Measure and the Truth

by Doug Niles

  He shrugged. “You like it here?”

  “Yes, I do.” She snuggled against him, sighing blissfully.

  “Me too. Maybe we stay for a long time. Live here in winter, with fires on hearths to keep us warm.” With a squeeze of his massive arm, he held her tight.

  “I like that. But bad men—what if they come and fight us? What those dwarves doing anyway?”

  Ankhar chuckled genially. “Dwarves, hah! We squash them if they come too close. And see little fort down there, pet? Bad men have to fight through that first!”

  And right then, before his very eyes, that massive gatehouse simply disintegrated. He saw the explosion before he heard it: the platform where a hundred ogres and a hundred Dark Knights stood blasted straight up into the air, propelled by a gout of flame and smoke that seemed to erupt like a volcano from somewhere deep in the bowels of Krynn. Pieces of stone shot high into the sky, intermingled with lazily tumbling bloody figures of ogres and men.

  Next he felt the pressure of the blast, a sickening lurch in the floor beneath his feet. The massive High Clerist’s Tower swayed like a tree in the wind, and for an instant, the half-giant was certain he would be pitched over the low side and fall to certain death. Pond-Lily screamed, and for a moment, that piercing noise, coming from right below his ear, was the only sound he heard.

  Finally the sound of the explosion reached him, a boom of noise louder than any blast of thunder he had ever heard. It felt like a punch to the heart and gut and deep inside his brain, knocking all the air out of him, smashing and staggering him. He tumbled back against the interior column, where the tower climbed to its lofty Kingfisher’s nest, then slumped to a sitting position, stunned and staring. The first echo came then, almost as loud as the initial blast, and all he could do was numbly clap his hands over his ears.

  Jaymes, Coryn, Dram, and the generals watched the explosion from a mile away. The dwarf let out a whoop as the column of debris—intermixed with smoke and searing balls of fire—spewed high into the air. The blast was tremendous, carrying away the entirety of the south gatehouse and a great section of the adjacent wall. Even the huge spire of the central tower felt the shock, swaying visibly back and forth. Churning upward, the mass of smoke and destruction billowed into the sky. Bursts of fire showed in the darkness of the cloud, and for a splendid few heartbeats, the great scatter of debris poised, almost weightless, in the air.

  The smoke kept climbing, but almost immediately stones, rocks, and bodies rained back down across the pass, killing men and ogres of the garrison who had survived the blast but weren’t quick enough to duck under shelter. One slab of wall, a hundred feet wide, smashed every Dark Knight on a nearby rampart above the curtain wall. A huge portcullis, bars twisted but still banded together, crushed three ogres who stupidly had raced outside the base of the main tower to gape in astonishment at the devastation.

  Smoke spewed into the sky like a column of ash from an erupting volcano. Bits of wooden debris, much of it flaming, tumbled away from the murk, scattering like small meteors across the road, the mountains, and the interior of the fortress.

  “Go now! Give them your steel!” Jaymes roared to the men and dwarves of his assembled, waiting forces.

  As soon as the rocks and other shrapnel ceased to rain down, the dwarves of New Compound together with the infantry of the Palanthian Legion and the Crown Army rushed forward into the gap. Shouting and cheering, chanting hoarse battle cries, they erupted into the open. Dwarves banged their axes against their shields, and humans clattered their swords together, adding to the din.

  The attackers swept forward in irregular formation—pushing through the choking smoke and dust, scrambling over the piles of rubble left by the shattering of the walls, stumbling and scrambling up the steep slopes. They charged into the gaping courtyards of the fortress. So much of the wall had come down that the attackers had dozens of possible routes leading right into the interior of the fortress. Quickly they rushed up stairs, claiming the tops of the walls to either side of the massive breach, and passed through the vacant courtyards, pressing into the fortress’s interior buildings.

  The dwarves, with Dram in the lead, charged to the left, sweeping up onto a standing curtain wall, rushing along the rim, one by one taking the towers that obstructed passage at intervals around the ring-shaped barrier. Axes and hammers smashed against closed doors, splintering the boards. The dwarves crushed ogre skulls and broke ogre limbs with abandon, as many defenders were still stunned by the tunnel blast. Whether the ogres were lying down, fighting, or running away, the dwarves of New Compound gave no quarter.

  Following General Weaver, the men of the Palanthian Legion spread out in the middle of the fortress, capturing one courtyard after another. Several companies burst into the base of the great tower before the defenders could recover enough to close their gates, and soon the attackers found themselves in the deep passages where long ago the Heroes of the Lance had lured dragons to their doom with the Orb of Dragonkind.

  From there, the attackers worked their way higher, charging up stairways, slaying any Dark Knights or ogres who stumbled into their path. The farther they got from the scene of the blast, the more organized were the defenders, yet the swiftness of the advance continued to carry the day. The knights and foot soldiers swept through a level of temples and shrines, another of garrisons and mess halls. Six ogres tried to hold at the top of a stairway. Weaver’s crossbowmen shot them down with a single well-aimed volley, and again the emperor’s men rushed up and past.

  General Dayr led the footmen of the Crown Army to the right, with a large detachment under Captain Franz attacking the separate redoubt known as the Knights’ Spur. They clashed with a line of Dark Knights on the drawbridge to that isolated complex, and again the charge swept right into the spur before the outer gates could be closed. Skirmishes raged in a dozen chambers, but the Crowns threw more and more men into the figh. The Dark Knights could only fall back or die.

  Then Jaymes ordered the second rank—mostly heavy infantry—to advance in as close a formation as they could maintain through the rubble and debris. The field commanders would use the second wave as a reserve, concentrating them wherever the enemy seemed determined to make a stand. Some men cleared paths through the rubble, so the follow-up troops could fight more readily.

  Then, finally, the emperor and the white wizard advanced, side by side, seeking an end to the matter once and for all.

  Pond-Lily was sobbing, and Ankhar cradled her under his big right arm. They leaned against the solid tower wall inside the High Lookout, watching as the attackers ran rampant through the fortress. The southern gatehouse, where the Nightmaster had pledged an epic defense, was simply gone, blasted into pieces by the unimaginable explosion. Those pieces, the half-giant assumed, included the little bits that remained of the black-masked cleric. The gatehouse was merely a gaping hole, a smoky crater crawling with the figures of dwarves and the emperor’s men.

  Bakkard du Chagne burst out of the door from the tower’s interior to find Ankhar and his ogress on the parapet.

  “The emperor’s men are in the base of the tower!” he cried shrilly. “They’re coming up the steps! Our men can’t hold them back.”

  “Coming up the steps of this tower?” asked Pond-Lily, gaping.

  “Yes, you stupid bitch!” screamed du Chagne. “They’ll be here any moment!”

  Pond-Lily uttered a choking sob and buried her head in the half-giant’s side.

  Ankhar shook off his lethargy and shock to glare at the chubby, balding man. The former lord regent, used to obedience and command, nervous of disposition and irascible of temper, had been an annoying presence during their weeks in that confined space. The half-giant had tolerated him only because he had been brought there by and was under the protection of the Nightmaster.

  But … he looked at the crater again. No one could have survived that. It seemed safe to conclude the Nightmaster was dead.

  Ankhar released the weeping Pond-
Lily, who merely watched in amazement as the half-giant grabbed du Chagne around the neck and easily hoisted him off the ground. The human’s eyes and tongue bulged out, but the grip was too constricting for him to make any sound. He could only stare pathetically into the half-giant’s eyes as Ankhar lifted him over the parapet and dangled him in the air, hundreds of feet above the violence-racked courtyard below.

  Then the half-giant let the former lord regent go, and that was when du Chagne found his voice, uttering a piercing shriek that lasted a very long time—as long as it took for him to hit the ground.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN

  GODS, MORTALS, AND MAGIC

  Coryn and Jaymes strode side by side through the wreckage caused by the blast. Nothing about the smoking crater suggested it had once been a mighty gatehouse or part of any kind of structure. The broken rock was strewn haphazardly, with a shallow groove running through the middle to vaguely suggest where the explosive-packed tunnel had been mined underneath the ground.

  The bodies of many men and ogres of the garrison had been blown to pieces by the explosion. Here and there lay a grotesque corpse—or a part of a corpse—but those, like everything else, were so coated with the ubiquitous gray dust that they resembled stone more than flesh. Coryn turned away from the sight of one apparently unmarked corpse, a dead Dark Knight pasted with so much fine powder that he looked like a skillfully rendered statue of a dead man.

  “Over here,” Jaymes said, finding a channel in the debris. They passed between shattered walls rising like jagged cliffs to either side of them, and the emperor had to clasp a hand over his face just to keep the dust from choking him. He felt it coating his beard and skin, saw it on his leggings and tunic and boots.

  Yet when he looked at the enchantress, her robe was as immaculately white as ever. He could only shake his head in amazement.

  “We need to climb up into the tower, see who’s still alive up there, right?” he asked.

  “Ankhar has been on the High Lookout many times every day,” Coryn reported. “I’m guessing he has quarters somewhere high up in the tower.”

  “Yes,” Jaymes agreed. “Let’s go pay him a visit.”

  He came to a section of broken stairway leading toward the top of one of the walls. The outer portions of the steps had been blasted away, but some remained. Clasping the railing with his left hand, he stepped carefully upward, kicking loose rubble out of the way. Coryn took his other hand and climbed behind him.

  From the top of the wall, they could see the dwarves surging around the top of the curtain wall. Already they were halfway around the main tower, closing toward the north gatehouse. Dayr’s men were making good progress on the other half of the wall, and Jaymes had hopes that within another hour or so the entire perimeter of the great fortress would be in the hands of his men.

  Of course, that still left the main tower, the mountainous structure that rose to its imposing height in the middle of the massive fortress. Sounds of battle rang from throughout that edifice as the two moved closer as fast as caution would allow.

  They passed through a doorway where there had been heavy fighting. The bodies of three men of Palanthas were pulled to the side and arrayed in respectful repose, while a dozen dead Dark Knights sprawled just within the entry, just where they had fallen.

  The pair started up the great central stairway, but after climbing fifty steps, they came up against the backs of a hundred of Weaver’s legionnaires, who were engaged in a furious clash with a company of ogres who had barricaded the way with benches, tables, and other furniture. The heart of the skirmish was about one floor above them, and they couldn’t see much, though they heard plenty of steel clashing, voices shouting and crying out in pain.

  “We’ll flush ’em out with steel, Excellency,” a sergeant promised over his shoulder. “But it might take us an hour or two.”

  “What about elsewhere in the tower? How goes the advance?”

  “They’re blocking all the stairs now. We can beat ’em back one floor at a stretch—for as soon as we carry one stairway, we can outflank all the others on the same floor—but it’s a damn tall tower and it’ll take time, sir,” the man concluded awkwardly.

  “Carry on,” Jaymes said, clapping him on the shoulder.

  “There’s a way we can get around this,” Coryn said. “Come outside.”

  She led Jaymes through a door onto one of the small parapets that dotted the outside of the massive tower. They stood side by side as she pulled a small bottle from within a pocket of her robe. “It’s a potion of flying,” she said. “I’ve been saving my magic, but I think we might as well head straight to the top now.”

  “That’ll give us the advantage of surprise,” he agreed. Jaymes took the tiny bottle from her and quickly tossed back the bitter, burning liquid. The magic tingled through his limbs, and he merely had to will himself upward to rise from the parapet.

  At the same time, Coryn cast a spell of flying on herself. Thirty heartbeats later, the wall of the tower slipped easily behind them as, like ascending birds, the magic-user and the emperor soared toward the High Lookout.

  Ankhar held his spear in his right hand while clutching the waist of his ogress in his left. He could see the emperor’s army was going to take over the fortress. For all the talk of high walls and gatehouses, the defense had proved hopeless. Hundreds had been killed by the initial blast, and those left alive were dazed to the point where many could not even fight. As far away as he had been, Ankhar still felt the stunning effects of the explosion and had just begun to recover his senses. But the tower would fall.

  Even so, the half-giant did not feel much disappointment. He was prepared to die there that day. He did experience a momentary tug of regret when he thought of the winter he might have spent there in a snug room with a fire and a large bed and Pond-Lily. But he shrugged away the thought. He was a warrior, and it was fitting he should die in battle.

  Just then, Hoarst and the Nightmaster came through the door from the tower to join Ankhar and Pond-Lily on the lookout. The ogress and the half-giant, standing at the parapet while watching the battles rage below, turned at the approach of the two men.

  “So, you’re alive,” the half-giant grunted at the sight of the black-masked priest. “I thought you probably blew up.” He gestured at the smoking crater where the gatehouse had stood.

  “The Prince of Lies whispered a warning in my ear, and I teleported away an instant before the blast,” the Nightmaster said dispassionately.

  “Hmm. You are favored by the Prince, indeed,” Ankhar said, impressed. He thought of du Chagne, and wondered if he should tell the priest what he had done. But he merely shrugged that thought away too. Dropping the man from those heights had been one of the most pleasurable things he had done in a very long time.

  At the memory, Ankhar peered over the edge, hoping something blocked the sight of the man’s shattered body below. But something else—movement he did not expect to see—caught his eye.

  “Oh, oh! Here comes the emperor and the White Witch!” the half-giant cried. Hoisting his spear over his head, the shook the weapon eagerly. “They fly like birds to us! Come here, birdies! At last—the birdies are bringing a fight to me, a fight for the Truth!”

  In the next instant, the two humans, magically soaring, swept up and over the wall. Coryn paused in the air, hovering, while Jaymes stepped onto the platform, landing in a crouch and drawing his mighty sword. Ankhar raised his spear to greet the swordsman.

  The Nightmaster, Pond-Lily, and the two wizards were all forgotten as the huge half-giant readied himself to meet his hated foe.

  Then the Nightmaster cast a spell, and everything went dark.

  Jaymes came to rest on the parapet and immediately charged toward Ankhar—until the darkness spell blinded him and he halted, spun, and dodged instinctively. He heard a clatter of stone against stone and realized the half-giant must have stabbed his huge spear into the ground, just missing him.

  “Light!” roared
the great brute. “I must see!”

  “Use the darkness, fool!” the cleric’s voice hissed. “Strike about you!”

  Air whooshed past Jaymes’s ear, and he knew Ankhar was taking the priest’s advice. The foe had a longer weapon, and he was too close already. The swordsman edged away, trying to keep away from the edge of the tower. Where was Coryn? Damn, he had to see!

  “Burn!” Jaymes demanded, crouching and twisting in the magical darkness.

  Giantsmiter erupted with crackling energy, limned with the searing blue flames. That fire pushed back the darkness in the man’s immediate vicinity. Ankhar stood right before him, and the half-giant reared back, retreating from the lunging attack, vanishing again into the murk of the priest’s cloaking spell.

  Jaymes noticed the Nightmaster then, and he rushed at the priest with his weapon raised. The dark cleric cast another spell, this time causing an image of blurry force to gather in the air between the two men. The power of the great sword knocked the magic away, breaking the shimmering force field into shards, and the murk of the darkness spell broke as well.

  “Look out!” cried Coryn. Flying, she swept around the central pillar, pursuing the Thorn Knight who was retreating in front of her.

  Then something hit Jaymes from the side, and he darted out of the way of a deadly blow. Looking down in shock, he saw blood spilling from his hip. The chubby ogress, who was obviously Ankhar’s consort, stood there, a bloody knife in her hand, which she was drawing back for another blow. With a quick slash of his great sword, Giantsmiter, Jaymes cut her down, half slicing her head from her shoulders before he spun back to attack the priest.

  From somewhere out of sight, he heard Ankhar’s wail of anguish.

  The Nightmaster turned to run, reaching the door to the interior of the tower as the emperor charged, driving his blade through the black cleric’s back. As the priest gasped and stumbled sideways, Jaymes spun on his heel, swinging the sword so the impaled man slipped off the end of the blade. He struck the edge of the parapet and, with a wrenching drive, Jaymes pushed him over the lip. The high priest of Hiddukel, already dying, tumbled downward to sprawl near the body of Bakkard du Chagne.