::No warrior born of woman, no weapon forged in the world can unmake my form!:: the Warmother said in disbelief. The hag took a staggering step backward, still staring at Glory in shock.
Glory kicked her in the face. The impact sent the hag sprawling onto the prop-stake in her back, driving the point through her ribs in front, but Glory wasn't willing to settle for that. She'd already pulled a second stake from its boot-sheath, and dropped to her knees beside the hag's squirming body. With a practiced gesture, she hammered it down through the sternum, driving it home with the heel of her hand. Black goo, thick as watery gruel, pushed up out of the hag's mouth and ran down the sides of her face. Glory reached for a third stake, ignoring the burning in her hands, talking as she hammered it home beside the other.
"I'm a Phys Ed teacher, mate, not a warrior. And that's a prop, not a weapon. Didn't anybody think to tell you?" Cast, not forged, and in another world than this. Tailor-made for the circumventing of prophecies, as a matter of fact.
She reached for a fourth—Vixen carried six—but the Warmother had stopped moving.
As Glory stared, the ancient hag withered away to a skeletal mummyish bundle, then began to melt like a chunk of dry ice, a thick mist rising skyward from her huddled form.
The Lucite stakes were dissolving along with the body, leaving only melted stubs and ends behind. Seeing that, Glory tore the cloth panniers loose from her costume and scrubbed her hands furiously with them, tearing the shredded flesh further, until there was nothing left on her skin but her own blood.
It began to rain. Thick, fat, cold drops of honest water, hitting her on the back of the head, on her raw back and her bare sunburned shoulders, trickling down into the lining of her leather corset. Glory had never been so grateful to be cold and wet in her entire life.
::You'll live to regret this, Vixen the Slayer!:: came a faint disembodied whisper, fading even as the words were uttered.
"Yeah, yeah, yeah," Glory muttered, not paying very much attention. I guess bad villain-dialogue is the same everywhere.
She was jittery and exhausted at the same time, giddy with relief, watching as the creature dissolved. I won? How could I have won? It can't be that easy. . . .
"Slayer!" came an irritable shout.
Ivradan.
Irritable?
Wearily, Glory got to her feet and walked carefully over to the altar rock. It was raining in good earnest now, and the smooth granite mountaintop was as slippery as polished marble. Puddles were gathering in places where the surface wasn't quite as even. Soon it would be completely dark.
But the Warmother was dead.
They'd won.
Ivradan was struggling against his shackles. "Get me out of here!" he demanded.
"Um . . . sure, mate," Glory said, surprised. Look here, she wanted to say, I've just put paid to your chief villain for you, and all you can think to do is yell at me? How about the thanks of a grateful nation, and all that, hey? "Any ideas?"
She wanted to sleep. Right here, right now. In the rain. On the rock. Her hands hurt. She leaned against the slab, wincing. She thought she'd done something not very nice to her shoulder in that last fall. Not that anybody around here seemed to care. Her eyes prickled hotly. In another moment she was going to start bawling out of sheer self-pity.
"Use the sword. Or what's left of it."
Ivradan sounded downright pettish. She supposed he might have a right, since he'd been the one about to be the dragon's lunch and all, but it didn't really seem fair, somehow. . . .
And suddenly the penny dropped.
Belegir: "A terrible power has been unleashed in the land of Erchanen. Long was it prisoned upon the peaks of Grey Arlinn. . . ."
Charane: "No warrior born of woman, no weapon forged in the world can unmake my form."
Long was it prisoned . . .
No weapon can unmake . . .
Not "kill." Unmake.
"Uh-oh," she whispered guiltily. Cinnas might have been called the Warkiller, but he hadn't killed the Warmother. You couldn't kill War. Cinnas had bound her into corporeal form, removing the threat of war from Erchanen by removing War Herself. And then he'd chained her up.
And what had Glory done?
Only a hero can chain her once more, Belegir had said, but that wasn't what Glory had done. Glory had unmade Cinnas' binding, forcing the Warmother to return to her original form from eons before, the form out of which she'd been summoned by the Mage Cinnas so that she could be chained.
"Well, bugger all," Glory said inadequately. And began to laugh.
"What are you laughing at?" Ivradan demanded.
"I've violated the bloody Prime Directive! Hoo!" Glory told him gleefully, giggling harder. James T. Kirk, where are you when we really need you? The giggles turned to guffaws, then great roaring whoops of laughter that made her sides ache. She'd solved one problem, and set up a thousand new ones. The peaceful pastoral Allimir were now the old warlike Allimir again. She'd been out to do a good deed, and it looked like all she'd done was re-introduce the concept of not-very-original-sin into a world that had managed to get rid of it.