The enraged fomorian had no such patience for any investigation, though. The giant stalked over and slugged the protesting archer in the face, launching it head over heels down the grassy slope. The giant grabbed a second archer as the third scrambled away, lifting the unfortunate creature and squeezing the life out of it. All the rest of the camp fell upon the third, taking its flight as an admission of guilt. Their blood lust in full, they pounded and stomped long after the poor creature had stopped squirming.
For the ranger, watching the brutal spectacle was a confirmation of his belief in the absolutely irredeemable nature of the wretched beasts. The killing was over quickly, but the pushing and shoving and accusations did not relent. He had seen enough, though. There were perhaps a dozen goblins left in the camp, not counting the leader, who wouldn’t be up for any fighting anytime soon, and, of course, the one fomorian. Thirteen against three, counting Symphony.
The ranger liked the odds.
He hopped down from the tree, onto the back of waiting Symphony. The great stallion gave a snort and rushed away, out the back side of the copse. The last thing Nightbird wanted was to bring the goblins charging down the slope, where they could scatter. He went west, and then south, and then turned back to the east, coming in sight of Pony, who was in position at the end of the long and narrow trail. They shared a wave, and the ranger searched out a new vantage point. Now came his turn to wait.
The goblin camp remained astir, with accusations flying. The creatures seemed perfectly oblivious to the notion that an outsider, might have shot down their leader, until Pony struck hard.
A goblin appeared at the end of the trail, leaning on one wall of stone. It removed its metal helmetanother oddity for the crude creatures-and scratched at its hair, then replaced the cap, talking all the while with another who remained out of Pony’s line of sight. She focused on the one goblin, on its helmet, as she held before her a black, rough-edged stone, magnetite, or lodestone, by name. Pony fell into the stone, saw through it, down the trail. Everything blurred and fogged overeverything except for that one helmet, the image of it sharpening to crystal clarity. Pony felt the energy building within the stone, energy she lent to it, combined with its own magical properties. She felt the attraction to that helmet growing, growing, the stone beginning to pull against her grasp.
As she reached the pinnacle, as it seemed the stone would verily explode with tingling magic, she let it go. In the blink of an eye it covered the distance and smashed against then through the helmet, and the goblin flipped over once and lay dead.
How its companion shrieked!
Pony was not surprised when the fomorian giant turned down the narrow trail, running full out and bellowing with rage. She held forth another stone, malachite, the stone of levitation, and before the behemoth had gone three strides, it found that its feet were no longer touching the ground. It was moving, though, its momentum propelling its suddenly weightless form in a straight line.
The trail curved slightly and the giant brushed the wall. It tried to reach down and find a hold, but the movement came too late and only sent the creature tumbling head over heels, twisting and turning, reaching desperately for any potential handhold.
Pony could hardly believe the effort needed to keep the behemoth aloft, and knew she would not be able to hold it there for long. She didn’t have to, though. She ducked very lowthe giant spinning over more quickly as it grabbed for herand let the creature soar past her. Then, as soon as the giant moved out over the cliff, she dropped her concentration, releasing the stone’s magical energy, and let the brute drop.
Looking back the other way, she saw a handful of goblins at the far end of the trail, gaping at her but not yet daring to approach.
Quickly she went for her third stone, the graphite, and reached deep inside herself to find some more magical energy. Already she had done more magic in rapid succession than ever before, and she had little faith that her next casting, a bolt of lightning, would have much power behind it.
She took hope, then, in the commotion that sprang up on the hillock behind the goblins, at the screams and cries of agony, at the sound of charging Symphony off to the side and the thrum of the ranger’s deadly bow.
But her love could not get there in time to help her, she knew. A line of five goblins came on, rushing down the narrow trail, howling. One let fly an arrow that barely missed the young woman.
Pony stood resolute. She dismissed her fears and focused on the graphite, only the graphite. The bolt came forth more quickly than she had intended, wrung from her by sheer urgency as the nearest goblin closed to within three running strides.
Pony staggered as if hit; the expenditure of energy was more than she could tolerate. Her knees wobbled and she instinctively ambled away, her eyes hardly open as she glanced back, with some relief, to see that the lightning had pushed the goblins back. Three of the five were down, jerking spasmodically, while the other two fought hard to hold their balance, their muscles trembling violently.
Up on the hillock, Nightbird shot one last arrow, catching a nearby goblin right through its skinny nose, then turned the bow over in one hand, whipping it like a club as Symphony pounded past another creature. That creature dispatched, he dropped the bow altogether, drawing out Tempest, the elven blade, light and strong, forged of precious silverel and crackling with energy, from both elven magic and the gemstone set in the sword’s pommel. The ranger turned Symphony in line and let the great stallion run down the next goblin, and as Symphony passed, hardly stumbling, Nightbird swung out with his sword at the next. This goblin held a metal shield and had it up to block, but the gemstone in Tempest’s ball hilt, a blue stone clouded with white and gray, flared with power and the fine blade smashed right through the shield, snapping the straps that fastened it to the goblin’s arm, then charged on past the turning metal to crease the creature’s face.
The hillock was clear, the only goblin in sight in fast flight down the grassy slope. The ranger, his blood lust high, thought to pursue, but changed his mind when he heard Pony’s lightning bolt behind him, a sparking crackle and not a thunderous blast, and then heard the groans of goblins still very much alive.
He rolled backward off the saddle, landing lightly on his feet. Symphony skidded to a stop and turned about to regard him, and Nightbird couldn’t help but pause and do likewise. The horse’s black coat glistened with sweat, accentuating the powerful muscles. Symphony looked hard at his companion and stamped the ground, ready, eager for more battle.
The ranger looked from the horse’s intelligent eyes to the turquoise set in his breast, the gift of Avelyn, the telepathic bond between Nightbird and Symphony. Elbryan used that bond now to instruct the horse.
With an agreeing snort, Symphony wheeled and charged away, and the ranger went fast for his bow, in full run on his way to the narrow trail.
He came to its lip, sliding to one knee, Hawkwing up and drawn. Only one goblin remained down now, with two starting off after Pony and two others still struggling to secure their balance. Off went the arrow, zipping between the two standing nearby and over the head of the third, to strike the lead goblin in the back. The creature went into a weird hop then, seeming to fly for several feet before falling facedown. Its running companion, fearing a similar fate, howled and dove to the ground.
Elbryan’s second shot got the closest goblin in the chest, and then he was up, Tempest in hand. He came in hard, sword flashing back and forth, maneuvers designed more to put the goblin off-balance than to score a hit The creature struggled to keep up with the flashing blade, its own crude sword ringing against Tempest only a couple of times in the ten-stroke routine. In short order the goblin was staggering again, nearly tripping on its own feet as it tried to twist and turn in tune with the darting blade. Tempest went left, then right, then right again, then Nightbird started back for the left but cut short the swing, and then came that signature lunge. Suddenly, immediately, he was simply there, fully extended, his sword tip tw
o feet farther ahead than it had been, stabbing the goblin hard through the shoulder.
Down went the goblin’s arm, its sword falling uselessly to the ground. One step brought the ranger to the side, where he chopped down hard on the head of the remaining goblin even as it struggled to stand. Then he came back in, ignoring the last goblin’s cry for mercy, driving his blade through the creature’s ribs and into its lungs.
The ranger glanced down the trail, to see that Pony, no unskilled fighter in her own right, had come back in, with sword this time and not gems, to finish off the goblin who had dived for cover. The woman looked up at Nightbird and nodded, then opened wide her eyes as the ranger let out a startled shout and launched himself toward her.
He went right by Pony as she turned, throwing her sword up defensively in fear that something had come in at her back. Indeed, the giant had returned, stubbornly climbing the cliff face. It had both hands and one shoulder over the lip when Nightbird met it, Tempest flashing. The ranger slashed one arm, then the other, then again and again, all the while dodging the behemoth’s futile attempts to grab at him. Finally the beating opened wide the giant’s defenses and its grasp on the ledge weakened, and Nightbird calmly strode ahead and kicked the creature in the face.
Down it went again, bouncing along the thirty-foot descent. Stubbornly, it shook its head and rolled to its knees, intent on climbing once again.
Pony was beside Elbryan in a moment. “You might be needing this,” she remarked, handing Hawkwing over.
His fourth arrow slew the giant, while Pony walked back along the trail and encampment, finishing the wounded goblins. Symphony returned during that time, the horse’s rear hooves splattered with fresh goblin blood.
The three friends regrouped shortly after.
“Just another day,” Pony said dryly, to which the ranger only nodded.
He noted that there was an almost dispirited edge to her tone, as though the battle, as smoothly as it had gone, had been somehow unsatisfying.
CHAPTER 2
St.-Mere-Abelle
His wrinkles seemed even deeper now, shadowed by the torchlight. Deep grooves in that old and weathered face, the visage of a man who had seen too much. By Master Jojonah’s estimation, Dalebert Markwart, the Father Abbot of St.-Mere-Abelle, the highest-ranking person in the Abellican Order, had aged tremendously over the last couple of years. The portly Jojonah, no young man himself, studied Markwart carefully as the pair stood atop the seaward wall of the great abbey, staring out into All Saints Bay. He tried to compare this image of the Father Abbot, unshaven, with eyes sunken deep into sockets, against the memory of the man just a few years previous, in God’s Year 821 when they had all waited eagerly for the return of theWindrunner, the ship that had delivered four of St.-Mere-Abelle’s brothers to the equatorial island of Pimaninicuit, that they might collect the sacred stones.
Things had changed much since those days of hope and wonderment.
The mission had been successful, with a tremendous haul of gemstones taken and properly prepared. And three of the brothers, with the exception of poor Thagraine who was stricken in the meteor shower, had returned alive, though Brother Pellimar had died a short time later.
“A pity that it had not been Avelyn who was hit in the head by a falling stone,” Father Abbot Markwart had often said in the years hence, for Avelyn, after achieving the greatest success in the history of the Church as a Preparer of the sacred gems, had returned a changed man, and in Markwart’s eyes had committed the highest heresy possible in the Order. Avelyn had taken some of the gemstones and run off, and in that flight, Master Siherton, a peer of Jojonah’s and a friend of Markwart’s, had been killed.
The Father Abbot had not let the theft pass. Indeed, he had guided the training of the remaining brother from the party of four, a stocky and brutish man named Quintall. Under Markwart’s strictest orders, Quintall had become Brother Justice and gone after Avelyn, with orders to bring back the man or his broken body.
Word had come back to the library only the month before that Quintall had failed and was dead.
Still, Markwart had no intention of letting Avelyn run free. He had set De’Unnero, the finest fighter at the abbeyand, by Jojonah’s estimation, the most vicious human being aliveto training not one, but two Brothers Justice as replacement for Quintall. Jojonah didn’t like De’Unnero at all, considered the man’s temperament unbefitting a brother of the Abellican Church, and so he had not been pleased when the still-young man had been named to the rank of master as a replacement for Master Siherton. And the choice of hunters, too, had bothered Jojonah, for he suspected that the two young monks, Brothers Youseff and Dandelion, had only been admitted to St.-Mere-Abelle for this purpose. Surely neither of them qualified above others who had been refused their appointment.
But both could fight
So even that choice of admission to the Order, the greatest responsibility of abbots and masters, had fallen victim to Markwart’s desire to clear his own reputation. The Father Abbot wanted those stones back.
Desperately, Master Jojonah thought as he looked upon the old Father Abbot’s haggard visage. Dalebert Markwart was a man possessed now, a snarling, vicious thing. If at first Markwart had wanted Avelyn captured and tried, he merely wanted the man dead nowand painfully killed, tortured, rended, his heart torn out and put on a stake before the front gate of St.-Mere-Abelle. Markwart hardly talked of dead Siherton these days; his focus was purely the stones, the precious stones, and he meant to get them back.
All of that had been put aside for the moment, though, out of necessity even greater than Markwart’s obsession, for the war had at last come to St.-Mere-Abelle.
“There they are,” Father Abbot Markwart remarked, pointing out across the bay.
Jojonah leaned on the low wall, squinting into the darkness, and there, rounding a bend along the northern spur of the rocky seacoast, came the lights of a vessel, obviously sitting very low in the water.
“Powrie barrelboat,” Markwart said distastefully as more and more lights came into view. “A thousand of them out there!”
And so confident that they approach in full view with lights burning, Jojonah silently added. And that wasn’t even the extent of their problems, though the master saw no need to remark on the potentially greater troubles facing the abbey.
“And how many by land?” the Father Abbot demanded, as though he had read Jojonah’s mind. “Twenty thousand? Fifty? The whole powrie nation is upon us, as if all the Weathered Isles had been dumped at our gate!”
Again the portly Jojonah had no practical response. According to the reports of trusted sources, a vast army of the four-foot-tall dwarves, the cruel powries, had landed less than ten miles down the coast from St.-Mere-Abelle. The brutal creatures had wasted no time in laying waste to the nearby villages, slaughtering any humans who could not escape. The image of that brought a shiver along Jojonah’s spine. Powries were also called “bloody caps” for their practice of dipping their specially treated beretscaps made of human skininto the blood of their slain enemies. The more blood one of those berets soaked, the brighter its crimson stain, a sign of rank among the barrel-bodied, spindly limbed dwarves.
“We have the stones,” Jojonah offered.
Markwart snorted derisively. “And we’ll tire our magics long before we diminish the ranks of the wretched powriesand of the goblin army that’s said to be moving south of here.”
“There is the report of the explosion far to the north,” Jojonah offered hopefully, trying in any way possible to improve Markwart’s surly mood.
The Father Abbot didn’t disagree; whispers from reliable sources spoke of a tremendous eruption in the northern land known as the Barbacan, reputedly the land of the demon dactyl who had gathered this invading army. But while those rumors offered some distant hope that war had been brought to the dactyl’s doorstep, they offered little in the face of the force now moving against St.-Mere-Abelle, something Markwart emphasized with
his next derisive snort.
“Our walls are thick, our brothers well-trained in the fighting arts, and our catapult crews second to none in all Corona,” Jojonah went on, gaining momentum with every word. “And St.-Mere-Abelle is better suited to withstand a siege than any structure in Honce-the-Bear,” he added, preempting Markwart’s next glum statement.
“Better suited with not so many mouths to feed,” Markwart snapped at him, and Jojonah winced as if slapped. “I wish that the powries had been quicker!”
Master Jojonah sighed and moved a few steps to the side then, unable to tolerate his superior’s grating pessimism and that last remark; obviously aimed at the multitude of pitiful refugees who had recently come swarming into St.-Mere-Abelle, it had, in Jojonah’s estimation, been on the very edge of blasphemy. They were the Church, after all, supposedly the salvation of the common man, and yet here was their Father Abbot, their spiritual leader, complaining about giving shelter to people who had lost almost everything. The Father Abbot’s first response to the influx of refugees had been to order everything valuable, books, gold leaf, even inkwells, locked away.
“Avelyn started all of this,” Markwart rambled. “The thief weakened us, in heart and soul, and gave hope to our enemies!”
Jojonah tuned out the Father Abbot’s ranting. He had heard it all beforeindeed, it had by now been disseminated to all the abbeys of Corona that Avelyn Desbris was responsible for awakening the demon dactyl, and thus setting into motion all the subsequent tragedies that had befallen the land.
Master Jojonah, who had been Avelyn’s mentor and chief supporter through the man’s years at St.-Mere-Abelle, couldn’t, in his heart, believe a word of it. Jojonah had studied at the abbey for four decades, and had never in all that time met a man as singularly holy as Avelyn Desbris. While he had not yet come to terms with Avelyn’s last actions at the abbeythe theft of the stones and the murder, if it was a murder, of Master SihertonJojonah suspected there was more to the story than the Father Abbot’s version would indicate. More than anything, Master Jojonah wanted to speak at length with his former student, to discover the man’s motivations, to find out why he had run and why he had taken the gemstones.
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