Friendly Fire

by Dale Lucas

  Queydon reached the dungeon door. She plunged in the iron key, turned, and threw back the several locks barring the dungeon from the outside, then took the door handle in both hands and yanked. The door swung wide with a groan and a squeal of hinges thirsty for oil. As he arrived at the door, Queydon tossed Rem the keys that would open the inner cells. While he went to work, she waited outside.

  Rem began with Valaric’s solitary cell. When he undid the lock and swung the gate open, the stonemason only stared at him quizzically.

  “What is this?” Valaric asked.

  “There’s a dwarven vengeance demon here to kill you,” Rem said. “We need to go, now.”

  “Kill me?” Valaric asked.

  Rem rushed to the next cell. “Yes, you. All of you.”

  He tripped the next lock and threw open the gates. “Out! Now! Follow the warden in the corridor! We’re leaving by the back door and we’ll have transports waiting outside!”

  The men in the cell seemed just as puzzled as Valaric had been. They stared at Rem for a time, then at one another. Valaric was out of his cell now, but he still hadn’t taken a single step toward the door.

  Rem threw open one more cell. Seeing that those freed thus far hadn’t moved, he stopped before going on.

  “Did you not hear me?” he asked.

  “I just don’t understand,” Valaric said.

  Rem lost his patience. He barked like Ondego as he stomped to the next cell and went about unlocking it. “There’s a beast made of grave dirt and bones forcing its way into the watchkeep as we speak! I saw it kill Hrissif myself—crushed him, right under its heel! It’s the thing that killed Hrissif’s brother Foelker and ruined your ambush in the Warrens! We think it’s coming down here to slaughter the lot of you! Our plan is to get you all out of here, split you up, and try to lead it somewhere where it can be trapped or waylaid! So if you want to survive the night, follow me out of here!”

  That seemed to do the trick. The men all surged forward, rushing toward the door. Outside, Queydon led them back down the corridor that she and Rem had just run the length of. About halfway down, on the left, Rem knew that another passage diverged from the main toward a series of shadowy, little-used storage cells and a final chamber with winding stairs that led up to the surface. That was their destination, their only means of escape. Rem just hoped there were more watchwardens waiting topside, to keep the stonemasons from fleeing into the night.

  He had the final cell opened now. As the last man came running out, Rem followed him and brought up the rear. He trailed the long, crowded line of them—thirty or forty in all—as they jostled down the corridor toward the side passage that would lead them to the back stairs.

  Just as the vanguard of their little column rounded the corner into that side passage, Rem saw something moving at the far end of the main corridor: dark, hulking, formidable, descending the stairs with deliberate patience.

  The Kothrum had arrived. In the flickering light of the passage torches and the dungeon level’s deep, oppressive shadows, it looked even more nightmarish than it had above.

  The Kothrum stood for a moment, as though orienting itself. The men in the middle of the column had seen it. Panic rising, they all began to shout and shove one another aside, eager to escape the thing now striding toward them.

  Rem started pressing the men ahead of him. He really didn’t want to be here, right in its path, when it finally met them at the passage intersection.

  “Move!” he shouted. “Move, gods damn you!”

  Someone up ahead stumbled. As he fell, he drew several men with him into a chaotic pile. Those who avoided the fall parted and surged around their prone comrades, while only two or three stopped to help their fallen brothers.

  Rem saw that the Kothrum’s pace quickened as it got closer. It seemed to have acquired a target—one of the men in that dog pile on the flagstones. Rem sped up, pressing through the bodies just before him in an effort to get to the fallen men. One of them, a young man, still assisted his fallen friends, back to the creature, completely oblivious to its advance.

  Rem skated around the dog pile, reached for the young mason who was completely unaware of what was about to happen, and yanked him into the divergent passage. Just as the young man shouted and stumbled toward Rem, the beast reached the spot where he’d been standing and brought one of its great, bony fists down upon a man struggling to rise. That man had a single moment to cry out, then the beast’s fist crushed his skull and he was silent.

  Rem tugged at the boy he’d saved, urging him on. “Go, don’t look back,” he said. The boy took off at a run. Rem retreated after him, but kept his eyes on the advancing Kothrum.

  A few men tried to flank it, to flee back up the main corridor toward the stairs. After crushing one man’s skull, however, the Kothrum turned its attentions on a certain man in the group of three angling to edge around it. It reached out, seized the stonemason in its dreadful hands, and swung him against the opposite wall of the passage. The force of that impact probably crushed every bone in the man’s body instantly. The other two fled up the hall, ignored by the creature. Another mason threw himself at the beast to try to save the one it had just crushed. The Kothrum cast him off with a shrug that sent him flying and returned to beating the life out of the limp man in its grip, apparently unsatisfied that its first strike had killed him. As Rem watched, horrified, the beast finally dropped the corpse at its feet and turned toward its next target.

  For a moment Rem thought it was looking at him. A second later he realized it was tracking one of the men from the dog pile who’d scrambled to his feet and now pounded along the corridor right toward Rem.

  As Rem watched, the Kothrum took three long strides, snagged the fleeing man in its grip, and yanked him backward. Rem saw the look in the man’s eyes as he was torn away from freedom, away from life itself. He struggled in the creature’s grip for a moment, but it was no use. In a deft, smooth movement, the beast spun and drove the man’s body—headfirst—into the opposite wall of the passage. Rem saw a terrible bloom of blood and brain matter paint the sweating stones, and the man’s ruined corpse went rag-doll limp.

  That was enough. Rem turned and ran, falling in behind the other fugitives and trying to put as much distance between himself and the Kothrum as possible. Only when he’d reached the far end of the hall did he dare to look back.

  The Kothrum strode on, unhurried, intent on its prey. Rem knew that it wanted nothing to do with him—that it was not looking at him and probably could not even see him. And yet the sight of those deep, burning, malevolent fire pits that seemed to be its eyes, and the way it came on, steady and sure, in no hurry because it knew there was no escape …

  Rem suddenly collided with a wall of jostling bodies. All the men freed from the cells were now crammed into the little chamber that held the spiral staircase leading to the surface. He saw them crowding the stairs, all the way up and out of sight.

  “What’s going on?” he demanded. “It’s coming!”

  “Hinges rusted!” someone shouted back. “The door’s stuck!”

  “Bloody well push on it!” Rem shouted. “It’ll be here in moments!”

  Maybe it didn’t want him, but he really didn’t want to be standing here, between it and its quarry, when it arrived.

  Rem peered back around the corner. The Kothrum was less than a hundred yards away and closing. It passed through a deep well of shadow where no torches burned, and in that instant all Rem could see was those terrible eyes burning in the dark, its considerable bulk a black mass on the deeper blackness of the shadow enfolding it. There was nowhere to run down here. The passage dead-ended into this chamber. If they couldn’t get that door open—

  Above there was a sudden cheer and a mad surge. Rem looked over his shoulder and saw the men streaming up the stairs as fast as they could go. Those at the back shoved their mates forward, urging them on, pleading for them to hurry. Up above, the already-freed masons called out to their brothe
rs, telling them to get out of the way and clear a path for those coming behind.

  Rem fell in behind them, backing toward the stairs so he could watch for the Kothrum’s imminent arrival. Just as he placed his boot on the lowest step of the staircase, he saw the beast round the corner. It came toward him.

  Rem turned to the men choking the narrow passage above him. Though they were moving as fast as the space allowed, they seemed impossibly slow. Rem couldn’t believe what a panic he felt—how his heart hammered in his chest, how it seemed to beat like a boatman’s drum in his ears, how his vision seemed energized and enlivened. His whole body knew only one desperate need: to be out of here, away, to clear the Kothrum’s path and escape sure death by its cold, bony hands.

  There it was, below him. Without hesitation it mounted the stairs. Rem expected it to be on him in moments, but something miraculous saved him. As the beast tried to climb, its round, flat feet failed to find purchase on the narrow stairs. The beast slid and tripped, almost sprawling on its face. With a strange, guttural huff, it started digging its bone claws into the stairs themselves and the stones of the stairwell walls, drawing its body up laboriously, inch by inch, using the strength of its forelimbs to give its clumsy legs and feet a better hold.

  Rem pressed on, still blocked by the men crammed into the passage ahead of him. Below him the Kothrum came to the place where the passage of the stairway narrowed around the spiraling stairs. The creature hesitated again, unable to move. It was too broad to fit, its stout, barrel-shaped body hindering its advance. As the beast pressed forward, determined and implacable, its soil-and-bone bulk became more aggressively wedged into the narrow passage. Rem heard the rattle and rasp of its bony ornaments against the stone of the stairwell, saw clods of earth littering the stairs, heard a few of the more obtrusive bones protruding from its torso breaking as the beast shoved itself forward a foot at a time.

  That’s where Rem left it. The men ahead of him had finally cleared the way. He felt the cold wind of the night kiss his face, felt hands grasping his arms and yanking him through the narrow little doorway at the summit of the stairwell. Suddenly, blessedly, he was outside. He was out of the beast’s path, safe and free. He’d done his duty, fulfilled his mission; what happened now wasn’t his problem.

  He looked around, blinking. At each end of the street and off two side lanes, the fleeing stonemasons were urged into waiting carts by eager watchwardens, while more of Rem’s comrades stood sentinel, creating a broad perimeter around the scene to await the Kothrum’s emergence. Standing just beside Rem were Queydon and Valaric. It had been the two of them who’d yanked him out of that cramped stairwell into the blessed, wide-open, freezing air of the Yenaran night.

  “You need to go,” Rem said to the steward. “It’s stuck in the passage, but that won’t stop it. It’ll be up here in moments.”

  “I was the leader,” Valaric said. “I should be the one to bear its wrath. If that’ll stop it—”

  “Not alone, you’re not,” a familiar, stone-roughened voice broke in. Rem, Queydon, and Valaric turned toward the sound of that voice.

  It was Torval. That youngish dwarven priest—Bjalki, was it?—stood beside him.

  “About bloody time,” Rem said, relieved.

  “Sorry I’m late,” Torval said. “The ethnarch proved … difficult.”

  Below the Kothrum roared, angry and frustrated by its slow progress.

  “All of you go,” Valaric said. “Get my men out of here. I’ll meet it.”

  Torval marched up to the steward, shaking his head. “The Kothrum has a number of targets among your men,” he said. “You could all flee to the ends of the earth. Sooner or later the Kothrum will catch up with you—all of you.”

  “And how do you know that?” Valaric asked.

  “Because that’s what I summoned it to do,” Bjalki said.

  Rem saw Valaric’s dumbfounded expression and assumed he wore something similar on his own face. This was the Kothrum’s summoner? This bland, soft-spoken, young-faced dwarven priest?

  Down in the passage, Rem heard bone scraping stone. The Kothrum would soon make the surface.

  “We need to go,” Rem said, “It’ll be up here any second—”

  “Stand fast,” Torval said, laying a hand on Rem’s chest. “Forget about drawing it off or getting these men to safety. We can make our stand here.”

  “Here?” Rem asked.

  “Here?” Queydon parroted.

  “Right here,” Torval said to them all—Valaric included. “This is where you’ll help me kill it.”

  Suddenly Rem no longer wanted to cheer for his partner’s return.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-FIVE

  Below, the Kothrum gave an impatient roar. Though they had withdrawn some distance from the doorway, that roar yet made Rem feel too near, too vulnerable. He looked to the priest.

  “You’re the one who summoned it?” Rem asked.

  “I am,” he said.

  “Then why can’t you just unsummon it?” Rem asked.

  The priest shook his head. “I had to dig deep to find the spell to raise it,” he said. “So far as I know, there are none that banish it. The only way to stop it is for its mission to be completed, or for its source of power to be destroyed.”

  “Fine,” Rem said. “What’s the source of its power?”

  “It’s a runestone,” Torval broke in. “Bjalki here told me all about it.”

  “They’re sacred artifacts,” the priest explained, “discovered as our people mine and dig. We recognize them because they glow from within, containing fantastic energies from elder ages. When we come across them, we polish them and carve holy runes into them and add them to our temple reliquaries, evidence of the gods’ power manifest in physical form. Every dwarven temple from Kosterland to Quaim has them.”

  “And you employed one of these holy stones in the raising of that demon?” Queydon asked.

  Bjalki nodded. “I did. It’s buried in the middle of the thing’s head. I tried to remove it myself but the Kothrum wouldn’t let me.”

  “So,” Torval said, “if we can get it out—”

  The Kothrum bellowed from the stairwell, closer now, sounding far more angry and impatient. Across the street, Ondego broke from a line of watchwardens encircling one of the wagons and marched toward them, calling as he came.

  “What the fuck are you lot doing over there?” the prefect called.

  “Stay back!” Torval shouted at him. “Keep everybody back! We’ve got this in hand!”

  Ondego stopped. “Have you?”

  “Just hold the perimeter!” Torval barked back. “Be ready to get the prisoners out of here if the Kothrum gets past us!”

  The prefect raised his hand and trotted back to the cordon. Torval turned to Rem and the others. Only then did Rem see that Torval carried a weapon Rem had never seen before: a big dwarven war hammer, balanced on his shoulder, far larger and heavier than Torval’s usual maul. The dwarf brandished it.

  “This is for the smashing,” Torval said, then dropped it at his feet with a heavy thud and pulled two more implements from a scabbard on his back. Rem recognized them immediately: a pair of rock hammers—stunted picks of a sort—commonly employed by miners in confined spaces, or by those climbing mountains, to keep them from sliding down sheer slopes. “These are for digging.”

  “This is mad, Torval,” Rem said. “How are you supposed to dig into that thing? If you try to approach it or fetter it, it’ll kill you!”

  Valaric chimed in then. “I can distract it,” he said. “I’m one of its targets, aren’t I? Shouldn’t it give me its attentions, so long as the dwarf doesn’t stand right in its way?”

  They all looked to him. He was dead earnest, without fear. Rem admired the mason’s determination even as he damned him for letting this whole mess escalate to these mad ends.

  “It wants me,” Valaric said. “Myself, or one of my bloodstained brothers. If it’s truly drawn to me, then I can keep it busy, st
ay right out of its reach. While I do that, the dwarf here can—”

  “If Torval threatens it or interferes with it while it’s trying to get to you,” Bjalki said, “it’ll tear him to pieces. It doesn’t care that he isn’t the target—he’s an obstacle.”

  “Then give it better obstacles,” Torval said. “Rem, Queydon, hit it hard. Threaten it and strike it and get the beast’s blood up. If it’s chasing Valaric, and it’s troubled by you two, I should be able to do my work.”

  “This is insane,” Rem said, wishing they had more time to build a better plan. He looked to Bjalki. “Can’t you call it off? Even give it pause? Won’t it listen to you?”

  Bjalki shook his head. “I’ve already tried,” he said. “As I said, I created it for a purpose. Its only reason for being right now is to fulfill that purpose. I am its summoner, but I am not its master.”

  Behind them there was a loud, shattering crack. They all turned and saw the Kothrum shouldering through the too-small doorway, splintering the wooden frame and cracking the stone that surrounded it. Free and clear, standing tall at last, it once more did that strange little trick that Rem had seen it pull in the dungeons—stopping, waiting, as though searching for the scent of the nearest prey. After a moment it slowly turned its head, its blank and burning gaze, toward their little band.

  Toward Valaric.

  It advanced.

  “If anyone wants to argue,” Torval began.

  “Fine,” Rem said. “We’ll go with your plan.”

  Torval nodded and resheathed one of his rock hammers. He suggested the big war hammer on the ground. “When I toss you the stone, lad, you bring it here and smash it—clear?”

  Rem nodded. There was nothing else to say. Ready to start, he drew his sword. It looked frail and pitiful compared to the hulking juggernaut of bone and grave earth now stomping toward them. Rem broke left. Queydon drew her own curved sword and slid right. Torval followed Rem, intent on looping all the way around the beast and getting at it from behind. Valaric stood his ground.

  “No heroics!” Torval called to Valaric as he trotted off. “You’re only useful while you’re still alive. Keep it occupied, but don’t get too close!”