Maverick

by Curtis, Greg

  In the end though, he really didn’t have much in the way of a choice. He simply couldn’t wait, and so whatever lay inside the mountain, waiting for him, he had to let it be. He would deal with them when he found them. First he had to destroy the enemy he knew of, and a dozen wyrmling infected stone trolls seventy feet high, guarding the entrance fitted that description perfectly.

  Of course, he didn’t have to do it in a way that would leave him and Bearabus exposed, and he almost laughed out loud as the plan came to him. Some days there were advantages to being a capable enchanter.

  An hour was all it took, he already had a quiver of arrows half prepared with spells for accuracy, range and power, and so it was only a matter of changing the damage spells. Stone trolls were resistant to fire and ice, electricity meant nothing to them, and neither did any venom he’d ever heard of. But sound, that was another matter. Hit the right note and a singer could shatter a crystal glass with just her voice, and the same principle applied to stone. He just needed a little more power than a singer could muster. A lot more power.

  Soon enough, he had thirty arrows ready, humming literally with the magic coursing through their oversized stone heads, more than he needed for a dozen trolls, but enough so that if more should arise, and he was only too aware that there could be more underneath his feet, he was ready for them. Then it was just a question of summoning up his nerve, notching the arrow into the string, drawing it back, and waiting until the moment felt just right.

  Three or four heartbeats later, it felt perfect.

  He released the first arrow, and even as it sailed towards its target was drawing the second from the line of them standing up proudly in the dirt in front of him. He’d drawn it all the way back by the time the first hit and he didn’t even have time to see the damage it did. Instead he released the second arrow and drew the third, moving as fast as he could, never looking at the damage he was doing never, even wondering about it as he concentrated on his work, though he enjoyed the sound of stones screeching, which he assumed were the trolls starting to realise something was wrong.

  By the time he released the sixth arrow he could see the trolls just starting to sink into the ground, sinking surprisingly fast and he knew he didn’t have a lot of time before they were gone. But he also knew he didn’t have a lot of targets left, and he carried on drawing, aiming and releasing the arrows, working like a war machine, faster than he ever had before in his life.

  The twelfth arrow struck home perfectly just as the troll was buried up to its waist in the mountain, and with a sigh he drew the next arrow but didn’t release it. There was no target in sight. Instead he crouched there behind the bushes, taking a few deep, comforting breaths, knowing his work was done. It wasn’t just that he couldn’t see any more of the stone trolls, he couldn’t feel them either, and the air smelled somehow cleaner for their absence. It was then that he finally allowed himself the time to study the damage as his final arrow hit home. It was the last and he had the chance, and besides he told himself, he needed to know just how effective his arrows had been, just in case more of these monstrosities were out there. What he really wanted though, was to see these creatures die, and they didn’t disappoint.

  Through the sight on his longbow he watched as the last troll gave one final almighty shriek, whether of pain or shock he didn’t know, before its face started shattering. First it was the nose that turned to dust and fell away to the ground in a shower of rubble, and then the very centre of its head that followed, just as he’d hoped for. But what he hadn’t expected was that as the rest of its face fell away in a rockslide, a mixture of blood red rubble and flesh followed it, proving at least one thing. Underneath their immense and somehow flexible stone armour the trolls were flesh and blood. Flesh and blood that exploded in a fountain of redness before the rest of the creature’s head disappeared.

  It was dead. He knew that even though the troll didn’t fall over. But then the creature was buried up to its waist in a mountain and encased in stone armour, it probably couldn’t fall any further. But it didn’t move either after that, headless creatures seldom did, and instead he was treated to a sight of a headless half statue, thirty feet high, with blood pouring down from its open neck in a series of rivers. It was far from alone.

  Putting the bow down and letting his eyes adjust to their more normal way of seeing things, he could finally see the rest of its brethren, all of them also headless, and also dead. Some of them had fallen over, they were probably the impacts he’d felt through the ground as he’d worked, others like his last victim were still stuck in various grotesque positions, still half buried in the mountain, unable to fall over. But all of them were headless, all of them were leaking rivers of blood down the mountain, and most important of all, all of them were dead.

  “Yes!” He breathed a sigh of relief as he cheered himself, quietly, overjoyed that the first stage of his plan was completed perfectly. The guards were dead, and though those inside surely knew that something was wrong, that was still something. Now though, it was the time to find out what waited within.

  He could have entered, done some exploring, but that would have been dangerous and he knew he didn’t need to. With the size of the explosions as the trolls had met their ends, he knew those inside would have felt them die, and it was likely that soon some of them would come outside to see what had happened. So instead of moving he simply found himself a seat on a small rock, obscured slightly by some bushes and a spell of concealment and waited, patiently. Bearabus sat beside him, strangely silent for once but still a source of comfort as she nestled her head in his lap.

  He didn’t have to wait long.

  The first of the little creatures came scurrying out of the cavern with a shuffling, skipping motion that he had seen before, and even before he could make out its horrid little features he knew his enemy.

  “Goblins!” Four feet high, arms and legs so thin that they looked like they might snap at any moment as they tried to support their pot bellied torsos, dressed in strips of animal hide, with green and grey skin showing through everywhere and beak like mouths full of pointed teeth, they could be nothing else.

  He was shocked by the understanding, and with good reason. They were a menace to travellers passing too close to their lairs, but they simply didn’t attack towns, that was completely beyond them. Goblins weren’t bright creatures, they didn’t plan and they didn’t form armies with others. The most they could do was form a sort of horde when some prey came too close to their den, and then swarm out with their spiked clubs and sharpened bones, and overwhelm them. It wasn’t a subtle strategy, or a safe one, and many of them were killed when they encountered prey too dangerous for them, but it was effective, and in any case those of their number that fell were dragged back inside the lair along with the prey and eaten. Goblins didn’t waste food.

  No more did they work with others, they barely worked with themselves. Though they had a language of a sort, a primitive chattering tongue that most thought little more than the tongues of beasts, they couldn’t speak with others, and in any case, stone trolls had no known tongue other than savagery. So how could they work together?

  There was no way these savage creatures could be the masterminds behind the attack on Evensong. In fact it was all but inconceivable that they could have joined the stone trolls in the attack, wandering far from their lair, out in the open and away from safety, and yet somehow they had.

  Despite the impossibility of it all though, he knew one more thing about them, they needed to die and he drew an arrow with a fireball enchantment on it, and released it directly at the leader of the small band, a foul creature with a puzzled expression on its wrinkled up little face, clearly trying to understand what had happened to their guards. Before he could work that much out however, he and his dozen or so followers were consumed in an explosion of flame that blew them apart and sent dozens of smaller fireballs flying in all directions before their burning remains crashed down over the entire front
of the mountain lair, setting its remains alight and most of the cavern entrance with it.

  One thing was certain Marjan decided as he sat there and watched their remains burn, the goblins knew he was here, and despite it probably being a mistake, giving away the element of surprise and so forth, he was glad of it. If they could have discovered a measure of fear with it, he would have been ecstatic, but that wasn’t their way. Cannibalism and murder were their way, not fear.

  In time the remains of the goblins burnt down and the rivers of troll blood dried up, and after tying Willow loosely to a bush, she could easily pull free from it if she needed to though he knew she’d stay there until he needed her otherwise, he and Bearabus slowly made their way towards the cavern entrance, crossing the open plain while constantly waiting for an attack and then beginning the trek up the stony side of the mountain, all the time wondering if another stone troll would rise out of the ground in front of them.

  It wasn’t an easy climb up the mountain side by any means, the ground was broken and ruined, the terrain steep, they had to pick their way through endless little rivulets and puddles of drying blood everywhere, he didn’t want to get any of it on him, and he had to maintain a cloak of invisibility around them as they travelled, just in case any more goblins showed up to take a look around. It was a useful magic, bending the light around them so that it met where it began, and one he’d been practicing of late, but it worked best when they remained still and he constantly worried that some might see them as they approached. Not that he could see any more goblins emerging from their lair. Curiosity was not a trait of theirs.

  On the way they passed by several dead stone trolls and he got to see first hand just how much damage he’d done to them, and despite it being gruesome, despite the thick smell of blood hanging in the air, no doubt soon to draw predators by the hundreds, he studied them, pleased with his work. Surely stone plate at least four feet thick had simply shattered under the magic of the arrows, and he’d never used sound as a weapon before, not in actual combat. There was something inherently pleasing about seeing such enormous, vanquished foes and knowing he’d killed them, as primitive as that was. Especially when he’d seen the damage, and the death, that they’d caused to Evensong first hand.

  Eventually they made the terrace entrance to the cavern, after crawling on his hands and knees up the last sixty feet or so of broken rock face and scrambling over the edge of the platform, and he finally had his first chance to stare into the goblins den.

  It was massive was his first thought, the opening into the mountain standing at least twenty feet high and just as wide, and somehow he doubted it had been made by the goblins. Even if they had the intelligence or skill to carve such a massive entrance, he doubted they would have. They were tiny creatures, standing no more than four feet in height each, and as such they liked smaller holes, things which they could enter and which predators couldn’t chase them down. Besides, it was old, very old. So old the stone itself was crumbling.

  The cold grey stone under his feet was worn smooth by the passage of time and feet, as were the edges all around the doorway. It took a lot of time, a lot of centuries if not millennia, to do that. What was more he realised as he studied the massive entranceway, it had once been ornately carved. Time had robbed it of whatever message or beauty that it had once known, whatever might have been written on it, but here and there he could see the remains of the etchings that some long dead mason had chiselled away at for hours if not years.

  This he realised was an ancient ruin, probably many thousands of years old, and possibly there even before the elves had begun recording their history. Who the ancients had been who had carved this structure out of a mountain, or what had happened to them, he had no idea. The world was full of ancient ruins, and what little was known of any of them was far less than what remained a mystery.

  Yet all of that was less important than what lay inside, and staring into the lair all he could see at first was darkness. It took a while for his eyes to adjust as he began walking slowly into the goblins home. Every step of course was torture, as he constantly feared being discovered, of hearing the high pitched yelping as the goblins sounded their alarm and came flooding out, but still he carried on, Bearabus beside him every step of the way. She was a good bear he decided, brave and loyal, and when they got out of this he promised her a nice juicy treat. She’d earned it.

  Finally, fifty or sixty paces in, the entrance way opened up wide into a vast cavern, and with his eyes adjusting slowly to the darkness, he could begin to make out all that he’d wondered about.

  It was a vast lair, far larger than he’d imagined, a huge ancient amphitheatre carved out inside the mountain, surely three hundred yards across and a hundred high. There was no way that the goblins had created it, they had just moved in some time after the original owners had left, but they had come in numbers. There weren’t hundreds of goblins here, there were surely thousands. He could see them everywhere over the cavern floor, moving around, lying still, doing whatever goblins did, looking more like a carpet of rats than anything else, but at least they seemed peaceful, or at least quiet. Despite all that had happened outside they didn’t seem to be panicked or forming up into columns to attack anyone. But then they had food, meat, he didn’t want to think about what sort of meat, and their interest was clearly only on fighting over the scraps and eating and sleeping, not looking for enemies.

  He couldn’t see any people among them, no elves, no humans, no men in armour, no one, and that frightened him. Essaline and her family might already be dead, a thought that very nearly robbed him of his strength. Still somehow he held himself together, enough that he didn’t drop his magic of concealment, knowing that if he failed, any chance they had was gone, and there had to be a chance. He couldn’t allow himself to think otherwise. Still he knew that the only reason goblins would take people might be for food, and though at least several hundred were believed to have been taken, with a lair this size it surely wasn’t impossible that they’d already killed and eaten them. But it seemed unlikely in only a few days, and he couldn’t see any human or elf bodies among the goblins. There were dried out bones aplenty spread all over the cavern floor, and here and there he could make out the shapes of great beasts, bison perhaps, that had slowly been torn to pieces and eaten, but no people. So maybe they were locked up somewhere, safe and ready to be freed.

  He hoped and prayed it was so, but he couldn’t put the dreadful thought out of his mind, and just when he needed his wits about him. Master Argus would have welcomed his emotion, asked him to use it, build on it, but at no time would he have wanted him to give in to it, and so slowly, remembering his lessens, Marjan managed to pull his errant thoughts back into a semblance of order as he firmed up his magic. It took time, but he knew it had to be done if he was to win, and he had to win.

  In time as he stood there gathering his calm and remembering his mission, he became aware of another oddity, light. The lair itself was dark, all but pitch black, illuminated only by the light coming from the entrance, and from a few cracks in the rock ceiling high above. It was so dark that even his magically enhanced wizard sight was having a hard time piercing the gloom. But on the far side of the cavern, in an alcove looking over the main chamber he could just make out a faint greenish glow, and that he knew had nothing to do with the goblins. In fact near to the light they seemed to have formed some sort of barrier, so that none would go near it. It was possibly some sort of magic at work, or maybe just fear but either way it told him one thing.

  Another wizard was there!

  Marjan’s blood thrilled at the understanding, and at the understanding that he might possibly have an enemy to face. An actual one, not a puppet, and someone to blame for this latest atrocity. But at the same time he knew that an enemy wizard was a dangerous foe. He was strong and fast, and thanks to Master Argus very capable of striking where his magic would do the most good, but he had no idea whether this other wizard was more powerful than hi
m or not. He had no idea if he even knew he was there, though surely he had to know someone was nearby since the stone trolls had been killed. That meant waiting, planning, and striking hard when the chance presented itself, the one lessen he had learned from Master Argus that he liked. Plan carefully, attack first and last and with overwhelming force. It wasn’t a honourable way of fighting, but their enemy had no honour and it was the safest one. First though, he had to know his enemy.

  Sitting down on the cold stone where he had just been standing, hoping not to trigger any traps assuming he hadn’t already, freeing his thoughts of any distractions by closing his eyes, he reached out with his magical senses and started trying to locate his foe. It wasn’t easy despite the fact that he had been becoming quite accomplished in this very magic of late. The man, if he was a man, was made out of the same darkness that the beasts were, and so it was like looking for a hole in the fabric of life rather than anything more obvious. Perhaps that shouldn’t have surprised him, but it did. The wizard was from the rift, though he slowly realised, not all of him.