Friendly Fire

by Dale Lucas

  Then he was flying, not sure when or where he would land.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE

  “Papa!” Tavarix screamed from the stairs.

  “Milord, no!” Godrumm shouted, sounding terrified and panicked.

  Torval dropped his maul and raised his sword just in time to catch Eldgrim’s first strike and parry it. He countered with a great sideward chop of his own. The ethnarch managed to avoid the tip of Torval’s blade with a clumsy backward lurch, but recovered quickly and lunged for another round of slashes and thrusts.

  “Stop this!” the trade minister cried.

  “Guards!” the Lady Leffi pleaded, “draw my husband off!”

  “Stand where you are!” Godrumm commanded from his perch on the stairs. “Neither help nor hinder him!”

  Peripherally, amid the lust and terror of their fight, Torval saw the guards all shuffling and looking to one another. Attack? Don’t attack? Help Torval? Help the ethnarch? Torval could not blame them. They’d been trained and conditioned all their lives to serve powerful dwarves, to protect them and deliver justice by their orders and lay down their lives when their superiors were threatened. But Eldgrim had stolen something from them when he’d drawn a sword of his own and engaged Torval in a duel. He was the sole, gods-ordained authority over all the dwarves in Yenara, that was true … but by taking up arms, he had also stepped outside of his appointed purpose and powers. His duty was to lead, theirs was to fight. Now that he had taken that from them, it was little wonder they opted to do nothing at all.

  Torval was alone in this, then. Perhaps he’d escape their wrath, but he certainly wouldn’t get any help, either.

  They circled and danced and stomped around the grand foyer’s marble floor, toward the fireplace, across the great handwoven carpet in the center of the room, over to the staircase, back toward the front door. Eldgrim, though not of a warrior clan, was nonetheless a fierce opponent, pressing, always pressing, furious and enraged but never, ever sloppy. Torval had only the sword in his hand to keep himself safe from the thrusting point and honed slashing edge of Eldgrim’s own broadsword. He felt a sting on his cheek suddenly and realized Eldgrim had drawn blood. Enraged at that, Torval pressed his attack, driving the ethnarch back with a series of savage blows until he almost had him pinned against the base of the grand staircase. At the last moment, as Torval drew back for a powerful swing, the ethnarch dove aside and scrambled across the floor, out of reach. Torval’s sword blade nicked the stone wall with a spark and he turned, eager to avoid Eldgrim attacking from behind.

  Torval and Eldgrim faced each other across the floor, each dwarf drinking in great draughts of air, harried, sweating, streaked with fine streamers of blood from his superficial wounds.

  “Husband,” Leffi said, and this time Torval thought he heard true concern, a deep beseeching, in her tone. “Drop your sword. If you persist in this, it will mean infamy for you … for your family.”

  “Infamy?” Eldgrim answered. He held Torval in his burning gaze. “My only crime would be to give this outcast what he asks without putting my people and their collective honor first.”

  Torval met Eldgrim’s fell gaze. “This is your last chance,” he said slowly. “I will leave you and never return again if you just give me my boy and let us walk away.”

  “He deserves better than you,” Eldgrim said, his earnestness truly unsettling. “Every son with a failure of a father does. I will not let him lose a precious connection with his people—his legacy—because of his father’s foolish pride.”

  Then, with a fearsome battle cry, the ethnarch charged.

  Torval parried, struck, feinted, thrust—then stepped aside. Eldgrim overextended and struck empty air. As he bent, threatening to topple over, Torval raised his sword and brought it down in a steep, powerful arc. The pommel of his sword connected with the back of the ethnarch’s skull and Eldgrim Sastrummsson sprawled, face-first, to the floor. The ethnarch’s sword fell from his hand, ringing loudly on the marble. Torval kicked it aside.

  Silence reigned. Torval could hear only the pounding of his own heart in his ears and the ragged rhythm of his breathing. He waited, his blade hovering expectantly, as the ethnarch groaned where he lay.

  “Mercy,” someone said. Torval glanced sideward. It was the young dwarven priest, Bjalki.

  “He shall have mercy,” Torval said, eyes back on the ethnarch, “if he will but offer it in return.”

  The young priest knelt, still some distance from Eldgrim. He seemed to be trying to meet the ethnarch’s downturned eyes, to implore him directly.

  “Milord,” the priest said. “This has gone far enough—”

  “Not so,” said Eldgrim, and he lunged, arm extended, toward Torval.

  Torval searched for the ethnarch’s kicked-aside sword, thinking for a moment that the blade was what he reached for. Then he realized too late how wrong he was.

  Eldgrim’s fist closed around one of the dagger hilts protruding from Torval’s own boots. The ethnarch, newly armed, drew back the blade and struck, plunging it deep into Torval’s left thigh. Torval grunted, raised his sword, and struck without thought.

  His blade bit halfway through Eldgrim’s skull, entering just above his right ear, splitting his right eye, and stopping at the bridge of Eldgrim’s large hawkish nose. For just a moment, Torval stared into the hateful old ethnarch’s remaining eye, noting something like surprise or self-reproach there. Then, as though someone had blown out a candle, the lights went out. Eldgrim went limp and fell to the floor, dragging Torval’s lodged sword with him.

  Torval stumbled back, the pain of the knife wound in his leg suddenly announcing itself. He tried to stay upright but unceremoniously fell on his ass.

  “Husband,” he heard the Lady Leffi say from across the room. He could not tell if she was saddened or simply relieved.

  “Captain?” one of the guards near Torval called, begging some direction from his commander. “The ethnarch … He’s …”

  “I see,” Godrumm said from the stairs.

  Torval heard them, but he did not bother looking at them. He could not take his eyes off Tav, still held back by the captain of the house guard. Tears streamed down the boy’s reddened face, but he was smiling. If Torval wasn’t mistaken, that smile was full of pride.

  “My boy,” Torval said, knowing that his voice would break, that tears would come, that he would howl like an animal if he spoke even one more word.

  “Go to your father, lad,” Godrumm said, and took his hand off Tav’s shoulder. Tavarix took the stairs two by two and pounded across the floor. Still sitting, still bleeding, Torval opened his arms and welcomed his son into them. The boy held him up. He had a strong embrace, despite his youth.

  “Forgive me,” Torval said, and though he would have liked to ask for absolution for so many sins—so many ways, large and small, in which he’d failed his son—he could not, at that moment, decide which he should name first. And so those two simple words came again. “Forgive me, boy. Please forgive me.”

  “Shut your mouth, Papa,” Tav said against him. “It’s I who should ask … who should beg …”

  Someone slid into Torval’s peripheral vision. Without hesitation Torval shoved Tav away from him, reached down, and snatched up his other boot knife, ready to gut whoever now threatened them. But it was no threat at all, just the young priest, hands up in surrender, trying to edge closer.

  Torval lowered his knife. He slumped. Tav was there to catch him.

  “You’re hurt,” the priest said. “Let me bind your wound.”

  “Fuck binding,” Torval said, then jerked his head toward the fireplace. “Lay that iron poker in the fire. When it’s red, we’ll put it to work.”

  “This night,” Bjalki said, lowering his eyes, “it’s not over for you yet.”

  “What does that mean?” Torval asked, honestly confused by the priest’s words.

  The younger dwarf raised his eyes to Torval’s now. They were red rimmed, brimming with
tears, and they bespoke a terrible shame, a terrible sadness, that Torval knew all too well.

  Those were the eyes of someone who’d done a horrible, irrevocable thing and knew not how to atone for it.

  “You have to help me,” the priest said. “What I’ve done … it’s unforgiveable.”

  Torval thought he understood. “You summoned it, didn’t you? The Kothrum?”

  The priest’s voice caught in his throat. He only nodded.

  “Do you know where it is?”

  The priest nodded again. “It will be wherever the masons are, assuming it hasn’t murdered them already …”

  Wherever the masons are. Cold panic swept through Torval as realization dawned. When he’d left the watchkeep, Ondego was preparing to raid the guildhall. If the masons were already in custody, they’d be packed into the watchkeep’s dungeons.

  The watchkeep.

  His friends.

  Rem.

  “See to that poker,” Torval snapped. “There’s no time to lose.”

  CHAPTER THIRTY-FOUR

  For just a moment, Rem was convinced that Hirk would close the door and lock him out. From his vantage in the square, amid the fighting and the fleeing, it was a wonder Rem heard the burly second call out to him at all. But somewhere on the wind, he’d heard his name, turned toward the sound, and seen Hirk behind the half-open front door of the watchkeep, waving him up frantically. Rem took a last look around the square, to see what else he could do to help. The Kothrum kept advancing toward the watchkeep, waylaid for moments at a time by eager watchwardens or brave bystanders who dared engage the thing. In all cases the Kothrum simply shoved or swatted aside its opposition, then carried on.

  Some of those brave, unlucky souls might be dead, Rem supposed—more than a few still lay where they’d fallen, unmoving—but most of them simply got tossed aside and scrambled away with only some bruises or, at worst, a broken bone or two. Based on observation alone, Rem wagered the beast wasn’t out to kill them. Hrissif had been the only one murdered outright as it plowed through the crowd. Now something within it, something magnetic and undeniable, drew it toward that watchkeep. If the Kothrum wasn’t kept from its appointed task, it posed no threat to anyone it encountered … but they couldn’t just let it waltz inside and kill those men, could they?

  Off to Rem’s right, the Kothrum lumbered toward him. Brogila, the Tregga horseman, rushed into its path, sword in one hand, a castoff ax in the other.

  “Brogila, come on!” Rem shouted. “You can’t stop it! Fall back!”

  “You fall back!” Brogila shouted over his shoulder. “And take Donal with you! I don’t think he can walk!”

  Donal—a brown-haired, pale-faced Warengaither, younger than Rem himself but a wardwatch veteran because he’d been on the force since his sixteenth birthday—was sliding through the mud, trying to drag himself into the waiting shelter of some winter-bare shrubs growing around the watchkeep’s base. He didn’t seem entirely present in the moment—eyes foggy, mouth hanging slack—but he was determined to reach those bushes, even if he couldn’t use his legs.

  Rem hurried to the boy, scooped him up, and threw him over his shoulders. Straining under the weight of him, he tottered toward the front stairs, climbed each painfully slowly, then slipped in through the half-open doors. Hirk waited just inside. When Rem was through, the second slammed the door shut and threw a heavy oaken bar across it.

  Rem swung Donal off his shoulder and handed him off to Eriadus and Minniver. The old man and young woman accepted the half-delirious boy and shuttled him away.

  “I want eyes on those front windows!” Ondego shouted from the administrative chamber beyond the cramped front vestibule. “Get polearms and spears up there to repel the thing if it tries to climb in!”

  “Polearms and spears?” someone shouted back incredulously. “Against that thing?”

  “Did I stutter?” Ondego asked. “Do it!”

  Rem turned to Hirk. “Unbar the door! Brogila’s still out there!”

  “I know,” Hirk said. He had his eye pressed to the little peephole drilled into one of the two entry doors. “He’s engaged it.”

  “He’ll be killed if it gets his hands on him,” Rem said.

  Hirk smiled a little, still staring out the peephole. “Brogila’s unstoppable, it won’t get its hands on him,” he said. A moment later his expression fell. “Cack and piss … it got its hands on him.”

  Rem ran to the nearest window, a tall, narrow loophole designed more for defense than for visibility. When he peered out into the night, he saw Brogila rolling in the mud, face bloodied, trying to regain his senses after a mind-scrambling fall. From his vantage through the loophole, Rem could no longer see the Kothrum.

  “Where is it?” he asked himself.

  The front doors suddenly buckled and shook. A moment later they thundered again. Rem saw dust sifting from the bolts that held the door’s great hinges to the stone arch containing them, saw the boards of the door bending weakly, splintering after each heavy collision.

  Hirk and his door guards had leapt back at the first strike. “There it is,” the second said. “It wants in.”

  Ondego appeared in the doorway to the administrative chamber. Their compatriots were gathering as well, bringing the spears and polearms they’d been ordered to arm themselves with.

  Crash! Another collision as the thing threw its considerable bulk against the doors. The great oak plank that barred those doors was stout, surely, but Rem guessed it wouldn’t hold out forever against that thing.

  “What is it?” Hirk asked, looking to his prefect for some guidance.

  “It’s called a Kothrum,” Rem said. He turned to Ondego then. “Torval told me about it, feared that might be what the dwarves had unleashed.”

  “Nice of him to tell his commander,” Ondego offered as the doors continued to shudder as the beast battered its way in.

  “He was scared,” Rem said quietly. “Afraid what people might think—”

  “Enough,” Ondego said. “How do we stop it?”

  “We cannot,” Queydon said, now joining them in the vestibule. “This is old magic, magic born of pain and loss. If it was animated to hunt the dwarves’ enemies and punish them, it won’t stop until those enemies are all dead.”

  Crash! One of the doors splintered, breaking at its center, just above where the bar held it. Everyone shrank from the flying splinters. A moment later another fierce strike punched a hole clean through the other door. More splinters flew. The thing would be inside in moments.

  “What if we set them free?” Rem asked.

  “Those men need to pay for what they’ve done,” Ondego said.

  “I’m not saying they shouldn’t,” Rem said. “But we can’t let that thing just march into the dungeons and murder them in their cells. It’s only a threat to us if we try to stop it, and it will follow the men it’s hunting wherever they go. What if we try to buy ourselves some time by drawing it off?”

  Ondego nodded, finally understanding. “That’s good,” he said. “What did you have in mind?”

  In truth, Rem hadn’t formulated much of a plan—he just knew that trying to stop the thing or keep it from its quarry was pointless. But the prefect wanted a strategy …

  “We need to gather them and move them, fast,” Rem said, the door still thundering and splintering behind them. “Get everyone out of here—out of the beast’s path. Queydon and I can go to the dungeons, free the masons, and get them out the back. If you could have horse carts or some other conveyance ready—”

  “Say no more,” Ondego cut him off. “Hirk, go to it.”

  The second nodded and rushed into the administrative chamber. Rem heard him shouting, gathering all available hands and directing them toward one of the back exits. Ondego looked to the rest of those gathered in the vestibule, ready to meet the beast when it burst through the almost-ruined doors.

  “Get back!” the prefect said. “Stay out of its path! Don’t engage and it w
on’t lay a hand on you!”

  They obeyed. Ondego urged Rem and Queydon along, back toward the common room.

  “Queydon,” the prefect commanded, “snatch the keys to the clink and take the Bonny Prince here with you.”

  Queydon hurried off to fetch the keys. Rem fell back into the center of the room, ready to see the Kothrum come marching through at any moment.

  Crack! One of the doors had lost its top half. The beast’s great fists and long, strangely proportioned arms swung in now, trying to tear the rest of the barricade apart.

  Queydon fell in by Rem’s side. The elf threw him a daring sidelong look—a strange mixture of deadly irony and thrilled anticipation.

  “You’re enjoying this,” Rem asked, “aren’t you?”

  Queydon shrugged. “Such respites from the mundane should be appreciated.”

  Rem had no answer for that.

  “Go,” Ondego said. “If it takes another path or breaks from the program, we’ll let you know. Just get those men out. Use the back stairs. We’ll have transportation waiting.”

  Queydon clapped Rem’s shoulder—one comrade urging another to action—then took off at a run. Rem fell in behind her. As they rushed to the stairs that led down to the lower levels and the dungeons, he heard Ondego behind him.

  “I want everyone back! Retreat to the outer chambers or hug the gods-damned walls, but don’t take a single step in this thing’s direction. Stay out of its way!”

  “Retreat?” someone shouted. “How are we supposed to stop it if we fall back?”

  “Did I say we were going to stop it?” Ondego barked back.

  Rem took the stairs two at a time. When he made the bottom and took off at a dead run down the long central corridor that led to the dungeons, he saw Queydon already far ahead of him, practically to the dungeon doorway. Get the prisoners out … load them into horse carts … draw the beast off … and then what?

  Aemon’s tears, what kind of a plan was that?

  And why had Ondego listened to him?