Tyndal didn’t waste the moment. He dropped to one elbow, spun around and swept Jenerard’s legs out from under Rau Obicei. As the Nemovort’s hand clasped for the fallen scimitar, Tyndal stomped his hobnailed boot down on the creature’s wrist, pinning it to the floor. He was about to decapitate the animate corpse once and for all when his blade flew out of his hand, and into Rau Ortava’s undamaged hand.
“Ah, knot coral!” she smiled, as she examined his mageblade with a critical eye. “I have missed its utility. And its appalling lack of loyalty. A delightful trinket for this crude but intriguing blade!”
“My lady will be gratified at the novel places I intend to stick it, then,” Tyndal said, drawing another wand from his belt. The beautiful Nemovort sneered darkly.
“We discovered that we can prolong the quality of these vessels by consuming the essences of living humani,” she informed him, darkly. “It’s an acquired taste – your souls are so bitter. But in your case, Sir Tyndal, I will enjoy every drop of your blood!” She looked up, suddenly, toward the rafters of the hall and said something in a language Tyndal didn’t recognize. One of the other Nemovorti uttered a spell, and Atopol was suddenly pulled out of hiding and onto the ground before them. “Both of you!”
“I don’t!” he yelled, and threw a thaumaturgic glass sphere from a pouch on his harness at her. The tiny marble flashed in the dim light of the hall for just a moment before it landed at her feet . . . and didn’t shatter.
“Ishi’s tits!” Tyndal groaned. Those spheres were supposed to be fragile enough to shatter easily! Atopol groaned without the oath. He’d hit the ground hard.
“Let me devour them, Mistress!” hissed another Nemovort with a long iron staff and the ugliest face he’d yet seen on an undead.
Tyndal was about to call forth another weapon when Rondal materialized next to Rau Ortava, who still bore his mageblade with the Waystone in the pommel. Rondal took a fraction of a moment to orient himself, and immediately stepped on the glass sphere. The blast that followed threw all three bodies across the hall, and scattered a trio of draugen who were headed for Tyndal and Atopol.
Of all times for things to go wrong . . . Tyndal kicked at a draugen who got too close, and then leaped into the air as he called Grapple to his hand. The baculus was not a weapon, it was a tool. But any tool is a weapon in the hands of a warmage, he recalled Master Loiko instructing him. And this was no ordinary tool.
It made a decent point of leverage as he tripped the persistent draugen. It made more-than-adamant club as it smashed through the temple of another, crushing it. Then the first one spun around, back into range, and he put the dull bronze spike at the heel of the rod through its forehead, getting sprayed with blood and brains for his efforts.
Once he was clear to shift from combat to spells, he saw an opportunity. He aimed the rod through the thinning crowd of undead and aimed a blast at the goblin. Pritviken yelped and fell to the floor. Paralyzed, not dead. Tyndal had a good many questions to put to the goblin.
But he had other problems at hand before he could have that luxury. Rau Obicei had recovered from his spill, and as he was still in possession of his head, he threw himself at Tyndal.
Grapple was not designed as a warstaff, but it was rugged – rugged enough to block the heavy blade as it relentlessly flew toward him.
“You said make it worth your while,” Tyndal quipped, blasting the floor at the Nemovort’s feet. While the tactic worked to throw the creature off balance, it also earned Tyndal a painful slash across his shoulder, where it found a crevice between the plates in his armor. He almost followed up with a spell – he had plenty that might confound the Nemovort – but he didn’t have time to decide.
Instead he released the hoxter pocket he’d used with the dragon. Though it was nearly exhausted, the few pounds of molten lead left inside neatly melted through the chest of the Nemovort. Not even necromancy could protect against that, he saw.
“You killed him! Again!” screamed Rau Ortava, clutching her bleeding wrist with one hand. “Damn you! I was looking forward to enjoying that body!”
She struggled to her feet as Tyndal began to look for a good spell to bind her, and the other few Nemovorti and draugen around her. Something that wouldn’t roast Tyndal, either, he realized. That limited his options.
They got limited even more a moment later, when Gareth appeared along with Gatina next to the wounded undead woman – just like Rondal, they were expecting to come out of the Waypoint at Rondal’s side.
Tyndal bowled over a draugen and shouldered his way to intervene. He shouted into Gareth’s mind as he went.
Rondal is unconscious and needs a medic! Get him out of here! Now!
Tyndal was gratified to see the wizard grab Rondal by the scruff of his neck and the back of his belt and go back through the Ways. Rau Ortava did too – and screeched.
“They have mastered the Ways! But there is no Waypoint here!” Just as she turned she took the point of Kitten’s slender sword in her shoulder, which immediately sagged.
Tyndal snatched his mageblade up in his left hand as he tripped the blind Nemovort as it struggled to get to his feet. That frustrated the creature beyond its patience, and it bellowed.
“ENOUGH OF THIS FOOLISHNESS!”
And then they weren’t in a hall anymore. With a sickening lurch, Tyndal, Gatina, and all of the undead were thrown to the dark pebbled, unforgivably hard ground. Gatina rose, dizzily . . . and then vomited across the sprawled body of Ray Ortava.
Tyndal looked around in confusion. He was on an island in the middle of a black lake, where an evil looking mist hovered above the water’s surface, promising dark terrors lurking within. There was a low roar in the background, the sound of water being hurled from great height. Half a mile away the stubs of great, dark buildings were climbing into the night’s sky. A foul rotting smell filled the air.
“Where are we?” Gatina gasped. The undead were beginning to stir around them. The goblin, still ensnared in his spell, was unmoving. Tyndal snatched up his sword and baculus quickly. Then he heard the bellow of a dragon, followed by another. He knew exactly where they were.
“Oh, Trygg’s grace preserve us,” he moaned, as the first dragon trumpeted back. “We’re in Olum Seheri! Run!”
Chapter Forty
Olum Seheri
The pebbles crunched unpleasantly under his heels as he ran as fast as he could away from the rising undead. It wasn’t them he was afraid of. It was the reinforcements they could call.
Where are we? demanded Gatina, mind-to-mind, as he heard her lighter steps pounding behind him. She had shorter legs, but she was making up with it with faster steps.
Olum Seheri, fortress of the Necromancer! he sent back, as he searched for any hint of cover on the island. Most of it was well-washed with debris, the remains of hundreds of beautiful Alkan buildings destroyed in the invasion, or in the destructive wave the master of the city used to destroy it, rather than see it fall into enemy hands.
Only that hadn’t quite worked out. The old city of Anthatiel was all but destroyed, but the surviving gurvani had started to rebuild from the ruins in their own image. Thankfully, there were still plenty of piles of debris the wave had deposited across the island. Tyndal chose one three or four rows from where they’d emerged and threw himself behind it. A moment later he felt a second thud next to him as Gatina landed.
And then a third. Atopol uncurled from a dark ball and heaved.
“Where . . . where . . . the hells . . . are we?” he gasped.
“The second-worst place you could possibly be,” Tyndal whispered, peering over the ridge of debris. The undead were just struggling to their feet. He noted their slower recovery time. “This is where Korbal and his friends live. Or . . . don’t live.”
“It’s awful!” Gatina said, making a face under her mask. “What is that smell?”
“Dragonshit, rotting wood, and the decomposing corpses of a hundred thousand gurvani. And the stench of a
few thousand live ones,” he said, looking around at the desolation. The once-beautiful City of Rainbows was forever gone. The dark spire that was rising on its roots was a blemish, surrounded by squalid sheds of rude manufacture, and a couple of buildings cobbled together from the wreckage. The effect was both chaotic and orderly, and all together horrifying. There weren’t even any stars overhead. The mist formed a gloomy ceiling high overhead, at the edge of the deep chasm from which the five great rivers fell into the lake. “And sorcery, foul, foul sorcery.”
“If those were undead,” Atopol said, his eyes wide, “we cannot allow them to invade Enultramar!”
“They are moving very quickly,” agreed Tyndal, looking around as much as he could. He tried to commit as much as possible to memory, the location of every hut and shed, every tower and spire.
“Shouldn’t we be leaving here?” Gatina wondered, aloud, worried. “Can’t you get us home?”
“I can and I will,” Tyndal assured them. “But while we’re here . . .”
Atopol sighed in frustration. “You knights never stop your errantry, do you?”
“We knights,” Tyndal reminded him. “You’re one now, too. Indeed, I’m proposing you for inclusion in the Order of Estasi, along with Lorcas and Gareth, when we return. You’re starting to get good at errantry. But since our original mission was to scout this place, and since we’re here, I think it’s only wise to take a quiet look around.”
“What if someone sees us?” Atopol asked. Gatina smacked him.
“When was the last time someone saw you who you didn’t want to see you?” she hissed.
“About ten minutes ago, when a nice undead lady threw me out of the rafters,” Atopol said, sullenly.
“Darkness, just pull yourself together!” the Kitten of Night swore at her brother. “Tyndal’s right! They brought us right to their fortress! We need to look around, while we’re here. We might not get this kind of chance again.”
“We’re still too exposed out here,” Tyndal said, looking around. He saw shapes joining the undead in the distance, a lot of shapes. “We should find somewhere more private.”
They peered into the gloom around the awful island until Atopol thought he saw a spot nearer the settlement in the middle of the island, amongst the worst of the debris. They moved almost silently through the ruins, hugging the terrain for as much cover as they could, while the shadowmagi cast spells to conceal their passage. In an hour they were near the summit of a great pile of wreckage, the ruins of one of the beautiful spires of lost Anthatiel, laid on its side and crushed by the force of its fall.
“This is better,” Atopol decided, as they crept into a chamber tilted at an odd angle. There was a small chamber-like space near the highest point of the chamber, perhaps once the rafters of the structure. The outer walls were cracked enough to allow a surprisingly good view of the plain of desolation as well. “Cats like to be up high,” he added, taking off his gloves. “What are we doing here, again?”
“Basic reconnaissance, gather what intelligence we can on the defenses and the troops here, and seek out the location of any prisoners. What else would we do?”
“Escape?” offered her brother hopefully.
“If we could establish that Princess Rardine is here, we’d have a victory. If we can rescue her . . . well, how could we not try?”
“Because this place is crawling with undead and goblins and maybe undead goblins?” countered Atopol. “We are not prepared for a rescue mission!”
“We’re here!” Gatina insisted. “We’re doing this!”
“Well, if you want to look for a prison,” Atopol suggested, unhappily, that building over there looks like one.” He pointed to a square, squat structure at least three stories tall, with a low-peaked roof. It looked particularly dire. Though there were windows aplenty in the place, they were firmly and thoroughly covered with thick iron bars. “You can see the hands of their prisoners. And sometime their faces,” he added, sadly.
Tyndal looked himself, using Grapple to adjust his perspective. Atopol was correct. He could see thin, hopeless faces and gnarled, battered hands at the windows of the keep. Slaves to be used to build their mighty fortress, he realized. And perhaps spare hosts for their shock troops. It was guarded by gurvani, he saw. Hobs.
“That’s certainly a prison,” he agreed. “A good place to start.”
“Well, it will save them travel distance when they capture us and throw us in,” the shadowmage said, darkly.
“Darkness! You are such a baby! I’ll sneak over there, see if she’s inside, and be back in an hour!”
“No, you won’t!” Atopol ordered. “We’ll all go!”
She snorted. “You think I’ll get in undetected with you two clumsy lunkheads stumbling around?”
“No one is going to expect someone to be trying to break into the place,” reminded Tyndal. “All the security is designed to keep them in. Hells, the entire island is a prison. You don’t want to know what’s in that lake,” he said, shaking his head.
“So let’s go break into prison and rescue a princess,” Atopol sighed.
“Let’s make certain we have a place to retreat to,” Tyndal said, unscrewing the pommel of his sword and removing the Waystone. He tucked it securely in a crevice, then buried it with sand.
It took less than an hour to cross the debris field without being detected, and Tyndal proved correct: the hobgoblins who guarded the prison were far more concerned with what was going on inside, not who was skulking about outside. The first two sentries were already asleep, even though it was the middle of their nocturnal “day” – but Tyndal knew plenty of sentries took naps on their shifts, at all hours of the day. The goblins weren’t any different.
He left them in an even deeper stupor, one they were unlikely to arise from until long after their shift. It served them right, he reasoned, for their dereliction. The turnkeys within were more interested in their dice game than the doorway, and the three of them crept by without alerting them. After that, they were in one long corridor after another, each with a dark cell. The ones on the exterior of the building had tiny heavily barred windows, though the scenery was bleak. The ones inside were smaller and dank.
Tyndal did his best to see who was in each one, but it was difficult. In some cases the prisoner had been in captivity for so long that they were unrecognizable. Some were crammed several to a room, trying to sleep as best they could in miserable conditions.
But all the prisoners seemed to be men – well-muscled, but poorly fed workers, penned for the night for a few brief hours before being forced back to their jobs, Tyndal reasoned. Strong men being used for their labor and used up. Not all the bodies he passed lying in the cells had the glow of life about them.
Nor, he discovered, as he came to the last cell on the block, were they all necessarily human.
The cell was smaller than the others, due to its position on the block, but they gurvani had made good use of the squat conditions by finding smaller prisoners to keep within.
“Karshak!” Tyndal said, aloud, as he saw how the sleeping figures differed.
What? Atopol asked, mind-to-mind . . . which made a lot more sense when you were sneaking through a dark prison full of anxious slaves on the middle of an island packed to the shore with evil, Tyndal realized.
They’ve got Karshak prisoners here, he said, excitedly. Like those you saw in Sevendor? Strong as oxen, and can work all day. You should watch the masons at the mountain work, sometime.
“Dradrien,” a muffled voice croaked in the darkness.
Gatina froze – a pose so motionless, she could have been a shadow in the gloom.
“What?” Tyndal ventured in a whisper.
“We . . . Dradrien . . . not . . . Karshak,” the voice rumbled.
“Who are you?” Tyndal asked, though he knew it as risky. So, apparently, did the prisoner within. He scooted closer to the bars, until Tyndal could smell him. Definitely not the dusty scent of a Karshak, he knew.
>
“We . . . Alon Dradrien,” he said, with a little more confidence. “Prisoners.”
“The gaol gave that away,” Tyndal agreed. “All right, so you’re Iron Folk – Dradrien. Why are you here?”
It took a moment for the creature to find the right words. Clearly he knew little Narasi.
“Came . . . find . . . uncle,” he stammered. “Smith. Great smith,” he added.
“Your uncle? Is he here?” Tyndal insisted.
“Not here,” the Dradrien said, shaking his shaggy head. “High prisoners in great tower,” he said, each word said with deliberation and a lot of grunting. “Work forge.”
“Have you seen a girl? A human girl?” asked Gatina, impatiently.
The Dradrien considered. “Female,” he finally grunted. “Yes. High prisoners in great tower," he said, nodding.
“She’s not here?” Atopol asked, disappointed.
“High prisoners in great tower,” the prisoner repeated, with some satisfaction. “Can show,” he added. “Free us!”
“It’s going to be hard enough sneaking around without three—” Tyndal.
“Dangerous,” Tyndal informed the poor creature.
“We die here soon!” he shrugged, sadly. “Free us! Can show great tower!”
That would be a big risk, Tyndal, Atopol pointed out.
She’s not in this gaol, he said, flatly.
I heard. High prisoners in great tower. So we know she’s here. We can send an army, later. Right now, let’s just get out of here! Every breath we take is one closer to capture!
We need to rescue her, Tyndal insisted. If these three clods can show us where she is, we can do the rest!
We?
Shadowmage: Book Nine Of The Spellmonger Series Page 61
