Stormblade

13

Where is the sword?

The voice, as hard and cold as black obsidian, became the darkness. The darkness became the voice. Hauk did not know whether he saw the dwarf with his eyes or felt him, like a shape-shifting nightmare, in his mind.

Where is the sword?

Hauk answered carefully. The dwarf could see into his mind. Or he stood inside his mind. “I don’t—I don’t know.”

The questioning had become like a defensive sword fight. Parry and deflect, retreat, then parry again. Like a fighter whose back is to a cliff’s drop, Hauk knew that he could not retreat much longer. His answer was true. He didn’t know where the sword was now.

Who has the sword?

“I don’t know.” I don’t, he told himself. I don’t know her name. He cached the picture of the red-haired barmaid behind the wall of his will. It’s mine, he told himself over and over again. I own this memory. I own it! He buried it deep and far, as a miser does who hides a treasure of immeasurable worth.

Realgar’s laughter washed sickeningly up against the edges of Hauk’s soul. Like a miner with a sharp pick, the mage dug and scraped at Hauk’s mind and held each memory up to cold, white light.

Hauk smelled smoke in the air of a tavern’s common room.

Realgar laughed again. The white light vanished, it’s afterglare throbbing and pulsing. Between one heartbeat and the next, it leaped high, a column of flame. Stormwinds howled.

Hauk tasted ale in his mouth, the rise of bile in his throat. A silver flash cut the smoke. He saw Tyorl’s blue eyes, amused and tolerant of his young friend’s follies.

His dagger’s steel blade quivered in the exact center of a wooden serving tray. The sound of the blade’s vibration rose, high and humming, and Hauk felt it. The floor of the cell trembled as though an earthquake shook the stone.

Darkness fell hard, and Hauk, his heart trembling, let it settle over him and told himself that the darkness was good. It hid treasures. Realgar’s laughter became the raucous noise in the tavern’s common room. Hauk had found Tyorl in his mind, and he clung to the image of his friend. He filled his mind with all the memories of the years, boy and man, that he had known the elf.

Blood tapped on stone. It slid across a shadow-pocked, rock floor. Tyorl lay dead at Hauk’s feet. The elf’s fingers stiffened in death, still clutching the mortal wound in his belly.

Stormblade, sapphires breathing like soft twilight, hung from Hauk’s hand, blood hissing down the blade.

Where is the sword?

Hauk threw back his head and howled in grief and rage and denial. He never, not even for a moment, allowed himself to remember the girl with the copper braids and eyes like emeralds. She was no real girl to him now. She was only a light, bright memory in the darkness. That memory was his and he clung to it the way a drowning man clutches the last splintered board from a storm-whelmed ship. He had nothing else.