The Sun Sword by Michelle West

Author:Michelle West [Michelle West]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Fantasy, Science Fiction, Adult
Goodreads: 153223
Publisher: DAW
Published: 2004-01-06T08:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

TELAKAR'S dance was brief and graceful; Nugratz chose power A to make his statement. The winds howled beside him, like the face of a jagged cliff, and he traced them, falling, his plummet controlled by the shadows of the Lord of Night.

But his wings came up short, tearing him out of the dive, as he screeched a wingspan above the second blade. This he recognized, not by vision, for he moved too quickly to look, but by something more visceral.

The shock shored him up.

In the roiling of the wind, he called his servants, and they came.

"Anduvin!" he roared.

And the Swordsmith replied; he cut wind with the edge of his blade, his cursed blade. The wind could move faster than the eye could see, but the wind had no need of sight; it could not move faster than that blade's edge, and in its fashion, it bled, its trail an awkward gash across the path of flight. Nugratz' flight.

It changed the face of the battle.

Lord Nugratz would pay for this. The wind would demand its price, exact its toll. Small cost, but the battle had hardly been joined; the kinlord could measure the whole of the night's work in the single figure of the Swordsmith. He did not like the accounting.

"What Telakar offered," Lord Anduvin said, "I, too, will offer. But I offer it less willingly."

The Swordsmith.

Here. . It was almost beyond belief.

"Do you have any idea of what you do?" Nugratz yelled, his wings gathering wind in their upward stretch.

Anduvin offered no answer. Telakar was likewise silent.

"The Lord will confine you in the Hells for eternity!"

It was Telakar who replied. He laughed. "And what would that signify?" he said, in a voice so smooth it should not have carried over the breaking beat of thunder. "To confine us, he would have to be in the Hells, and of them—and he has returned to the mortal realm; he will never again surrender what he has worked so hard to gain."

Nugratz was silent for a moment, and when he spoke, he was graceless. "I will see you destroyed."

Telakar shrugged. "And you differ from the rest of our kin in what fashion, brother?" His blade rose.

When it fell, it missed the limb of the demon that appeared to his right. But only barely.

"The Hells will have a Queen in the absence of our Lord," Telakar continued. "And who will argue with her? She will rule the whole of the realm; there is not a demesne within the Hells that will not know her for what she is."

"She will never live to rule."

"You failed to kill her when she was a mortal babe; she is much, much more than that now. How will you succeed when she has grown in power?"

The second demon came, and the third; the sky was littered with their presence. They were not without power, but they were not Lord Nugratz; in his Court, he suffered no equals.

In silence, in the bond of blood, they asked his will, struggling against its imperative at the same moment.

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