by David Dickie
“It’s a standard precaution when an elf is traveling with minimal protection in territory that has the potential for peril. It prevents anyone captured from revealing information, even under advanced interrogation techniques, even with mind probes.”
Grim shook his head. “Sounds kind of brutal to me. But to each their own. You said you are my friend.” Alan nodded. “Then I’ll ask you, in respect for that friendship, to take the information I give you and leave Daesal and Stegar alone.” Grim took a deep breath. “While we were with him in Tawhiem, Beldaer found out that at least one of the Great Swords, Morpangler, did not perish in the Lanotalis island explosion. He and Daesal agreed to pursue how that happened. Daesal is here as part of that arrangement.” That was only part of the story. The smallest part, actually. But Grim wasn’t in much of a sharing mood.
Alan was still. “I know enough about the Great Swords and how the humans made them to know that is a bad thing. Those swords, by virtue of being formed from unwilling hosts, are inherently evil and will corrupt anyone who uses them, anyone around them, to serve their own dark desires. It kills the user, but they are in its thrall, and they are unable to control themselves. They will bend to the sword’s will, and they will find themselves more than unable to stop it. They will become willing slaves to the sword’s purpose.”
Grim nodded. “I know.”
Alan said “Why didn’t Beldaer share this with the elves? What happened to him on that mission? Again, I know a little, enough to assist me in asking you questions during the trip. The elves have divination spells that let them… let us know that Beldaer is alive, that he is under no coercion, that he made the choice to stay apart from the Evael on his own. But they are not powerful enough to say why.”
“I wasn’t there when he made that decision, and I’m not sure he’d share all of his information with me in any case.” That was true, certainly, although in this case misleading. Beldaer had shared more with Daesal, and Daesal had in turn shared some of it with Grim, and Grim had picked up more in her conversations with Stegar. But this was one case where misleading was more honest than the full truth.
Alan looked thoughtful. “Indeed. I suspect he would only share what he needed to in order to accomplish his end goals. She is a tool he is using to gather information. And that… that means he believes there are elves involved in this, elves somehow complicit with saving at least one of the human Great Swords from destruction. There is no other reason he would not return. And that is impossible, as you have already noted, because we share minds with one another. No one could hide such a thing. And yet… I can’t think of any other explanation.”
“Couldn’t say,” said Grim. “But the big secret you were worried about is already out there. And Daesal and Stegar are doing this because an elf asked them too. There’s no need to go heavy handed on them.”
Alan frowned. “How are they supposed to report what they find to Beldaer?”
“He’s supposed to get in touch with them.” Grim was making this up on the spot, always a risky thing to do. It would be easy to say things that didn’t add up, that had inherent contradictions. “I don’t know the details. I was never part of the inner circle. No one trusted me enough to tell me much. But I know enough to tell you that what you’re after isn’t a secret you need to worry about. I ran when Kethem Naval Intelligence picked up Daesal, Stegar, and the rest. Either Kethem military already know, or Daesal and Stegar are keeping it a secret on Beldaer’s behalf. Either way, they will do you no harm.”
Alan nodded. “So it would seem. I believe you Grim, but I am not sure others will simply accept this at face value.”
Grim gave him a thin smile. “Morpangler was not destroyed. It is out there, right now, evil, sure, but one of the most powerful things ever created by the old empire, and worth a fortune. Would I tell you about it if I was hiding something?” Alan looked thoughtful, but not convinced. “I will sweeten the deal. Daesal and Stegar trust me enough to talk about their research. I will tell you what they’ve found. It might be enough to lead you to Morpangler.”
Alan paused, then nodded. “Knowing that it exists is enough. The elves… we… have methods to ascertain its location. Nothing in five-hundred-year-old tomes would be salient anyway. If it exists, it is moving, it is plotting.”
Grim doubted the elves could find Morpangler, given it was in a different universe and held by great trolls, but that he would leave to the elves to figure out. Grim said, “Good enough. Frankly, I’m glad it’s your problem. I don’t think there’s anything humans could do to rein in something like that.”
Alan frowned for a moment, and perhaps Grim had gone a little far, but finally Alan sighed and said, “Very well. We will…” and stopped. A howling siren was penetrating the walls, a harsh call to arms that was the last thing any of them expected to hear.
Chapter Twenty-Six
Alan, Lug and Grim joined a number of other guests who were milling outside the entrance to building number five. The alarm was louder and clearer than it had been in the building. There was a distant thud and a flare of what looked like fire to the north. The faint sound of battle magic wafted to them through the night air. Grim listened to the disjointed conversations of the people around him for a moment. It was nothing but questions about what was happening. He looked around, and in the light cast by the glow disks, saw an acolyte, a young man, running for the building with the patio. He nodded in that direction and moved at a jog to get there at the same time as the running man. Alan and Lug followed.
The acolyte Grim had spoken to when he arrived was outside on the patio. Grim was close when the second acolyte reached the patio and called out between gasps for breath, “Ohulhug… attacking the dock.” Grim felt a chill, but Rotan was right about near impossibility the black ship could make it from the sea to Nyquet. The enclave was much farther up river than that. This had to be something else.
The first Acolyte nodded. “Listen up!” she yelled over the hubbub of voices. “The enclave is under attack by ohulhug. Those who can be of help in a battle, please group on me. Only those who have fought before. Remember, the enclave is non-discriminatory, and there may be ohulhug or those with their lineage on our side. Be careful who you target. If you are not battle experienced, please go directly to the temple. Doors lock in ten minutes. You want to be on the inside.” Then she stepped out of the center of the group and stood waiting for people to come to her.
About a third of the group, roughly a dozen people, moved to the acolyte. Grim hesitated. He didn’t even have his rapier with him, just a couple of daggers and the artificer’s weapon he’d picked up in Eleyford. He didn’t even know if the weapon had a charge left. He found himself moving toward the woman regardless. The running acolyte was moving to the clusters of people outside the other buildings. Grim assumed it was to gather more support.
“Let’s go,” said the acolyte, and headed down the road at a jog. Grim, Alan and Lug followed. It wasn’t a hard pace. The acolyte knew what she was doing, didn’t want people to get exhausted from running before being thrown into battle. It seemed a little odd to Grim that an acolyte for an organization dedicated to peace and co-existence would know small-squad tactics.
Grim sped up a bit and caught up with her. “This a common occurrence?” he asked.
She shook her head. “Never happened in the five years I’ve been here. We’re much too far south of the mountains the wild ones call home. Local ohulhug, the orcs and half-breeds, they’ve settled in. No reason to do this. I have no idea what’s going on. Plus… the docks make no sense. If they wanted to pillage anything valuable, they could have landed in half a dozen places and gotten much closer to the enclave before we knew they were here. As it is, the temple will be in lockdown by the time they reach it. It will be days before they could get through, but they won’t have that opportunity. There will be troops from Nyquet here in less than twenty-four hours if Master Brandin calls in a favor.”
Grim thought about that.
Why attack the docks? The barges were there, full of unrefined ore. Valuable, but hard to move quickly or quietly. How would they get the contents downriver without getting caught? There were other supplies, small things, nothing worth a pitched battle. The only reason for things to start at the dock would be if the attackers had arrived on boats. It couldn’t be the black ship.
Nonetheless, his sense of unease grew. He dropped back a few steps until he was with Alan and Lug.
“You two help at the dock. I’ll catch up, need to check something out.” Alan was saving his breath for the jog and just nodded. Lug looked at him enigmatically. Grim slowed, waved, and turned back in the other direction. Without quite intending to, he found himself at a dead run. Something was wrong; he could feel it in his bones.
He passed other groups heading for the docks, some of whom called out to him to see if he knew anything about how things stood there. He didn’t bother to slow or to answer. He kept an eye out for Aurora and Tyrgo but didn’t see them. The clusters of people outside the long buildings had already dispersed, although there was a small stream of people flowing out the doors with bundles in their hands, clearly having gone back to their rooms to fetch valuables and now on the way to the safety of the temple.
Grim sprinted the last hundred feet to the first building, the one with the porch, and he suddenly realized where he was going. The acolyte had said Fayyaad and Rotan were in that building, on the second floor. Grim ran up the steps, through the front door, up the staircase to the balcony. He swung open the door to the corridor. Inside, nothing was moving in the hall, dimly lit by glow disks spaced fifty feet apart. Grim paused. He had no idea what room Fayyaad and Rotan were in.
While he hesitated, the door on the far end of the corridor flew open, and Fayyaad came running through it. Ohulhug in leather armor were after him, swords drawn. Worse, the two directly behind him were high ohulhug, the seven-foot, three-hundred-pound monsters that had been driven back to the mountains to the north two centuries ago. High ohulhug were invariably vicious, intelligent, and usually battle mages. Very good battle mages. Most humans had a hard time casting spells in anything but the best conditions for concentrating. High ohulhug had been known to cast spells while they were being stabbed to death.
Grim was pulling daggers. “Fayyaad, behind you!” he yelled.
Fayyaad looked over his shoulder, turned back and pointed at Grim. “Kill him.”
The two high ohulhug ran past Fayyaad. Fayyaad pointed to a door. “This is it.” Fayyaad and the rest of the band of low ohulhug, maybe a half dozen of them, opened the door to the room Fayyaad was pointing at and ran inside. Grim didn’t have time to worry about it, as the two in front were charging down the hallway at him. Grim threw one knife at them. His chances of it hitting a moving target with the point was close to zero, but it was just meant to slow them down. Being ohulhug, they didn’t flinch, didn’t change course, and the knife hit one in the chest handle first and fell to the ground having accomplished nothing. Both of them were carrying swords, and one had a matching dagger, black metal with a vicious serrated edge. The one without a dagger gestured, and with a loud whoosh, a bolt of flame shot out of his hand, burning down the corridor. It suddenly vanished as it reached Grim. If either of them was surprised it didn’t show or slow them down, so they were almost on him before he finally managed to pull out the artificer’s weapon he had taken from the street soldier back in Eleyford.
With a crackling roar a jagged bolt of lightning jumped from the stone to one of the two ohulhug, and it staggered backward under that harsh electric arc. Where the arc touched things burned whether they were leather armor or flesh. That was about the time Grim knew the ohulhug were going to kill him, because the other one was so close Grim could see hairs on the back of the hand holding the sword that was going to run him through. Grim didn’t have the time to bring the lightning weapon around again, even assuming it had another charge. He still had a knife in his other hand, but that wasn’t going to turn a sword. Grim was out of options.
Just before it reached Grim, the second ohulhug staggered backward with half a dozen metal bolts inexplicably sticking out from different parts of its chest. Grim had been back peddling, and as he went one way Tyrgo and Aurora were going in the other, past him, toward the ohulhug. Tyrgo gestured and another half a dozen spikes went flying from the space in front of Tyrgo’s hand and were suddenly embedded in the ohulhug that was already staggering from getting hit by Grim’s artificer’s weapon.
The two ohulhug should have just dropped and died with that much steel in them, but instead both caught their balance and charged forward again. Aurora went flying through the air like she’d been launched by a giant spring, eight feet off the ground. One heavy-booted foot snapped forward and caught the ohulhug with the sword and dagger combo straight in the head, and this time he went down. Somehow Aurora used the force from that blow to backflip and drop. The second ohulhug’s sword went whistling by her as she fell to the ground, missing her by a hair’s breadth and embedding itself in a wall. Aurora hit the floor, and suddenly two daggers were in her hands. She slashed at the backs of the second ohulhug’s legs. The thing stumbled and fell, hamstrung.
While they had been fighting, Fayyaad and the low ohulhug, the orcs, exited the room they’d run into. Four of them were dragging Rotan, who looked unconscious. The other two charged down the corridor at Grim, Aurora and Tyrgo.
Aurora was still on the floor, and she threw herself backward to avoid a sword slash. Tyrgo was moving forward. He was carrying a quarterstaff he hadn’t had a few second before. It was a poor choice for the constrained area presented by the corridor. The orcs knew it and charged at Tyrgo gleefully. Tyrgo held the quarterstaff in the center, with one end pointing at the charging orc, not any kind of stance Grim had seen with that weapon before. Then Tyrgo rotated his hands in opposite directions while holding the staff firmly, and a long blade popped out of the end of the quarterstaff pointed at the rushing orc. Tyrgo planted the other side of the staff on the ground. One of the charging orcs had no time to slow and impaled himself on the end of what was suddenly a spear. Tyrgo rode the impact, letting the back of the staff on the ground take the force of it. The orc rose into the air at the end of the shaft, the blade completely through its body.
The other orc lashed out at Tyrgo with his sword, but Aurora popped up from the floor under him, uncoiling like a wire under tension that had snapped, and she stuck a dagger through the bottom of the thing’s jaw up into its brain cavity, the force of the blow enough to lift it a couple of feet off the ground, only to come crashing down again in a heap.
The hamstrung high ohulhug was on the ground with legs that couldn’t bear weight any more, but it wasn’t out of the action yet. It spun around, and Grim saw a flashing dagger embed itself in Aurora’s hip. She staggered. The ohulhug was trying to clumsily pull its sword around when Grim pointed the artificer’s weapon at its head and willed it to fire. A bold of lightning scored the things face, leaving burnt flesh and frying eyeballs in its wake. It stopped moving.
Fayyaad and the four orcs carrying Rotan had vanished through the door at the other end of the corridor. “Come on!” yelled Grim, running toward the slowly shutting door.
“Let us clear weapons!” called Tyrgo. Grim was sure he and Aurora were trying to pull blades out of ohulhug bodies, but there was no time. If the orcs got more than fifty feet away from the buildings, they would be out of range of the glow disks and could lose themselves in the dark. Grim smashed through the door, which led to a simple staircase that went down on both sides. He skipped down the steps on the left, hearing his quarry below. At the bottom of the steps was another doorway to the outside, still ajar, and he hit the bottom of the stairs and threw it open with his shoulder as he barreled out of the building.
Outside where the four orcs carrying Rotan’s body, heading off toward the dock. Waiting just outside the door were Fayyaad and two more of the high ohulhug. Grim tried to dodge to the right
but he had a lot of momentum and couldn’t change direction fast enough. The ohulhug’s thrusting sword tore through his clothes and scored a deep gash in his side. Grim let himself continue forward, past the ohulhug, dropped and rolled, stopping with the artificer’s weapon held out straight in front of him. He willed the stone to fire. Nothing happened. It was out of mana.
Fayyaad didn’t have a sword, but he knew something about fighting, and Grim was seriously injured, could feel the blood pouring down from the wound in his side. Grim tried to get up, but Fayyaad did a spinning dropkick that took Grim directly in the side of the head, and Grim went rolling in the other direction seeing stars. By the time his vision cleared, Fayyaad was in front of him with the two high ohulhug behind him.
Fayyaad didn’t smile, didn’t look like he’d won. He looked… trapped, like an animal in a snare so tight its only option was to chew off a limb. “Stay down, Grim.” He turned to the side to talk to the ohulhug towering behind him. “We have what Dulaguk wanted. He’s nothing. Let him sit here and bleed out.”
The two ohulhug glanced at each other, and then one of them gave Fayyaad a back-handed blow to the head that sent him reeling. The other grabbed Fayyaad by the front of the shirt and smashed a metal-and-leather-glove-wrapped fist into Fayyaad’s face so hard Grim saw teeth go flying. Fayyaad dropped like a sack of wheat. The two turned toward Grim and raised swords. Grim tried to scamper back on his hands and feet, but it wasn’t even going to be close.
