Taking cover behind an undead cave troll, Grakk’n took aim. He drew his bowstring back, and yet another ice wraith, with its spider bodyguards taken by surprise, went up in flames.
With another of its valuable ice wraiths taken out, the Factory Core’s army again lost a tremendous amount of firepower … and as this happened, the Demon Horde surged forward, closing the final few yards still separating the two rival sides. With a manic howl the demons were among the spiders and geckoes, engaging in furious, chaotic hand-to-hand combat.
“Send in the undead cave trolls!” roared Grakk’n with a twisted sneer.
As the huge undead trolls and their imps jumped into the thick of the fighting, Grakk’n crept through the charging ranks of his troops, ready to take out another of the Factory Core’s ice wraiths. Victory was almost in his grasp. Almost.
CHAPTER 48
Bomfrey, Akzad and Randor crept through the dark tunnel. The only light came from Randor’s wizard staff, the tip of which was glowing gently. The three of them did not want to alert any demons to their presence, but they did need light to guide them through the inky blackness.
In the distance, the sounds of the great battle that was underway in front of Karak-Drang’s city gates could be heard: the crashing booms of thousands of muskets being fired, the roar of tens of thousands of howling, screaming demons, and the earth-rumbling booms of the gigantic trebuchet projectiles exploding throughout the capital.
“It sounds like the final face-off is underway, master dwarves,” whispered Randor as he followed the two dwarves through the cramped tunnel, holding his glowing staff over their heads to light the way. “This is good. It means that the demons will be distracted, and will not likely notice us.”
“It also means my city is being rapidly destroyed,” muttered Bomfrey. “All the more reason for us to make haste. Quickly, this way.”
“Not too fast, Bomfrey,” cautioned Akzad, his voice tremulous with fear. “There may be some fiends skulking around these tunnels and passages. We do not want to draw their attention by making unnecessary noise.”
They hurried forward, increasing their pace but also trying to be stealthy—a real challenge as it turned out, especially for Randor. Unlike the dwarves, who were used to moving through cramped, dark tunnels like these, Randor kept slipping and stumbling on the uneven ground, and often came close to bumping his head on the low ceilings, with their jagged spikes of rocks.
They turned another corner, and as they did, the tunnel opened out before them, giving them a clear view over the whole city of Karak-Drang below, as well as the battle that was taking place on the plains in front of the city.
“By all the gods,” murmured Bomfrey. “Half of the area is on fire! And more than half has been destroyed already!”
“Ruins … so much of it has been turned to ruins,” murmured Akzad, his eyes welling up with tears at the sight of so much devastation.
“Come, master dwarves,” said Randor. His voice was bolstered with determination. He had witnessed many such tragedies in the wars he had fought in before. “We must speed up to prevent the current levels of destruction from getting worse.”
Before moving off, though, they all watched in silent horror as one of the demons’ massive trebuchets launched a gigantic ball of fire from the plains. The flaming monster arced through the air, and came down with a mighty force mere yards from the palace, blowing an enormous crater in the ground and causing a section of the walls to crumble.
“The demons have almost got their weapons dialed in to hit the Factory Core!” gasped Bomfrey, his face a mask of despair and horror. “And if one of those things hits the Core directly, it might be the end of it.”
“Then there is no time for waiting and wringing our hands,” said Randor. “Quickly! Forget the secret passage; it will take too long. We must go directly to the Factory Core!”
“B-, but, that will mean going through the city streets,” said Akzad, his face pale with fear. “Where there are…”
“I’ll take care of any demons we happen to come across,” said Randor, his face a mask of resolute purpose. “This old wizard still has some of his former powers, master dwarves. I do not fear these vile creatures from the Infernal Realm. Come, down these stairs, we must go straight to the palace!”
A staircase had been cut into the rock here, and it led directly down to the edge of Karak-Drang. A locked gate stood between them and entering the walled city, but Bomfrey had a set of master keys that opened any of the city’s doors. Realizing the urgency of the situation, the three of them hurried down the flight of steps. It was a steep and perilous trip, and any slip on the uneven stairs could have sent them plummeting to their deaths, but they managed to reach the bottom in one piece. They hurried over to the huge gate, and Bomfrey used his master key to get them in.
Now that they were inside Karak-Drang, their fear of coming across assailants was definitely more legitimate. In fact, they could hear the sound of a skirmish between a pack of demon warriors and a group of the Core’s zombie demons happening very close to them.
“Quickly, master dwarves,” said Randor, striding on ahead and making a beeline for the palace, which was a few blocks away. “Let’s not lose focus!”
Bomfrey and Akzad scampered behind him, struggling to keep pace with the tall wizard, whose long legs were carrying him forward in great, determined strides. As the three of them rounded another corner, though, a group of demon warriors burst out onto the street in front of them from a side alley, blocking the way. The demons seemed surprised to find two dwarves and what looked like an old man here, but this surprise quickly turned to vicious fury. With bloodcurdling screams the demons rushed ahead, their claws and fangs bared as they thundered down the road directly at the three companions.
Bomfrey and Akzad were seized with terror, and panic rooted them to the spot. They were so terrified that they could neither shout nor run; they just stood there, frozen. Randor, however, was perfectly calm and collected, and as the demons bore down on them with murderous intent, he aimed his staff at them and whispered some words of an arcane language.
Lightning, almost blinding in its brightness, blasted out of the wizard’s staff, and a deafening thunderclap accompanied this vein of potent electricity. The demons were blown to tattered shreds of charred flesh by the lightning bolt, which—the instant it hit the leading demon—split into multiple branches, each of which smashed into another fiend, wiping them all out in a mere half-second.
Bomfrey and Akzad watched in disbelief, their ears ringing from the thunderclap and their eyes hurting from the intensity of the brightness. Where a charging mass of demons had stood a second earlier, there were now only smoking shreds of burned meat.
“If that was only some of your former power,” murmured Bomfrey, amazed, “I can’t even begin to imagine what you must have been capable of at the height of your powers.”
Randor chuckled heartily and blew a wisp of smoke off the end of his staff. “Never underestimate a wizard, master dwarf,” he said with a smile. “We have many tricks up our sleeves. But come, there is no time to talk of such things! We must get to the palace!”
“Yes, yes, the palace,” said Akzad eagerly. “Down this alley, Randor, it’s a shortcut. We’ll be there in just under a minute.”
They hurried down the alley and skidded around the corner at the bottom of it, and there, before them, stretched the palace walls. Inside the grounds was the Factory Core, and they needed to get to it immediately. Thankfully, the section of the palace wall that had collapsed when the trebuchet projectile had struck it was very close, and they were thus able to climb through the opening and get into the palace grounds.
There, a mere fifty yards away, the Factory Core awaited. They started racing toward it, but then they skidded to a halt as they saw a horrifying sight: one of the huge trebuchet projectiles came hurtling through the air … and smashed directly into the Factory Core in a tremendous explosion
of fire, smoke, and flying rubble.
CHAPTER 49
Trapper ignored what had just happened, or how long he had been out. When he came to, though, his ears were ringing with a shrill, persistent whining, and he was covered in a thick coating of masonry dust. Piles of rubble were everywhere, and dust was billowing in the air. There was a distinct smell of acrid smoke, and it was difficult to breathe.
One minute he had been navigating the endless labyrinth that was the interior of the Factory Core, and the last thing he remembered was a tremendous, earth-shattering crash and a blinding light. And then, darkness.
“What the hell happened?” he muttered into the dusty gloom. He couldn’t hear his own voice; the screaming whine in his ears was too loud.
It seemed that something huge and destructive—one of the fire balls flung by the giant trebuchets, most likely—had scored a direct hit on the Factory Core. Somehow, though, the structure of the Core, or rather some of it, at least, was still standing. Whether it was still operational, though, was another question.
Still, Trapper had little choice but to press on. It seemed that the passage behind him had been partially demolished by the strike, so the only way to go was ahead—into the heart of the Factory Core, which, he hoped, was still operational. Still alive.
He pressed on, heading down a spiral staircase. He had noticed that the machine had been moving its internals around prior to the trebuchet strike; he had been told the Core would do this, creating a maze within itself to confuse any intruders and lead them to their death. He knew, of course, that by activating the runes he was immune to the Core’s traps, but he also knew that even though it couldn’t kill him, it could have him run in endless circles.
Now, however, the Factory Core seemed to have stopped shifting its walls, doors and stairwells around. Everything was static. If the Core was still alive, perhaps it was now only partially functional.
Still, partially functional suited Trapper just fine. It made it a lot easier for him to reach the central control area without having to find his way through an almost infinite maze.
“I thought you were supposed to be smarter than anything alive,” he said with a smirk to the unmoving walls. “Not so smart now, I reckon.” The screaming whine in his ears was still there, but seemed to be fading in intensity, thankfully.
Trapper turned another few corners, went up another set of steps, and then came to a door that sported a number of runes on it. He mentally scanned the archives of his photographic memory, and quickly realized that these were the runes that revealed that he had arrived: this was the heart of the Factory Core.
He took out his enchanted goblet, dropped another gold coin into it and then prepared to pour the instantly-molten gold into three runes in a sequence that would clear the way. Now he would find out if the Factory Core was still alive, or if the trebuchet strike had killed it.
He transferred the gold into the runes and waited in suspense for a second. Then, with a whirr from machinery within the door and the click of the lock being automatically opened, a smile came across the thief’s face: the Factory Core was still active … and therefore was still his to steal.
Walking into the chamber beyond the unlocked door, he heard a clamor of sound. Branching off from this chamber were a number of doors, and it sounded like behind each one of them was a workshop, with something being manufactured inside. The sounds of hammers beating on metal, bellows blowing air onto fires, steam hissing, and engines cranking filled the chamber.
Trapper had no interest in what was going on in those rooms. The Factory Core could continue to work on whatever it was working on. All he cared about was completing his mission, and becoming master of the Core. To do that, he needed to turn on the runes located in the very deepest heart of the Core, where the soul gems with the souls of ancient heroes had been fused with the Core’s structure. To find this hallowed room, he walked around the chamber, checking the runes on every door. Again, he scanned the archives of his mind to try to find the correct sequence.
Soon enough he found it, and again he used his enchanted cup to trigger the runes that would unlock the door to the very heart of the Core. After the door opened for him, he stepped inside, grinning with anticipation. Starting out on this mission, he hadn’t even been sure that he would make it to the outside of the Factory Core alive, let alone get inside it. Yet now here he was, not just inside the fantastical creation but ready to take control of it.
There was no point in wasting any more time; he needed to seize command and to force the machine to move itself out of here, and get up to the Above World, where King Pavanir could take it and use it for his own ends. As for the Demon Horde down here? Well, Trapper didn’t care. They could take Karak-Drang and turn every stone in the city to dust.
He walked straight up to the tablet on which the most important runes were inscribed, and it didn’t take him long to identify the correct order of runes that, once filled with gold, would fulfill his and his king’s wildest dreams.
“And here we are,” he said to himself, rubbing his hands together eagerly after he dropped another gold coin into the enchanted alchemist’s goblet. “Mission … almost … complete.”
Trapper poured the gold into the first of the five runes, then the second, then the third, and then the fourth. He paused before he moved on to the fifth to savor this final second before he achieved his ultimate victory. Then with a grin he began to tilt his wrist to transfer the final bit of molten gold into the last rune of the sequence.
It was at that moment that something very strange happened: his wrist simply locked, as if a mighty invisible hand had clamped its steely fingers shut around his wrist. He grunted, straining harder to turn his palm, but it remained unmoving. With a groan of annoyance, he reached for the goblet with his left fingers—but found that this side too was frozen in place, as if another powerful invisible hand was gripping it and preventing it from moving.
“I’m sorry, thief,” said a stern, booming voice. “But I cannot let you do this. Your mission has failed.”
CHAPTER 50
Bomfrey and Akzad stared with cold fury at Trapper’s back, watching while Randor—with his wizard’s staff pointed at the thief—kept him immobile with invisible holds.
“We should just kill that vermin now and put an end to this,” growled Akzad, his face crimson with wrath.
“As tempting as that is,” said Bomfrey, “and believe me, I wish nothing more than to stick a dagger between his ribs … we need him alive, so that he can admit, before King Odok-kram, that he was hired by King Pavanir and Ser Greenfield to do this. We need him alive, as evidence of the heinous crime he and Pavanir were trying to commit, and how they totally betrayed the trust of our king.”
“I agree,” said Randor. “He will be most useful to us as evidence. I will bind him with my magic; he won’t be able to go anywhere. Bomfrey, master dwarf, you’d best go and remove that goblet from his hand before the gold in it spills into that final rune.”
“Agreed,” said Bomfrey.
He walked over to Trapper, who was, essentially, paralyzed from the wizard’s imperceptible chains around his body, and snatched the enchanted cup out of the thief’s frozen hands. Standing so close to the thief, he felt his right hand ball into a tight fist, and it took every ounce of restraint he possessed to hold himself back from beating Trapper’s face into a bloody pulp.
“Put this disgusting scumbag over there,” hissed Bomfrey, pointing at a corner of the room. “We’ll deal with him later. Right now we need to do everything we can to help the Factory Core defeat the Demon Horde. I don’t know how the structure survived a direct hit from those trebuchets but—”
“Well, only some of it,” murmured Akzad with a deep wince. “Much of our creation has been destroyed. Luckily for us, though, the heart of the Core is still intact…”
“Yes, yes,” said Bomfrey, his tone brimming over with annoyance. “The point is, any more damage will be
fatal to it; there is no question about that. And we will be destroyed along with it.”
“Let’s take a look through the Core’s eyes and see how the battle is progressing,” said Akzad. “And we’ll need to examine each of the workshop rooms to find which ones are still operational, and which were rendered useless by the trebuchet. The Factory Core was working on its final invention, one that would completely change the tide of the battle … but if the workshop in which it was making that secret weapon has been struck, I’m not sure whether the battle can be won at this stage.”
Randor used his staff to shove the now-paralyzed thief into the corner of the room, and then the three of them peered through a number of lenses to get a view of the formidable struggle through the eyes of some of the Factory Core’s mechanical soldiers.
From what they could observe, the battle was not going well, not for the Factory Core’s army at least. The spiders and geckoes were fighting furiously and tirelessly, but all of them had run out of ammunition, and even though they were capable fighters when it came to hand-to-hand combat, the sheer numbers of the demon warriors meant that they were simply being overwhelmed.
The demon commander Grakk’n seemed to have taken out all of the ice wraiths by this stage of the battle, and his undead cave trolls were wreaking havoc on the spiders and geckoes, smashing them to smithereens. The situation was dire; it looked as if the war was almost certainly lost for the Factory Core’s army. Over three quarters of the Factory Core’s troops had been annihilated by this time, and while they had exacted a heavy toll on the Demon Horde, it had not been enough to prevail. The final survivors of the Core’s army were now banding together in a tight square, surrounded on all sides by the Demon Horde, which looked as if it would almost certainly wipe them out completely, perhaps even within minutes.
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