Marked for Death

Chapter 62

“Sallah!” Kandler screamed as he charged across the arena floor toward Bastard and the fallen knight. He’d thought his head might explode while Te’oma was probing in it, but now he felt like it might happen on its own. He’d come to respect Sallah over the course of their travels, even if he could never understand her devotion to her deity, and after his daughter he wanted to lose her the least of all. He roared in horror as the warforged stabbed the woman with its spikes again.

“Bastard!”

The warforged leader’s head snapped up at the mention of his name. He stopped mutilating the woman beneath him and climbed to his feet, Sallah’s burning blade still running through his middle. The flames from the sword scorched the creature’s front and back, but its tight-fitted plates of armor kept the fibers beneath from catching fire. Bastard grunted as he pulled at the hilt and tried to remove the length of hot steel from his body, but the warforged’s fall onto the blade had wedged it in tight, and it would not budge.

Kandler reached Bastard and leveled a devastating cut at the creature’s head. The warforged blocked the blow with his arm, but the justicar’s blade bent back a few of its bloodied spikes and bit under the creature’s armor. Bastard howled in pain and danced back from Kandler’s attack.

“At last,” he said, “a worthy foe.”

The creature’s admiration was little comfort to Kandler as he glanced down at Sallah. She coughed once and rolled on the ground, clutching at her wounds. Kandler prowled away to the right, his sword at the ready before him, drawing Bastard away from the fallen knight.

Bastard growled, then lowered his head and charged. The spikes rising from the creature’s head stretched toward the justicar like the horns of a raging bull. The points on these were far sharper.

Kandler dodged to the right, and as Bastard barreled past he tried to gore the justicar with his spikes, but they only tore at the fabric of his shirt. Bastard spun about to face the justicar again, the raging fires glinting off his sharpened and polished tips.

The justicar shook his head and took a deep breath to calm himself. The warforged’s anger could work for him here, but not if he was mastered by his own.

Bastard lowered his head and charged again. The justicar spun away at the last second, but this time the creature sliced open a gash along Kandler’s left shoulder.

“First blood!” Bastard crowed in delight as he spun back around several yards beyond the justicar.

Kandler cleared his throat and looked down at his blade, which wore the warforged’s blood. “Did you forget?” he asked. “Or are you just stupid?”

“I only count the blood I draw,” Bastard said, waving an armored hand over his bloodied spikes. “I have plenty of the woman’s. Soon I’ll have the rest of yours.”

Kandler tapped the floor between them with the tip of his sword. At first he dragged it in a semicircle in front of him, then he jabbed the end of the blade into the wood of the arena’s floor.

“Come and get it,” he said.

Bastard bent down his head, exposing his spikes again, and charged forward, faster than ever. This time, he flung his arms wide. As the warforged came at him, Kandler pushed his own blade aside. Bastard barked out a mirthless laugh and stretched his arms wider. Kandler waited until the last moment then fell on his back and stabbed out his hand to grab the hilt of Sallah’s blade, still jutting from the warforged leader’s front. The sacred sword firmly in his grasp, he shoved up on the hilt and leveraged it over his head.

Kandler slid underneath the stampeding Bastard, and the creature’s momentum carried him somersaulting over Kandler’s head. The justicar let loose the hilt of Sallah’s sword as Bastard sailed past, then he twisted over on his front to watch the results.

Bastard flipped entirely over Kandler and landed flat on his back. The burning sword jammed through the creature stabbed into and through the floor beneath him. The sword stopped Bastard’s forward roll by tearing through the fibers in its chest harder than any human hand ever could. He screamed in agony as the blade tore through his midsection.

Kandler scrambled over to where his own sword lay on the ground and scooped it up. He strode over to where Bastard lay wriggling on the blade that pinned him to the floor, and he hefted his weapon over the warforged leader.

“Do you know where warforged go when they die?” Kandler asked. His voice trembled as he spoke.

The warforged leader hauled on the hilt of Sallah’s blade. With more of its fibers exposed by the growing gash, Bastard was starting to burn.

Kandler smacked the warforged across the top of his head as he circled around him, hunting for the perfect spot for a killing blow.

“Do you?” he said.

Bastard glared up at Kandler through its sapphire eyes. “No.”

“Well,” Kandler said, “you’re about to find out.”

He reversed his grip on his sword and raised it over his head for a two-handed stab. He threw himself forward, putting all his weight behind the blow and driving the point straight for the warforged leader’s exposed neck.

Bastard released his grip on the hilt of Sallah’s sword and flung up his arms to protect itself. Kandler’s blade caught Bastard square in the forearm, drove through, wedged into the arm’s fibers and caught halfway along its steely length, jarring Kandler’s shoulders in their sockets.

Bastard roared as he wrenched its arm forward, smashing Kandler in the eye with his own sword’s pommel. The justicar fell back, clutching his hands to his face.

Surging with fury, Bastard began to roll back and forth on the arena floor. Each time he did, Sallah’s sword cut deeper and deeper. To Kandler, it seemed that the warforged leader was trying to saw himself in half. Perhaps he would have succeeded, but the blazing blade became wedged between two plates of the warforged’s armor and stuck.

Kandler stumbled back and fell a safe distance away. He pulled his hands from his face and felt the damage. His eye was still intact, but it was swelling shut so fast he could only see out through a tiny slit between.

Bastard slammed his wounded arm down into the arena floor at an awkward angle, shoving the point of Kandler’s blade through the boards. Using this point as leverage, he wrenched against Sallah’s sword again, again, and again.

The wet sound of the weapon working its way through Bastard’s artificial flesh turned Kandler’s stomach. He just wished that the creature would do the right thing and die, that this would all come to an end.

With a snap, Sallah’s sacred sword broke in two, and Bastard came tumbling off the blade, his pinned arm twisting at a horrible angle.

Kandler heard the fibers and plates in Bastard’s limb crunch and break against each other under the stress. The justicar scrambled back to his feet and watched the warforged through his one good eye.

Bastard pulled his way to his feet, but his arm was still stuck on the floor. He reached down and grabbed the hilt of Sallah’s sword protruding from his chest. Its flames had snuffed out when the blade snapped, but the remaining shaft still smoked where it touched the warforged’s flesh. Bastard pulled on the hilt, and the sword’s shattered length slid free. The warforged snarled at Kandler, who hung back a respectable distance to see what would happen next.

“I may have your sword”-Bastard waved the hilt-shard of Sallah’s sword at him, its sacred light extinguished forever-“but you,” he said, “you still have something I want.”

Kandler stepped backward, ready to run, even though the warforged was still anchored to the floor by its mangled arm.

“What’s that?” he said.

Bastard raised the hilt in his hand and brought it chopping down on his pinned arm. The edge of the broken blade sliced through the twisted fibers there, parting him from his maimed limb for good.

Freed from his ruined arm, Bastard stood up to his full height. He held the shard of Sallah’s blade and pointed it at Kandler’s chest.

“I want your blood.”