasion to cross blades with him, seven long years ago.
Twisting in the air and landing with almost feline grace, the red-bearded dwarf had barely touched down when he was rushing at her again, the haft of his greataxe held parallel to the cavern floor as he ran. She knew that grip. It was the one Aggar used when he wanted to get up close and personal with an opponent. For, unlike a normal axe, a greataxe was double-headed and double-edged, making it an effective and deadly weapon both at arm’s length and in close quarters.
She couldn’t let him get inside her guard. Not unless she wanted her last sight to be of him eating his own eyes at Eddarga’s command before the assassin finished them both off. And before she then moved on to do the same to Frostmantle.
With her shoulder throbbing, her hand on fire and dripping, and her grasp on her weapon made slippery by warm blood, Sabira went on the offensive. She charged forward to meet Aggar, her shard axe singing as it whizzed through the air toward the dwarf’s knees. With her superior reach, her best hope was to try and harry him with attacks he had to either parry or dodge, and to keep him too busy to get close.
But she’d forgotten about Aggar’s preternatural jumps. He leaped up, over her blow, and landed within arm’s reach. As she struggled to arrest her swing and bring the shard axe’s spear-tip to bear, Aggar punched her in the gut with the spike that separated the blades of his axe. The sharpened metal tip stabbed into her flesh, not nearly far enough to puncture anything vital, but still drawing blood and an oof of pain from her.
Then he yanked the haft of his greataxe to the left, intending to disembowel her with the axe-blade on the right. She threw her hips backward, arching her back, and the edge of the blade skimmed along her stomach, scoring her armor. Before he could reverse his momentum, Sabira completed her own backswing, catching him behind the knee with the butt of her shard axe. Aggar’s leg folded and he went down with a surprised grunt.
Sabira stamped down on his wrists until he let go of his weapon, then she planted the toe of her boot under his ribs. As the air rushed out of him and he was momentarily stunned, Sabira kicked his axe away, sending it skittering across the uneven ground and right into the leading edge of the advancing magma flow.
She stood over him, the tip of her urgrosh nestled at the base of his throat. As she leaned into him, the Siberys shard broke skin. The power inherent in the golden dragonshard seemed to momentarily counteract that of the darker one on Eddarga’s finger, for Aggar’s eyes cleared of the mad rage that had filled them and then widened in horrified realization. But Eddarga would not be so easily denied her prey, and the hatred bled back into his face as the duergar attempted to reestablish her influence over him. Aggar fought the assassin’s mental onslaught valiantly—Sabira could see it in the sweat beaded on his upper lip and the deep lines of effort creasing his brow—but he wasn’t strong enough. As Eddarga’s mind once more took hold of his, Aggar was able to whisper a single, urgent entreaty.
“Forget about me, Saba. Save Frostmantle.”
Then all recognition was gone from his eyes, and Sabira had the space between two ragged heartbeats to make her choice, the same awful choice she’d been faced with seven years ago, triggered by the same awful words.
Leoned’s voice rang out of the past, calm and unafraid. Accepting.
“Forget about me, Saba. Save Aggar.”
Sabira stared down at the dwarf, his green eyes at once alien and too familiar, and, remembering, made her choice.
She pulled the spear-end of her shard axe away from his throat, then quickly pivoted and thrust it deep into the meat of his thigh. Aggar howled in agony, but Sabira was already moving away. Even if the pain didn’t sever Eddarga’s hold on him for good, the injury would at least guarantee that he couldn’t get up and follow her as she charged his manipulating mistress.
The Noldrun, her mind still entangled with Aggar’s, was caught off guard by Sabira’s sudden rush. She was barely able to muster her mindblade and bring it to bear against Sabira’s furious onslaught in time. As it was, Sabira forced the duergar to abandon her high ground and landed a good hit to Eddarga’s midsection as well, smiling when her axe came away satisfyingly bloody.
But the assassin recovered quickly, and soon the two were battling back and forth across the cavern floor, trading blows and taunts, neither of them able to gain the advantage over the other.
“You should have seen your face when you realized that you triggered the trap that wound up killing your partner. That memory has kept me warm on many a long, cold night in the years since,” Eddarga said as she feinted toward Sabira’s thigh, only to change direction at the last minute and jab at the wound in the Marshal’s shoulder.
“No doubt it was the only thing,” Sabira retorted, twisting out of the way and getting in a jab of her own, the Siberys shard of her urgrosh grazing the Noldrun woman’s hip.
“Perhaps. But that’s still better than having no one to share my bed with all these years except the ghost of a man who turned his back on me. Don’t you think?”
Eddarga accompanied the verbal barb with a quick lunge to Sabira’s chest that slid off the haft of her urgrosh and nicked her under the arm. But neither the insult nor the wound caused Sabira any real pain, for she knew what Eddarga could not—that she had shared her bed with someone, a man who was definitely not a ghost and who did, in fact, love her. Probably more than she deserved.
“I wasn’t lying,” he had written.
Someone, she realized, whom she loved in turn.
That knowledge spurred her on as anger or vengeance could not. It gave renewed strength to her blows and purpose to her attack. Slowly she forced the assassin back, toward the advancing magma, the air around them shimmering with heat.
The gray dwarf risked a glance behind her and saw where Sabira was guiding her. Panic poured into her eyes and she launched herself at Sabira, her mindblade a black blur as she landed a flurry of blows. But Sabira, with a calmness that bordered on serenity, parried every strike with haft and axe and pushed the duergar back, inexorable and implacable as death itself.
“What are you doing?” Eddarga asked, alarm making her voice high and childlike. “You’ll kill us both!”
“If that’s what it takes,” Sabira agreed amiably.
“You’re mad!”
“Aren’t we all?”
Eddarga thrust at her again, with flashy footwork designed to hide the fact that she’d angled her steps so that she would be moving mostly parallel to the magma’s edge instead of toward it as Sabira advanced on her. Sabira let her think the ploy had worked and didn’t immediately try to correct the duergar’s path. Instead, she intensified her attack, bringing her shard axe down in powerful, sweeping blows that Eddarga could not counter. And when she had the assassin in position, she pretended to tire, taking too long to recover from one wide swing.