The Gates of Thelgrim

by Robbie MacNiven

  “Traitor,” Astarra barked, advancing on Shiver. Adrenaline had given way once more to raw anger, potent enough to make her staff glow white-hot and cause its flames to coil and twist about her, fury made manifest. Shiver faced her, standing his ground and raising one hand.

  A blast of bitter cold struck her full on, as though a gale from the highest peaks of the Dunwarrs had suddenly been summoned to the mountain’s core. The shock of the icy blast stole her breath away and caused her flames to gutter and retract.

  “Back down,” Shiver snarled, his jaw clenched. Ice was blossoming across his raised hand, beginning to physically encase it.

  Astarra’s anger redoubled as she realized he was drawing on the Turning without so much as a conduit. She thrust her rage into her staff once more, reigniting its flames, the flicking wrath twisting and guttering as though in a storm.

  “You led us into this place,” she hissed, her head beginning to pound as the focused strain took its toll. “You led us here so your kin could slaughter us, or worse.”

  “If they were my kin, would I have stolen the soul from one?” Shiver demanded. Astarra’s eyes darted to the brittle corpse at Shiver’s feet. The split-second’s distraction caused her flames to sear away once more.

  Shiver pressed the sudden advantage, taking a step forward. Astarra felt the chill biting to her core. It was agony. She tried to refocus but couldn’t. There was nothing now but the cold. It felt as though the deep elf was turning her very soul to ice.

  Abruptly, the sensation dissipated. The elf had lowered his hand, ice crunching as he flexed his fingers. Astarra was left shivering and panting, her breath frosting in the now-frigid air.

  “I didn’t betray you,” Shiver said, his own breath short as he recovered from the surge of magical energies. “I sensed them just before they attacked us. I was about to warn you.”

  “But you didn’t,” Astarra snapped. She smacked the base of her staff into the road, causing newly formed ice to cascade and shatter. “Do you really expect us to believe it’s just coincidence that we’ve been attacked by deep elves?”

  “Did I blame you for the interest the bandits took in us on the road from Frostgate?” Shiver demanded, his voice now as cold as his magics. “They were all human. I am not responsible for the actions of every elf in the Dunwarrs. I have no ties with the deep clans here!”

  “Regardless, deep elves on the Hearth Road doesn’t bode well,” Raythen said, before Astarra could respond, moving in between the pair. He sounded in no mood for an argument. She noticed the pain on his face, underlit by the fires still consuming the corpse of the elf she had blasted off him.

  “You’re injured,” she said.

  “Barely,” he grunted.

  “Show me your side.”

  Raythen glared at her for a moment, then removed his hand and pulled his cloak back. The leather of his tunic was dark just above his hip, the blood gleaming in the firelight.

  “Can you heal that?” Astarra demanded of Shiver.

  “You trust me to?” the elf retorted.

  “I’d say it’d improve your standing,” she said.

  Shiver looked at Raythen, who shrugged. The elf hesitated, then spoke.

  “Unlace your jerkin.”

  The dwarf grumbled something in his own tongue, but did as Shiver instructed. The elf approached and slipped his hand over the bloody wound, closing his eyes.

  “I was expecting it to be cold,” Raythen said, surprised at the elf’s touch. Shiver said nothing, though his manacles rattled slightly as he began to shake.

  Astarra watched carefully. The sight of the elven magics at once angered and awed her. Like many practitioners, her abilities required the runestones to work – anyone could utilize them, with a little training, but their power didn’t extend beyond the particular effects specific to that shard. Astarra possessed three – the Deeprune, the Ignis Shard and the Viridis Seed, each one acquired in desperate, deadly circumstances and truly mastered only after years of study and experimentation. The power of the runes, often untapped by more inexperienced wielders, was immense, but it didn’t compare to the abilities of those who could reach into the heavenly energies of the Empyrean, or even those like Shiver who could access the Turning without a locus. Their skills were innate, unshackled by the specifics of the shards. It was a kind of power Astarra knew she would never possess.

  “That’s all I can do for now,” Shiver said, withdrawing his hand. The stab wound in Raythen’s side had ceased bleeding and was scabbed over.

  “My energies are spent, for the moment,” the elf went on, his tone almost apologetic. Astarra noted he seemed even more pale and drawn than usual, and he was still shaking slightly. She felt a surge of satisfaction. It seemed he hadn’t snuffed out her own magic quite so easily after all.

  “Well, it’s better than nothing,” Raythen said, peering at the wound for a moment then beginning to lace up his jerkin once more. “We should keep moving. If the elf clans are attacking travelers on the Hearth Road, then the gates really must have been abandoned. I haven’t heard the like since the last Deep War, and that was when I was still a youngling.”

  “Do you think they might have attacked Thelgrim?” Astarra asked, casting her eyes back to the smoldering remains of the elf she’d immolated. “What if the city has fallen?”

  Raythen scoffed. “Thelgrim is the most secure place in all of Terrinoth, runewitch. The clans don’t have the numbers to take it, even if they wanted to. The deep elves and the Dunwarr keep themselves to themselves most of the time. Something bad must have happened if they’re attacking people on the Hearth Road.”

  “That, or they recognized one of us,” Astarra pointed out, looking back at Shiver. “And had a score to settle.”

  Shiver didn’t appear to be listening to her. She was about to repeat the accusation when he spoke.

  “More are coming. We need to go.”

  “Agreed,” Raythen said, beginning to move up the tunnel. Shiver checked him.

  “That’s the direction they’re coming from.”

  “They’re coming from Thelgrim?” Astarra asked.

  “Yes,” Shiver said. “And they’re not deep elves.”

  As he spoke, Astarra detected what the elf’s ears had already picked up. The sound of iron-shod boots, tramping in unison along the Hearth Road.

  “Into the side tunnels?” she asked urgently. She ignited her staff as she spoke, feeling the fiery wrath of the Ignis surge through her, melting away the bitter chill of Shiver’s magics.

  “You want to risk bumping into more of those dagger-wielding cutthroats?” Raythen said, glancing from the roadway to the dark arches looming on either side of them.

  “They have not gone far,” Shiver said. “I can still sense their presence.”

  “Then the only way is back along the road,” Astarra said.

  “Perhaps,” Raythen said, sounding despondent. “But if we want to reach Thelgrim, this was bound to happen at some point. Trust me, I’m looking forward to it even less than you two.”

  The oncoming figures had entered the light of the nearest lit braziers. The flames gleamed and shimmered from helmets, shield rims and axe heads. Astarra realized she was watching a cohort of Dunwarr warriors, fully armed and armored, marching down the Hearth Road towards them.

  The urges to run or to fight flared up inside her, warring with one another. She knew both options were foolish. Raythen was correct. The plan had never been to attempt to enter Thelgrim covertly. As far as they were aware, the Dunwarr were awaiting their arrival, or at least the League of Invention was. Right now, trusting that to be the case suddenly seemed dangerously naive.

  She stood her ground, glancing sideways at Shiver. The elf was leaning with one hand against the tunnel’s rune-carved wall. He seemed spent. Raythen was stepping forward so he was in front of both of them, ha
nds on his hips, facing down his oncoming kinsfolk. Astarra counted about fifty – too many for even the Ignis Shard to overcome.

  “Well, this is quite the greeting party,” Raythen called out over the sound of the tramping boots, the noise of the oncoming dwarfs rising to a thunder that seemed to fill the whole tunnel. Astarra planted her staff before her, keeping the rune alight but focusing on not letting it surge. Ahead of her Raythen was framed by the advancing phalanx, the gleam of their armor reduced to a dull, faceless glitter as they entered the stretch of tunnels where the braziers had failed.

  With a crash, the Dunwarr came to a halt. Their shields slammed together, forming a barrier of steel as the second rank presented a row of primed crossbows, quarrel tips bristling.

  Silence followed. It was all Astarra could do to keep the flames of the Ignis in check.

  Raythen raised both hands and, slowly, began to clap.

  “Very impressive,” he called out over the serried wedge of warriors. “Consider us thoroughly intimidated. But if you were looking for the elves, we’ve already driven them off. Except for this one, that is. He’s with us. At least, I think he is.”

  There was no reaction from the Dunwarr host. Astarra risked a glance at Shiver. The deep elf appeared to have composed himself to a degree, standing away from the tunnel wall, his hands clasped before him. He showed no reaction to being faced with a wall of Dunwarr steel.

  “You need to patrol the Hearth Road more regularly if you consider this good enough protection for those traveling it,” Raythen went on.

  At last, his words drew some sort of reaction. There was a clatter of armor as two of the front-rank Dunwarr broke the shield wall momentarily, making way for a figure who strode out to face Raythen.

  “You are either very bold, or very foolish, to return to Thelgrim,” the warrior said. She was wearing gilt-edged pauldrons and a cuirass over a knee-length surcoat of shimmering scale mail. Her finely-engraved half helm hid the upper half of her features, and two plates of long, red hair hung over her shoulders. She carried a short sword and a heavy shield emblazoned with the embossed, snarling head of a slope-tusker.

  “Captain Bradha,” Raythen said. “How wonderful to make your acquaintance again. I was starting to wonder if we’d even get an opportunity to catch up, what with the gates standing abandoned.”

  “You and your companions will accompany us to the city,” Bradha said, her voice terse. “The king will wish to see all of you.”

  “Well then, I’d best offer you a proper introduction,” Raythen said, full of faux joviality. “These two upstanding subjects of Terrinoth are Astarra and Shiver. We’re traveling to Thelgrim on business, and we’d appreciate not being detained or abused.”

  “Thelgrim is closed to the kind of business you peddle,” Bradha said, before turning back to her phalanx and raising her shield.

  With flawless precision the block split, creating a channel through its middle. She looked back at Raythen, then at Astarra and Shiver for the first time.

  “This is not a request,” she said.

  Astarra hesitated, but Raythen was already walking past Bradha to the heart of the Dunwarr formation. He looked at her.

  “You shouldn’t test Bradha’s patience,” he said in a stage whisper. “Fortuna knows, I’ve found that out the hard way.”

  Astarra sighed and let the fire of the Ignis Shard die. She and Shiver both began to follow Raythen, the ranks of the Dunwarr closing around her.

  She just hoped this was all part of the rogue dwarf’s plan.

  Chapter Six

  “This wasn’t part of the plan,” Raythen said over the tramping sound of Dunwarr boots. “There’s really no need for an armed escort. I’m not expecting King Ragnarson to stand on ceremony.”

  “Trust me, he won’t,” Bradha said. It was the first time since setting out together that she’d risen to Raythen’s bait. As happy as he was to have provoked a reaction from the Gate Captain, he didn’t much like the hint of relish in her voice.

  He was telling the truth, to an extent. Ideally, he’d have gotten into Thelgrim unnoticed and retrieved the runestone from the idiot inventors without concerning the city’s hierarchy with his presence. Of course, that was always going to be a long shot trailed by two figures as out-of-place as Astarra and Shiver. He kept glancing covertly at them as they were marched along the Hearth Road together, silently willing them not to do anything stupid, at least as long as he was still with them. Astarra seemed as close to furiously lashing out as ever, and he was surprised Bradha’s cohort hadn’t filled Shiver with crossbow bolts on sight, especially if the deep elves had resumed their raids.

  Now that the Warriors’ Guild had them, they were going to have to do it the hard way. He’d tried to wring information out of Bradha without making it too obvious, but she was as recalcitrant as she’d ever been. It seemed Raythen still hadn’t been forgiven for the merry chase he’d led her and her warriors on through the Deeps, or the blow he’d dealt her escaping from the undercroft of the Dunwol Kenn Karnin. He resisted the unwise urge to ask her if he’d left a scar.

  Thelgrim, at least, didn’t seem to have been overrun by a surge of deep elves or wiped out by some sort of cataclysm. Raythen supposed he was glad of that, even if a deeply buried, bitter part of him wished the city of his birth would be annihilated by some titanic cavern collapse. What could have caused Bradha to abandon the outer gates though? He’d asked her as much and received nothing but a warning glare.

  Ahead of them the Hearth Road was coming to an end. The precisely carved tunnel dipped, beginning to widen out into a vast cavern, a cavity at the core of the mountain so huge that Raythen was barely able to discern either ceiling or walls.

  Within it lay Thelgrim. Raythen actually heard Astarra’s gasp over the thumping of boots. Cynic though he was, he couldn’t blame her, not this time. There was no sight in all of Mennara quite like the greatest city of the Dunwarrs.

  It filled the cavern from end to end – in a way, it was the cavern. The towering walls and the vast stalagmites that studded the well-worn floor had been crafted and fashioned into buildings great and small, burrowed atop one another into the core of the mountain.

  The soaring space would have spent eons in stygian darkness, but the genius of the Runescribers’ Guild had ended the eternal night of the Deeps and brought light to the Dunwarr’s depths. Crystal starglobes adorned the distant ceiling, their wan light catching the precious stones buried in the countless stalactites and refracting their natural luminescence down onto streets carved from the bristling rock below. They lit up the gems and crystalline sediments that in turn studded so much of the cavern’s sides and floor, the natural wealth of the mountain that had been crafted around them. The array of brilliance made the whole city glitter, like one vast, precious geode, the sublime heart of the great mountain range that had given the dwarven people their ancestral home.

  “Keep moving,” Bradha snarled. Raythen realized Astarra had come to a halt, stunned by the sight of the great city that shimmered and glimmered below them. He managed to make eye contact with her, giving her a warning look. She started forward hastily.

  The edge of the city lay before them, beyond a stretch of road that ended with a plunging chasm. A single bridge spanned the opening, the only way from the Hearth Road into the city. Raythen, of course, knew plenty of other routes from elsewhere in the cavern, especially through the deeps on the northern end, but it seemed today he’d be walking in through the front door.

  At the far side of the long, slender bridge loomed another set of gates, built into a fortress formed from a single great stalactite. Its arrow slits and crenelations seemed to glare down at them as they approached, stepping onto the bridge.

  Bradha barked an order and the Dunwarr broke step, standard practice when crossing over. A host of boots pounding in unison did nothing for structural integrity. Raythen was
shoved between two burly warriors as the column narrowed out for the crossing. He didn’t mind – he never much fancied being able to see over the edge and into the utter darkness of the chasm. The elders of Thelgrim had ordered it formed after the Third Darkness, as a last line of defense. It had taken the Masons’ and Miners’ Guilds over a century, but the work had been completed. Fool’s legend claimed it ran all the way to the core of Mennara itself.

  “So, you think the old Dunwarr himself will be happy to see me?” Raythen asked Bradha as they fell into the shadow cast by the fortress. In truth he was goading the captain in an effort to take his mind off what he suspected lay ahead.

  “Do not speak of King Ragnarson like that,” she responded. “Or I will take my short sword to your tongue and think nothing of the consequences.”

  Raythen smiled to cover his nervousness, but didn’t say anything more. He knew well enough not to test someone like Bradha. In fact, he was surprised he hadn’t earned a beating from her already.

  A horn sounded from up ahead, ringing sonorously through the great cavern. There was a thump and a groan of heavy hinges as the gates before them began to open. Raythen was struck by how much it looked like a huge maw, yawning wide at the end of the bridge as if to swallow them all. It wasn’t a comforting image.

  They were marched into the fortress. A cobbled entrance hall awaited them, lit by braziers. The column reformed after exiting the bridge and came to a halt at its center, the crash of the final, heavy footfall resounding in the confined space. It matched the boom of the gates as they slammed shut at the same time behind them, making the fires in the braziers shiver.

  In the silence that followed, Raythen began to applaud again.

  “Really, spectacular precision,” he said. “Just how long does the Warriors’ Guild spend practicing its marching? It can’t be easy, putting one foot in front of the other, over and over again.”