Realms of Valor a-1

by Douglas Niles

  "Not right away. At least not until they've got me. Right now, the groundlings-"

  A scraping noise drew Azoun's attention back to the road. There, the assassin's corpse was slowly sliding into the burrow. The sword point jutting from its chest cut through the ground like a plow blade as the groundlings dragged their dead fellow deeper into the earth. Soon, the corpse and the sword were gone.

  Azoun sighed. "Right now, the groundlings are building a warren, an underground camp. They must realize they have us trapped, since nothing is moving on the ground. They'll do all they can to bleed us out of weapons, food, and hope, then wait for us to come down." Scowling, he noted, "Especially food. They'll eat almost anything. I managed to escape them outside of Waymoot by dumping my rations onto the road-that and being lucky enough to have a very fast mount with enchanted horseshoes."

  "I have some bread!" Artus offered brightly, gesturing to his pack. "I mean, if you can think of a way to use it against the groundlings …"

  "Well, at least we won't starve," the prince said, trying not to be patronizing, but failing badly. "But since we don't have a horse or any way of escaping, tossing it to the assassins won't do us much good right now."

  Clouds slid over the moon once more, blanketing the hillside in a more profound darkness. A cold breeze made the branches creak and sway. The boy was glad for the prince's cloak then, for his shabby clothes gave little protection from the wind. "I'm Artus," he began softly.

  The words jolted Azoun out of some intense reverie. "Eh? Well, Artus, you can call me Balin."

  The boy paused, then pulled the gem from his pocket. Its blue light cast strange shadows over Azoun's face. He stared at the young man for a moment, openly sizing him up. "But that's not your name," Artus said at last.

  "Of course it is," Azoun began, but he saw the frown on Artus's lips, the look of distrust stealing over his eyes. He looked down at his hands, to the indentation on his finger left by his missing wedding band. His purse was gone, too. "Was it the princess's name on the wedding ring or the signet ring in my purse that gave me away?"

  "Kinda both," Artus replied. He dug the gold band out of his pocket and returned it to the prince. "And the tabard, too. Not many sell-swords would wear the king's symbol like that."

  Azoun looked down at the torn and grimy Purple Dragon. "My tutor always said this was rather silly, to wear the family crest on a disguise. Still, it fooled men a lot older than you."

  "People don't look for the obvious. Do you want me to call you Your Holiness?"

  "No," Azoun said, trying not to smile at the boy's blunt-ness. "We're fighting together now, and brothers-in-arms need not bow to courtly manners. Besides, you call clerics Your Holiness, not princes."

  "Sorry. I never met a prince before."

  "So how do you know so much about me?"

  The boy fidgeted uncomfortably with the cloak's fur collar. "Well, I've read about King Rhigaerd and about you on the royal proclamations posted around Suzail. And I saw you on your wedding day, when your carriage went down the Promenade. Well, I was too far away to see you, but I saw your carriage. And then there's the stories they tell in the Thieves Guild about you-how you dress up in disguises and play like you're a knight They say-"

  "All right," Azoun said, holding up a hand to stop the torrent. It was his turn to study his unwilling companion, to size up this worldly child-robber. Most children grew up quickly in Cormyr, especially poor children from the city. But this boy was more than world-wise. He was obviously clever. Moreover, he could read, a skill confined mostly to the nobility, the priesthood, and a few wealthy merchant families. "Your father taught you to read, did he?"

  Artus laughed with surprising bitterness. "He doesn't like me to read. A priest of Oghma taught me on the sly, until Father found out, that is. It didn't matter, though. By the time he told me to stop I already knew how." He gripped the gem tightly, cutting off most of the light. Still, Azoun could see the angry look in the boy's eyes as he said, "I don't want to be a scamp like him."

  The prince held his hand up to the boy. "If you don't want to be a highwayman, how about giving me your mask? I could use it right about now."

  For a moment Artus thought the prince was going to try to fit the dirty strip over his face, but he began to tie it over his forehead. Then the boy noticed the gash on Azoun's head was leaking blood into his brown hair, staining it dark and masking the strands of gray already taking hold there. "So what's your ambition then-a priest, perhaps? Maybe a bard? You seem to remember stories pretty well."

  A smile crept across Artus's features. "I like stories a lot. I-" He cast his eyes down at the glowing gem and paused. "I know some about you. The men at the guildhall told me about the King's Men. They say you won't be a good king, you know, that you'll be wandering off to rescue people and fight dragons."

  "Indeed," Azoun said flatly. "Maybe they're right. We'll find out soon enough, though, won't we?"

  Artus let the cryptic comment drop, for the cold tone in the man's voice frightened him just a little. His father sounded the same way whenever he talked about a failed jaunt or a rival in the Thieves Guild who had questioned his skill. "What will we do now?" he asked after a time.

  "Wait, I suppose," the prince said mournfully. "They won't attack us once the sun comes up. It hurts their eyes too much. Besides, by dawn there'll be travelers on the road again. We can muster enough people to stand against the little monsters, if they haven't given up by then and gone back to Darkhold."

  An uncomfortable silence fell over Artus and Azoun after that. Both were certain there should be some way to fight, but neither came up with a plan worth suggesting. Azoun took to whittling away bark with the boy's knife, while Artus slumped unhappily against the trunk.

  Occasionally one of the groundlings would appear at the mouth of the nearest burrow. It would sniff the air, squint uselessly into the night, then call into the darkness, "Escape is not for you, Azoun." Their voices were frightful, high-pitched and screeching like hobnail boots sliding on a slate floor.

  After a time, though, even this harassment stopped. Artus dared to hope that the assassins were giving up, that his father would soon crawl out of the ground a free man. But the sudden, violent collapse of a tree perilously close to their sanctuary crushed those hopes.

  "They're not going to wait for us to come down," Azoun observed bitterly.

  Horror-struck, they watched another tree drop into a sinkhole, then pitch forward. The night filled with groans and cracks as the oak smashed into a leafless maple and both crashed to the ground. All around the fallen trees, groundling burrow tracks cut through the earth. Every few feet, one of the assassins would breach and test the air.

  Finding no trace of the prince amongst the wreckage, the groundlings set about toppling more trees. The din was terrible as the oaks and pines tumbled, tearing branches from other trees in the path of their fall, pounding the life out of anything caught beneath their impact. Birds and squirrels and other creatures took flight as their homes swayed and collapsed. Any creature larger than a rat that fled on the hillside found itself swallowed up by a groundling burrow. As the prince had noted, it seemed the voracious assassins would eat almost anything.

  Finally a tree toppled close enough to swipe at Artus and Azoun with its barren limbs. The gnarled branches clutched at them like skeletal fingers, scratching a painful line across the prince's cheek and snagging the heavy cloak Artus wore. The boy felt himself falling backward. The gem in his hand threw its magical globe around him at that moment, shielding him from a branch that careened past him. Yet the globe didn't anchor Artus to his perch; neither, he knew, would it cushion his impact with the ground if he fell. Reluctantly the boy let the gem slip from his hands and tried one desperate grab for the trunk.

  His cold-numbed fingers closed on air. Shouting for help, Artus plummeted.

  He didn't fall far, though. Azoun, his legs wrapped tightly around a branch, grabbed for the boy as he went past. Fortunately, the
prince stopped Artus's fall. Unfortunately, he did it by snagging the cloak, which fluttered behind the boy like a sparrow's broken wing.

  Artus jerked to a stop. Choking, he tried to get a foothold or handhold on the tree. Any sizeable branches were well out of his reach, so all he managed to do was set himself swinging back and forth. The clasp cut into his throat, and the tree's smaller branches battered his face. When at last Artus got a firm grip on the cloak, he gasped in a ragged breath and looked down at the site of his almost-doom.

  The tree had barely landed before the assassins were swarming around it. They nosed at the glowing blue gem, which lay nearby, but it held little interest for them. The groundlings were, after all, dwarves at heart. Though mutated, they shared that stout people's disdain of unfamiliar magic.

  The Zhentarim agents wasted little time on the search. As soon as they were convinced the prince had not fallen with that particular oak, they set to work undermining the next. It wasn't long before shudders began to ripple up the tree holding Artus and the prince.

  His face red, his arms quivering at the strain of holding his neck out of the fur-collared noose, the boy looked up at Azoun. "Let me go," he croaked.

  Ignoring the plea, the prince began to reel in the cloak like a net. Artus writhed, trying to break free. "I can. . save us," the boy cried.

  Azoun grimaced. "Don't be foolish," he snapped. "You can't-"

  Another shudder wracked the oak as the groundlings cut away a major root. The prince braced himself, waiting for the trembling to pass. At the same time, Artus twisted sharply, jerking the cloak from Azoun's fingers.

  The boy fell, spinning violently in the air. The momentum was enough to send him toward a heavy branch. He grabbed it just long enough to slow his fall, then dropped again, rebounding off limbs closer and closer to the ground. He hit the hillside on his feet and was running before the assassins could react.

  As Artus dashed away from the tree, one of the groundlings broke off from the excavation and followed. It tried to keep up with the runner, but he leaped onto the trunks of fallen oaks and scurried into the thick branches of toppled firs. With footfalls muffled by the fresh blanket of needles, he was almost imperceptible to the hunter's keen senses of hearing and touch. Artus might have eluded the creature completely, had it not been for the cloak he wore. Even tearing through the frozen earth, the groundling could smell the prince's scent.

  And that was just what Artus was counting on.

  A deep groan warned the boy that the tree sheltering Azoun was ready to fall. He turned back just as it started to lean. But instead of avoiding the tree, the boy ran straight toward it.

  The oak fell slowly at first, and Artus could see the prince scrambling for a vantage from which he could leap clear when he got close enough to the ground. The boy wanted to shout to him, tell him not to jump just yet, but he knew the prince wouldn't be able to hear him. Even if he did, he probably wouldn't listen, just like the Shadowhawk….

  Those bitter thoughts kept Artus's mind off what he was doing, which was a blessing of sorts. The chance the plan would fail was great, the chance it would succeed terribly slim. Nevertheless, Artus ran right into the path of the falling oak, the assassin bearing down on him.

  As the track of churning earth touched his boot heels, Artus shrugged the heavy cloak from his shoulders and dived forward. The groundling, certain its victim had fallen, burst up and grabbed the prince's cloak-just beneath the tree trunk as it hit the ground. Like a mallet wielded by a storm giant, the oak drove the unfortunate dwarf-thing back into the dirt, shattering its skull and most of its bones.

  That part of the plan worked perfectly. The rest did not.

  Artus rolled away from the tree's impact and landed next to the softly glowing magical gem. The boy dared for an instant to hope he'd won. Then a thick branch dropped onto his leg. Artus managed to heave the wood aside, but it left his knee throbbing. Teeth clenched in pain, he sprawled on the soft bed of pine needles and clutched the blue gem in trembling fingers.

  The prince fared no better. As he leaped from the oak, he was battered by its limbs. The tree flung him toward the ground in an awkward tumble, and his mail shirt prevented him from righting himself. Azoun hit the hillside shoulder-first and slid into the furrow left in a groundling's wake. Though he landed only a horse's length from Artus, the prince might as well have been a hundred leagues away, for all the help he'd be against the last assassin.

  Azoun pushed himself to his knees and dazedly looked around. The makeshift bandage had been torn from his head, and blood ran freely down his face. He spotted Artus and managed to crawl to the wounded boy. "Save yourself," he murmured, then spiraled down into unconsciousness.

  Warily the remaining groundling surfaced a dozen yards from Artus and Azoun, squinting toward them with its slit-like red eyes. "Now you are done, princeling," it screeched and tunneled into the ground.

  The assassin surfaced again, near the spot where it had scented Azoun. All it found was the blue glow of the force globe, since the magic masked the prince from detection. The groundling cried out in frustration and, for the first time, a little fear. The Zhentarim sorcerers who had dispatched the assassins from the bowels of Darkhold never brooked failure. Even if it survived this encounter with the prince and his able young protector, the groundling would find itself facing endless punishment in that foul keep's dungeons, tortures like the smiling screws or the gruesome kiss of the carrion worms.

  To even the groundling's limited intellect, this proved incentive enough for an original thought to emerge.

  "You cannot run," the assassin shrilled in sudden realization. "I've won!"

  "We can hide in the globe," Artus said as bravely as he could, though pain and fright made his voice crack pitiably. "You've lost. Sooner or later, the royal wizards will come looking for the prince. Until then, we'll be safe in here."

  The last was pure bluff, but it set the groundling digging around the magical globe. Dirt and stones rained down on the shell, the clatter underscored by the assassin's unearthly wailing. Then, all at once, the creature ceased its frightening tantrum and sidled up to the globe. It glared at the magical bubble, the pale light nearly blinding it, and said, "They'll find a corpse here just the same. I have the one who was with you, boy." The groundling paused and licked its snout with a long black tongue. "I'll leave his bare bones around you like a picket fence if you keep my prize from me."

  "But the guild rules-"

  "Mean nothing if I lose the prince," the groundling snapped. "So they take away my guild badge for killing the wrong man. So what?"

  Artus's shoulders slumped. There was really no choice if the assassin threatened his father. Besides, what was Azoun to him?

  "A trade, then," the boy called. "I'll hand over Prince Azoun, but you've got to bring the other man back here."

  "What about the magic wall?" the groundling shrieked. "You'll take the other and hide him there with you and never give me the prince!"

  "And you'll just kill me as soon as you have Azoun!" Artus snapped.

  There was an uncomfortable pause as the boy and the dwarf-thing considered their rather limited options. It was Artus who finally suggested a plan. In it, there was just the slightest chance he and the Shadowhawk would survive this nightmarish ordeal-and maybe even rescue the prince, too.

  "I'm a thief, so we're brothers in trade, right?" Artus began tentatively. In truth the groundling did rather remind Artus of his brother Oric. "So we should be able to make a fair bargain. If, uh, I promise to put the magic gem away and not use it until you have the prince, the trade should be easy. Is that all right with you? I mean, once you have Azoun, you've got no reason to harm us, so we can all get what we want out of this."

  It took a few moments for the groundling to wrap its limited intellect around that complicated arrangement, but at last it agreed to the plan. In a flurry of gravel and dirt, the assassin disappeared into its burrow. As soon as the thing was gone, the globe vanished. Art
us unslung his ragged pack and prepared Prince Azoun for the groundling's return.

  The Shadowhawk was bound hand and foot when the assassin dragged him to the surface. His cloak hung in tatters on his back, and his hood lay in useless strips around his shoulders. Fear filled his wide, staring eyes. Dirt and grime clung to his hair, transformed into clinging mud by blood and sweat. A gag pulled his mouth into a frightful rictus grin.

  In silence, Artus stood over the unconscious form of Prince Azoun, who now lay with his head propped up on the boy's pack. Stepping away from the nobleman, he walked slowly toward his father. He could see the surprise in the Shadowhawk's usually cold green eyes, but that didn't concern him as much as the look of reckless triumph twisting the groundling's already horrific features.

  The assassin swam through the ground at the surface, paddling straight toward Azoun. It paused at the prince's side, then reached out with a single claw. Perhaps the groundling assumed Azoun would turn out to be a phantasm, despite what its keen senses reported. Whatever the reason, the assassin started when it touched the prince's warm flesh. This was even more than it had hoped for bringing Azoun back to Darkhold alive would quadruple the reward, perhaps even purchase a transformation back to its original dwarven form.

  Carefully the creature encircled the prince's legs and started to pull him into the burrow. As Azoun slid, the bed of pine boughs and the small pack that was his pillow slid with him. The groundling didn't seem to notice the branches falling into the burrow, but it stopped dead when the sack's contents rolled onto him-a few sticks of greasepaint used for disguises, a small length of thin black cord, and the stale loaf of bread that was to have been Artus's sustenance on the long trek home. It was this last item that caught the attention of the groundling's twitching nose.

  "Hey," Artus called halfheartedly, "that's mine!"

  The assassin snorted and scooped the loaf into its maw. Chewing only enough to break the bread into chunks, it gulped the prize down. The groundling then turned its weak eyes back to Artus, a snide comment on the tip of its black tongue, but found the boy standing very close to the burrow's edge.