Bones of the Dragon - Margaret Weis [69]
Skylan aimed his sword again at the ogre’s leg. The godlord, anticipating this attack, lowered his shield to block. Skylan kicked the shield aside, which left the ogre wide open, and drove his sword into the ogre’s hip joint, severing tendons and muscle. The ogre godlord crashed to the ground. Howling in pain and rage, he rolled about in agony, wallowing in his own gore.
Skylan flung aside his shield. He shifted his sword to his left hand and bent over the ogre to wrest the Vektan Torque from the godlord’s fat neck.
Pain lanced through Skylan. The godlord had stabbed him in the shoulder with his knife. Skylan slammed the hilt of his sword into the ogre’s face. He felt and heard bone crunch, and the ogre quit moving. Skylan’s fingers closed around the golden circlet that was half-buried in the ogre’s flesh and yanked it free.
He saw, out of the corner of his eye, the shaman flapping his black-feathered arms like an irate bird, waving his gourd at him and chanting strange words. Skylan paid no attention to the shaman. He heard Norgaard’s voice shouting to kill the shaman, but he paid no attention to his father either.
With the torque safe, Skylan drove his sword into the ogre’s neck, cleaving the head from the body. He raised the torque into the air in triumph. He was about to shout a prayer of thanks to Torval, when he was suddenly deluged with warm blood. Blood flew into his eyes. Blood filled his mouth. He tried to wipe the blood from his eyes, but he couldn’t. He tried to spit the blood out of his mouth, but he couldn’t do that either. He couldn’t move his lips or his tongue. He couldn’t move his hands. He couldn’t shift his feet. All he could do was stare at the black-feathered shaman.
The shaman had known better than to try to stop the fight between the godlord and the human. The shaman was permitted to bless the warriors before the battle, but he was strictly forbidden, on pain of death, to take part. In the old days, not so long ago, shamanistic magic among the ogres was known as “death-magic.” Ogre shamans did not necessarily have to kill something for their magic to work, but they did have to make a sacrifice of some kind. Ogres were pragmatic. They knew that life was hard and you never got something for nothing. In the dark days, when they worshipped dark gods, ogre shamans who wanted to raise a dead ogre did so by killing off one of his relatives. Ogres healed sickness in one by inflicting the illness onto another.
When the Gods of Raj took over, they had been appalled by such behavior. Pragmatic themselves, they saw that their worshippers were eventually going to kill themselves off. The Gods of Raj persuaded the shamans to use symbolic sacrifice to replace blood sacrifices. Break a gourd, not a head. The shamans were still in the practicing phase of trying to learn this new magic, which meant their spell-casting tended to be erratic and unreliable, resulting in some spectacular failures. Ogre warriors feared their own shaman far more than they did the enemy, and so shamans were not permitted to join the fighting.
The shaman now had nothing to hold him back. The godlord was either dead or dying, and the human was about to recover the Vektan Torque.
The moment the shaman had seen the torque around Horg’s neck, he had sensed its power. He was the one who had urged the godlords to accept Horg’s bargain, take the torque, and leave him and his people in peace. The shaman had been irate when the godlord claimed the