Gauntlgrym

CHAMPIONS

BARRABUS WATCHED THE UNFOLDING BATTLE WITH GREAT INTEREST, HIS first view of the elf woman who was champion of the Ashmadai. He knew the champion’s opponent, a relatively competent warrior by the name of Arklin-but anyone who hadn’t seen Arklin fight before would hardly have called him competent. It seemed as if he was swinging his sword under water, so sluggish were its movements in comparison to the spinning flail of the elf. She hit Arklin repeatedly on the shoulders and arms, every blow painful, but none lethal.

She was toying with him.

Barrabus watched intently, trying to measure the rhythm of her movements. He didn’t like how his fighting style, sword and main-gauche, matched up against her twin weapons and their longer reach. He’d successfully faced off against notable two-handed fighters before, but swords, scimitars, and axes were not the same as those exotic spinning sticks. The angles of attack of more conventional weapons were more predictable, and a solid metal blade was not nearly as able to escape a well-executed block as her weapons.

He winced as the elf finally moved in for the inevitable kill. As Arklin lunged ahead with an awkward thrust, she spun her left-hand weapon around the stabbing blade, yanked it out wide, and moved forward inside it. Her right-hand weapon spun up behind her head, coming forward, but to Barrabus’s surprise and Arklin’s doom, the elf somehow reconnected those tethered poles into a single staff as they came around. As the pole leveled with Arklin’s head, the elf warrior tucked her hand tight against her shoulder and drove forward with her weight behind the strike. The end of her four-foot staff caught Arklin right under the chin and the warrior elf continued forward, driving the doomed Netherese back and to the ground. She ran right over him and yanked hard again with her left hand as she did, taking the sword from the gasping Arklin’s hand and throwing it far aside.

She fell into a forward roll. Barrabus again had to nod in admiration when she came up, spinning to rush right back at the fallen Netherese. She held not two weapons, not a staff and a flail, but a single eight-foot pole.

Clutching his throat and trying futilely to roll away, Arklin presented an easy target and the elf planted the end of that pole just above the top of Arklin’s collarbone and vaulted up into the air, her weight pressing the pole into the squirming, shrieking Shadovar.

A blast of crackling lightning blurred Barrabus’s vision as it shocked Arklin’s prostrate form. When the elf lightly touched down to her feet on the far side of the fallen warrior, she skipped away, paying his still form no more heed.

Barrabus had seen her, so he had an advantage, he told himself as he started through the forest to intercept her.

The eight-foot full length of Kozah’s Needle made moving through the forest more difficult, so Dahlia folded her staff into a thicker, four-foot walking stick. She needed to remain agile.

He was out there.

The bodies of Ashmadai warriors proved it. Certainly their Netherese opponents had many capable fighters, but the recent kills, so clean, so precise, spoke of the mysterious man who had stepped from the shadows to rain death upon the Ashmadai. The ferocious warrior cultists of Asmodeus, who proclaimed their greatest hope to be dying-even to be raised as undead warriors-for the cause, spoke of the Netherese assassin with a noticeable tremor.

And all of that, of course, had only prompted Dahlia to go out there in hopes of encountering this shade herself.

She let her instincts take over. She didn’t try to pick out any particular movement, sound, or smell, but let the whole of the environment guide her.

He was close, perhaps stalking her.

Even before he had become something other than strictly human, Barrabus could slip from shadow to concealment to shadow with the very best of Faer?n’s rogues. He needed no elven boots to keep his soft footfalls from the ears of a clumsy human, but with their added benefits, not a creature in the world could hear his approach.

He’d moved with all speed once he spotted the Thayan champion, that striking elf woman with her distinctive weapon. He slowed his pace only as he’d neared the spot, and had lost sight of her only once or twice in that rush. He had to be careful, had to keep obstacles-trees, at least-between himself and the woman.

He didn’t want to fight her straight up, not with the stakes so high, and was confident that such would not be the case. Barrabus couldn’t see her at the moment, with his back against twin birch trees, but she was there, he knew it, on the narrow path that wound under the oaks.

Poisoned dagger in hand, Barrabus the Gray didn’t hesitate. He rolled around the trees and leaped for the spot-and skidded to an abrupt halt.

She was gone!

Concerned, he scanned wildly. Only the brief glimpse, hardly registering, of a spot on the soft ground revealed to him the truth, and just in the nick of time. He fell aside as the elf warrior came down out of the tree-the indentation betraying the point where she’d planted her staff and used it to leap straight up to branches that should have been beyond her reach.

The warrior landed, but Barrabus kept rolling. He heard the hum of air behind him as she swept her deadly staff his way.

He came up in a pivot and launched his dagger-an awkward throw that had no real chance of getting through the defenses of a warrior as capable as she, but one that slowed her advance just enough for Barrabus to draw his sword and main-gauche.

She held her tri-staff horizontally in front of her, rotating her hands just enough to send the two-foot lengths at either end spinning vertically out to either side of her.

Barrabus couldn’t help but be drawn to the elf, the cut of her blouse and skirt, the impish smile on her delicate face, the thick braid of red and black hair running down the right side of her head and over the front of her shoulder to lead the eye enticingly to the low V of her partially untied blouse. He was as disciplined a warrior as any, but even he had to fight against the distraction, had to remind himself that even the cut of her clothes was strategic.

She circled slowly to the right, and Barrabus moved to his right as well, keeping square with her.

“I knew you were out here,” she said.

“I knew you were out here,” he replied.

“It had to come down to this, of course,” she said.

He didn’t answer-he hardly heard her. He knew he was at a disadvantage, given the unusual nature of her weapons.

Dahlia kept up her end of the conversation on her own. “It is said among my people that ‘the Gray’ is a formidable warrior.”

He didn’t answer, but she continued circling. He had tuned out her distractions-all of them.

Dahlia came forward, punching out with her right hand then her left then turning the tri-staff vertically before her, its ends spinning furiously. She let go with her left hand and let it loop completely around her right before catching it again, now reversing her right grip and pulling her right arm in while punching out again with her left, sending the left-most section sweeping out at her opponent.

He blocked with the main-gauche, trying to hook that end staff, but Dahlia was smart enough to recognize her own failed attack, and quick enough to retract the weapon. She threw her right arm straight back and let go of the shaft, launching the staff behind her, but caught it by the end piece in both hands held closely together, shifting her feet as she did, turning her hips so that she could quickly reverse the momentum with a snapping, whiplike swing. And a simple strategic call to the staff broke the middle section as well, so that as it came forward, it was four equal lengths, separated by the cords.

It rolled out before her, not quite a whip, not quite a staff, the end snap aimed perfectly for the Gray’s head.

He fell straight back, narrowly avoiding the surprising move, and the end pole cracked against a tree, releasing a lightning charge that ripped a large piece of bark from the trunk.

Barrabus could hardly believe the power generated in the whipping motion of the strange weapon, to say nothing of the added magical devastation wrought by the lightning.

He hadn’t tried any counter to the elf’s first routines, preferring to let her play them out in the hope that he would gain some insight into the angles and speed of her attacks, but suddenly, as he threw himself back in a desperate and barely-successful attempt to get out of her reach, he realized his folly.

She was too quick and too precise, and he realized he would figure out the truth of her movements right before she smashed in his skull. There was no learning curve to be found.

His backward rush ended up against a smaller tree and he rebounded off it with fury, coming forward as the elf grabbed up her staff by the central poles. He thought she’d somehow reconnect them, matching his sword and dagger with that tri-staff she wielded so adroitly.

It took him a heartbeat to realize that she did the opposite, breaking the staff into a pair of flails.

The angle of Barrabus’s intended attack, straightforward and inside the reach of the tri-staff end-poles, was all wrong!

He dived for the ground, a headlong roll, as the flails swatted in at him from left and right, and came up with a strong presentation of his right foot forward, lengthening the reach of his thrusting sword.

The elf dodged desperately, bringing one weapon in at the last instant to smack against the side of the sword as she faded back and to Barrabus’s left.

He pursued. A second stab, a third. He blocked a sweeping strike with his main-gauche and traded parries, sword and flail.

Barrabus rolled his hands in a sudden fury, circles sweeping over and in before him as he pressed forward in a rush. Instead of keeping one foot back, as was typical for his weapons, he had his feet moving side by side, his shoulders squared, daring the elf to find an opening and strike through the blur of spinning metal in front of him.

Indeed she tried, and he had to constantly change the speed of his rotations to block the myriad angles presented by the similarly spinning flails-and worse, on more than one of those blocks, the elf’s weapon presented an electric shock, some quite powerful, one nearly ripping the sword from his hand.

But he held on, and he used that unfortunate sting to make it seem as if he couldn’t, teasingly interrupting his circular flow.

On came the elf-just as Barrabus reversed his momentum and stabbed straight ahead.

He had her awkwardly dodging, and he pressed all the harder, stabbing and slashing with fury, keeping her on her heels, betting that one of his blades would find her flesh before his momentum played out and his weariness from the flurry allowed her an advantage.

Just when he thought he had her she threw herself backward in a perfect tuck and roll and retreated around the trunk of a thick oak.

Barrabus faked a move to the other side to intercept, and instead followed her directly. He smiled, thinking the Thayan had finally guessed wrong.

He didn’t catch her as he pursued her around the tree!

Had she hesitated, Dahlia would have surely felt the Gray’s sword stabbing her in the back, and a lesser warrior would have fallen right there.

But Dahlia sprinted forward instead of trying to turn and block. She reconstructed her staff in two quick strides and planted it, leaping up its length, inverting up above it and hooking her legs over a branch, tugging her weapon up behind her and just ahead of her pursuing enemy.

She gained her footing and rushed along the branches, leaping and sprinting in perfect balance, even jumping out to a second tree. She tried to spot the Gray, but he was gone-simply vanished.

She ran out to the end of a branch and jumped down to some brush, converting her weapon once more into a tri-staff and lashing out with wide-sweeping strokes even as she touched down in case he was waiting for her.

Dahlia silently cursed herself for allowing the break in the fighting. She was on her opponent’s terms once again, and he knew she was ready for him. She had no idea where he’d run off to.

She knew she was in trouble-she’d heard that this assassin had caught and killed many Ashmadai who never saw it coming. She had to keep moving, and had to keep up her assault on any potential hiding spot she passed by.

If she could only locate him… if she could only get face to face with him again!

She spotted movement ahead, off to the side. Even knowing how unlikely it was to be the Gray, she went that way and had to work hard to suppress her relief when she came upon an Ashmadai patrol.

“Dahlia!” two of the nine said together, and the whole contingent came to rapt attention.

“The Gray is about,” she told them. “Be alert.”

“Stay with us!” one said, the desperation in her voice betraying the female tiefling’s desire to avoid the Gray.

Dahlia looked around the quiet forest, nodding.

From the shelter of a pine tree, Barrabus the Gray watched that exchange.

He was no less relieved than Dahlia that their encounter had ended.

He would have to get her by surprise, he thought.

Or he would have to stay away from her.