I rolled over one hand drawing the knife from under the pillow as the second grabbed for my sword and found it was missing. A hand flashed out from the darkness and knocked my knife spinning, I lunged across the bed rolling across the bed and drawing a knife from my boot as I went. There was a heavy impact and a strangled cry followed by the scent of blood on the air. I stood for a moment knife in hand and waited.
“Khan?”
“I have them.”
I felt along the bed until I reached the night stand and fumbled across it until I found the lamp and made the minor effort of will needed to illuminate it. Other lamps around the room came to life at the same time and I saw Khan at the foot of the bed one massive paw pressed into the chest of a boy that looked like he was barely old enough to shave. Khan’s claws were pressing into the boys skin and had managed to leave five small but neat tears through the cloth of the boy’s tunic and chest. Khan’s other plate sized paw was pinning the arm holding my sword to the floor. I’d have felt sorry for the fact he couldn’t breathe past the several hundred pounds of tiger on his chest if it wasn’t for the fact that he’d just tried to kill me, and the fact none of his bones were broken proved Khan was treating him like an ill-mannered cub rather than a legitimate threat. I squatted down beside the boy and idly twirled the iron dagger I was now holding between my fingers.
“Well now, you obviously have some skill since you didn’t trigger my wards coming in. You’re not one of Arianrhod’s servants or you would have knocked, and she’s the type to do the job herself if she wants a visitor dead. So who sent you?” The boy eyed the dagger and then Khan before shaking his head. Khan leaned down flexing his paw drawing more blood and eliciting a wince from him.
“Nobody sent me.”
“Well see that’s a shame, I don’t recognize your face and you don’t feel familiar enough to me. Khan, he smell familiar to you?” Khan leaned in again and sniffed the boy then lapped at the small pool of blood forming on his chest before shaking his head with another growl that was doing a decent job of sounding menacing even to me.
“So you were sent by an enemy or were targeting me for your own reasons. I have two choices. I can hand you over to Arianrhod who won’t be very happy about you trying to kill one of her guests. Trust me, violating her hospitality will merit a very long stay in her dungeons, or we keep you with us till we get bored.” I mussed aloud as I dug the point of my dagger into his shoulder and dragged it down his arm. “My friend and I have been having a bad couple of days and I really don’t like bothering my host with my issues. So, we’ll blow off some stress by taking turns slicing off bits of you. Your definitely some sort of faerie so I imagine an iron dagger will probably burn you a lot more than his claws but he’ll eat the bit’s he rips off. If you still haven’t given me a name by the time we run out of limbs to remove then I’ll start ripping the life out of you in bits and using it to heal your body. Not damaging but you will feel like your starving to death after that sort of healing. Then of course there’s what it will feel like when I feed on you. Normally you wouldn’t feel when I started taking power from you but, well, I can dig very deep, deep enough to pull off a bit of your soul. If I’m not careful and take to much at once the pain will kill you. If that doesn’t work, we’ll move on to creative methods. Of course, you could just tell us the name and avoid all the messy parts where you end up screaming, bleeding, and crying but really, that takes all the fun out of it for us.” Khan let out a deep throated purring chuckle that vibrated through the wooden flooring and up through my legs. The boy looked between the two of us and started laughing. His short brown hair and delicate features melting into the long dark black hair and sharp features of Gwynn ap Nudd at the same time that his body flowed and stretched to his true height.
“So you’re still a hard ass. I had to make sure you’re the real ones. There are a lot of tigers running around that could pass for Khan and his Name is known, your blood has the right charge but that can be faked with the right knowledge. Even what I was told about the battle outside could have been staged by the right person if they were motivated. So convince me you’re really the Prime Elemental of Ice, convince me that you’re the frozen heart.” I sighed and reached down grabbing his hand where it was wrapped around my sword.
I closed my eyes and probed his metaphysical shields, strong but resilient just like I’d expect and durable enough to take the sort of relentless attacks someone would use against him. Most people assume a shield will protect them from anything if it’s made right but it’s still just energy, and in his case it was laced with the chill of the grave. Cold was cold, the cold of the grave was not so different from the cold of a frozen lake or a driving snow to me.
“You want proof? Then here it is.” I reached out with my mind and latched onto the energy in his shields and drew it into me and kept feeding off his shields until I felt them flicker and collapse and then turned that energy around and sent it into his body to draw more power and then fed it into the sword he held. A sword that had been in my hands since a time history had forgotten. I watched as his body bucked and shuddered under the assault. The wings of the angel on the sword hilt snapped down without warning, slicing into his hand and laying his flesh open to the bone. I let go of his arm and nodded to Khan as I gave one last tug on his energy pulling out enough to make him feel light headed. Both of us stepped back and let him up.
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“Yeah, that’s your sword alright, and I don’t know anyone that can drain a shield and a deity without killing themselves.”
He didn’t know how close to being wrong he was. Judging by the feeling of pins and needles all over my body I was at just short of what my body could tolerate. I spared a glance down at the palms of my hands and noted the mottled look the skin had. I was definitely pushing the boundaries of my body’s tolerance for holding energy. If I had taken much more from him my organs would probably start shutting down, just another reminder that while my soul wasn’t human my body hadn’t been conditioned to the level from my memories. I could only cheat the system so much even outside the influence of Earth’s seals. I summoned my power, concentrating it into my chest until I felt a steady low-level thrum. I waited until he had managed to pull himself to his feet before bracing my feet and lashing out my hand connecting with the tip of his chin and sent the knot of power flowing down my arm and out of my hand at the same time. Gwynn stumbled back and fell over slamming his head back against the nightstand and staring at the ceiling. There were black specks on his face where the sudden cold from the blow had caused frostbite. Even though my hand was throbbing from the force of the blow I could feel the uncomfortable tingling from the overabundance of energy fading away.
“Oblivion’s hunger what was that for?!”
“I promised myself when I saw you, I’d hit you for sending me here instead of greeting me in your own hall without at least an explanation first. I requested an audience with you and instead you send me to your cousin with whom little love is lost between us. Perhaps I’ve forgotten the old etiquettes but at the very least you owed me an explanation in person before dropping me on someone else’s door step.” I tensed my hand a few times wondering if I’d broken a bone in it when I hit him. Damn but the man had a hard jaw.
“You’re right, I probably should have given you more notice. But it’s not like I let just anyone into my realm, even in the old days I came to people, not the other way around. I don’t even lead the hunt out anymore. Sending you here instead of bringing you to my home first was the safest alternative I had. If you were a pretender, my cousin wouldn’t have any complaints about you being killed, and you could do far less damage here in Caer Sidi than in Arawnn. If it was you on the other hand, you were where I needed you to be before I would make a deal with you.”
“Your judgment’s still piss poor. But at least this time you’re not gambling that the person you hand off your realm to too, and let run it for a year and a day, won’t screw your wife while he has the chance anymore.”
“I lost that bet with Aeron actually. I figured Pwyll would sleep with her. I figured something was broken in the man’s pants, not that he had the fortitude of a saint and would practically double the Welsh population within a year of coming home.”
“Either way, next time you pull a stunt like this on me I’ll hit you hard enough to do more than put you on your back side and give you mild frostbite. Now why did you decide to wake me at this unholy hour?”
“I came to get you actually, Arianrhod is ready to do the ritual to fix your memory issues. You need someone to show you how to get down to the soul vault, since she’s been stuck down there ever since she started preparing the ritual and I’m the only other person that knows how to get there.” He rubbed his jaw as he stood up. “Damnio, I think you hit harder now than you did the last life time I saw you in, and really? Throwing cold behind your hits was unnecessary.”
“You’re immortal, it will heal. Now will you give me a second to get my gear on so you can lead the way? I’m not exactly keen on the idea of leaving my weapons behind while I follow you around.”
“I have to do the same. For some reason I was concerned that bringing my weapons in here might end with me getting stabbed with my own blade.” Khan’s growling chuckle echoed from the other side of the room where he was idly scratching at a spot on his side.
“Still have the scars from the last time he took your daggers away?” Khan asked in a bemused tone.
“Hurry up, you don’t want to keep my cousin waiting.” He moved out of the room quickly shutting the door behind me. Khan laughed again and began washing himself like a cat as I set about gathering my weapons from their hiding places.
“I stabbed him with his own dagger?” I asked as I pulled my armor on tightening the straps under my arms with the unconscious motions of repeated practice.
“After you froze his guard, broke his sword and took his weapons belt.”
“Ah. How is it we’re still on good terms then?”
“Easy, after that you killed the captain of his guard and proved the man was a traitor planning to assassinate him. That and a fair amount of diplomacy on Synbel’s part smoothed things out.” I suppose that was a new way to make friends with someone. I rolled my shoulders a few times to settle my armor and then partially drew each of my weapons to make sure they were clear before walking into the main room to find Gwynn had added a heavy leather armor chest piece and weapons belt with two Celtic dirks and a short sword.
I gestured towards the door and followed him as he guided me through the halls of the castle and down in to the lowest levels that had been carved from the bedrock below Caer Arianrhod. We stepped off what I hoped was the last flight of stairs, my knees and back aching from the long downward climb.
“Sorry about this.” Gwynn spun his arm moving in a blur and my arm came up just in time to block the first strike aimed for my gut before I realized the distraction and felt a heavy blow land on the back of my head and the dim light of the torch lit hallway winked out of existence.
