Strife & Valor: Book II of The Rorke Burningsoul Saga Read online

  “You already have it back,” I assured her, my head light with pleasure that tightened all the muscles in my body. While her voice began again to mount toward its euphoric peak, I nuzzled my lips and nose against hers. “But I’ll gladly command the direction of your love until you’re comfortable enough to admit you’d like the company of the durrow as much as I do.”

  “Oh, yes! Yes, Rorke, yes, oh, if there’s anyone who can manage such a thing, it’s you—yes, Rorke, yes, please, I want to feel you inside me, dripping out of me! Rorke, Rorke, fill me to the brim, go on—”

  Groaning, I did as she begged of me and pounded home into her until I saw stars—until those searing stars shot their light into my brain and sped through me into sweet Branwen’s belly. She moaned, trembling, her body quivering with a second climax to receive my seed. Her face searched mine and, without having to be begged, I kissed her.

  Somehow her mouth seemed to have grown sweeter with the course of our lovemaking. I sighed into her soft lips, drawing from her when the storm had passed, then eased her down upon the stones of the tunnel beneath us. We kissed while I straightened out my clothes, and I found on leaning back that she had gotten her breeches back up. I smiled, about to utter some word of fondness for her.

  Something massive scuttled in the darkness at the edge of the lantern and I pushed her behind me, the scimitar in my hands at a second’s notice.

  BITTERSWEET FREEDOM

  ADONISIUS HAD A knack for surprising us, it seemed—but I still felt terrible to have more than once drawn arms on the good-natured misshapen. He raised up his hands, in fact, laughing as he took a few more steps into the light and revealed the spider torso that distinguished his race from that of the durrow.

  “I wondered if that was you from a distance, Burningsoul,” commented the Nightlands guide, “but now it has to be you! No one else is so quick on the draw.”

  “Hail, Adonisius! How good it is to see you again. The Nightlands being as they are, I expected our paths unlikely to cross again…at least, not so soon.”

  “My kinfolk live this way,” he explained to the immediate sinking of my intuition. “It’s funnier that I should find you here! I thought for sure that spirit-thief would make quick work of you…I guess I was wrong.”

  Trying not to let my ego be bruised by this well-meaning but backhanded praise, I instead struggled to think of how I would tell this misshapen the unfortunate truth about his kin. It seemed to me that, unless this area formed a complex of misshapen dens, (and, considering the structure of El’ryh and its strange hivelike arrangement, that might have been the case), the odds were more than good that I had slain most if not all of Adonisius’s family members.

  Unsure as I was on how to proceed, I was almost relieved when Branwen said with a quick look of shock at the spider-centaur’s lower half, “You’re a misshapen, too! Like one of the bandits Rorke saved me from.”

  Adonisius’s mouth opened in fright. “Bandits? Oh, no—”

  Looking shocked, then, slowly, horrified, the misshapen removed the helmet Valeria had given him. His pupiless gaze darted between myself and the high elf still half-hidden behind my shoulder.

  When next he spoke, Adonisius’s voice was soft.

  “Why is it that you’re here, Burningsoul?”

  “I heard the screams of my friend,” I told him, trying to walk the fine line between solemnity and condescending insincerity. “And I had to help her. I’m sorry, Adonisius.”

  As the gentle man’s eyes filled with tears, I reached out to lay a hand upon his arm. He took a step back and I admonished myself for the sting this caused in my spirit. What right had I to feel any sort of bruise? What obligation had he to tolerate comfort from the same hand that had dispatched his relatives but an hour or two before?

  “Please,” Adonisius said, covering his eyes with his free hand. “Don’t—oh, don’t. You killed them?”

  “Yes,” I said, glancing at the floor, feeling the abashment of a child before a parent. “It is my oath, Adonisius. I must defend the defenseless. She was defenseless; they were not.”

  “I’m sure,” said the weeping misshapen, turning to study the shut door around the corner from where we stood. “No, I’m sure you did what was right. They were vile men.”

  Adonisius at last forced himself to look upon me, a curious tone to his voice. As though he begged me to understand that, “I’ve been kept as a hostage—forced to pay my room and board and serve as their maid while they rob and kill defenseless passers through. In some way, some awful way, I am almost glad to think them gone…but they were my family, Burningsoul. My only kin.”

  “Had I known that, Adonisius, I might have done things differently.”

  “It’s no use speculating or wishing things were different,” lamented the man, wiping the back of his hand definitively against the high peak of his cheekbone and then replacing the helmet to somewhat obscure the sorrow in his face. “No, no use. And for the best, perhaps, that they are gone and I’m now free…but I am honor-bound to shun you now at best, Paladin. At worst—I dare not even dream of avenging the violence commissioned against my kin. Not as concerns one such as you.”

  Looking pained, the misshapen lowered his head and said, “I suppose you and the others will be putting up in there for the dark?”

  “We planned on it, Adonisius, but—”

  “Then stay as my guests,” he said. “It’s my property now. Stay as my guests to permit me to thank you for my inheritance. And then, kindly leave at bloom’s first light.”

  Thinking of the misshapen’s intimate familiarity with the tunnels of the Nightlands, I dared ask, “Perhaps you might be good enough to take us some way that would hasten our leaving?”

  The gamble paid off. He looked reluctant but nodded in the end, saying, “Yes, I can show you an expedient way back to the surface, though it is a taxing climb at some points. Let it be my final payment to you, then let us do business no more. Life down here is dangerous enough…the last thing I wish is to be haunted by the specters of my ancestors, not just for failing to avenge them but for too often helping the man who took their lives.”

  I will admit—in those days (or blooms, if you are reading this, greatest love of all my loves), I had rarely spared deep thought to the lives I took in battle outside of prescribed. It was the nature of my station to pray each morning and night for my own welfare, for the souls of my ancestors, for the salvation of the lives I had taken in battle, and for the manifestation of Weltyr’s will upon the planet through my works. Therefore one would think me used to slaying my enemies…but that was just the problem.

  I was used to it.

  After a lifetime of prayers, I had been hypnotized into not thinking with any great depth on the lives Weltyr ended through Strife; through me. I had not before been confronted face-to-face with the family of any creatures, criminals, or monsters I had slain. Indeed, I had seen these vanquished foes as little more than obstacles between myself and Weltyr’s will. It had not yet fully dawned on me that the Day Bringer could easily have allotted me the same fate.

  However…in that moment I could not help but see, at least in small part, the pain I was capable of causing. Though I had never thought the taking of a life was a small thing, I realized in that moment that I had never been in touch with death. Not really. I turned entirely away from Oppenhir, whose awful void-realm was the black pit to which I sent those heathens and opponents to Weltyr who were, sadly, beyond repentance. In failing to contemplate the nature of this death, I felt somehow I had done both it and myself a strange disservice.

  Certainly I felt I had done Adonisius a great disservice—even in my freeing him from his proverbial shackles. Before I could say anything to this effect, however, the misshapen bent his head and retreated into the dark.

  “I’ll come meet you all here at tomorrow’s bloom. The journey will be a few blooms and darks. You’ll have to forgive me if I keep to myself.”

  “I understand.”
/>   Though he hesitated, perhaps wishing to say more, Adonisius at last turned away. He went off into the tunnels of the Nightlands to spend time in contemplation for his dead relations, however complicated that relationship had been. I felt oddly chastened…not by Adonisius, but by that great inspirer of all magnificent things both good and bad. I felt my god had, as they say, “called me on the carpet” in some way, though I was not yet sure of the specific lesson he wished me to learn.

  “You’d think he’d be relieved,” said bratty Branwen under her breath, perhaps only projecting her own joy at being rescued. “Those brigands were abysmal creatures.”

  “That may be so…but what family is without its controversy?” With a lift of my brows at Branwen, I shook off the interaction with the misshapen as best I could and gestured the high elf back toward the door of the appropriated den. “After you.”

  “I’m nervous to walk in on them…oh, I’m afraid I embarrassed myself.”

  “Not at all. I’m sure they’re used to an adjustment period when it comes to those who live aboveground.”

  To my disappointment but Branwen’s sure relief, whatever had occurred in my absence had left all three dark elves entangled and content. When we found them, their bodies at relative rest save for the petting of an indolent hand along a miscellaneous limb.

  “Did we hear you speaking out there?” Valeria’s innocent question, her eyes lit with a mischief I had not enjoyed knowing in her while she was captive to her city.

  “I’m afraid these weren’t just any band of misshapen brigands,” I told them, kneeling down to kiss Valeria upon the mouth, then Indra and Odile upon their cheeks. “These were the kinfolk of our guide from before. Adonisius.”

  While the veteran adventurers did not look particularly moved by this appeal, Valeria—softer-hearted than any of us after a lifetime of living in the Palace of Roserpine and caring for all the citizens of El’ryh—appeared shocked. Her lips tightened into a thin line while she looked away from me, toward the poorly covered row of bodies that would soon be covered in mushrooms and picked apart by insects.

  “He has agreed to show us an expedient route to the surface, but warned me that it may take some effort. For the most part, he just asked we leave him be.”

  “He’d ought to thank us,” said Odile.

  Branwen, quick to relate to the most selfish member of our merry band, nodded vigorously. “That was what I said, more or less—Rorke is a hero, so far as I’m concerned.”

  “Heroes can only be so heroic to certain types of people.” Sitting up slightly from the pile of flesh, Valeria reached for a nearby loose fur and said, “If we’re to take advantage of Adonisius’s offer without falling behind or otherwise earning his greater impatience on this journey, then we had ought to sleep soon, and well.”

  “I know I will,” said stretching Odile, pinching Indra’s hindquarter while sitting up to set the magic lantern by the door. “And, from the sounds of it, so will our new friend.”

  “Well—well”—Branwen was red to the tips of her ears, and I had to turn away to keep her from seeing my barely contained laughter as I undressed—“well, if you really must hear about it—”

  “Lighten up, surface girl! I was only kidding.” Checking the bar of the front door and dragging over a set of shelves for an added precaution, Odile satisfied herself that the den was secure and pranced back to the furs to bundle up against Indra. “Who can keep a man like this one around and not put him to good use? Or be put to good use by him—eh, Indra?”

  “Don’t tease me, Odile! You know I’m sensitive when I’m tired…”

  While Indra and Odile settled in together as was their custom, Valeria sat up on the edge of our pile of furs. Undressed, I stretched out and invited her, with the extension of my arm, down into my embrace by the flickering blue flames of the hearth. The displaced queen of the dark elves took my offered caress, melting against my body, her white hair falling in waves across my face and neck.

  “Is this what adventuring is always like?”

  Her pale eyes searched mine. Fingers running through those silken tresses, I pushed aside the curtain before Valeria’s face and confessed to her, “It did not seem as such to me until I met you…I’m starting to think that, despite the rumors otherwise, Roserpine is far more gentle a goddess than Weltyr is a god.”

  With a light scoff and a little laugh, Valeria’s nose brushed against mine and she patted my chest in a manner that was genuinely fond. So intimate it seemed as though we had known one another for years, yet so fresh it excited me to new thoughts of love in an instant.

  “That’s what I’ve been trying to tell you,” she said, her tone one of playful remonstration. “Good dark, Paladin of Weltyr.”

  “Good dark, Materna of Roserpine,” I said against her ear while she turned away from me. She settled in with her round backside pressed against my hip and her face to the room, away from me, where I could not see if she was asleep or awake with restless thoughts of danger, of future, of what she had lost and perhaps would never regain.

  Then, there was Branwen. Branwen, who understandably did not seem inclined to get out of her armor or clothes. The truth was, however, that this would be our last opportunity for some days to divest ourselves of such things and sleep behind the relative safety of a door. I pitied her for missing the chance to be comfortable for even a few moments. I glanced down at my free arm, then looked hopefully at her.

  “I’ve two arms, Branwen.”

  With a skittish, embarrassed glance at Indra and Odile curled together, then another at Valeria to my right, Branwen took off her boots and rested beside me.

  How familiarly she settled in my arm! I thrilled. But what man wouldn’t to have a woman in each arm, plus two more sleeping near his feet! Weltyr’s kindness was unmatched, truly. Hot-and-cold as always, Branwen looked wryly at me even in my arm.

  “I’ll bet you’re pretty pleased with yourself right now, aren’t you, Rorke?”

  “Wouldn’t you be?”

  With a scoff and a roll of her eyes, (as Odile produced a short “Ha!” while drifting off to sleep), the high elf tried to hide her crooked smirk by laying her face against my heart. “Good night, Rorke.”

  “Good dark, Branwen…sweet dreams.”

  ABOVEGROUND

  THERE ARE THINGS in accounts such as this that, as a reader, I tend to skip. Ahead of me lay two such narrative traps: the recounting of a dream, and a long journey from one place to another with little to no action. The first, I must share because Weltyr commands it, and because it will become important later. The second, I may compress in order to sooner discuss those things that happened on the surface—but, rest assured, it was an arduous task for myself and my companions to follow the misshapen along his shorter route out of the Nightlands.

  And all the way there, I found myself bleakly revisiting the dream I had the dark after we rescued Branwen.

  I was not sure it could rightly be called a dream. Dreams, after all, were perceived as gifts from gods—containers for divine information and inspiration that could not be received by the human mind in another fashion, whether direct or obscure.

  As was taught in the Church of Weltyr and the Temple where I was raised, the information in dreams was concealed in their symbolism. Even a dream that seemed forthright tended to contain a second or even third meaning, and the challenge was to plumb the depths of those meanings for the concealed message. Dreams with prophetic content—of the sort Valeria experienced and attributed to her goddess, Roserpine—were the dubious pleasure of only a few, and by and large considered undesirable. It was burdensome to become the waking—or in this case, dreaming—tool of Weltyr, and those who experienced such things did well to be afraid.

  Then there were dreams that were not messages from gods, but instead transmissions from something else.

  A red organ throbbed like a palpating heart in the shadows of a flooded chamber. In the way of dreams I knew without having to be informe
d that this chamber stood in a distant land and was very, very old…but not half so old as its contents. Red tissues kept the mass of unidentified muscle clinging to the stone walls, and I knew the texture of these stringy, vein-filled nettings in the same manner that one knows their hand is made of flesh.

  You are being lied to, Eradicator.

  The hivemind of the spirit-thieves throbbed a message through my brain, the knowledge of its words flying in as though they were my own thoughts.

  Your history, your Church—all of it is full of lies.

  A bubble expelled from an orifice in the shapeless red hivemind, rising with a few companions to the surface of the dark chamber.

  I could tell you the truth now…but it would disturb you too much.

  The floor above the hivemind rattled with the footsteps of its approaching keeper.

  Instead, I simply encourage you: pay attention. Pay close attention. Ask questions. Learn to look around yourself. You know your problem with your god, don’t you, Eradicator?

  A trap door opened over the fiend and a square of light shone in.

  He only has one eye.

  “Supper’s on,” said an old man whose voice sounded very much like my own, or, at least, as it would be once Time had stuck a hand down it.

  I snapped awake and safe, in reality, myself. Surrounded by splendid women, and changed from the man I was before this sojourn into the Nightlands to do the will of Weltyr—but, all the same, myself.

  Why should the dream have greatly disturbed me? Because it was so clear, for one. Yes, it was possible that it really was just some dream. That it might have referred to both my battle with Al-listux and the portal through which he leapt, which contained a man I could only describe as a far older version of myself.

  But the sharp, deliberate nature of the information was what gave me pause. Dreams have a certain appearance in the memory—hazy and drained. But this vision was as crisp and clear as any other recalled event in which I had participated while waking.