Defenders of the Valley

by K. J. Coble

  Jayce put a foot on the battlements of his tower, pointed a finger and calmly intoned formulae to tap the forces of the lower planes. Power coursed through him, rose from his toes to his skull like a flush. For an instant, Jayce Zerron was merely a conductor for the ravening energies of the cosmos. But he gave them direction.

  Walls of orange-red flame flecked with cyan frothed from the ground ten yards below the crest, directly in the barbarians’ path. Skinners at the fore stumbled to a halt, crying out in alarm, but were shoved forth into the inferno by the press from behind. The body of men ground to a halt with its edges ablaze, feral cries for blood becoming screams of agony.

  The stink of cooking flesh caught in Jayce’s throat but he didn’t look away, kept his focus on the work. He pointed his other hand and murmured new words, summoned fresh energy. Simultaneous castings were the kind of thing that separated the talented from the truly inspired. The concentration and endurance needed for one spell was daunting enough; two at the same threatened to overwhelm the caster, make him more than a conduit for the power, turn him into a bomb, instead. But Jayce Zerron had been wrestling the cosmos to his will longer than most had lived.

  A half-a-dozen rays of eye-gouging cyan brilliance shafted from the low-hung overcast into the horde. Skinners caught in the thundering blasts flashed translucent for a fraction of second, skeletons visible against the glare. Comrades at the edges of the strikes spun away, shrieking as clothes burst into flame and mud boiled at their feet. The earth heaved. Shattered dirt, rock, and smoldering body parts geysered skyward. Concussion flattened very barbarian within twenty feet.

  What order the Skinner assault had possessed disappeared in a moment. No Horns of the Hunt, no war song or chieftain’s furious beating could hold the panicking men under the sorcerous flail any longer and the mass splashed away from the hilltop. The citizens of Edon Village rose from behind the compound wall to cheer them on their way.

  Movement in the burning village drew Jayce’s gaze. A wave of Skinners emerged from the smoke; the pillagers drawn finally to the noise of their kin’s fight. They’d only caught flickers of the magic and felt the shudder of its impact. They couldn’t see the horror wrought upon their people, knew only the cries of dying men and the smell of blood leading them in a lusty surge for the hilltop and the tower.

  Jayce moved his right hand, tracing a line before him that the wall of fire below followed, expanding from an arch at the northern crest to a semi-circle that would encompass most of the tower perimeter and block the new attack.

  A ripple across the lower planes warned Jayce of another wizard’s presence.

  He halted his casting in time to see a spark flash from the forested ridge and rise towards him, building power as it screamed across the sky, a fiery missile arching for the tower top. Jayce turned away with a hand up to shield his eyes as the spell struck, slamming into a globular barrier that flashed into the visible range with the fury of the attack. The missile rebounded and spiraled back in like an enraged hornet, stinging the barrier a second and third time, but losing its fury with each failure until it finally sputtered away in sparkles of glowing ash.

  His eyes watering with the caustic stink of brimstone, Jayce turned to glance at Danelle. The girl sat cross-legged before her brazier, mouth moving with a silent mantra. Smoke rose in purplish serpentines that braided together and disappeared overhead, weaving the protective aura that had just saved their lives. She kept at her work but sweat glistened across exertion-tightened features and Jayce saw the slightest hint of alarm at the corner of her eyes, like the look of a brawler who hasn’t expected to get hit.

  That was no shaman, Jayce thought, turning back to battle. He concentrated for a moment, feeling the currents of energy, seeing into another plane. Danelle’s aura of protection appeared to him as a pool of calm in a tossing sea. The other wizard’s presence was an eye at the center of a sudden storm. Something funny about the spell-craft, though, as if it were not organic, had been augmented somehow...something familiar about it, too.

  Energies surged in the eye of the other wizard’s storm. Jayce smiled as he whispered words of preparation, summoned his full strength.

  Let’s try this again.

  Cyan glared through the tree line behind the ridge. A moment later, a vaporous, yellow-white cloud mushroomed into the sky, billows contorting into the visage of a skull face with its mouth open in a scream. The cloud funneled towards Jayce, the face at its point, howling with malevolent magical life as it drew near. The features distended as the mouth stretched disproportionately wide, exposed fangs of glimmering power that hungered for a magic-user’s soul.

  Impressive, Jayce thought, but obvious.

  He raised his hand with palm presented to the incoming horror and spoke a single word. A ray of prismatic light carved a narrow rainbow across the sky, struck the spell-creature in its phantasmal mouth and split the funnel behind it down the center. Tatters of phosphorescent cloud drew wild vortices away from the detonation of dispelled sorcery. Fragments reconstituted into smaller mimics of the greater whole and fluttered for the tower top, tiny skulls shrieking with the frustration of the wizard who’d birthed them. They battered themselves into oblivion against Danelle’s aura, Jayce standing untouched at the heart of a strobing nimbus of cyan fire.

  Cries of fear and pain rose in the shuddering aftermath of the magic strikes. Jayce looked down, remembering the overall struggle.

  Undeterred by the magic fires that had sent their kin fleeing, the second band of Skinners hit the wall. Metal and flesh squealed as the barbarians forced themselves over the two-foot barrier, Edonites going down in blood and panic before men brought up in war. A handful of villagers, veterans of the Imperial Levies or the Legions, fought on without hope, badly-notched swords that hadn’t seen use in decades slicking with gore. One by one, the stalwarts fell before the spreading breakthrough.

  Jayce strode to the southwest side of the tower and mounted the battlements there with his arms upraised. The spell came easily, his soul singing with powers to which it rapidly merged. Lightning crashed from his fingertips, showered into the mass of men behind the breach in the villagers’ line.

  Earth, metal and flesh exploded. Barbarians writhed as sorcery bounded amongst them, dropping one man in a pile of steaming, twitching pulp and moving on to maul the next. Skinners scattered from the brilliance, shoving back life-long friends, kinsmen, even siblings in their panic to avoid the lightning’s caress.

  Skinners who’d broken into the interior of the compound found them selves abruptly alone and surrounding by grim-faced Edonites who offered no quarter. Other villagers took heart as the tide reversed, moving in behind their leaders and finishing off the wounded or sorcery-dazed.

  The cosmos quivered again. Jayce let his spell fade and looked back to the north. I grow weary of this. You want to play? Very well. He turned to Danelle. “Let the aura go.”

  The girl looked up from the brazier in shock. “Are you sure?”

  “Do it now!”

  Magic charged with his opponent’s malice ravaged through the trees, spontaneously combusting boughs and branches in its path as it sought Jayce. He waited with a hand up, Danelle’s barriers falling away and leaving him exposed. The beam of coherent light slammed into his palm. He groaned against the brute force, pinching his eyes shut to save them from the glare.

  The other wizard’s fury ground into him. Jayce let it, sampling the energies, feeling for weakness and some sense of who or what he faced. His arm trembling as he leaned back into the strike and forced the energy away. His own power building towards a crescendo, Jayce grinned with exultation, with something akin to a musician’s mastery of his instrument.

  A wail of frustration and pain passed along the beam of brilliance, resounding simultaneously through the air. The beam fluttered and went out. Jayce stumbled, caught his balance at the battlements’ edge as the resistance dissipated. Blinking away stinging tears, he eyed the ridge and the smoldering
path the blast had seared through the woods. Somewhere in that smoke, his opponent raged at being foiled.

  Giving up so soon? Well...perhaps another time.

  Cheers rose from below. The Edonites stood at the walls and waved weapons and arms in triumph as the Skinners scattered down the hill and slowed to a trudge for the hike up the opposite ridge. Still-glowing gouges marred the hill, streamers of ozone-stinking fumes fluttering from the craters. Barbarian dead heaped at the wall, lay strewn across the crest in piles glimmering with greedy cyan flames. A few still had enough life to drag their shattered, burnt bodies after their flown kin. A few, but not many.

  The mingling scents of magic and death hit Jayce as he took a steadying breath to let the energies simmer down within him. He grimaced, the smell bringing back memories he’d left dead long ago. He hated himself suddenly, fervently, knowing that he’d become that thing of his past again, if only for a few terrible minutes.

  “Master?” Danelle stood at his side, touching his arm. “Are you all right?”

  Jayce looked at the girl and nodded. He waved a hand over the carnage. “Take a good look, young one. This is the lowest expression of our talents.”

  Danelle nodded. Jayce tried not to notice how little she seemed to be affected.

  The trapdoor to the tower flipped open and Fletcher emerged. Blood on one side of his face spoke of the man’s commitment to defend his people, for all his other faults.

  “We did it, wizard!” the Speaker crowed. “We sent them back, the bastards!”

  Jayce offered the man a weary smile. “Yes, we did.” He nodded towards the ridge and the woods, where the survivors clustered. Behind them, the forest quivered with motion as fresh war parties emerged. “But this is only the beginning.”

  Fletcher’s face fell somewhat as his gaze followed Jayce’s to the tree line.

  Jayce returned to examining the smoke settling about his opponent’s approximate position during the fight. Another spell could probably tell him the wizard’s exact location, but might spark another confrontation and he needed to conserve his strength. He’d learned enough during the duel, as it was. The magic thrown against him had a distinct feel to it, was the product of a land long-accustomed to the arcane and the occult, a place of long, lazy days under a heavy desert sun and nights of black teeming with intrigue and things best left unknown.

  A land he had not seen or hardly thought of in nearly three decades.

  Jayce’s innards cooled as he thought about what Verraxian magic in this remote place meant, and what kind of thing had drawn it here.

  LONADIEL SCAMPERED to the seared place at the ridge top. Caustic haze burned the back of his throat and his skin quivered at powers still skittering loose amongst the smoldering trees. He stepped over a blasted log glimmering with heat and saw Ango Morug, the wizard’s shrouded figure leaning heavily upon his staff.

  “They’ve got a wizard,” Lonadiel said, coming to stand before the Verraxian.

  “Tell me something I don’t know,” Morug replied with a derisive snort. “He has talent, this one. And there are two, by the way, fool.”

  “Are you injured?”

  “Spare me your concern,” Morug said, a hand rising to rub the pewter skull head of his staff, fingers shivering momentarily at the touch.

  Lonadiel glanced downhill, through shattered tree trunks. The last of the barbarian mob filtered away from the open fields. But fresh parties coming up set the war drums to pounding again, their fresh songs of conquest rekindling the frenzy of their battered fellows. “Can you match these sorcerers?”

  Morug’s eyes glittered with their liquid silver light, gave no hint of concern. But the wizard’s hesitation was obvious as he answered. “They will die. They are not enough to stop us.”

  Through the smoke, a knot of Face elders approached, barking amongst themselves, one of them with his mask hanging in scorched tatters, the features beneath bright red with burns. Lonadiel nodded at them. “They’ll demand better protection if they are to attack across that hill again.”

  “If they had pressed the attack, they’d have been in that tower by now,” Morug snapped in response.

  “The better part of a tribe lies dead out there!” Lonadiel replied, waving a hand across the morning’s battlefield.

  Morug clenched his staff close, for a moment trembling with fury. “These fools are the terror of the Valley?”

  “Mind your tongue, wizard!” Lonadiel glanced over his shoulder then stepped close to Morug, spoke in low tones. “Question their courage in front of them—the very thing by which they define themselves—and they’ll start to question the divinity they think you possess.”

  “Don’t lecture me, elf!” Clenched teeth flashed within the folds of Morug’s cowl. “I didn’t see you at the fore of that charge!”

  “Then you will when next we attack!” Lonadiel replied, raising his voice so that the arriving elders could hear it. He glanced at them again before he continued. “I will lead the tribes from the front; but they must have the guarantee of your shield over them.”

  Morug’s eyes flicked once to the elders before he smiled, obviously noting Lonadiel’s ploy. “I was caught off-guard, this time. They will have my protection, from now on.” He met the elders’ gazes. “How many more can we expect?”

  “My lord,” the elder with the singed face said, bowing, “you will have us all. The tribes are gathering here, every one of them. We will have thousands by the full moon.”

  Three days, Lonadiel thought impatiently.

  “Very good,” Morug answered. “Then you will have victory.”

  This seemed to placate the elders, who bowed to the point of touching their foreheads to the earth—an unheard-of sign amongst their kind and a symbol of their continued and complete obeisance. Homage given, they scuttled away, left the wizard and the elf to glare at one another.

  “Lead from the front, will you?” Morug said, some of the normal mocking returned to his voice. “The sooner to reach your little love?”

  Lonadiel looked away. “You know nothing of it.”

  “I know she is there,” Morug said. “You Yntuil and your weak-willed bonds...I know because I can see you sensing her...lusting for her.”

  “Perhaps.” Lonadiel refused to meet the wizard’s stare.

  “I know this, too...” Morug stepped to Lonadiel’s side and put his hand on the other’s arm, the fingertips warm with a heat that wormed under the skin like corruption. “...the game at which we now play is vaster than you or I, vaster than you and your unhappy, little love. The powers to which we have both pledged ourselves demand undivided loyalty. There is no room for anything else. You understand?”

  Lonadiel yanked his arm free.

  “Good,” Morug said. The wizard turned and drifted away into smoke-shrouded trees with a self-satisfied chuckle.

  Lonadiel stared at the tower, looming over the haze of the bloody morn. He saw Illah as if in a dream, waiting inside, tossing across a bed in sweaty, pain-filled nightmares.

  Waiting for him...

  THE WOOLLY MAMMOTH groaned as it shouldered a pair of trees apart, sent them crashing to the ground in splinters and clouds of disturbed birds.

  Seated upon its back in a gondola of stretched animal hide, Sarcha leaned out to bark an order to the creature’s driver, a nasty little man in a boiled leather cap from Candolum who’d charged entirely too much for the use of his beast. He tugged on his harness of joined oxen-horns, drawing back reins fastened about the mammoth’s tasks and bringing it to a bellowing halt.

  Sarcha rose from within the gondola to look out across the terrain before her.

  The so-called Frigid Fens stretched into misty oblivion beyond the edge of the forest. Skeletal tatters of dying trees rose from browned mats of marsh grass and vast pools of dank water colored slightly red by the clay of the region. Tenacious frost clung to branches that swayed in a mournful breeze carrying chill not felt in the forest, carrying with it too the smell of old rot
. An animal call warbled through the fog, lonely but with the hunger of desperation.

  “Not the best terrain for us,” the mammoth-driver said over his shoulder.

  “I’ve got to agree with him,” Clegg Greatclub said from below, coming to stand beside one of the beast’s tree-trunk-sized legs. “We should skirt the forest to the east and then move south.”

  “That would add two weeks or more to our travel time,” Sarcha replied in annoyance. “And this marsh runs directly into the southwestern Labyrinthines.” She shook her head. “No, according to my maps, this is the best way.”

  “The Fens get runoff from the Icing River and snowmelt from the mountains. This area is pure slop this time of year.” Clegg hefted his axe to his shoulder and frowned. “And these are goblin and troll territories. No one comes this way, not even barbarians.”

  “We go this way,” Sarcha said, looking down at Clegg imperiously. “We’ve already wasted too much time.”

  Clegg looked away, knowing some of what she said was true. It had been almost a week, hacking their way south through the woods from their drop-off point on the Icing River where the feeble tributary of the Aleil grew too shallow for water traffic. The going had been rough on the dwarf column, and none too easy for the mammoth, carrying supplies purchased in Candolum for the expedition on its back.

  Not too bad for Sarcha Urkaimat in her sheltered gondola, though.

  “I thought dwarves to be a tight-lipped race,” Sarcha said with a teasing smile. “Yet I’ve heard so much complaining. I wonder, again, Clegg Greatclub, if gnomes wouldn’t have been better company for this trip.”

  Blood rose from under Clegg’s whiskers to color his brow. He turned and snarled an order to the column. Ten dwarves scurried past and fanned out into a screen ahead of Sarcha. Clegg gave another order and the rest resumed the march.