Sheroth met Vix’s amethyst eyes, and his body swayed.
Gledeth’s eyes narrowed. “Hmmm… you may be right. Ah, well, Kalev, you’ll just have to set your skulks on her.”
The skulks roared and lunged forward. Vix screamed and stabbed out, catching one skulk in the shoulder. The skulk howled and reeled, and she pivoted on her heel to face the other sneering murderer.
“Kill them!” Gledeth shouted.
Sheroth plowed into the unsteady pile of debris that Kalev had climbed upon. Kalev leaped for the warforged’s armored shoulders and bounced off, scarcely jarring Sheroth at all. He hit the floor hard, barely staying upright. Vix shouted again as both skulks charged her. She sliced one on the arm with her blade, sending it staggering backward, and with the back stroke slammed the butt of her spear into the other one’s guts.
“They’ll kill her!” Kalev bellowed to Sheroth. “You’ve got to do something! They’ll kill Vix!”
Sheroth froze, just for an eye-blink. Kalev could practically feel the wave of power pouring from the psion, but it was not enough. It could not be enough to break such loyalty. Sheroth roared and turned, brandishing his blade in one massive hand. With the other, he grabbed the nearest skulk and tossed it aside.
Kalev faced Gledeth, spear poised. “Who are you working for, Gledeth?”
“You expect me to name my masters to you?”
Kalev smiled patiently. “You must be at your breaking point. You can’t let the skulks go-they’re just as likely to kill you as us. You can’t let Sheroth go because he and Vix will take you down. If I want, all I have to do is wait it out, and you die.”
The half-elf’s eyes glittered. “Perhaps all I need do is wait until my skulks kill your pathetic allies. Then you are mine.”
“You think I won’t fight?”
“I think you don’t want to,” said the psion. “What I know is too useful to you and to your little queen. You need me to name my spy master. You know that you do.”
He did. He wanted to bring Gledeth back alive, to see him questioned, to find out what the half-elf’s plans were, why he had murdered, and who he was working for or with. It could be a threat to the whole of the realm and he, Kalev, could end it all, be a hero to the queen. If he could just capture Gledeth Shore alive.
Kalev swayed on his feet. “I… need… you.”
Just then, Sheroth bellowed and stomped down on one of the skulks. There was a sickening crunch and squish as the creature’s skull splintered beneath the warforged’s foot.
Gledeth grinned and turned his shining eyes onto Kalev, in time to see Kalev’s dagger flying toward him, but not fast enough to dodge before the blade embedded itself in his throat.
“But I want you dead more,” said Kalev.
Gledeth gurgled and fell as a welter of blood spilled down the front of his silken tunic. Kalev turned in time to see Sheroth grab the remaining skulk and hold it so Vix could run her spear straight into its wide-open mouth, slitting flesh and crashing through bone. The skulk gagged and gurgled and sagged, spouting blood, and Sheroth flung the creature away.
Vix and Sheroth faced each other, panting, shaking, their friendship unbroken, the slow understanding of true circumstances that comes after a battle washing over them. Kalev retrieved his dagger and wiped the blood and gore on Gledeth’s sleeve before he tucked it back into his sash.
“Come on,” he said to his comrades. “Let’s get out of here.”
WATCHERS AT THE LIVING GATE
A TALE OF THE FORGOTTEN REALMS
He lived with his own kind in the forest, away from the towns of the human world, because of what he was. But once a year since he was small he’d come away to the ruined city on the mountainside where his own people never ventured, nor full-blooded humans either, a place of old magic and old defeats. That first time he’d been hunting on the cliff top, and a wounded ram had led him far from home. In a bowl of mist and leaning stones he brought it down, a lucky shot with the small bow, but soon he heard the hounds yelping behind him. Before he could claim the kill he had been whipped away by men on horseback, shouting and cursing the mother who had borne him. Some dismounted and threw stones. Helpless, he had watched them pull the ram away, his arrow still lodged in its throat.
When he ran away it had not been in shame or fear so much as rage. Toward sunset he came out on the mountainside above the clouds and watched the red light cut across the rocks amid the tussocks of coarse grass. There was the fallen gate, its stone posts inscribed with runes he couldn’t read, not yet. He approached, and came into the first of the ruined streets, the ruined houses built into the cliff side.
Carved statues lined an avenue. Some had lost their arms, legs, heads, but even so, he could see a vision of ideal beauty in the broken stones. He paused to study the statue of a boy about his age, yet more beautiful even than a human child, tall and slender, with long eyes and delicately pointed ears.
He stood at the lip of a stone pool, gesturing down into its depths, and in the last rays of the setting sun, the living boy squatted over it and saw reflected in its surface, as carefully as in any mirror, his own distorted features, his heavy jaw, protruding teeth, mashed nose, bulbous eyes under heavy ridges of bone. In such circumstances even the small attempts at decoration, the shards of broken glass that his mother had tied lovingly into his shaggy hair, appeared to mock him as they caught the light.
Then it was dark. He looked around for the door of a stone hall that still retained some of its roof. The black doorways seemed suddenly menacing. Who knew what ghosts and spirits prowled these ruins, who had died here when the city fell? Instead, shivering with cold, he stayed beside the pool, until the moon rose behind the shattered peaks, and moonlight struck the surface of the water.
That was the first time he had seen her. Every year since then he had returned, when the first full moon of summer fell into the water. He had changed since that first time, grown in stature and in skill, but she never changed. Always she stroked to the surface as if swimming up from underneath, from some submerged tunnel, he had thought at first.
Then, because he was a boy, he had worshiped her as a boy does a woman, worshiped her goodness, as he imagined it, striven to be worthy, and to fulfill every command. Later, full-grown, his shoulders tattooed with his clan’s symbols of manhood, his ears pierced with iron rings, he had moved into another kind of worship, as she had stood with the water to her knees, her body clothed in wet silk, and a phosphorescent sheen that had followed her from the depths. Later still, reckless, he had staggered down into the pool, only to find himself enmeshed in weeds, while she pulled laughing away. “How ugly you are! How is it possible for a living creature to be so ugly? You disgust me-truly, you disgust me.” But when he was exhausted and discouraged she came close to him again, and with flashing eyes she told him once more what he must accomplish to prepare himself. He’d done everything she’d asked.
These commandments, as if from a goddess, had led him far from his own people. Not for him the brawls between the clans, the comforts of marriage and children. Instead he lived with his widowed mother in the forest, away from the clan’s hearth, despised, he imagined, by the purebreds in his village. With a dedication born of rage, he studied human lore. He learned the languages of men and other creatures. He studied old books by candlelight, and parchment scrolls from the libraries of the abandoned city. He spoke the words the goddess brought to him until the trees came alive. And in the spring he cut his totem stick from a piece of bone, and carved the length of it in a pattern of braided hair, and fashioned its knob in the shape of a wolf’s head, with lumps of agate for its eyes.
On the night of the full moon he slept most of the day. His mother woke him for supper, as he had requested. Yawning, he sat down on a mossy rock in the middle of the stream, washed his body, shaved his face, combed his hair and knotted it with iron beads. Then he dressed himself in the clothes he had laid out the night before, his father’s shirt, made from doeskin as fine as linen, salvaged by his mother after he’d left them, mended and patched over the years. The tribe wore furs and harder, heavier leather when they wore anything, but she had kept this human garment for the wedding of her half-human son.