by H. A. Harvey
Nian started a brief recount of their escape from Broadstone. He was in the midst of explaining the relic blade when their reunion was interrupted by another sudden arrival in the gully. Xain, Autumn, and Kaesa were bowled aside as Tombo excitedly tackled Nian to the ground and set about soaking his face and hair thoroughly.
“Ow! Tombo, I’m hurt.” Nian cried out from beneath the mass of fur and blunt claws. “Get off me!”
Rowan clicked his tongue at Tombo crossly and the hampan sheepishly backed away from Nian. After staring apologetically at Rowan for a moment, he reached a claw over and gently pushed Nian to his feet, holding him steady for a moment. Nian laughed at the simian and gave him a one-armed hug around his thick neck. Rowan smiled at the momentary correlation to happier days, but his reverie was interrupted when his gaze drifted toward the sky. Each side of the gully was lined with more than a score of brogan staring down at the company.
“Um, alright.” Rowan swallowed nervously, “Everyone can ask me about this in a minute, but right now I need you all to slowly come over and pet Tombo.”
“What?” Autumn blinked at him in confusion.
“We’ve got company. No! No weapons.” Rowan quickly held out a hand toward Kaesa, who evidently could see them as well. “Just . . . trust me. They’re not fond of mortals, but for some reason Tombo is like a holy shrine to them. They might be alright with more if you’re with him.”
One at a time, the group warily stepped over to Tombo and started petting or scratching him. The hampan made happy gurgling noises at all the attention. Rowan barely dared to breathe as he watched the brogan above them. Slowly, they seemed to relax, and he let out a sigh of relief. As the brogan drifted back into the woods, Rowan’s eye caught the fur bundle. The heavy cloak had been dropped and knocked open in the commotion, revealing its tiny occupant.
“Thea?” Rowan blinked in confusion, “She wasn’t even coming with us.”
Nian turned toward the Goblin’s body and sighed as Xain hurried over to re-wrap her. “She ended up coming along after all, though now I wish she hadn’t. We . . . I promised to get her somewhere nice.”
Rowan nodded. He wasn’t sure why the sight of her upset him so much. Perhaps it was simply that she was so small that part of him still thought of her as a child despite her being roughly ten years his elder. Whether or not that had anything to do with it, Rowan realized that though he never bothered to socialize with her or the other mercenaries much, her constant jabs and unquenchable bright mood had lent a kind of light to the otherwise grim journey. Parting ways had seemed easy enough, but knowing with certainty that her levity had been removed from the world suddenly made the world seem somehow more hollow and dark. Rowan knelt and reverently stroked the soft fur.
“I know a place. It’s not far.”
14
Coming to Court
Nian stood staring at the base of the poplar tree, lit by the early morning light. Three cairns lay in the shade of the tree. Rowan was putting the finishing touches on Amalthea’s mound. He and Xain had hauled a large, flat stone from the river which they nestled over the stones at the head of the cairn. Nian watched as Rowan laid a trio of the Goblin’s jagged daggers on the stone with their blades crossing. He was surprised Rowan seemed to be so deeply touched by Amalthea’s death. Nian had always thought Rowan generally didn’t like people, and he hadn’t paid the Goblin much attention at all.
The feather on Kolel’s hat caught a gust of wind and drew Nian’s eye. Despite the overpowering grief Nian felt, he found himself smiling. Even from the grave, the Sattal had to get attention somehow. As Nian reminisced about the strange little merchant, Kaesa hobbled over on her makeshift crutch and stood next to him.
“Ye ar hard to read.” She said simply in a quiet voice.
Nian blinked, “What?”
“At home, dere is no sorrow for one who dies well. I hear in odder lands, dere ar always tears.” Nian felt her look at him though he kept staring at Kolel’s hat. “Wid de Goblin, ye wept, but for dis man, ye smile.”
“I was just thinking of things he did, how he helped me, taught me. He was like you in a way. One little mention of the divine and he was committed with everything he had. He never thought twice about leaving everything behind. He believed in an instant, in Her and in me. I still don’t know if I believe any of it. It’s still horrible that it had to end like this.”
“Do not say dat.” Kaesa admonished him with a severe tone. “All ends are de same. In de end, ye die. All dat matters is de means by which ye live. If he lived for someding he believed, did not fall prey to fear in de end and ye remember him well, it is to be celebrated.”
Kaesa had a point, but Nian really didn’t feel like discussing anything at the moment. He focused back on the graves. His attention drifted to Adair’s cairn. Autumn knelt beside the stones, sitting back on her heels. Her slender hand rested on the breastplate that acted as the grave’s marker. She didn’t weep, but hadn’t moved or spoken since Rowan had led them to the hill. Nian limped his way over and rested a hand on her shoulder. No sooner had he touched her skin than Autumn’s hand wrapped around his wrist and wrenched his arm painfully. Before Nian quite knew what was happening, he was rolling down the hill.
“I told you to leave me alone.” Autumn stated flatly.
“Autumn!” Rowan leapt to his feet, “He was just trying to . . .”
“Don’t Ro.” Nian interrupted, trying without success to get up without wincing, “Just leave it. She did tell me, I just didn’t get it. I do now.”
Nian watched the Dryad’s eyes for any sign, but they were unreadable, almost hollow. The brogan chose that moment to return. The pack of seven creatures seemed to be led by one that was a head shorter than the rest, wearing a grubby cotton shirt that hung loose down to his ankles. Most of the brogan stopped at the foot of the hill while the plump little one with the shirt trudged up to Rowan. It gained his attention by nuzzling its snout against an angry-looking bite mark on his friend’s arm. The brogan made a beckoning gesture and then waved at the sky. The little creature nibbled at his claws and pointed open claws at Nian and the others. Rowan frowned angrily.
“You can’t eat them!”
“I don’t think that’s what he wants.” Nian interjected, “I think he wants us to get out of the light. He’s nervous about something.”
“How do ye know dat?” Kaesa asked, sounding a little suspicious but more impressed.
“I don’t know.” Nian answered honestly, “I guess I’m just used to reading people.”
The little brogan gave a grunt and looked down the hill at the others. A few seemed to start forward, but balked. Nian watched their eyes carefully. The creatures didn’t seem to be afraid of him or any of his companions, nor even regard them at all really. However, their eyes kept darting between the graves beneath the poplar tree, himself, and Xian. More specifically, they seemed to eye their bandages.
“They don’t like the dead.” Nian observed aloud, “Or our wounds for some reason.”
“We should go with them.” Rowan said quickly, “They’re worried about what those things will bring.”
“We can handle any predators dat show up.” Kaesa boasted.
“Not these. Let’s go quickly.”
Nian didn’t know precisely why Rowan was so spooked, but he did trust his knowledge of wild things. Rowan knew the wilds well enough to outwit anything he couldn’t hunt and kill. Until today, he’d never heard his friend talk about any creature with fear in his voice. There had been respect, awe even, but never fear. Nian limped down toward the group of brogan and the others all silently followed suit.
The brogan shuffled along quickly ahead of the group. The lone exception was the little fellow who had approached Rowan. He shuffled along next to one, then another, of the company. He seemed to pay little attention to the ground in front of him and stumbled more than on
ce as he eyed each person, snuffled the gear about their belts, and made odd grunting noises at them. It didn’t seem to be speech of any sort, at least not that Nian could make out. Nian’s best guess was that the creature seemed to keep working himself up into a tizzy over the different things they were carrying, and the grunts seemed like almost unconscious outbursts. The only thing that the pudgy brogan didn’t seem to like was Nian’s sword. At one point, his snout brushed against the hilt and he gave a sharp yelp that brought Nian’s companions and the brogan ahead of them to a halt. Once it was evident that he wasn’t harmed, they moved on again, but the curious brogan didn’t come back to Nian again.
The procession made its way through the woods in relative silence. Nian passed the time by observing their strange little hosts. They didn’t seem to communicate, at least not idly. The little black-and-white sentries simply trudged along in an irregular mob. Occasionally, one would brush up against another. Sometimes, each member of the collision would give an odd grunt not unlike the little shirted fellow’s noises in exploring their gear. Other times, a disturbingly violent wrestling match would break out. The other brogan would stop and watch, seeming half-interested. Nian noted that these tussles involved a great deal of biting, headbutting, and grappling, but never the use of their formidable claws. After each tussle, the march would resume, with the victor waddling to the front of the group, while the vanquished brogan trailed behind the others briefly. Then they would seem to forget the whole thing and drift back together again, generally just before the next pair bumped shoulders.
When it became apparent that there wasn’t going to be much variation to the brogan routine, Nian let his attention drift elsewhere. He looked over his shoulder at Autumn. She was walking slowly behind everyone else, staring emptily into nothing. Her normally golden eyes lacked their typical luster, looking more like burnished bronze than their typically bright, gilded appearance. Suddenly, her eyes focused on him. Nian immediately felt as though he’d been caught snooping and his first instinct was to quickly turn away. Instead, he found himself remembering her smiling at him in the Deepwood tavern, and for no reason in particular decided to return the gesture now. Autumn looked blankly at him for several moments before drifting back to wherever she had been before. Nian turned back to face forward, quietly chastising himself for grinning at her like an idiot at such a time.
Nian looked back again, but made certain not to look at Autumn. His gaze instead fell upon Kaesa as she hobbled along in silent determination. She’d set her broken leg herself, largely because no one else present could have held her down while it was done. They’d bound strips from Nian’s cloak around the scaled armor on her thigh, binding them together to splint her leg. Rowan had tried to get Tombo to carry her, but the pointed ridges on each scale of her armor irritated him to no end, and the Njord adamantly refused to remove her armor. The green branch Rowan had cut for her only let her keep some weight off the leg, and Nian could tell that she was suffering despite her silent stoicism. He had just determined to try and get the brogan to stop and rest when he turned forward to find their escorts had halted of their own accord.
They had stopped at the base of a steep hillside where the tangled roots of a great oak tree lay half-exposed. One of the brogan scuttled under the gnarled roots and seemed to squeeze under a particularly thick one and vanish. Nian knelt down to get a closer look, and a hole, no more than a foot and a half across, led into the hill at an upward angle behind the root. He watched two more brogan perform the impossible feat of squeezing their broad forms through the black gap while the rest of his companions caught up. Rowan joined Nian and gave a humorless chuckle when he saw the fourth brogan vanish into the hole.
“They have to be kidding.” Rowan moaned. “Even healthy, nobody but maybe Autumn could get in there, and I’m not leaving Tombo out here to be dragon bait.”
Nian froze. Rowan took a moment to notice that everyone else had as well, and were all staring at him. Nian had to work at clearing the lump that had mysteriously blocked his throat before he could say anything.
“There’s a dragon here?” Nian tried to sound casual about the question, but was quite certain he’d failed miserably.
Rowan sighed, “I wanted to get somewhere safe before we got into it, but yeah. Well not exactly, there isn’t a dragon here, there are dragons.”
Something Kaesa said was drowned out as the hillside a few yards from the oak tree trembled suddenly. Nian wasn’t entirely sure that the sudden sound hadn’t also helped conceal a rather girlish yelp on his part. He watched as leaves and other detritus shook loose from the hillside and several inches of earth fell off of a large boulder as the stone worked its way out of the hillside. At length, the boulder slid out far enough to reveal the brogan pushing the stone out from a tunnel beneath the hill. The three still outside dug their claws into the sides of the rock and helped haul it back far enough that even Tombo could access the tunnel, though he would take up nearly the thing’s entire breadth and height.
Perhaps due to the mention of dragons hunting the surface, few of the party wasted any time heading into the tunnel. Only Autumn walked in casually, and then there was Tombo, who stood staring after them from outside the dark hole. The brogan tried to push him in but he bleated miserably and scrambled over them to resume his post outside. It took Nian lighting the tunnel with his sword and nearly twenty minutes of coaxing from Rowan before the hampan finally crawled reluctantly into the tunnel. Another round of theatrics and plaintive bellowing followed when the brogan slid the boulder back over the entrance. It took quite a bit of work, but Nian and Rowan were finally able to get Tombo to a state of at least muted terror. They worked out a marching order that placed Xain and Kaesa, who had no need of the light, farthest forward, following the brogan, while Rowan stayed at the rear with Tombo. Nian stood at the middle, next to Autumn, keeping the sword between them and in plain view of the hampan.
The company moved quietly down the large tunnel as it snaked side to side in a path that lead progressively downward. Smaller tunnels intersected theirs intermittently. A few were similar to the tiny entrance hole that the brogan had used, but most were large enough for two of the creatures to walk abreast, though any of Nian’s friends would have to crouch to enter them. Out of the group of companions, only Xain and Autumn failed to seem ill-at-ease in the dark, cloistered passage. For his part, Xain actually seemed somewhat more relaxed than normal. He commented on what he called the tunnel’s “rough and unfinished workmanship,” but did seem impressed that the brogan tunnels ran through earth without the need for buttressing or supports of some kind. All the same, he cautioned the others against loud noises or unnecessary vibrations.
Time was difficult for Nian to gauge under the ground, but he guessed they pressed on for the better part of an hour before the earth turned to rough stone. Xian said that most of the rock seemed to be natural, though the brogan had definitely scratched out a few modifications. They passed several side chambers that seemed to be larders of some sort, each having the smell of dried fruit, fish, or meat. As Rowan said most of the brogan fare seemed to be eaten fresh, Nian guessed the chambers held their stores for winter or other lean times. Finally, they came to a spot where the tunnel opened into a large cavern. The vast chamber’s size was impossible for Nian to gauge, for beyond the large ledge they found themselves on, his light stretched out into an empty void that echoed with the odd grunting of the brogan and a constant sound of flowing water.
The brogan stopped and their little ambassador, who Rowan explained Riona had named ‘Shirts’, eventually explained that they were to wait. Then Shirts and all but two of their escort trudged off down a ramp into the cavern. Kaesa was the first to take advantage of the pause. She found a slope against the chamber wall to lay upon and Nian was fairly sure that she was asleep shortly after she got her leg situated. No sooner had Rowan sat down than Tombo buried his face in the Desaid’s lap and refused to mov
e, so Nian and Autumn sat near them, forming a small ring around the relic blade. Only Xain seemed uninterested in holding still. He stood off in the dark near the edge of their landing surveying the massive cavern.
At first, everyone sat in silence, but after a few minutes passed without the return of their guides, Nian reasoned that they might as well pass the time productively. He began acquainting Rowan with his journey since their parting and his friend caught him up on the events he’d missed since Rowan’s party had entered the valley. Rowan had just finished his description of the dragon when Kaesa’s voice interrupted.
“Drake, not Dragon.” She murmured. “Dragons ar Immortals. Dey once warred against de gods for mastery of Creation, till a greater foe forced an alliance. A drake hunts for food, but Dragons have no need to eat, nor could yer beast escape one if it wished him dead.”
“It flew, breathed fire, was impervious to attacks, and I could feel its power from a hundred yards away.” Rowan argued, “That’s dragon enough for me.”
Kaesa laughed, “When I was a little girl, a man came to Kaldrbrekka, said he was a prince from de Avan Empire. He stayed two years, asked to hear our stories so he could write dem down . . . to keep dem from being forgotten, he said. But it seems in Nilheim, we remember what de writers of lore forget. No drake or Dragon breathes fire. Dey sing in de old tongue of Creation; songs of fire, ice, life, und death. Some drakes remember a note of power from de songs deir ancestors sung before de fall. In Nilheim, de ice drakes are as tall against a Jotun as a draft horse stands to a man, and a twelve foot barricade comes only to a Jotun’s waist. Deir note is dat of force. It cannot be seen to evade, and shatters ice, bone, walls of wood or stone, all as easily as a stone drough glass. For ages on end, deir scales have drunk in de icy winds of Nilheim, till steel breaks and shatters before it touches deir glistening white armur. It is even said dey can speak any mortal tongue, but e’en wid all dis, dey are drakes, not Dragons. Dey eat, age, bleed, und die.”
