Barbarian Gladiator (Princesses of the Ironbound Book 4) Read online

“Depends on which side you are on,” Ymir growled.

  “Who in the hell are you talking to?” Jennybelle asked in wonder as she held the torch, burning with black flame.

  The skeletons around them creaked, and their burial gowns turned into sighs. Their heads turned on squeaking neck joints. A few of the skulls popped off in the process.

  They were turning, slipping off the shelves, and disappearing into the black water.

  Jenny hissed, “Fuck this. Jelu jelarum.” Casting Flow magic, she froze the water to her left and created steps to her own ice platform. She climbed out of the water. A skeleton crawled up her steps. Its bony hand reached for her, and she bashed the thing’s skull off with the black-flame torch.

  Ymir couldn’t leave the water. He stood in front of his ice anvil. Grisly hard fingers grabbed his ankle, but he didn’t kick them away. He was too focused. He was going to make this next damn ring, and he wasn’t going to fret about living bones. The skeletons were swarming him, clinging to him with their arms, their skulls pressing against him. He could easily use the Yellow Scorch Ring to blast them away and cover them in fire. Or he could freeze the room. A few swings of his sword would also clear himself.

  He chose to do nothing of the kind. He let those specters climb him and cover him. He wore them as a grisly mantle. This fucking magic was all demonic, and he might as well wear demons as a coat.

  He freed his right arm enough to strike the ring with the jeweler’s hammer, and the sound was like an enormous bell ringing. His head swam, and he squinted against the noise and the light. He felt Jennybelle’s terror as she fought the skeletons coming near. They wanted to be closer to the warmth of the living. There is no chill as painful as the cold of death.

  Ymir felt Lillee, standing at the crossroads, and farther down, Tori, and lastly, Gatha, worried that they’d be found out by the head librarian, Maezelith Bealheam. He felt the duszas of the women calling out to him, and each had their own sweetness to it. Their own special scent, only it wasn’t smell, but something deeper, the very essence of who they were.

  Gatha was strong and unyielding—that made her fragile. Tori was sweet and sensible but also secretive, and that made her untrustworthy. Worse yet, the dwab didn’t think too much of herself. Then there was Lillee, who longed for power, who longed to throw off her chains and to stand tall. In her was an unexpected iron. Lastly? Jennybelle Josen, who was full of fire and life and hate and schemes to get every little thing she wanted. There was a deep selfishness to her, yet she fought those inclinations with an unexpected heroism. And once she gave you her loyalty, it was forever, unless you fucked her over. And that was what had happened to her birth family, and so she’d severed ties with them. She’d chosen a new family—Ymir and his harem of outcast princesses.

  All that understanding hit Ymir in seconds. Then he sensed his own dusza, and the minute he pondered it, he was cast away from the submerged crypt, flung far across the world to the cave of the Lonely Man, dreamlike and strange. As in a dream, he had an intuitive understanding of the situation. This was before he’d come to destroy the demon. Before he’d lost so many of his battle brothers, and before Ynyo was burned, nearly killed. Before the curse.

  The Lonely Man demon slept in a central black pool of boiling mud. It slept, with its twin eyes of fire closed and with its spear, covered in crimson runes, clutched to its chest. It slept, yet it was aware of him. This was before.

  In his dream body, Ymir walked under the archway and surveyed the Lonely Man’s cave. Marble tiles had been laid in a pattern, which led to the central mud pool. Around it were other pits of burbling mud as well as pools of bright green water, steaming. The place was close to the center of the world, where the Axman’s forge boiled both water and dirt. Yet the Axman had nothing to do with the awful place.

  Five green pools to the east, a mud pit to the south, a mud pit to the north, and the central resting place of the demon itself. Eight pools in all. Eight Akkiric Rings. There might’ve been a point to the mad place.

  A voice drifted up from the demon sleeping in the mud. The blood of the innocent drew you in. I would awake just as the sleeper will awake. I knew of you because of the night bear you slew. I felt you above, and you were perfect. You could become a seed.

  Ymir laughed in his vision, this dream, this terror. “I’ve been a seed, and I’ve cast my seed about. Speak clearly, demon. You might as well because you are dead.”

  Death is a circle with no beginning and no end. Eternity longs for death. All days will die. Night will reign supreme.

  That sounded suspiciously like the Midnight Guild’s words: May the night never end, and may the day never begin. All of it was claptrap.

  “More riddles.” Ymir laughed and walked down the cracked marble as black smoke swept into his eyes. “And me without pen and parchment to write anything down. I’ll remember. So you led me here using the blood of the innocent. You wanted me here.”

  For vengeance. To curse you. To curse you forever. Let the sleeper wake from the dream!

  Boiling black smoke swirled around Ymir as he stood at the front of the central pool. In reality, far to the north, in his world, this entire place had been destroyed. After the death of the Lonely Man, the demon had pulled down the entire underground palace.

  But here in this vision of the past, it was as it had been.

  That was what Ymir thought until a woman walked out of the smoke. Her elven ears parted midnight hair, as black as pitch, blacker than anything he’d ever seen before. Jennybelle had such dark hair, but even hers wasn’t as black. Her eyes were cat’s green, bright and inquisitive. Ymir recognized the former Princept, now dead hundreds of years. Sarina Sia. She was tall and thin, but she had the biggest tits he’d ever seen on such a slender woman. Her nipples were hard under her gossamer-thin gown. She spoke, but it wasn’t in the otherworldly booming voice he’d heard before. In this vision, her words came out wrapped in spider silk. “Hello to you, Ymir, son of Ymok.”

  Ymir felt the cold shiver run up his spine. Having skeletons crawling on him, holding him, was nothing compared to speaking with this elven woman, long dead. He nodded. “Hello to you, Honored Princept.”

  She laughed and it was musical but sad. “So, when I died an old woman, I died with disappointment in my heart. I would never again smell a man fucking me. I would never again hear the soft sighs of the women I made come on my fingers and in my mouth. My flesh would fall away. I would miss the sex. More? I would die never knowing how the story of our world unraveled itself. I hated that I could never read all the books, that I would never know the mysteries of our world, every single mystery. I would never know the truth of the grand Vempor Aegel Akkridor. His life. His lust. His murder.”

  Ymir listened quietly to the ghostly regret before speaking. “Yet here you fucking are. Not as dead as it would seem. What do you want, Honored Princept—”

  She cut him off. “Sarina. I’m not your Honored Princept. That would be Della Pennez, who will become the grandest Princept in the history of our school. No, I will forever more be Sarina. I am dead. I do not want life, rather, I want to see how the stories end. You, barbarian, will give me that. As for Della? For her, I have my plans. I’ve woken.”

  TRUST HER NOT! And Ymir was ripped from the Lonely Man’s cavern and thrown back into the crypt.

  In that room, he heard the Akkir Akkor with their thunderous voices. WE HAVE YOUR FATE PLANNED, YMIR. LISTEN NOT TO THE SLUTS AND WHORES THAT MIGHT CONFUSE YOU. STAY THE COURSE, CLANSMAN. THE SLEEPER. THE AWAKENED. THE DREAM. GATHER THE BREATHS. FINISH THIS RING. WE STAND OUTSIDE OF THE MINUTES OF YOUR DAY AND THE MILES OF YOUR WORLD. WE WATCH. WE WAIT.

  Maybe from their presence, or maybe from something else, the skeletons were all shattered into a collection of dusty bones and rags. They splashed back into the water.

  Jennybelle’s eyes were wide. There was a beat, then she squalled, “What in the fuck just happened?”

  Ymir grinned as sweat dripped down his face. He
lifted up the ring, a pretty combination of metals, three hoops tied together with wine-soaked seaweed now turned to emerald strands. “I forged the Gather Breath ring, only it’s not finished yet. I need to gather breaths.”

  Jennybelle blew at him through pursed lips. “There. That’s your first breath. Can we get the fuck out of here now?”

  Ymir’s laughter boomed through the crypt. “We can, but I don’t think collecting breaths is going to be as easy as all that.”

  And he wasn’t about to trust the Akkir Akkor. He found it interesting that they hated the spectral Princept so much. He’d have to keep that in mind because it just might be a clue into the true nature of the otherworldly demons.

  Chapter Two

  THE NEXT DAY, SUNDAY afternoon, Ymir sat with Jenny and Lillee at his normal table on the second floor of the Librarium Citadel. Every table below him was packed as the scholars prepared for their Fourth Exam, which would start the following day. It would mark the end of his sophist year, but the clansman couldn’t care that much about the simple test. He had a variety of other concerns to consider. His vision from the night before wouldn’t leave him be. And Jennybelle hadn’t slept, either, because she was too scared. The dead had come to life—both in the form of the skeletons and as the inscrutable former Princept, the insatiable Sarina Sia.

  Lillee had her head down, reading, and Jennybelle sat with her hands over her face, moaning because she was so tired. Gatha would come and sit with them every once in a while, but today she was busy getting Ymir’s and other scholars’ books from the shelves.

  Gatha would stop, though, every so often, to crouch down to stare into Ymir’s eyes. For the Gruul, this was a form of affection, like kissing or telling someone you loved them. For several long moments, he stared into her rose-colored eyes. Her white hair was bound into a ponytail, which fell back against her Sunfire robes, red and yellow. Her green skin seemed darker against those vibrant colors. Her tusks were hidden away—female orcs could hide their tusks when they weren’t angry or fighting.

  Gatha then nodded and walked off.

  Jenny clutched a ceramic cup of kaif to her chest. “It’s weird. She doesn’t do that to any of us. Only you. Is it a love thing? Or is she just insane?”

  Lillee adjusted the gold cuff on her left arm. “It’s called the Farrg Panng, and it symbolizes deep love and intense feelings. I find it touching.” She smiled at Ymir with her full lips. Her platinum hair fell onto her scholarly Flow robes, black and gray. Her almond-shaped eyes were green with platinum flecks, and since she was Sullied, she had the stylized “S” tattoo on her temple near her left eye.

  Jenny sighed. “My Gruul was never very good. It didn’t need to be. So Farrg Panng is the weird staring contest thing. And we’re her ptoor? Am I saying that right?”

  Ymir grunted in the affirmative and turned a page in the Circulum. “Before, she was igptoor—a woman without a family.”

  Jenny sipped from her kaif. “It’s sad they have a word for that. I guess I’m lucky. I went from my old family to my new one with you guys. I was igptoor for like ten minutes.”

  Gatha returned and set two more big tomes on the table. She sat, nodded at Jenny and Lillee, and opened a dusty book to read through the table of contents. Ymir lifted the cover and saw it was a Theranus dictionary, going over words and phrases from the Age of Union. That was thousands of years before the rule of the Vempor Aegel Akkridor, the same ruler who had built the citadel that eventually became the Majestrial Collegium Universitas.

  And how had Aegel Akkridor died? It was shrouded in mystery. Ymir was going to take a class next year to study the vempor.

  Ymir supposed he could ask Sarina, though she’d been the Princept during the Age of Withering, three hundred years after the vempor was killed. However, as an Ohlyrran, she’d been alive during both the Age of the Withering and the Age of Discord. She might know the truth.

  Gatha scooted close to him. “Show me the passages from the Circulum that tell us of this ring.” He flipped through rough sketches of demons rising from the pits, of shadowy faces in the ink, and whole paragraphs that were scratched out. The annotations were hastily written in shaky handwriting. Hence, they were impossible to read.

  “Is Tori coming to study?” Lillee asked in a soft voice.

  “She’d better.” Ymir frowned. “She’s my Basic Alchemy lab partner. And I have questions.”

  “Good thing I have answers!” The cheerful little dwab came huffing up the stairs. “Gosh me underground, the lunch rush was bad today. Good thing I like to work, or you might catch me complaining!” She was a busty woman, four feet tall, with green eyes and a freckled nose too cute for words. Her smile was as warm as it was wide. She carried a leather case almost as big as she was.

  She caught sight of the piles of books. “Oh, but we aren’t studying Basic Alchemy, are we? No. You’re ring-crazy, Ymir!” She grabbed a chair from a nearby table and said hello to the scholars studying there. She brought the chair back over and clambered onto it.

  Gatha didn’t look up. “You’ll put that chair back, Tori. Correct?”

  “We do clean up after ourselves,” Jennybelle insisted, defending the dwab.

  “I’m a big cleaner from way back.” Tori laughed. “So, Ymir, what about your other classes? Your Moons class about Willmur Swordwrite, your sophist Flow class, and your Age of Discord class with Nile Preat. I’m betting you don’t know all thirty generations of Akkridors before Aegel.”

  He couldn’t help but smile at the little woman. “You’d lose that bet. I know enough. I’m more concerned about my vision from last night.”

  Jennybelle opened a listing of all the Princepts and their biographies. “Sarina Sia was middle-aged when she became a Princept. Well, the elderly side of middle age. The bio doesn’t mention her sex dungeon or any other improprieties, though we know she was such the dirty girl. However, she must’ve been discreet. She was well-respected until the day she died, which was soon after she retired. She lived on campus, in the Imperial Palace, until the end. She never went home.”

  They were quiet for several long seconds.

  Lillee spoke first in a hushed voice. “She never went home because she took off her essess. She embraced her sexuality and didn’t care what anyone thought of her.”

  A smile touched Jenny’s lips. “And yet, she kept her activities discreet. I wonder why she was never caught. It does make one wonder. And why isn’t she resting comfortably in death?”

  Gatha grunted. “We took a bone from her throat. If you touched my body in death, I would be enraged.”

  “That’s a short trip,” Jenny breathed.

  Gatha’s smile was full of tusks. “I keep my temper in check most of the time, Jennybelle Josen. You have no idea how patient I must be with you.”

  The two stared at one another. He could feel the heat in the air, though it was tinged with conflict. The two women were powerful and not given to letting slights pass. Lillee got along well because she was shy and quiet most of the time. Tori was cheerful and liked people easily. It was a good attribute to have.

  Ymir leaned back and scratched his head. “I’m less worried about Sarina. Yes, she’s around, and, yes, her presence is troubling, but I’m not going to listen to the Akkir Akkor without drawing my own conclusions.” He sighed. “I’m more interested in the pools in the Lonely Man’s cave. Eight pools. Five green water, boiling to the east. A north pit. A south pit. And the central pool. Eight pools. Eight Akkiric Rings. And we know that the Vempor Aegel Akkridor has a connection to the rings.”

  “Pah!” Gatha erupted and closed the Theranus dictionary. “So we’re not studying, neither for our Fourth Exam nor to understand the Gather Breath Ring. Fine. Do we want to discuss eights?”

  Jennybelle clapped, laughing. “And there you have it, ladies and gentlemen. Gatha the Gruul’s famous patience in action.”

  The Gruul popped her tusks. “Quiet, girl.” She then turned to Ymir. “Eight pools. Eight rings. A
egel had his seven Corvidae. He had seven wives. He would make eight in either case. He divided up his empire into eight provinces. Spiders have eight legs as well. I could bring you Octovato’s The Divine Perfection, which has eight volumes and chronicles all he knew about mathematics.”

  “I know eight recipes for xocalati cookies.” Tori’s smile softened the tense feeling in the air.

  Gatha’s brow furrowed. “Cookies are a poor man’s cake. Neither can match sweet cream. Weren’t we going to have that fairy bitch sell xoca sweet cream?”

  Ymir cut that line of questions off. “We’ll discuss our summer business plans once we finish the Fourth Exam. At this stage, I don’t think we need to gather the breaths for the ring right away. We have until the autumnal equinox. When the shadows balance with the light, if my ancient Theranus is correct.”

  “I saw that.” Gatha retracted her tusks. “It is.”

  Ymir stood. “Let me walk some. I do my best thinking as I walk. Besides, I think I’m in need of kaif.”

  “Not in the Librarium.” Gatha gave Jenny a poison look.

  The Swamp Coast woman drained her kaif in a single drought. “Yes, we must not have food or drink in the citadel.” She blinked her very blue eyes.

  Gatha half grinned. “You’re lucky I like you, Jennybelle Josen. Or else I would hate you.”

  “I know what you like,” Jenny said in a flirty little voice. She slid a hand down her Flow robes to brush her fingers along her cleavage.

  Gatha’s eyes twinkled.

  Ymir left them, talking, reading, studying, and walked down to the ground floor. In the feasting hall, he found the tureen of kaif, kept hot by Sunfire magic, and poured himself a cup. Scholars were hunched over their grimoires and sand parchment. He walked through their ranks to get to the window.

  It was late afternoon, the sky blue, the sun high in the sky. Soon, school would be over, and he would have all summer to read, to make love with his women, and to work on his business. Gatha wasn’t wrong. They had to capitalize on the deal they’d made with Ziziva and her candy shop, The Paradise Tree. But now was not the time to think of such things.