Her abdominal wall was punctured and torn, several of her ribs broken. Fortunately his fingers hadn’t driven that deeply inside of her. The orange moonrat eye, her one true weakness, was undamaged. It was still in its customary place nestled next to her heart.
You’ve felt worse, she reminded him.
The regenerative power of the rings was already at work. The pain of the wounds ceased, replaced by a tingle as her flesh began to knit itself back together.
Her main concern was her dress. She took a minute to repair the material, using an age old spell to remove all traces of blood, before calling for Felberon and Welven to halt.
Djeri lay bruised and bleeding from the repeated blows, still frozen in place and quite helpless. The blood magic of his dwarven heritage had kept the two trollkin from breaking any bones, but she was certain there was some internal damage. Nevertheless, she didn’t bother with any healing magic. Let him feel the pain of his beating. He would heal quickly enough.
She released the portion of the paralysis that covered his head and he opened his mouth, releasing a long stream of blood.
“This bond is new,” she said accusingly. She hit him with a lash of steam, causing a hiss to escape his lips. “How did that happen? Is there a bonding wizard here in KhanzaRoo?”
Even as she asked the questions she knew it didn’t make sense. The bond had been there upon his rebirth, just too weak to stop her magic. It had merely been strengthened. Perhaps he had been bonded before the Mother swallowed him. The bond could have been weakened when his soul was transferred to his new body, only recently being reconnected to his bonding wizard.
Arcon, though knowing only what she had told him about bonding magic, was thinking along similar lines. “Could he be bonded to someone outside the swamps?”
Her eyes widened. If so, he could have shared many of our secrets.
“Mellinda, look under the bench,” Arcon advised, seeing something at the edges of her vision.
The light was reflecting on something shiny beneath the stone bench Djeri had been sleeping on. Switching to mage sight showed her a metal breastplate swirling with elemental protections.
“I recognize that breastplate,” Arcon said, remembering the “F” embossed in the center. “It must have been brought back from the Mother’s midden.”
It was vaguely familiar to her too. Then she realized where she had first seen it. In the Tinny Woods deep within the Dark Forest, a dwarf wearing a similar polished armor had fought against her with a group of Academy and Mage School forces. Then once again she had seen it on the night when she had taken control of Arcon’s body. He had been one of the group opposing Aloysius.
“All this time and I never recognized you,” she said, reaching under the bench to retrieve the breastplate. It was quite heavy. Fortunately, the Rings of Stardeon did impart a portion of extra physical strength. “Is this part of the reason your bond returned?”
Djeri spat and once more her fine dress was spattered with blood. She gestured, paralyzing his face again. A quick spell cleaned the dress. “If you would only have seduced Murtha like I asked I might never have discovered this. Now I have to find out what you know.”
Mellinda had Welven throw Djeri over his shoulder while Felberon had the chore of carrying the breastplate and the ugly kobald dog thing. A few flows of air and fire cleansed all blood from the floor and they left the room, none of the guards aware of their visit.
The only minor difficulty came upon exiting the palace. The pathways and streets of KhanzaRoo were silent this time of night, but the city was never really silent. Trollkin would see their movements and Djeri was a very recognizable trollkin.
A minor difficulty only. Mellinda knew that the sight of her servants carrying limp bodies wouldn’t surprise anyone. A few flows of air disguised the two figures being carried. Mellinda led her servants across the islands and bridges to the Old Hospital where one of her largest secrets was kept.
The building that the trollkin called the Old Hospital was a true marvel of ancient Roo craftsmanship. The building, just like the other stone pyramids in KhanzaRoo was anchored to the very bedrock beneath them, allowing it to stand firm despite the ever changing nature of the swamps.
What made the Old Hospital different were its sublevels. It was the only building with a completely watertight construction allowing for a series of basement dungeons. Mellinda had only heard rumors of the place before uncovering it upon her arrival with the trollkin. She had discovered it on the day she had put out the fire she had started inside the building. After forcing a torrent of water through every corridor, one of her followers had seen water disappearing under a seemingly solid wall.
The lower levels of the dungeons had been flooded by high water levels during storms in times long past, but with her magic it had been easily dried up. These dungeons were now the place where she kept her most interesting experiments.
She led Welven and Felberon into the secret entrance and down to a vacant cell. They threw Djeri inside while she retrieved another one of her prized servants.
Mellinda soon returned with a tall, lanky trollkin. She had a body much like a troll’s except for certain female attributes. Her hair was long and frizzy, her skin a leathery green that was almost completely free of troll slime. Her eyes were mismatched much like the king’s, one trollish, the other human.
Her name was Sorrel and Mellinda had discovered that she was a powerful witch with a vast store of knowledge about her craft. The Mother had certainly swallowed a lot of gems on the day of the treaty, but this was one of her most prized finds, a master of bewitching and bonding magic.
“What would you have me do, my queen?” Sorrel asked.
Mellinda pointed at Djeri’s paralyzed form. “This one is bonded. I think it’s to someone from his former life. I need you to pierce him. Find out what he knows.”
Sorrel smiled. “That I can do, Queen.” She reached out and gripped Djeri’s arm, piercing his flesh and his defenses. “Oh, this one knows lots, he does.”
Mellinda stuck out her own arm. “Show me.”
Sorrel pierced her too and soon Djeri’s memories were flowing into her.
* * *
“King! King!” Murtha’s said, prodding awake the Troll King early that morning as was her usual duty.
Xeldryn stirred slowly at first, but he recognized the urgency in her voice. He sat up and stretched, opening his wide mouth into a toothy yawn. “What is it, Murtha?”
“It’s Djeri, King!” she said. “He’s missing.”
Yawning again, he stood. Murtha was usually a very level headed trollkin, which was one of the qualities that he had seen in her that had made him choose her for his assistant. But when it came to Djeri, her judgement was often suspect. “Perhaps he rose early to eat.”
She shook her head. “No! His room is empty. Clean. Too clean. And it smells strange.”
Xeldryn frowned. “Too clean?”
Murtha nodded. “Come see.”
The king grabbed his Jharro bow and staff and followed her down a set of stairs to the part-dwarf’s room. Immediately upon looking inside, he understood Murtha’s concern.
Trollkin left traces of slime on every surface of their living area. It was just the way they were. There was nothing that could be done about it. But large parts of this room were clean of all traces of slime, even sections of Djeri’s mattress. The king leaned in to inspect these clean patches.
The smell she had described was here too. “Fire.” Small traces of ash were trapped in the stone’s pitted surface. He turned a concerned look upon Murtha to find that the part-dwarf was crying.
“It’s my f-fault, king,” she said. “I was mad at the snake woman. She promised that Djeri would have me, but even after all her changes he didn’t want me!”
Xeldryn’s eyes widened. Would Mellinda truly have hurt Djeri for such a reason? Even though his talent was so useful for his people? Surely not, but he couldn’t deny that trace of fire. Magic w
as the only thing to explain it, but was that enough ash to explain a complete disappearance? Gray was gone as well. They couldn’t both have been burned away.
“What did you tell her that makes you think she would do something to him?” the king asked.
Murtha grimaced. “I told her that he remembered his previous life. That he loved his old wife instead of me. That I hated her for changing me like this.”
He understood Murtha’s pain, but why would Mellinda hurt Djeri in revenge for rejecting Murtha? The king shook his head. Mellinda was a foul creature to be sure, but she never acted quite this nonsensically. He also reminded himself that she wasn’t the only one with elemental magic. Not anymore. Maybe someone else was involved.
“He may still be around. We should ask the others. Someone will have seen where he went,” he said, but as they left the room a voice called out.
“King!” said one of the guards from the top of the stairs. “You must come down to Solitude. Mellinda is talking with the Mother!”
Frowning, Xeldryn hurried up to the throne room and onto the rear balcony, taking the stairway that led down the back side of the palace. He rushed down to the bottom and the pathway to the Still Lake.
He arrived on the shore just in time to see the Mother’s mind pulling away from Mellinda’s head. Xeldryn looked to the First who stood at the water’s edge an apologetic look on his face as the cylindrical stalk sank back into the water.
A ring of puncture marks marred Mellinda’s skull crowned by a hole in the center of her forehead. The power of the jewels in her hands worked to close the wounds. Her eyes fluttered as she tried to recover from the experience and the king knew exactly what she was feeling.
Then a smile curved her lips and a throaty laugh escaped her lungs. Mellinda’s eyes focused on him and she rose to her feet, swaying only slightly. “It has begun,” she said.
“What has begun?” Xeldryn asked, a deep feeling of dread rising within him.
“The Mother has been attacked by forces at the swamp’s edge,” she said, then raised one waving finger. “And more will come here directly, hoping to kill your people. They use witches, seeking to deceive the Mother.”
She raised her arms into the air. “She has commanded me to send the trollkin into battle. We will kill the invaders and the Mother will strike at the Jharro Grove. The war has begun!”
Xeldryn looked to the First and received only a sad nod in return. Then it was true. Delaying was no longer possible.
The Mother had spoken.
Chapter Twenty Four
The attack began on the northern most edge of the Troll Swamps, otherwise known as the Valley of the Treaty Disaster. For some reason this had remained the site of most activity for the Mother. Despite all the time that had gone by since her original feasting no one could step on the ground without being surrounded by tentacles and hungry mouths.
The army stayed safely beyond the Mother’s reach. Their positions protected by powerful witches. One figure walked slowly onto the pockmarked slopes, drawing a sword that instantly flared with a hungry heat.
It was daytime, but Star burned white hot. It knew its purpose was at hand.
Deathclaw, who had stayed behind just for this, walked out onto the eastern slopes with the hot steel held away from him. He knew from past experience fighting a behemoth that the first blows of the fight would be painful for him. The searing heat of Star’s thullish hunger would splash back onto him until the power reached its peak.
The Mother’s reaction was immediate. The moment she sensed his foot falls on the ground above her tentacles rose all around him. Grasping claws reached for him.
Deathclaw spun, lashing out at each limb. The severed tentacles fell burning, igniting the slime-soaked ground. Within minutes, the valley’s upper rim was a wall of fire and smoke.
Deathclaw ran at the leading edge of the blaze, leaping over gaping mouths and severing reaching tongues. The heat of the flames around him seared his scales. His feet, soaked with slime, were soon aflame, but he carried on.
As he went, Star’s fervor grew and a halo of heat formed around the raptoid. Soon he did not need to swing the sword at all. He pointed the blade ahead of him as he ran and any trollish flesh that approached him simply combusted.
Once Star’s power reached its crescendo, a protective shield formed around him. The heat around Deathclaw faded and the flames charring his legs were extinguished. He was now immune to the heat and his body’s regenerative magic was able to work on healing the damage.
Deathclaw completed his pass along the eastern rim of the valley and ran for the center where the true test of the sword’s power would begin. Rising from the shallow marsh pond at the center of the valley was a towering mound of troll flesh covered in unblinking eyes and split by a gaping razor-toothed maw. The enormous tentacles that sprouted from the side of the mound, ten-feet-thick at their widest point and fifty-feet-long at their tips, awakened at his approach. They swung towards him, reaching to pull him into the waiting mouth.
This is where Deathclaw was headed anyway, but he decided to make his own route. He ran towards the closest looming tentacle, approaching the tip of it with the point of his sword. The troll flesh burned away around him, disintegrating as he ran through the center of the tentacle, leaving flaming tatters behind him.
He followed the interior of the tentacle all the way up to the towering mound at the center. Star’s heat hollowed out the mound. From the outside of it, flames could be seen bursting out of the multiple eyes and roaring from the open mouth.
Here was where the true experiment began for Deathclaw. He pointed the sword down and began burrowing down into the Troll Mother’s subterranean flesh.
This was going against the advice of Justan. In fact, the named warrior had practically forbidden the idea when Deathclaw had brought it up. Justan worried that burrowing through the Troll Mother from underground was an invitation for disaster. After all, she lived under the swamp. Millions of gallons of water could rush to fill any hole he made.
Could Star’s power keep him from drowning? Or would the heat simply cause the water to boil him alive? Deathclaw was willing to test it here at the very edge of the swamp in this valley where the marsh was only a foot or so deep at its center. This is where Deathclaw would discover just how deep under the ground the Mother had burrowed.
From the first moment he pointed the sword down into her flesh, Deathclaw realized that he could be making a mistake. The sword burned through her so fast he was in freefall. How deep could she possibly be?
The answer was about fifteen feet. That was how far he fell until he hit packed earth. The power of the sword faltered when it struck soil and he lifted it quickly into the air above him. He had created a small cave within the Troll Mother herself, lit only by the glowing coals in the flesh at the edges of the sword’s power.
Justan’s concerns quickly proved themselves valid as well. Water was pouring in through the opening above him. As the water hit the blade’s cone of heat it was vaporized into steam. Deathclaw was still immune to the heat of it, but his vision was obscured and it became hard to breathe.
He followed the exposed ground in front of him as it sloped upward along the valley’s bowl. The Troll Mother’s flesh combusted all around him and the water built up behind him, filling the space he vacated even as he moved uphill. Deathclaw imagined that if he had tried this under the swamp that he would indeed have found himself in an unsurvivable situation.
As it was, he wasn’t so sure about his situation now. The Mother closed the hole he had made up above, trapping him inside of her. An immense pressure began to build up around him. The sword’s shield protected him from the brunt of it, but his ears popped several times as he trudged upwards along the valley slope, underground, immolating the Mother’s flesh from the inside.
Steam and fire swirled around him and he began to struggle for lack of air. Sooner or later that pressure was going to release or he was going to pass out.
He wondered which would happen first.
The leaders of the combined armies watched the burning valley from a distance. They watched gape-mouthed as the tower of flesh at the center went up like a torch. Then a plume of steam erupted from the spot and several minutes later the earth shook beneath them. The entire western slope of the valley exploded. Heated earth and flaming chunks of troll flesh filled the air.
Awe-struck silence followed the blast, followed by hesitant cheers. Everyone waited to see if Deathclaw would emerge alive. The wait took several minutes before one of the forward scouts reported movement on the valley’s western rim.
Deathclaw hissed as he dug his way out of the tunnel of earth that had collapsed on top of him during the explosion. It was not an easy task and he was no burrower. Finally, he had assistance from above as two Roo-Tan scouts helped to pull him free.
Deathclaw could not hear what they were saying as a high-pitched ringing still filled his ears, but he hissed a thank you to them as he shook the dirt loose from his body. His bandoleer of throwing knives was singed, two of the blades missing, but he was glad to see that Star’s sheath was undamaged. The blade itself looked normal as if nothing had happened, but Deathclaw did sense a vague satisfaction from it as he put it away.
The star-shaped scar on his palm was raw and red as he walked towards the line of soldiers waiting beyond the valley’s edge. He saw their mouths open in cheers and heard a dull roar as his body worked at healing his damaged eardrums. He walked past them, unsure how to handle such sudden acclaim.
As he approached the gathered leaders he was filthy, singed and bleeding, yet blackened scales were already falling away from his legs, replaced by tender new skin. He was unable to make out what Xedrion said to him when he arrived. Something about, “An incredible display.”
“My test failed,” he replied bitterly.
“You consider that a failure?” muttered Hubrin.
“Perhaps he should stay with us,” said the muffled voice of Warlord Aloysius, his calculating gaze taking in the raptoid. “Nearly one square mile of the Troll Mother destroyed. We could use him here.”
Behemoth (The Jharro Grove Saga Book 6) Page 36
