Haven Magic

by B. V. Larson

  The rhinogs were much larger than goblins, but smaller than the average man. It was difficult to see just what they looked like as they seemed to carry shrouds of darkness with them, or perhaps it was only that they excelled at crouching in the deepest pools of shadow available. From their general forms Brand made out that they had long arms, overlarge hands and crooked legs that seemed permanently bent backward at the knees, not unlike the hind legs of crouching wolves. Their eyes were two glittering rubies of evil swimming in the darkness enclosed within their drawn hoods.

  There were more movements, at the front and rear of the barn. Clearly, the enemy lay in ambush, waiting for them to come out into the yard. Brand squeezed Corbin’s shoulder, they exchanged glances and set themselves. They would have to make a run for the house. Brand’s legs tensed as he readied himself to sprint across the yard.

  Together they launched themselves at the front door of the house, hoping no one had locked it since they left. They knocked an old rainbarrel aside as they tore out of the barn. In the still night the sound of it clattering to the ground seemed deafening. An odd hooting sound of rage went up behind them. Brand could sense rather than hear their pursuers. Dark, hunched shapes that sulked beneath trees and huddled against the house rose up and turned toward them.

  Brand focused on reaching the door of the house before they could halt him. A dark shape scuttled close and reared up before them. He caught sight of glittering red eyes. Corbin swung the woodaxe wildly, there was an awful thunking sound and a squeal rent the cold air. As they scrambled past the rhinog, a clawed hand caught at Brand’s boot. He kicked at the thing and jerked away. Talons scraped and dug into leather, there was another snarling sound, then he was free.

  Brand reached the porch and the door first and all but fell into the house. They slammed the door in the leering faces of hunched shapes that mounted the porch steps behind them.

  “Modi!” shouted Brand, his chest heaving. For a moment no answer came, and a new fear gripped Brand. Had the enemy taken the house already? Had he risked all only to enter a new trap? Visions of Telyn and Jaks’ headless corpses came unbidden to his mind.

  Heavy footfalls came down the stairs then, causing Brand to heave a sigh of relief. Only Modi had such heavy boots.

  “Enemy?” questioned Modi as he emerged from the darkened hall.

  Brand nodded. “Rhinogs. They chased us from the barn.”

  Modi looked to Corbin and frowned. “Is he injured?”

  Brand followed his gaze and saw Corbin’s ashen face, drawn tight with lines of grief. He shook his head. “It’s his brother—Sam. The rhinogs killed him.”

  Modi nodded. He moved to look out a window, and that’s when the door seemed to heave against their backs. Brand and Corbin were still leaning against it, and on the far side the rhinogs had gathered, whispering and hissing. It wasn’t as if the door had been shoved, but rather as if it had suddenly come alive and taken in a great swelling breath.

  “They work a cantrip!” shouted Modi. “Away from the door!”

  Brand and Corbin staggered away from the door and it burst open behind them. The hinges came loose from the doorjamb and the lock shattered into metal shards. Beyond were the smoky, dark shapes of three rhinogs. Long serrated knives gleamed in their clawed hands. Red eyes gleamed beneath their cowls.

  Modi strode forward with his battleaxe raised. “Return to your dens! I am Modi of the Warriors, and many of you will I slay before this house falls!”

  A puff of smoky darkness seemed to obscure the three shapes, and Brand knew sorcery was at hand. He steeled himself for their charge, but instead of attacking, the three shapes seemed to fade from sight. After a moment the magical darkness faded and the porch beyond was empty.

  “Have they given up?” asked Corbin.

  Modi shook his head, scratching his beard. “It is not their way to fight openly. They have no stomach for it. They are assassins and footpads by nature. Their goblin sires will pull back and devise some new cunning trick.”

  Telyn and Gudrin came down then to join them and everything had to be explained. Modi lifted the battered door back into place and used spikes from the woodshed to hold it in place again. Brand armed himself with another woodaxe and helped the others rearrange the furniture into a barricade.

  Suddenly, Telyn raised a hand to stop their talk. Brand’s mouth opened to ask her what she meant, but then he heard it too. A crackling noise, coming from the back of the house. Moments later smoke poured out of the hall.

  “They’ve fired the house!” hissed Telyn, voicing everyone’s thought.

  Upstairs, Jak cried out hoarsely and there was a thumping on the floorboards overhead. Brand felt sick, his brother was trying to get out of bed and had fallen. He rushed into the smoky hall.

  “Brand!” Telyn cried after him. The smoke-filled hall was a cavern of hanging gray tendrils. His eyes burned immediately and his lungs rebelled with a choked cough. He ducked low, moving in a crouch and it was better, the air cleaner. He passed the kitchen and saw the lurid glare coming from the woodshed. They had fired it, and smoke was pouring into the house. Yellow tongues of flame licked up at the cabinets above the woodshed door. A rack of towels near the sink caught and flared brightly.

  Then he was on the stairs and the smoke was worse. He could hear his brother upstairs, coughing and dragging himself across the floor. At least they hadn’t crept in the upstairs windows and killed him yet, he told himself.

  He found his brother mostly by feel on the floor of the upstairs hall. The lamps had gone out somehow. He set down his woodaxe and groped in the dark. He got a hold of Jak under his arms and heaved him up. A groan of pain escaped his brother’s lips.

  “Brand?” Jak whispered. “They’re up here, Brand.”

  Brand caught a fluttering movement in the front bedroom.

  “I’m getting you out, Jak,” whispered Brand. He reached for a lamp, thinking to relight it. To his surprise he burnt his fingers on it. Looking closely, he saw that it was still lit, but that it gave only the barest glimmer of smoky, gray light. A lump of ice grew in his stomach as he realized he faced magic. The choking smoke had fogged his mind, but in a flash he realized that they had lured him up here by making Jak cry out. They had succeeded in drawing him apart from the others to slaughter him in this inky smoke.

  Brand began to drag his brother to the stairs, when he thought to hear a stealthy sound behind him. He looked back and saw the assassin. Visible only as a patch of deeper darkness in the hallway, the rhinog glided with an oddly inhuman, scuttling gait toward his exposed back, a long silvery knife poised low for a killing thrust. There was no time to reach his woodaxe, so Brand did the only thing he could think of, he grabbed up the hall lamp from its bracket on the wall and hurled it at the creature.

  The lamp exploded into yellow flame, the glass oil-vessel shattering and soaking his attacker. A horrible keening erupted from the rhinog and it sunk down, engulfed in flames. To Brand’s eyes it seemed to melt like a candle tossed into a roaring fire.

  He dragged Jak past the burning creature, which soon fell silent and stopped thrashing. At the top of the stairs he got Jak to his feet and drew one of his brother’s arms around his shoulders. Struggling and coughing, trying not to stumble, he headed down the stairs.

  At the bottom of the stairs he looked back. A second, smaller shape now stooped over the smoldering remains of the rhinog. It was the lithe form of a goblin, and Brand knew in his heart he faced the dark creature’s sire. He and the goblin met one another’s gaze for a moment, and never had Brand felt from another such vile hatred.

  Then the smoke obscured the scene and he was out in the front room again, where the others had repelled a sneak-attack through the windows. Aunt Suzenna’s prized shutters, which she had painted with rosettes and curling vines of her own design, now hung down, battered and scorched. Smoking black drops of what served the creatures for blood splattered the shutters and the sill.

  “Brand!” c
ried Telyn, hugging him. She took up Jak’s other arm. “Is he all right?”

  Gudrin stepped forward and examined Jak briefly. “He’s breathed too much smoke, but he should make it. If any of us do, that is.”

  “They’ve taken the upstairs,” Brand told them when he could speak. All of them were crouched in the front room, where the smoke wasn’t too overpowering yet.

  “They’re firing the house to drive us out into the dark,” said Gudrin.

  Chapter Sixteen

  Berserker

  “It is best that we try to break through immediately, rather than waiting until they expect us and we are entirely blinded by smoke.”

  “The manling we met in the barn said there were three goblins with their broods here, plus Voynod himself,” said Brand. “Can we hope to win through such a force?”

  Gudrin looked out the window for a long moment. Her face took on a cast of great age and weight. “There is a way,” she said, her voice almost a whisper.

  “You should leave me behind,” Jak told Brand. “I’ll only slow you all down. Don’t die on my account, someone must tend the isle.”

  “Forget it,” said Brand.

  “You could put me in the cellar, where I might live through the fire,” suggested Jak. He grimaced with pain at every step. Brand didn’t even bother to reply to his brother, thinking that the cellar would never survive the fire that was coming. He felt a pang of sadness for Aunt Suzenna, wondering where she was and hoping she was okay. If the rhinogs didn’t kill her outright, he thought that the sight of her beautiful home burnt to the ground would.

  At the front door barricade, they held a hurried council.

  “Modi, you are of the warriors, what do you suggest?” asked Gudrin.

  “We must break through them,” said Modi. For the first time since they had met him, the River Folk saw him in his true element. He talked more quickly and acted with greater decisiveness. There was a light in his eyes that had not been there before. Brand thought that he perhaps was only fully alive in the heat of battle. “They are attacking at the front of the house to lead us to attempt an escape at the back, where they doubtless lie in ambush. Therefore, we will exit here, at the front door. Straight into their ranks we will charge.

  “But,” he said, turning to Gudrin. The two locked eyes. “We need help. I see no alternative but to wield the axe.”

  Gudrin nodded in agreement. “I will wield it. You must be my second, Modi of the Warriors.”

  Modi’s eyebrows shot up. “But I should wield the axe. You are not of the Warriors.”

  “It matters not, for I’m still of the Kindred.”

  “But you have lived for so many seasons,” protested Modi, but he halted at a sign from Gudrin.

  “I will hear no more of it. I bear the burden, so I will wield it,” she said. While they spoke, the room had filled with a pall of black smoke and heat from fires in the back of the house washed their faces. Moving with care, Gudrin held up her rucksack, and for the first time opened it. A golden light shone forth from the rucksack, lighting up Gudrin’s face. Something seemed to shift, to move inside the golden light. Reflected specks of gold glinted in her eyes. The River Folk backed away in fright.

  “What sorcery is this?” demanded Jak.

  “High Magic!” cried Telyn, her eyes bright and her mouth curved in a broad smile.

  Gudrin made no answer. She slipped her book into the rucksack and it vanished into the golden light. “For now,” she said solemnly, “I relinquish the wisdom of the Teret and take up the fury of Ambros the Golden. Throw back the barricades!”

  Modi and the others hastened to obey her. Resetting the rucksack upon her back, Gudrin reached over her shoulder. Into her hand jumped the handle of a bone-white axe with twin, curved blades of great size. As she drew the weapon from its concealment a great change overcame her. Her aspect shifted from that of a talespinner to that of a warrior, lusting for battle. Her eyes shone with a light terrible to see, and her lips parted into a snarl of fury greater than any rhinog had ever produced. The bone-white axe she lifted high, and in its center was a great yellow Jewel. All there knew it to be the Golden Eye of Ambros, one of the Jewels of Power. A mixture of fear and wonder filled Brand to know he witnessed magic of legendary power.

  With an inhuman bellow, Gudrin charged into the shocked faces of the enemy. Behind her came Modi, his battleaxe also lifted high. The others followed, feeling a rage overtake them as well.

  Gudrin thrust up her bone-white axe so that the enemy might see the Eye of Ambros, shouting, “Know, foul ones, that you face the wrath of the Golden Dragon! The Lord of Wind and Sunlight is upon you!”

  The rhinogs fell back. A band of three stood in the yard, but melted back into the trees at their approach. With a shocking burst of speed, Gudrin charged to where they had vanished. As she reached the treeline, not three but five rhinogs appeared from the brush and tree trunks. They glided forward, springing an ambush. Brand released a cry of anguish as Gudrin, who had somehow outrun even Modi, faced the ambush alone. Stealthy dark shapes came at her from all directions in hunched postures. Their weapons, eyes and gnashed teeth gleamed in the brilliant golden light of the Jewel in the axe. Brand ran faster, sure he was about to witness the talespinner’s death.

  The axe flashed twice. Each time the white axe rose and fell the Eye of Ambros flashed, illuminating the night for a moment like a stroke of lightning. Two smoking carcasses fell and the rest of the band broke. The Rhinogs ran toward their goblin sires, who now glimmered near the barn.

  Gudrin made not for the road, but rather for the goblin sires that were gathering their broods to them for a hasty retreat. Modi and the River Folk could do nothing but follow her. The goblin sires gathered their rhinogs into three ragged lines and led them off into the trees. To Brand’s surprise, Gudrin still gave chase, running as Brand had never seen one of the Kindred run before. She caught up with one of the spry goblins when it ran into a thicket and had to turn. Its offspring showed no loyalty and fled in all directions in a panic. The goblin flew at Gudrin, all fangs and long-fingered hands stretched out like claws, but she lopped off its head. Gudrin then ran after another goblin. Deeper in the trees she went.

  “We must stop her!” cried Brand, running after Gudrin. “She can’t get them all! They’ll kill her!”

  “The Berserkergang has her in its grip,” said Modi. “It is best that you let her give chase.”

  Brand paid no heed, worried that the enemy would fall upon her alone in the forest and shoot her down or take her from behind. He had to run like the wind, but finally he caught up with Gudrin and laid a hand on her shoulder, spinning her around.

  Gudrin wheeled with the axe upraised. Brand wondered to see that despite the slaying it had done, the axe had not a single stain upon it. The Golden Eye of Ambros flashed in the blade, lighting up the dark forest as though it were day. The golden flecks still lived in Gudrin’s water-blue eyes and Brand thought to see a hint of madness there.

  “We’ve won Gudrin! Control yourself, Talespinner!”

  The axe blade flashed, and Brand thought he had forfeited his life, but it struck instead a great oak, biting deeply into the trunk. The entire being of the tree shivered, the finger-like winter branches rattling far above them.

  Brand looked down to see Gudrin on her knees, her face in her hands. The axe was buried in the mighty oak’s trunk so deeply that only the handle protruded. Amber light gleamed out of the crescent-shaped cut like the mouth of a jack-O’-lantern.

  “How will we ever get the axe free?” asked Brand in wonderment.

  Modi appeared at his side. “I will remove it,” he said, taking a step toward the tree.

  At this, Gudrin came alive again. “No, Modi! Don’t touch the axe!”

  Modi’s hand stopped, but it didn’t retreat. Brand watched Modi’s face and his huge hand, frozen in the middle of reaching for the axe. He knew there was a great struggle there. Clearly, he wanted the axe for his own. In the en
d Modi retreated. Gudrin stood weakly and took her book from her rucksack.

  “Lay your hands on the handle, Brand,” she said.

  Brand stepped forward, blinking. How was he supposed to pull the blade out of a foot of hardwood? What would the axe do to him?

  “No!” said Modi.

  “Silence!” shouted Gudrin with what seemed to be the last of her strength. “You will obey me and you will honor the words of your father.”

  Modi backed off and turned away. His shoulders hunched and his head hung low, he glowered at the ground fiercely. No one came near him.

  “Brand?”

  Brand stepped up. He glanced at Modi once, then at the others. Everyone watched him.

  “Remove the axe and place it back in my pack.”

  Brand nodded and laid his hand upon the handle.

  Brand felt the power of it course through him. It was as if he held the reins of a massive horse that shivered at his touch. He was reminded of the presence he’d felt when he had confronted the Shining Lady and Oberon.

  “Bruka!” Gudrin cried in the language of the Kindred.

  In response, the axe worked itself out of the hard flesh of the tree. Brand tugged at it, but it was the axe that did the work. He felt as though he drove a powerful animal, merely guiding it.

  It came free in his hand and he felt a greater surge of well-being...of power. The axe made him feel stronger. So strong, that its heavy curved blades were as light at a wand in his hand. Slowly, a wide grin opened his lips and spread over his face.

  Gudrin opened her rucksack and offered it to Brand.

  Brand froze, just as he had seen Modi do in reaction. He stared at the axe, and the Amber Jewel in the blade shimmered back at him, as if in acknowledgment , or perhaps as a form of greeting.

  Gudrin shook her rucksack suggestively.