by Markus Heitz
A foot turned her over onto her back and the terrible face of her enemy was directly above her own. He was staring at her as he raised his hammer again. The black fire around him had died away but its heat was still overwhelming. He pressed the hammer head against her brow and the metal ate into her flesh.
Kiras gave a scream and lost consciousness.
Goda saw the glowing wall of light approach the fleeing figures and forgot all her previous intentions. Three of her children were in mortal danger. If she did nothing neither she nor Ireheart would ever find forgiveness.
She leaped through the gap and let fall the spell that had been holding the opening against the company’s return. She hurried forward to protect Boëndalin and his troop from the magic forces attacking them.
Goda racked her brain to find some incantation she could use against the wall of light. The enemy magus possessed enormous power. This shimmering wall of spikes was rushing up behind the troops, who turned to face it when Boëndalin gave the command. They crouched down behind their shields.
The maga panted; there were still three hundred paces to cover before she could reach her eldest son. She had grasped the fact that she would never manage to protect all the warriors from the wall’s onslaught. In her left hand she had two dozen splinters of the magic diamond. They would be no help now.
“Take them softly to the eternal smithy,” Goda prayed, weaving a protective spell which she placed only around Boëndalin. He disappeared in a flickering cloud.
Then the wall of light hit the troop.
It was painful for her to witness the deaths of so many fine fighting souls. The spikes pierced shields and armor, bodies and heads, and speared the dead onto the living until they all lay heaped up like sand on a shovel; finally the wind fell and the corpses rolled apart to scatter on the ground, the momentum still driving them.
“Boëndalin!” she screamed, running on. She could see him, surrounded by the shimmering. He was standing in front of the pile of slaughtered warriors, unable to understand how he had been spared and the others had not. “This way,” called Goda. Between her fingers the diamond splinters crumbled and were blown away.
Thick veils of dust took away her vision. Fearful of a further attack, she put her hand back into her pocket, calculating how many splinters remained. She noted that she was down to half the original stock. Again she called her son’s name.
“I’m here, mother,” he gasped, coming toward her through the fog of swirling dirt. He was holding his arm across mouth and nose and had screwed up his eyes against the dust storm. “What happened?”
“The magus has…” As the clouds of dirt thinned out, Goda could see Bandaál and Sanda with Kiras standing before a dwarf in reddish-gold armor. His back was turned to her as if he had nothing to fear from her. Or had he not seen her? “Is that him?”
Boëndalin’s glance flew between his siblings and the corpses on the ground. “Why didn’t you save all of us?” he asked, his voice hoarse.
The hammer heads started to emit black fire.
“He’s attacking them!” Goda hastily prepared a spell.
Bandaál and Sanda ran past the unknown figure, while the undergroundling confronted the dwarf in combat.
Boëndalin wanted to charge off to help her, but Goda restrained him. “You cannot help her against this enemy. Only my powers can effect anything.” She chose an assault spell that would bombard the dwarf with multiple lightning strikes. But before she had finished speaking the charm, the foe had felled Kiras with a double blow, finally forcing his hammer onto her face; the undergroundling lay motionless.
Goda released the energies.
Lightning flashes shot out from the tips of her fingers, aimed at the dwarf, who straightened up, crossed his hammers over each other and held them up, arms outstretched.
Bandaál and Sanda had now reached their mother and saw what was unfolding.
The glowing flashes crossed the distance in zigzag lines, overtaking each other in a race to see which would reach the adversary first.
The first lightning bolt hit the hammer head, and discharged its power. Brighter than the flash itself, the symbols on the metal shone out. Then came the next strike.
The dwarf was forced back by the impact, his heels dragging great gouges through the dusty ground surface—but he did not go up in smoke, or fall! When the last bolt had hit him, he turned his upper body slightly and spread his arms again. It was a pose of consummate superiority.
Then he turned away and strode back to his beasts. He left Kiras lying there.
Abruptly he circled round again, his hammers crossed against the maga. Two of the armor runes shone out and seemed to be feeding light to a jewel that was placed above his solar plexus. The gem glowed and released an ochre-colored thick beam, for which the weapon heads formed a lateral boundary; the dwarf seemed to be steering it by manipulating the hammers.
Giving a deep dangerous roar he flew over to Goda and her children; the earth beneath him was scorched black.
Goda put her hand back into her pocket and created a hasty counter-spell, which crashed into the enemy magic with a crackling, hissing sound, shattering it like porcelain. The heat they were showered with took away their breath and singed beards and eyebrows and rebellious locks of hair. They had to shut their eyes against the blast to prevent them drying out.
When they looked up once more the dwarf had gone. The monsters were waiting four hundred paces away at the entrance to the abyss, watching them.
“Go and fetch Kiras,” Goda commanded quietly. The magus had made himself invisible.
Boëndalin sped off, threw the undergroundling over his shoulder and returned with her.
Then the monsters roared and charged.
They reached the barrier in the nick of time, and behind it lay the saving grace of the southern gate. Goda collected the last remnants of concentration and, with extreme difficulty, forced the red screen open for a second time.
She was the last of the group to re-enter the fortress. But when the gate closed behind her she still did not feel safe. The power of the disfigured dwarf had been far greater than she had feared.
Boëndalin laid Kiras on a stretcher. “See what you can do for her, mother,” he asked, as he dampened the girl’s face with water.
The soldiers around them and up on the battlements sent sympathetic glances to the returnees; one or two were angry, critical because of the disastrous outcome of the sortie and the death of so many warriors. Boëndalin gave a deep sigh.
Goda checked the undergroundling’s heartbeat. “She’ll be all right,” she comforted Boëndalin and her other two children, both of whom stood at her side, quite distraught. “Apart from the burn on her face she doesn’t seem to have sustained serious injury.”
The maga did not recognize the symbol that the enemy magus had imprinted on the undergroundling’s forehead. Was it intended as a branding mark of humiliation? Why had he spared her life? Because she had been so stupidly brave?
“It’s all my fault,” said Boëndalin to Goda. He sounded more than downcast. “We should have retreated after destroying the catapults. It was only because I insisted on leading the troops to the masts. That’s why they all died.” He lifted his head. “It was my fault,” he called up to the silent soldiers guarding the walls.
“Nonsense. This is war, and war kills. It kills humans, dwarves, ubariu and undergroundlings.” Goda contradicted him. “All of them knew that it was a really dangerous mission. They all volunteered to go with you.”
Boëndalin was past consolation. “I should be lying out there with them.” He lowered his voice. “It is only thanks to your art that I am still alive. It wasn’t my strong arms or my skills as a commander that saved me. The name of each of the fallen will remind me that I must be a better leader.” He was about to go.
Goda touched him on the shoulder. “And yet the mission did succeed. The camp has been burned down and the catapults have been destroyed. They have not sacrificed
their lives for nothing.”
“They would not have lost their lives at all if I hadn’t given those commands.” He left them and walked to his quarters.
Sanda and Bandaál came over and, in long tearful embraces, thanked her for saving their lives. Goda sent them off to rest.
She stepped into the lift to go up to the tower to survey the scene of conflict. She had not lied to them. The mission had won the defenders valuable time and the knowledge that, without outside support, they would never be able to vanquish their opponents’ magus.
Her gaze swept over the barrier, now obscured under clouds of smoke. In spite of all their losses she remained convinced that they had scored a victory over the monsters; albeit a two-edged victory.
We shall have to wait until the summer, Vraccas, she said in prayer. Her hand felt for the diamond fragments and found only four, together with a great deal of dust. The last ones…
XXI
Girdlegard,
Former Queendom of Rân Ribastur,
Former Northwestern Border,
Spring, 6492nd Solar Cycle
The air was cool and fresh but the sun was doing its best to warm the travelers. The tender golden rays shimmered through the canopy of dense foliage above their heads. There was a scent of nature reawakening and the first flowers were in bloom.
They were not riding particularly fast, not wanting to arrive in the Blue Mountains before Aiphatòn and his älfar. Tungdil and Ireheart were at the head of the column, then some of the Zhadár and Barskalín, and, in the middle, Slîn and Balyndar, with the remainder of the Invisibles bringing up the rear.
“Our messages will all have been delivered by now.” Ireheart blinked in the sunlight. “I wonder what Goda thinks? What will she say to our successes?”
“It won’t make any difference,” Tungdil hazarded. “She’ll still have her doubts about me? Unlike you. And I can’t blame her. In her place I’d be even more suspicious now. The victories only prove to her how evil I must be,” he laughed. “The älfar and myself, then the Black Squadron and the Zhadár as my new allies—a whole collection of bad lads.” This sounded like the old Scholar now.
If you only knew what I was thinking about. Ireheart hoped that his friend was not able to read his mind, because such thoughts had been exactly what had been going through it. Add to that those black lines on Tungdil’s face and the inexplicable changes in his eye. He had to force himself to join in the laughter. “Yes, it’s a troop Nôd’onn would have given his eye-teeth for. In the old days.”
“A very long time ago.” Tungdil cast a quick look back over his shoulder. “Everything’s going our way, and some things were just handed to us on a silver plate.”
“I wonder if we’ll catch sight of the firstlings. May Vraccas make sure they find our message quickly.” Ireheart relaxed his grip on his pony’s reins and it trotted contentedly along. “The points are set now, like for the old mountain tunnel trains. I’d be a whole lot happier traveling in one of them, too.”
“That would be fine, perfect if you’re good at breathing underwater!”
“Elria could hardly have thought up a better way to punish us dwarves, could she? To get all of Weyurn’s lakes to drain down into our tunnel complex.” Ireheart looked ahead to where their road left the woods and led through the meadows. “We’ve still not seen a single human. Or anything else, for that matter.”
“Did you hear the stories Rodario was telling us about Rân Ribastur?” Tungdil grinned and, as always at such moments, Ireheart felt so happy to be at his side. As it had been in the old, old orbits… the feeling was comforting. “Magic animals, which the famuli set upon each other; a spell put on great swathes of the land; and nature drawing the traveler to his doom.” Tungdil tapped his armor for good luck. “I’m all right as long as I’ve got my armor.”
Has he ever taken it off? At any time during the whole journey? Ireheart tried to remember when he had seen Tungdil without his coat of armor. Certainly not during the journey to Lot-Ionan. But he didn’t seem to stink, he didn’t complain, he—didn’t sleep?
Hoofbeats approached and the fair-haired Ido girl came up to Tungdil’s side. “Excuse me for interrupting but I must tell you this,” she said directly. “I must speak to you, Goldhand.”
“Whatever you have to say to me Ireheart can hear, too,” said the one-eyed dwarf, and Boïndil took it as further confirm ation that they were dealing with the genuine Tungdil Goldhand.
Mallenia nodded. “It’s about the queen. You should know that she has hardly any magic power left.”
Aha. It was all going so nicely till now. Ireheart’s eyebrows were raised so high they nearly touched his hairline, but he kept quiet.
“How do you know?” Tungdil asked.
“She told me so herself.” Mallenia put her hand on her sword. “I had to tell you.”
“Why didn’t she tell us herself?” Ireheart blurted out. “What use is it if we think she’s on an equal footing with Lot-Ionan only to find, the first time we meet him, that instead of an inferno we have a miserable little flicker emerging from her fingertips?”
“I don’t know. She had hoped to be able to renew her powers in a source in the Red Mountains, but that did not happen.” Mallenia’s expression was apologetic. “I would have wished to bring you better news than this.”
“Blessed hammers!” Ireheart went on cursing for a while, then growled angrily. “So what now?”
Tungdil rubbed his short brown beard. “We’ll have to make sure the maga doesn’t use up any of the energy she still has, whether to defend herself or us, until we’ve got her to Lot-Ionan. Then we’ll have to find a way to take her to the source so she can refresh her magic,” he said after some thought. He did not seem particularly concerned that their most important weapon was going to be far less effective than they had assumed. “We won’t tell the others. They should go on believing the maga is in full possession of her magic faculties. I’ll have a word with her when the opportunity arises.” He ordered the company to halt at the edge of the forest. “It shall remain our secret for now. Leave the others their illusion.”
“And how are you going to…” Ireheart could not go on, because Tungdil had turned his pony round and was sitting up tall in the saddle.
“Listen to me,” he called to the group. “We are now in the territory of Rân Ribastur, and some of you are aware of the possible dangers that may await us here.” He pointed to Coïra. “She will not use her magic here. The queen is accompanying us to Lot-Ionan and is not here to protect us against robbers or mythical beasts. We are dwarves and should be able to defend ourselves!” A muffled roar of approval was heard. “So, do not depend on the queen’s magic powers. She will not be employing them, not even if one of us is in mortal danger. On the contrary, we pledge our lives to protect her and get her safely to the Blue Mountains without her using any of her own spells. Be on your guard and report anything you hear.” He lifted Bloodthirster. “Our steel can cope with any danger!”
In renewed confirmation the dwarves and Zhadár banged their shields, then dismounted and made camp.
Ireheart grinned at his friend. His announcement covered everything nicely. Clever as ever.
Rodario, who now sported a neat beard and thin mustache, and was thus the spitting image of his ancestor, arranged his blanket under the canvas protection from sun or rain.
He had chosen a green lavender bush, stable enough to tie the canvas to. When he looked at Queen Coïra he saw she was having difficulties with putting up her tent. He crawled over. “Let me help you, Your Majesty.”
“Oh, there’s no need for that,” she said, smiling gratefully.
“I’d be happy to help.”
“I meant there’s no need to call me Your Majesty. I thought I’d told you that before. We’ve been through too much together and so I should like to grant you this privilege.”
Rodario returned the friendly gesture and smoothed out her blanket for her, rolling her extra cl
othing into a pillow. “There you are. Your royal bedstead now awaits.”
She laughed and lay down, sliding this way and that. “It’s not quite like home comforts but I’m sure I’ll sleep well in this fresh air. Though I shall miss the cries of the seagulls.”
“Ah, you’ll see. We’ll patch up the lakebed and fill the Bath again, as I used to call your people’s realm.” He winked. “Not far from our camp there is a little stream with a waterfall.” He slipped off his armor and outer clothing. “I don’t know how you’re feeling, but I’m longing for a swim… or at least to get rid of some of this dirt.” He stretched out his hand to her. “Would you like to come with me?”
She laughed. “Are you trying to seduce me?”
“Of course not. I’ll keep watch on the river bank while you bathe, and then you can do the same for me.”
Coïra’s laughter subsided and she appeared uneasy and dejected. “No, I’d rather stay where I am safe in the dwarves’ protection. You were telling the story about that thing that lies in wait for travelers, and even if I’m not blond…”
“Did Mallenia tell you about Xolototh?” Rodario looked over to the Ido girl who was arranging her bedding not far away.
“And that there was another kiss, yes. But this time, maybe, she took you by surprise.” Coïra could not resist this little dig. “I know I don’t have to be afraid of the Xolototh but I have a healthy respect for the enchanted creatures and plants in Rân Ribastur.” She sat down on her blanket. “You’d better go on your own, Rodario.”
He nodded and looked disappointed. Then he disappeared off through the bushes.
Coïra sighed with relief. She had not been sure whether she had managed to conceal her own feelings. An actor like him would surely notice when someone was pretending.
What Rodario could not know was that she had longed to accompany him. And she would have bathed with him in the water.
Coïra looked over at Mallenia, who was the exact opposite of herself in stature, coloring, and very nature. Yet the two of them shared an obsession with Rodario the Seventh, she was sure of that.
