“That sounded like the speech of Druids,” he said, frowning at me. “Are you a Druid, Sir Gawain?”
At this point I’m sure he expected a denial. I actually expected to issue one. Instead my left arm whipped up and I smashed him in the face with my studded leather bracer. The back of his head hit the chair, stunning him, and I pushed mine back to give myself room and stood. The assembled diners gasped in shock and some angry exclamations wafted my way. I gave Domech another punch in the mouth to prevent him from speaking a spell and then checked out the Fisher King in my magical sight.
He wasn’t alive. That explained the loss of appetite. He had plenty of dark spells wrapped around him, however, some of them clearly bound with Domech, and other wisps of smoky malevolence that seemed to radiate in every direction until they disappeared at the walls. Domech was definitely a necromancer.
“Right,” I said, pulling out Fragarach. There wasn’t time to analyze the situation with a room full of armed nobles and guards who would shortly be after my head. I made sure the Fisher King lost his first, since he wasn’t using it anyway. It was telling that he hadn’t moved, even though his most trusted counselor had been whacked in the face—twice—in close proximity. I swung Fragarach through his neck and it tumbled onto the table; there was no blood. The shadowy spells around him dissipated.
Domech jerked as if I’d hit him again and the screaming began. I checked my rear to see if anyone approached from that quarter and found the nobles cowering in a satisfactory manner. The lesser folk and the maids tore at their hair in terror as they fled the hall. There were guards running my way, however, and I was quite clearly the bad guy from their point of view.
“No!” Domech cried, his eyes fixed on the head of the Fisher King. “He was chained to the land!”
No wonder the land had died out so quickly; Domech had bound it to a dead man. With the Fisher King gone, the land would be able to recover on its own—so long as the Pict didn’t do it again.
Domech had more than earned the death sentence according to Druidic law; he’d been draining the life out of an elemental while cloaking his activities beneath a fog. There wasn’t a Druid alive who wouldn’t slay him for what he’d done, and I felt honored to get to him first. Unfortunately, he ducked under the swing of my sword and trapped my arm across my body before I could take a backswing. Magic swirled amongst the silver bars in his face and blood dripped from his ruined nose. His right hand grabbed me between the legs and then he lifted me bodily over his head, throwing me over the table into the clear space of the hall.
“Kill him!” he demanded, and pointed at me in case the guards hadn’t figured out I was a public nuisance.
A slim wee man like him shouldn’t have been able to pick me up and toss me. He was using the earth’s energy in the same way a Druid would to boost his strength. Except he’d stolen all that energy, leeching it through the Fisher King.
The minions in leather boots weren’t any trouble. Fishing out the silver cross, I used some of the stored magic in it to bind the leather on the insides of their calves together and they collapsed to the stone floor. Some landed less gracefully than others.
I couldn’t do the same to Domech; he had fashioned some kind of ward against my bindings. He couldn’t affect me directly with his magic either, since necromancers are incapable of affecting the living except through the dead. I used some of the juice to increase my speed and strength instead and charged him.
For all the power he had leeched, Domech was still at a disadvantage and he knew it. He wasn’t armed or armored and there weren’t any dead people in the hall he could use for his own ends. He did, however, have some big fucking chairs he could throw at me. I leapt over the first one but the second knocked me down. He was on top of me before I could regain my feet, his left hand pinning my sword arm to the floor while his right tried to grasp my throat. I prevented that by sweeping my left arm out, dropping the cross, and then I locked onto his neck—a rather skinny one—and began to squeeze with all I had. He could have grabbed me in turn, but instead he clawed at my arm and tried to break my grip. His damned nails ripped at my forearm and he bruised me, but he wasn’t enough of a fighter to know anything about pressure points or how to break bones.
“That black hand of yours got two Druids this way in the chapel,” I said through clenched teeth. “You know the one I mean, Domech? The wheel keeps turning, doesn’t it?”