They stood face to face for a long moment, Morkney staring incredulously at this curious young man, at this young man who had just killed him. The duke chuckled again, for some reason, then slumped dead into Luthien’s arms.
Down below, in the nave, the gargoyles turned to stone and crashed to the floor, and the skeletons and rotting corpses lay back down in their eternal sleep.
Oliver looked far below to the now huge crowd and the large force of Praetorian Guards coming into the plaza beside the Ministry.
“Put him over the side!” the quick-thinking halfling called to Luthien.
Luthien turned curiously at Oliver, who was now scrambling all the way over the battlement and back to the tower’s top.
“Put him over the side!” the halfling said again. “Let them see him hanging by his skinny neck!”
The notion horrified Luthien.
Oliver ran up to his friend and pushed Luthien away from the dead duke. “Do you not understand?” Oliver asked. “They need to see him!”
“Who?”
“Your people!” Oliver cried, and with a burst of strength, the halfling shoved Morkney over the battlement. The lasso slipped up from the duke’s shoulders and caught tight about his neck as he tumbled, his skinny, naked form coming to a jerking stop along the side of the tower a hundred feet above the ground.
But the poor people of Montfort, under this one’s evil thumb for many years, surely recognized him.
They did, indeed.
Out of the north transept came the victorious mob from the cathedral, taking their riot to the streets, sweeping up many onlookers in their wake.
“What have we done?” the stunned young Bedwyr asked, staring down helplessly at the brutal fight.
Oliver shrugged. “Who can say? All I know is that the pickings should be better with that skinny duke out of the way,” he answered, always pragmatic and always opportunistic.
Luthien just shook his head, wondering once more what he had stumbled into. Wondering how all of this had come to pass.
“Luthien?” he heard from across the tower top, and he spun about to see Siobhan, leaning heavily on the battlement, her gray robe in tatters.
But smiling.
EPILOGUE
THE SNOW LAY THICK along the quiet streets of Montfort, nearly every street lined with the red stains of spilled blood. Luthien sat atop the roof of a tall building in the lower section, looking out over the city and the lands to the north.
The people of Montfort were in full revolt, and he, the Crimson Shadow, unwittingly had been named their leader. So many had died, and Luthien’s heart was often heavy. But he gathered strength from those who savagely fought on for their freedom, from those brave people who had lived so long under tyranny and now would not go back to that condition, even at the price of their lives.
And, to Luthien’s amazement, they were winning. A powerful and well-armed cyclopian force still controlled the city’s inner section beyond the dividing wall, protecting the wealthy merchants who had prospered under Duke Morkney. Rumors said that Viscount Aubrey had taken command of the force.
Luthien remembered the man well; he hoped the rumors were true.
The fighting had been furious in the first weeks following the duke’s death, with hundreds of men, women, and cyclopians dying every day. Winter had settled in quickly, slowing the fighting, forcing many to think merely of keeping from freezing or starving. At first, the cold seemed to favor the merchants and cyclopians in their better quarters within the city’s higher section, but as time went on, Luthien’s people began to find the advantage. They controlled the outer wall; they controlled any goods coming into the city.
And Siobhan’s group, along with a number of ferocious dwarves, continued to wreak havoc. Even now, plans were being laid for a full-scale raid upon the mines to free the rest of Shuglin’s enslaved people.
But Luthien could not shake his many doubts. Were his actions truly valuable, or was he walking a fool’s parade? How many would die because he had chosen this course, because at that fateful moment in the Ministry, the Crimson Shadow had been revealed and the people had rallied behind him? And even with their astonishing initial victories, what hope could the future hold for the beleaguered people of Montfort? The winter would be a brutal one, it seemed, and the spring would likely bring an army from Avon, King Greensparrow’s forces coming to reclaim the city.
And punish the revolutionaries.
Luthien sighed deeply, noticing another rider galloping out from Montfort’s northern gate, riding north to spread the news and enlist help—in the form of supplies, at least, from nearby villages. There was word of some minor fighting in Port Charley to the east, but Luthien took little heart in it.
“I knew you would be up here,” came a voice from behind, and Luthien turned to see Oliver climbing up onto the roof. “Surveying your kingdom?”
Luthien’s scowl showed that he did not think that to be funny.
“Ah, well,” the halfling conceded, “I only came to tell you that you have a visitor.”
Luthien cocked a curious eyebrow as a woman climbed over the roof’s edge. Her eyes were green as Siobhan’s, the young Bedwyr realized, somehow surprised by that fact, but her hair was red, fiery red. She stood tall and proud, holding something wrapped in a blanket before her, locking stares with her old friend.
“Katerin,” Luthien whispered, hardly able to get words out of his suddenly dry mouth.
Katerin walked across the roof to stand before the man and handed him the item.
Luthien took it gingerly, not understanding.
His eyes went wide when he slipped off the blanket and saw Blind-Striker, his family’s treasured sword.
“From Gahris, your father and the rightful eorl of Bedwydrin,” Katerin O’Hale explained, her tone stern and determined.
Luthien looked searchingly into her green eyes, wondering what had happened.
“Avonese is in chains,” Katerin said. “And there is not a living cyclopian on Isle Bedwydrin.”
Luthien found breath hard to come by. Gahris had followed his lead, had taken up the war! The young man glanced all about, from the smiling Katerin, to the smiling Oliver, to the snow-covered rooftops of the quiet city.
He was faced with a decision then, Luthien knew, but this time, unlike the many events that had led him to this fateful point, he was making it consciously.
“Go out, Oliver,” the young man said. “Go out and tell the people to take heart. Tell them that their war, the war for their freedom, has begun.” Luthien again locked stares with the proud woman from Hale.
“Go out, Oliver,” he said again. “Tell them that they are not alone.”
LUTHIEN’S GAMBLE
To Diane, and to Bryan, Geno, and Caitlin
PROLOGUE
IT WAS A TIME in Eriador of darkness, a time when King Greensparrow and his wizard-dukes blanketed all the Avonsea Islands in a veil of oppression and when the hated cyclopians served as Praetorian Guard, allied with the government against the common folk. It was a time when the eight great cathedrals of Avonsea, built as blessed monuments of spirituality, the epitome of homage to higher powers, were used to call the tax rolls.
But it was a time, too, of hope, for in the northwestern corner of the mountain range called the Iron Cross, in Montfort, the largest city in all of Eriador, there arose cries for freedom, for open revolt. Evil Duke Morkney, Greensparrow’s pawn, was dead, his skinny body hanging naked from the tallest tower of the Ministry, Montfort’s great cathedral. The wealthy merchants and their cyclopian guards, allies of the throne, were sorely pressed, bottled up in the city’s upper section, while in the lower section, among the lesser houses, the proud Eriadorans remembered kings of old and called out the name of Bruce MacDonald, who had led the victory in the bitter cyclopian war centuries before.
It was a small thing really, a speck of light in a field of blackness, a single star in a dark night sky. A wizard-duke was dead, but the wizard-k
ing could easily replace him. Montfort was in the throes of fierce battle, rebels pitted against the established ruling class and their cyclopian guards. The vast armies of Avon had not yet marched, however, with winter thick about the land. When they did come on, when the might that was Greensparrow flowed to the north, all who stood against the wizard-king would know true darkness.
But the rebels would not think that way, would fight their battles one at a time, united and always with hope. Such is the way a revolution begins.
Word of the fighting in Montfort was not so small a thing to the proud folk of Eriador, who resented any subjugation to the southern kingdom of Avon. To the proud folk of Eriador, uttering the name of Bruce MacDonald was never a small thing—nor were the cries for Eriador’s newest hero: the slayer of Morkney, the unwitting leader of a budding revolution.
Cries for the Crimson Shadow.
CHAPTER 1
THE MINISTRY
THE REVOLT HAD BEGUN HERE, in the huge nave of the Ministry, and the dried blood of those killed in the first battle could still be seen, staining the wooden pews and the stone floor, splattered across the walls and the sculpted statues.
The cathedral was built along the wall separating the city’s merchant class from the common folk, and thus held a strategic position indeed. It had changed hands several times in the weeks since the fighting began, but so determined were the revolutionaries that the cyclopians still had not held the place long enough to climb the tower and cut down Duke Morkney’s body.
This time, though, the one-eyed brutes had come on in full force, and the Ministry’s western doors had been breached, as well as the smaller entrance into the cathedral’s northern transept. Cyclopians poured in by the score, only to be met by determined resistors, and fresh blood covered the dried blood staining the wooden pews and the stone floor.
In mere seconds, there were no obvious battle lines, just a swarming mob of bitter enemies, hacking at each other with wild abandon, killing and dying.
The fighting was heard in the lower section of the city, the streets belonging to the rebels. Siobhan, half-elven and half-human, and her two-score elvish companions—more than a third of all the elves in Montfort—were quick to answer the call. A secret entrance had been fashioned in the wall of the great cathedral, which it shared with lower Montfort, cut by cunning dwarfs in those rare times when there was a lull in the fighting. Now Siobhan and her companions rushed from the lower section of town, scrambling up preset ropes into the passageway.
They could hear the fighting in the nave as they crawled along the crude tunnel. The passage split, continuing along the city’s dividing wall, then curving as it traced the shape of the cathedral’s apse. The dwarfs had not had a hard time fashioning the passage, for the massive wall was no less then ten feet thick in any place, and many tunnels were already in place, used by those performing maintenance on the cathedral.
Soon the elves were traveling generally west. They came to an abrupt end in the tunnel at a ladder that led them up to the next level. Then they went south, west again, and finally north, completing the circuit of the southern transept. Finally Siobhan pushed a stone aside and crawled out onto the southern triforium, an open ledge fifty feet up from the floor that ran the length of the nave, from the western door all the way to the open area of the crossing transepts. The beautiful half-elf gave a resigned sigh as she brushed the long wheat-colored tresses from her face and considered the awful scene below.
“Pick your shots with care,” Siobhan instructed her elven companions as they crowded out behind her and filtered along the length of the ledge. The command hardly seemed necessary as they viewed the jumble of struggling bodies below. Not many targets presented themselves, but few archers in all of Avonsea could match the skill of the elves. The great longbows sang out, arrows slicing through the air unerringly to take down cyclopians.
A quarter of the elvish force, with Siobhan in the lead, ran along the triforium all the way to its western end. Here a small tunnel, still high above the floor, ran across the western narthex and crossed the nave, opening onto the northern triforium. The elves rushed among the shadows, around the many statues decorating that ledge, to its opposite end, the base of the northern transept. More cyclopians poured in through the door there, and there were few defenders to stem their flow in this area. The ten elves bent their bows and fired off arrow after arrow, devastating the invading cyclopians, filling the northern transept with bodies.
Below in the nave, the tide seemed to turn, with the cyclopians, their reinforcements dwindling, unable to keep up the momentum of their initial attack.
But then there came an explosion as a battering ram shattered the doors at the end of the southern transept, destroying the barricades that had been erected there. A new wave of cyclopians charged in, and neither the archers on the triforium nor the men fighting in the nave could slow them.
“It is as if all the one-eyes of Montfort have come upon us!” the elf standing behind Siobhan cried out.
Siobhan nodded, not disagreeing with the assessment. Apparently Viscount Aubrey, the man rumors named as the new leader of the king’s forces in Montfort, had decided that the Ministry had been in enemy hands long enough. Aubrey was a buffoon, so it was said, one of the far too many fumbling viscounts and barons in Eriador who claimed royal blood, lackeys all to the unlawful Avon king. A buffoon by all accounts, but nevertheless Aubrey had taken control of the Montfort guards, and now the viscount was throwing all of his considerable weight at the rebel force in the cathedral.
“Luthien predicted this,” Siobhan lamented, speaking of her lover, whom the fates had chosen as the Crimson Shadow. Indeed, only a week before, Luthien had told Siobhan that they would not be able to hold the Ministry until spring.
“We cannot stop them,” said the elf behind Siobhan.
Siobhan’s first instinct was to yell out at the elf, to berate him for his pessimism. But again Siobhan could not disagree. Viscount Aubrey wanted the Ministry back, and so he would have it. No longer was their job the defense of the great building. Now all they could hope to do was get as many allies out alive as possible.
And, in the process, inflict as much pain as possible on the cyclopians.
Siobhan bent her bow and let fly an arrow that thudded into the chest of a one-eyed brute an instant before it thrust its huge sword into a man it had knocked to the floor. The cyclopian stood perfectly still, its one large eye staring down at the quivering shaft, as though the brute did not understand what had happened to it. Its opponent scrambled back to his feet and brought his club in a roundhouse swing that erased the dying brute’s face and hastened its descent to the floor.
The man spun and looked to the triforium and Siobhan, his fist raised in victory and in thanks. Two running strides put him in the middle of yet another fight.
The cyclopians advanced in a line along the southern end of the swarming mob, linking up with allies and beating back resisters.
“Back to the southern triforium,” Siobhan ordered her companions. The elves stared at her; if they rejoined their kin across the way, they would be surrendering a valuable vantage point.
“Back!” Siobhan ordered, for she understood the larger picture. The nave would soon be lost, and then the cyclopians would turn their eyes upward to the ledges. The only escape for Siobhan’s group was the same route that had brought them in: the secret passage that linked the far eastern wall with the southern triforium. The half-elf knew that she and her companions had a long way to go, and if that small tunnel above the western doors was cut off by the cyclopians, the northern ledge, and Siobhan’s group, would be completely isolated.
“Run on!” Siobhan called, and her companions, though some still did not understand the command, did not pause to question her.
Siobhan waited at the base of the northern triforium looking back across the nave as her companions rushed by. She remained confident that her elven band, the Cutters by name, would escape, but feared that not
a single man who was now defending the nave would get out of the Ministry alive.
All the elves passed her by and were moving along the tunnel. Siobhan turned to follow, but then looked back, and a wave of hope washed over her.
As she watched, a small, perfectly squared portion of the back end of the cathedral, directly below the secret tunnel that her group had used to enter the Ministry, fell in. Siobhan expected a resounding crash, and was surprised to see that the wall did not slam to the floor but was supported by chains, like some drawbridge. A man rushed in, scrambling over the angled platform, his crimson cape flowing behind him. He leaped to the floor, and two short strides brought him to the altar, in the center of the apse. Up he leaped, holding high his magnificent sword. Siobhan smiled, realizing that those cunning dwarfs had been at work on more than the secret entrance. They had fashioned the drawbridge, as well, probably at Luthien’s bidding, for the wise young man had indeed foreseen this dangerous day.
The defenders of the Ministry fought on—but the cyclopians looked back and were afraid.
The Crimson Shadow had come.
“Dear Luthien,” Siobhan whispered, and she smiled even wider as Luthien’s companion, the foppish halfling Oliver deBurrows, rushed to catch up to the man. Oliver held his huge hat in one hand and his rapier in the other, his purple velvet cape flowed out behind him. He got to the altar and leaped as high as he could, fingers just catching the lip. Kicking and scrambling, the three-foot-tall Oliver tried desperately to clamber up beside Luthien, but he would not have made it except that Luthien’s next companion rushed up behind, grabbed the halfling by the seat of his pants, and heaved him up.
Siobhan’s smile faded as she regarded the newcomer, though surely the half-elf was glad to see Luthien in such strong company. This one was a woman, a warrior from Luthien’s home island of Bedwydrin, tall and strong and undeniably beautiful, with unkempt red hair and eyes that shone green as intensely as Siobhan’s own.
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