Valhellions, p.27
Valhellions, page 27
“It will be,” he said casually. “You want to show your courage? Take off that girlish armor. It’s not fitting for a man to be so precious with his skin.”
“This coming from a man wielding a magic sword that kills with the slightest cut,” I said, shaking my head. “I’ll stick with my steel, thanks.”
“Very well.” He reached the clearing and looked out over the warring shadows down below. “Look at them, John. Don’t they look happy?”
“They do not,” I said. “Are you done with your break time, old man? Can we start fighting, or do you need a nap?”
“The dead never sleep,” he said. “As you are about to find out.”
Our swords met in a crash of steel and necrotic magic, spitting sparks like fireworks. Below us, the silent dead fought on.
CHAPTER THIRTY-SIX
The thing about a longsword is that it’s long. I know that’s obvious, but I can’t emphasize it enough. The longsword replaced the shield in traditional fighting around the fourteenth century. That feels counterintuitive—you would think that having a shield would always be an advantage—but the fact is that the longsword’s superior reach coupled with the fighting style that developed around the double-handed grip made the shield obsolete. The only way I was able to defeat Gregory and his zweihander was with Chesa’s help, and the intervention of a magical pink ribbon. But now I was alone with Aelwulf and the Totenschreck, and all he had to do was draw blood to win this fight.
Our blades crossed, steel dragging along steel until we met at the hilt. He forced me back, twisting my arm away from my torso with the full weight of his body. I punched at his arm with my shield, but he just growled and pressed harder. Finally I spun in the direction he was pushing, risking a counterswing just long enough to get my shield between us. His strike came in low, denting the armor over my shin. I swore and scuttled back. That was going to leave a bruise.
I didn’t have time to think about that, though. He struck again and again, each time pushing me back with the weight of his blows and his superior reach. I began to despair. This wasn’t the kind of fight I was supposed to be in. As a warden, I was meant to protect the softer members of the team while Tembo, Gregory, and Bethany went on the offense. I could probably stay alive until I dropped from exhaustion, but I wasn’t going to be able to break Aelwulf’s defenses on my own.
Another exchange of steel and we both fell back. Aelwulf grinned at me.
“Ah, there it is,” he said. “Despair. I can see it in your eyes. You have taken my measure, and discovered that you are outclassed. There is no shame in that. You are a mere child. I have been a warrior for a thousand years, and will be for a thousand more.”
“Honestly, I’m worried that you’re going to hurt yourself. You’re limping around like an old man. You want to take another break?”
“Perhaps after you are dead, and my valkyries have returned to care for me,” he said.
“I don’t think they’re coming back. The zombies probably ate one, I cut another in half, one of them got crushed . . . I think you’re left with Solveig the Bashful.” I started circling to my left, away from the precipice. Aelwulf followed my movement carefully, keeping the weight off his right leg. “And the last I saw of her she was running for the hills. Literally, I think.”
“Solveig will be back. She always comes back,” he said.
“Maybe not this time. Maybe she got tired of being bossed around by a guy with his face cut in half.” I slid faster. Aelwulf struggled to keep up. “There’s been a lot of women’s liberation stuff going on in the last thousand years. You might want to keep up.”
Just then, the old Viking’s injured leg got hung up on an uneven lip in the stone clearing. Hardly an inch of elevation, but Aelwulf was dragging that leg around like a sack of potatoes. He caught himself quickly enough, but I was already on the move.
I crashed into him with my shield, catching his sword with the boss of my shield and shoving him backward. He stumbled, struggling to stay upright with half a leg, swinging wildly with the sword, more to keep his balance than to hit me. I chopped down on his wrist, then deflected his instinctive pommel strike with my shield. Rather than falling back, I circled quickly to his right, forcing him to pivot on his injured leg.
“Stand still, you bastard,” he spat.
“Sounds like a bad idea.” I struck again, but this time he fell back rather than let me get close. I smiled. “Who’s running now?”
“You are incredibly annoying,” he said. “Worse than Loki. Do you have troll blood in your veins?”
“No, I never could get the hang of Reddit.” I backed away a little, dancing to my right, slowly herding Aelwulf toward the precipice. When he was close enough, I quickly strafed left. Scowling, he let Totenschreck’s shimmering tip touch the ground. I thought I was finally wearing him out, but then he said something in a broken tongue.
The ground shifted under my feet. Something pinched my ankle, and then I felt the sharp probing of fingers against the chain mail at my calf. I looked down in horror. Skeletal arms reached out of the earth and crawled up my right leg. I tried to shake them off, but they held me firmly in place. I kicked at them with my other boot, cracking bone and turning the hand into dust. Once I was free, I quickly scooted back.
“Who’s running now?” Aelwulf asked, his voice mocking. He sauntered forward. “It’s no use, Rast. The dead are everywhere.”
To demonstrate, he swirled his blade overhead, speaking again in that halting, broken voice. The whole bluff shook, and skeletal forms unfolded from the shadows, rising from the stone like stop-motion trees, reaching for me. Bony fingers grabbed at the edge of my shield, my wrist, encircled my arm, seized my knee, pulled at me. I screamed and struck out desperately.
Smashing my shield into the nearest leering face, I hacked at the dozen or so arms that were grabbing at me. Bones scattered like dice. But for every skeleton I knocked down, two more rose up, and then three more. The horde pressed in on me.
“You see? This is hopeless. I don’t even need my sword to destroy you.” Aelwulf came closer and closer, his skeleton army leaving a space around him. He held Totenschreck overhead. A tornado of green light swirled around the blade.
And then I saw it.
Over Aelwulf’s shoulder, the sky parted and light shone through. Fluorescent light. Three long bars of flickering, bright fluorescent light, as mundane as a ham sandwich. Whatever magic the sword contained, Aelwulf was burning through it like a torch through butter. His domain, barely formed and still unstable, was collapsing back into the real world.
All I had to do was push it over the edge. And hope my own magic lasted long enough to survive.
“One thing I know about skeleton hordes!” I shouted as he stalked closer. “You can break all the bones you want, they’ll just make more. Only way to win—KILL THE GUY WITH THE CREEPY HAT!”
Aelwulf seemed taken aback by this. I planted my shield and, with a complicated series of gestures, activated the bulwark’s ultimate form. This was the kind of thing I could only do once, and I felt the power needed to fuel it leave my body with a snap. The shield came free from my arm, hovering just over my shoulder before separating into a half dozen smaller shields, each the size of a notebook. It was a real loaves-and-fishes moment, with more shield than I started with. My little armada of flying shields zipped around me, blocking attacks and shattering skulls.
Taking my sword in both hands, I charged forward, screaming. The shield-fleet kept most of the skeletons away, but I still had to smash my way through a trove of weather-beaten bones, skulls, rib cages, and spinal columns that snapped under the steel of my blade. Aelwulf watched my progress with amusement at first, then concern. Shouting in his broken tongue, he drove Totenschreck into the ground. The stone split beneath the glimmering blade, and a crevasse opened, cutting the plateau in half. Green light poured out of the hellish depth, and out scrambled hundreds of skeletal warriors. Their eyes glowed and their bones creaked, and the air filled with the smell of decay and ancient tombs.
They came at me in a wave. The flitting helix of my shields strained under the onslaught, and my swordwork shifted to defense, as I plugged the gaps between the hovering panels with my blade. And still they came. My forward movement stalled out. I could feel the Totenschreck’s power overwhelming me. I looked up at the sky in desperation. The clouds thinned, but the real world was no brighter, no closer.
One of the buzzing panels of my shield crumpled to the ground. Another, trying to protect me from a lumbering skeleton, flattened itself against the creature’s skull and disappeared. Three simply winked out of existence, their magic spent. My magic spent. But the horde thinned. I reached out my left hand and summoned the shield. The orbiting panels collapsed against my fist, reforming into a Viking round shield. Appropriate.
I sliced through the remaining skeletons, whirling my shield back and forth, putting my sword into rib cages and my boot through bony legs. Aelwulf watched me with increasing trepidation. He drew more power, made manifest in a final row of diaphanous skeletons still dressed in the misty cloaks of their living souls. It wasn’t enough to stop me. I smashed through them and struck at Aelwulf. He caught my blow with Totenschreck’s hilt, ending his channeled spell. The last few skeletons tumbled to the ground, piles of bones now that their animating magic had fled.
“Very well,” he growled. “We will do this the old-fashioned way.”
“No,” I said. “I don’t think we will.”
The swirling clouds of greenish light that had been emanating from Totenschreck collapsed in a storm of light and shadow. They brought the rest of the domain with them, drawn in by the emptiness of the sword’s magic, the void left by all the power Aelwulf had just expended. Like Chesa, and Matthew before her, Aelwulf had used all the magic that was keeping him grounded in the Unreal. The domain collapsed.
“What the HEL is going on?” he shouted. And then a door of light appeared and swallowed him whole. He vanished like fog at sun’s first light.
I took a shaky breath and tried to gather my thoughts. I had done it! I had knocked him out of his realm. Now he was somewhere in the mundane world. It was time to hunt him down like the dog he was. On my turf. On my terms.
“Let’s see what kind of place dreams that it’s an undying hellscape, filled with souls of the undying, trapped in eternal war,” I said, then drew in the last reserves of my mythic power and released it. I became mundane, and fell out of the Unreal.
My feet came down hard on cheap tile flooring. Harsh fluorescent light filled a hallway that stretched in both directions. The air smelled like industrial-strength disinfectant, body odor, even more body spray, mildew, and desperation. A long line of lockers ran the length of one wall. The other was covered by a glass case, filled with trophies. My eyes locked onto a sign over the case, draped in crimson and gold banners.
Hack Plain High School, Home of your FIGHTING VIKINGS! it read, and below it was the most culturally inappropriate cartoon of two Vikings punching each other in the guts. Someone had drawn in unrealistic genitals, using a ballpoint pen and a shockingly optimistic imagination. I nodded to myself.
“High school,” I looked around. The hallway was silent, though in the far distance I thought I could hear cheering, and someone yelling over a loudspeaker. “Seems about right. Now, where did that bastard get to?”
Somewhere down the hallway, something crashed through glass, followed by a string of angry swearing that could only have been Nordic in their syllable choice. I turned and ran in that direction.
CHAPTER THIRTY-SEVEN
My footsteps rang through the eerily halls of Hack Plain High. I passed a dozen closed doors, more lockers, and a trophy case that had been smashed open and pilfered of its many golden cups. There was a smear of blood on the jagged glass of the broken display. A trail of blood drops led down the hall. I followed them at a slow trot, sword and shield in hand, fully aware of how ridiculous I must look. Hopefully, I wouldn’t run into a security guard, or Cerberus, or anything in between.
The trail led through a science classroom and then directly through the windows that overlooked the athletic fields below. There was a Viking-shaped hole in the glass. Outside, night had fallen, but an array of metal-halide lights turned the field into day. There was a soccer game going on, and bracketing bleachers filled with students and parents cheered the participants forward in their endeavours. There was no sign of Aelwulf or the Viking dead.
“Cool,” I mumbled. “Just a bunch of normal people who aren’t going to be freaked out by a couple guys with swords wandering the field.” I started clearing the broken glass from the window frame with my sword, then stepped gingerly through, hopping into the low shrubs that surrounded the school. “Let’s try to not get shot, shall we, Rast?”
Sheathing my sword and slinging my shield over my shoulder as I approached the crowds, I looked around for any sign of Aelwulf. The trail of blood was gone, but there was also a distinct lack of tall, fully armed and armored warriors. Other than me, of course. I tried to look natural as I made my way across the asphalt track that ringed the field. Hopefully the mundane world would work its magic and make me look normal. Or as normal as I could be, given the circumstances.
As I walked, I peeled off my helm and tossed it to the side. I had a good-sized cut where Aelwulf had dinged me across my forehead, but the blood seemed to have dried, and other than a dull ache behind my eyes, there seemed to be no harm. Hopefully I’d look a little less alarming without the helm.
I still got a lot of curious looks from the attendees. Most of them were wearing some kind of school spirit gear, in the same crimson and gold I had seen inside, often with the cartoonish Viking emblazoned on their shirts. Apparently his name was Oofsen, and he spent his entire life punching things in the belly, or being punched in the same way.
“Hey, it’s their mascot!” some kid yelled at me as I walked past his little clique of friends. The rest of the crowd turned and looked at me. “Boo! Boo the Knights! Boo!”
“What are you . . . ?” I looked around, then saw a giant white school bus parked nearby. It was painted yellow, and had a giant blue helmet on the front. The side read Noughton Knights, written in an appropriately scrolly font. I sighed. “Oh, you have to be kidding me.”
“I heard there was a knight over here, marauding our villages!” A life-sized Oofsen pushed his way through the crowd, plush hands and oversized head in full effect. “Well, you’ve come to the wrong village, buddy!”
“Look, I don’t want anything to do with—OOF!” I said, as Oofsen laid a solid right into my temple. I felt the scab break, and a fresh gout of blood poured down the side of my face. Oofsen cackled and rather cartoonishly wound up to hit me again.
“Aelwulf, is that you?” I asked. The mascot swung again, padded fists banging off my armor to little effect. The crowd cheered him on. It wouldn’t surprise me if reality had somehow bent the bearer of the Totenschreck into this ridiculous caricature, but I didn’t want to hit him back until I was sure. This guy didn’t have a sword, but he sure was enthusiastic with those punches. “Listen, Aelwulf, if that’s you, we need to—”
“Oofsen goes OOF!” the mascot shouted, then kicked me in the (well-armored) groin. The crowd went wild.
I decked him with the steel knuckles of my gauntlet, going through six inches of collapsible fleece headpiece before connecting with a human skull. The mascot reeled, arms cartwheeling as he fell back into the supporting arms of the crowd. They pushed him up onto his feet, but the guy inside the suit wasn’t interested in fighting any longer. Instead, he was pushing his cartoon hands through the Viking’s mouth, trying to get at his real human face.
“Hey, I think he actually punched Oofsen!” someone in the crowd shouted. “Not cool, man! What’s wrong with you?”
“So many things,” Chesa said, appearing from the crowd. She seemed to have ditched her bow and blades, and didn’t look terribly out of place in her comic book T-shirt. She clapped her hands on my shoulders and dragged me back. “Come on, John. Time to stop beating up the high school kids.”
“I thought it was our guy. You know the weird things that the mundane world does to protect itself.” They had gotten the kid’s head off. I’d given him a bloody nose, and maybe broken some small cartilage bits. Hopefully he still had all his teeth. But the crowd was looking pretty angry. I looked back at Chesa. “How’d you get here?”
“Fell out of the sky, like any other normal person,” she said quietly. “Fortunately, no one saw me. Matt’s over by the concession stands, watching our stuff. Can’t go around armed. People notice.”
“Aelwulf’s here, somewhere. He was the edgelord. We both came through the school,” I said. “I think he’s carrying some trophies.”
“One thing at a time. Need to get you out of that armor before someone calls the police,” she said. We reached the concession stands and went around back. Matthew sat on a small pile of items that had been covered by a tarp. He was wearing his shades. I was going to point out that that was at least as weird as me going around in armor, but then he stood and pulled back the tarp.
“Your elven armor! And bow! And Matthew’s vestments!” I said.
“And all of Bee’s stuff, and Gregory’s as well,” Chesa pointed out. “When we fell out of the sky, it came with us. So hopefully Greg and Bee aren’t naked and tied together up there somewhere.”
“Hopefully they are! I don’t know which of them would be more pissed about that.”
“Point is, we’ve got our stuff. But can we walk around dressed like Ren faire rejects?”
“Why not?” I asked. “Aelwulf’s certainly not going to hide his sword in the woods.”
“We’re fully in the mundane now, man,” Matthew said. “No magic powers. Someone calls the cops and we’re done for.”
