She felt rather than saw the red wyrm land beside her. She felt something emanating from him-anxiety? Suspicion? Fear? “Cear! I have to share this with you!” She reached her hand out, felt it touch upon Cear’s steaming snout, and heard the dragon howl in pain.
“Cear!” she screamed, turning around, looking away from the tremendous black vortex, seeing everything through a shimmering veil of energy. She couldn’t move, couldn’t step out of the wall of the fiery column, and watched helplessly as the red dragon tried to recoil.
Ropes of orange and cobalt blue energy snaked out and seized the dragon. Where she had touched him, his scales grew thick, calcified, and crumbled into dust as if he had aged a thousand years. The vortex howled, and her dragon was pulled sharply inward, into the middle of it. It drew him in, and he was gone, lost to the Abyss.
“Rivven, I’m sorry,” said the Cook.
“Damn you!” she screamed at the ghost. “The sword …?”
“It’s the only thing keeping you alive,” said the Cavalier.
“All this power!”
“Never really yours to take,” said the Conjurer.
She opened her eyes again and looked out at the platform. Vanderjack was getting to his feet again. One leg hung limp; one arm was broken in several places. He looked at her and lifted a finger in her direction.
“I want my sword back,” she heard him say.
She held the sword out before her and pointed it at him. “You can’t have it. I need it!”
“That’s what I used to think,” the sellsword said, taking a step forward, “until a really ugly girl, who by rights should have been a really pretty girl, told me that I didn’t need it nearly as bad as I thought I did.”
“Don’t come any closer,” she said. “I’m warning you, Ergothian. I’ll not surrender this power!”
“This is why history will forget about you, Rivven,” said the Cook.
Rivven didn’t have time to ask him what he meant by that. She looked at the ghosts arrayed about her, their spectral visages sorrowful, and when she looked back at Vanderjack, he was running at her.
The fool! she thought. He’s running straight into-
Vanderjack leaped at Highmaster Rivven Cairn, the star metal blade in her hands piercing through his scale mail shirt, tunic, his ruined chest, and his heart. His mouth was near her ear, his ragged voice barely a whisper.
“Room in there for one more?” he said and she knew he wasn’t talking to her.
With his last gasp, Vanderjack shoved himself away from the highmaster, taking the sword with him. She saw the ghosts descend upon him; they faded from her sight, and all that she heard was the howling siren of the Abyss behind her. The vortex fell in upon itself, an implosion of light and sound. Like a flame deprived of oxygen, the column of nightmares was extinguished. It yawned open one last time.
Rivven followed her dragon down into darkness.
CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR
Vanderjack was dying.
He lay on the blasted stone surface of the raised platform, alone. Lifecleaver jutted upward from his chest. The pain was indescribable, but death had yet to claim him. He wondered if, by some bizarre stroke of luck, the sword had completely missed any vital organs and was just lodged in a rib or something like that. But every beat of his heart flooded his chest with a sickening warmth, blood pumping out of the wound formed by the sword.
It can’t take this long to die. Death should be instantaneous. Wasn’t that the way a soldier was supposed to die? He couldn’t have asked for a better way to go, though. Run through with his own life-stealing sword, sending the highmaster off to her doom, somewhere in the Abyss. It was glorious. But it was taking far too long.
“Vanderjack,” said a voice nearby.
He opened his eyes. He was surrounded by his ghosts. For some reason, they seemed brighter, larger, more real. He saw features on their faces that he’d never seen before. The Hunter’s hawklike face, with phoenix feathers arrayed behind his ear. The Cavalier’s mighty barrel chest, that helm with the curving bison horns he’d always kind of ignored. The Philosopher’s thin, ascetic features, quizzical movements, like a praying mantis.
“Vanderjack,” said the voice again. Etharion, the journeyman cook, was kneeling beside him too. “You won.”
“I did?” Vanderjack groaned, wincing at the pain. “The portal to the Abyss is sealed?”
“Yes,” said Etharion. “But I don’t think anybody’s going to remember. It was so chaotic.”
“Typical,” said Vanderjack. “Save the world and nobody’s paying attention.”
“The legend,” Vanderjack said.
“Right. If the sword is used to kill somebody who should not die, they join the Sword Chorus. Nine lives.”
Vanderjack groaned, hearing footsteps. He turned his head, trying to fight through the fog of pain and increasingly blurred vision. Somebody was approaching.
“Vanderjack? Vanderjack!”
It was Gredchen. He spoke her name, and she was there, kneeling beside the Cook. Of course, she couldn’t see the ghosts, could she?
“You saved my life,” she said.
“Figured it all out at the end,” Vanderjack said. “You and the painting. I’m sorry it took so long.”
He felt her hand on his head, cradling it. “I wish I could help you. I’m not a wizard. I’m just an ugly copy of a dead girl.”
“Come on.” Vanderjack coughed. The blood was emptying faster. He didn’t have that much longer. “You’re not so ugly. You … you did kind of grow on me.”
“Like a wart?” She smiled through her tears. The pain was setting Vanderjack’s nerves on fire. He’d gone from intense pain to numbness to pain again.
“They’re waiting for me,” he added. “The ghosts. Etharion said it’s my time. That’s it. I’m gone, unless …”
Gredchen held his hand against her cheek. “Unless … what?”
“Unless I have something to keep living for.”
No. Endure the pain. Die tomorrow.
Vanderjack gritted his teeth together and pushed himself up on his elbow first, then farther, feeling the sword slip deeper into his chest. He stifled a cry. The world swam around him. The only thing he could see clearly was Gredchen, up close.
Was she really that ugly? Did it matter? Vanderjack kissed the baron’s aide right where her pretty smile had been only moments before.
He fell back, Gredchen sobbing loudly, and let his last breath escape his ruined lungs.
Lifecleaver shook; it rang like a tuning fork struck against a rock and claimed its ninth and final soul. A half second or a lifetime later, it
“Nine lives claimed and released,” said the Apothecary.
“All is done,” said the Philosopher.
“The sword’s task is fulfilled,” said the Cavalier.
“The baron’s beautiful daughter is revealed,” said the Balladeer.
“What was unfinished is now ended,” said the Aristocrat.
“The hunt is over,” said the Hunter.
“The magic comes full circle,” said the Conjuror.
“I’m alive!” said the Cook.
“Ackal’s Teeth,” said the Sellsword. “So am I.”
