Defenders of the Valley

by K. J. Coble

  Jayce seized Illah by the arm and drew her close, at the same time raised the mirror and spat hastily-practiced words of command. The finger descended for them with a glare like a smear of sunlight. Valley men saw the magic coming and splashed away from the pair, diving for the ground with howls of terror unheard over the sorcerous roar.

  The spell struck and Jayce saw only fire.

  DAMN! Vohl flinched low and wrenched his face away as the magic struck the crest of the rise. The earth quivered beneath him, jostled him into Muddle with a curse. Blinking through a dazzle of throbbing afterimages, he looked again to the spot Jayce and Illah had occupied a moment before.

  A column of settling dust and billowing smoke rose from the hilltop. Vohl’s friends were gone. But the serpent of flame spun away from the Valley folk’s line, as if reflected back on its source.

  Vohl didn’t have time to linger long on the sick twist of loss in his chest. A great cry rose from the host below as Jayce’s wall of flames dissipated and Faces surged through the thinning smoke to join their comrades floundering on the south side of the creek. The Valley folk, on the verge of overwhelming those Faces trapped by the magic, recoiled before the resumed thrust of their enemies. The melee took on a desperate character as the battlelines tossed and intermixed. Vohl swallowed back the rising tide of panic he could sense amongst the Valley men. He checked the ties holding his helm to his head, shrugged to adjust the weight of his chain mail, and drew his sword.

  “Preliminaries are over,” Muddle growled at Vohl’s side, hefted his axe to the ready.

  The Valley line split ten yards to Vohl’s left, a pack of Faces shouldering through Eredynn swordsmen lost in their own personal struggles. For a few deadly moments, they hacked into the rear of men already hard-pressed to hold their front. The hole began to widen behind them.

  Vohl glanced over his shoulder to where Dodso and the Speakers waited amongst the file of Legionnaires left behind as a bodyguard. Their little knot at the highest point of the ridge formed the army’s only reserve. Dodso met Vohl’s gaze for a second before nodding his understanding and barking an unheard command that sent the Legionnaires downhill to join Vohl and Muddle.

  With the professionals of the Legion dashing at their sides, Vohl and Muddle raced to the breakthrough. Muddle’s long strides carried him ahead of the rest, his axe already hurtling into a stroke that sent notched steel blasting through the spine of a Skinner about to impale an Eredynn man.

  A second barbarian spun at the shriek of his felled kin and thrust his spear for Muddle’s side. The half-hobgoblin caught the spear shaft in his free hand and dragged its wielder towards him, caught the Skinner by the throat and lifted him high with features going mottled purple. A third Face bawled in outrage and rushed Muddle, who saw him coming and hurled his captive. The Skinner ducked the flying body and swung a handaxe low for Muddle’s vitals.

  Vohl parried the blow intended for his friend, knocking the weapon from the stunned Skinner’s hand then putting his blade into the man’s gut. He wrenched his sword free in time to block the overhand chop of another barbarian, a huge brute with more than enough muscle behind his stroke to stagger Vohl to one knee. For a few thundering heartbeats, Vohl watched his death advance as the Skinner ground their locked blades towards his throat.

  A swarm of cyan-limned flecks rushed into the barbarian’s face, tiny beetles of coherent light feasting upon his skin, buzzing into nostrils, ears and mouth opening in a shriek of rage. The Skinner released one hand from his two-handed grip on the sword grip to swat the air. The pressure on his guard eased, Vohl regained his footing and leapt back to thrust his sword under the barbarian’s ribcage, sawing the steel up through organs. The Skinner dropped like a puppet with the strings cut.

  Vohl turned to glance across the reverse slope of the ridge, where Danelle knelt in a circle of upturned earth, her eyes too blank in a trance to register his nod of appreciation. He had little time for thanks. Cries of alarm drew his attention to a second gap opening in the line between the solid block of the Legion and the fraying mass of the Eredynn men.

  The gnomes of Kobolon shifted into the breach and took the force of the Skinners’ charge, casting aside crossbows to reach for nasty longknives they wielded amongst the towering attackers’ calves and hamstrings. Skinners went down clenching lacerated legs, but others waded into the small beings, ignoring deep gashes to kick gnomes aside or pick them up and slam them back to the ground with bone-breaking force. The gnome line bowed and came apart. Skinners surged onto the open ridge behind them.

  Dodso and the Speakers stood in their path. Wendynn of Graystone blinked, as if disbelieving death to be so near, his triple chins quivering. Tenhas of of Eredynn bleated, dropped his sword and fled. Anatius of Koen was long-gone, rushed to join his fellows on the line in search of vengeance. Dodso, ashen-faced, clenched his baton in one hand and drew the now-omnipresent carpentry hammer from his belt with the other.

  “Muddle!” Vohl roared over his shoulder as he bolted for the hilltop. He reached Dodso just ahead of the oncoming tide and came to the ready at his friend’s side.

  “Good to have a familiar face here at the end,” Dodso said.

  “I’m not dying here,” Vohl rasped, watching the Skinners approach, “and neither are you!”

  “Well, it’s good to have company, either way,” Dodso replied.

  “Uh-huh...” Vohl glanced to the smoldering spot where sorcery had swept Jayce and Illah away. He wondered if he’d seen the last of them.

  He wondered, too, how long he’d have to think about it.

  LONADIEL WATCHED ANGO Morug’s magic rebound from the Valley folk’s ridgetop position and come ravaging back towards them, waiting in a clearing near the edge of the forest north of the battlefield. It had taken a supreme force of will for Lonadiel to hold himself back as he watched the fight spill across the fields beyond. It took even more out to hold him in place as the hellfire neared.

  “What is happening?” he screamed.

  “Prepare your self,” the wizard said.

  “Have you lost your mind?”

  “They come to us,” Morug replied as the roar of magic build to a deafening shriek, “as I promised you.”

  The shaft of living energy carved a winding path out of the air and hammered down upon Morug. The wizard angled his staff before him and accepted the blast on the head piece, deflecting it into the trees before him. The ground flexed beneath Lonadiel, nearly flopped him to the ground. Ash and ozone-stinking smoke filled the air. Younger trees caught at the point of impact sagged to the ground, smoldering. Older ones groaned and swayed, branches alight with flames of spontaneous combustion.

  Tags of fire and fumes fluttered away to reveal a pair of figures staggering to their feet from a still-glimmering crater. One of them, a man in robes Lonadiel instantly recognized as the wizard from Edon Village, shook glittering ash from one hand in apparent satisfaction. The second figure rose with a Yntuil saber glittering in her fist.

  The wizard was right.

  “Illah,” Lonadiel breathed.

  His former mate in the Order and more wiped soot from her face and stepped from the crater, eyes narrowing as she aimed the point of her blade his way. “I’ve thought of what I would say to you a thousand times,” Illah rasped.

  Lonadiel glanced towards Morug, who stood motionless in the clearing, gaze locked with the other wizard, the two fixated with unspoken dispute.

  Illah noted the look and stepped towards Morug. Lonadiel followed, keeping himself interposed between them. Illah lowered her blade to a loose guard at her right hip, left hand stretched towards him.

  “Why?” she asked.

  “You know why,” Lonadiel replied.

  His first strike flashed into an overhand hack he knew she’d expect. She sidestepped, parrying the stroke with her blade angled diagonally over her right shoulder. He turned, reversing his stroke as she did the same, the two of them mirror images that met again with a crash of sa
ber on saber, locked with his blade crossed low under hers.

  “You’ve not changed,” Lonadiel said with a tight chuckle.

  “The same cannot be said of you,” Illah spat back. “How cheaply did this wizard and his thugs buy your soul?”

  Lonadiel jerked their blades up, jolting her back, and slashed across where he expected to find her chest. But she pirouetted away in a glimmer of blade and came to stand again at the low guard. He grinned, thrilling to have her near, thrilling at the confusion in her eyes that the rage-mask of her face could not hide. With a nonchalance he knew would taunt, he lowered his saber and stepped towards her. “Kill me then, if I be so lost to you.”

  Illah raised her saber as he neared, the point glinting as it aimed for his breast. Lonadiel brought his weapon up slowly, touching it to her unmoving blade, letting steel whisper gently against steel. He didn’t need strength to fold her back until they stood nearly face-to-face, staring into each other’s eyes over the glittering cross of their mated sabers. The scent of her, sweat and leather, but that certain something else, musk and nature, tormented his senses.

  “You can’t do it,” Lonadiel said, his voice trembling with remembered passion.

  Illah’s face contorted, eyes quivering with the battle between her heart and her hate. “Why, Lonadiel?”

  He shook his head. “Our fool elders in their lofty spires of Mauvynn had a saying once that I liked; ‘the unknown is a weapon’. Why would I deprive myself of that now?”

  Illah shrieked and thrust him back. She launched into a whirlwind series of blows and Lonadiel relented, let her drive him into the trees and tangle. Amongst the gloom she hunted him, saber lashing out as he dodged amongst the trunks and branches, death singing inches from his flesh, cleaving air and bark. He cackled as she pursued, feeling light and giddy as he watched emotion devour her.

  Something was happening between the wizards. Lonadiel could sense the building power of their confrontation about to explode and remembered his primary goal. There would be time for him and Illah later. He led the chase back towards the clearing.

  Illah got ahead of him, apparently rational enough still to anticipate his movements. Lonadiel cursed his carelessness at allowing her to get between him and Morug and drove into an attack of his own, thrusting savagely for her midsection, causing her to stumble back. With her off-balance he flashed past her, raking the edge of his saber across her momentarily exposed right shoulder. She hissed and spun away, stole most of the blow’s force by moving with it.

  They whirled and again stood facing one another in the clearing. Illah panted like a horse driven to near-breaking. Tendrils of hair shaken loose from her ponytail plastered to her sweat-slick face. Pain shuddered about her, those blazing jade eyes its epicenter. She didn’t appear to notice the trickle of blood running down her arm to slicken fingers clenching the grip of her saber.

  “You’re fighting for the wrong side,” Lonadiel said.

  “I don’t believe you mean that!” Exertion bent Illah’s voice to nearly a wail.

  “The truth has set me free,” Lonadiel replied. He held out his free hand. “Let it set you free, too. My love.”

  Illah lunged for him again.

  JAYCE REGARDED THE rogue wizard at the center of the clearing before him. Silvery eyes shined back, malevolence crackling about a face that was distressingly Verraxian. The man pushed his cowl back to fully reveal ebony features and a scalp gone bristled with neglect, but obviously once shaven in the fashion of an Acolyte of the Sun.

  “I have been wondering,” Jayce began, “what it is that brought one of the Sun Children to this misbegotten corner of the world.”

  “One might wonder the same of you, Osepu Zerro’Isutep.”

  The sound of the name, Jayce’s name—spoken by no one, not even him in so long—struck like a slap across the face. He reeled, faltering back a step as memories cascaded, unwanted through his mind. A Verraxian sun, dipping low and deeply red to the shimmering horizon, painting the buildings of Holy Kyoss in sandy yellows and crimson. The Temple of Oth, where a young Jayce—a young Osepu—had faced the trials of his early fumbling in the cosmic arts, reaching its triple obelisks into a dusky sky. Jayce could almost hear the calls of the Sun Priests to worship, feel the achingly beautiful calm of night spreading its cool across the city and the star-dappled waters of the Scythius River.

  Stop it! Jayce wrenched his attention back to the present, wondering if his pause had already cost him the contest.

  “Yes, I know of you,” the wizard was hissing. “I know your sad tale and the things you left behind in our homeland. When we are through here, our people will know that the bane of their past has finally met his doom.”

  “You know nothing!” Jayce snarled. “You are a craven dog, playing at conquest with this army of dupes.”

  “Perhaps,” the wizard replied slyly, “but I am winning.”

  The squall of steel drew Jayce’s attention for a dangerous moment to Illah and the other elf—her traitor, he assumed—as their duel spilled into the clearing for a moment before whirling off again. He recomposed himself and drilled his will back upon the wizard, knew he could not afford distraction this close. “You have my name,” he said, managing a conversational tone again, “before you die, might I have the pleasure of yours?”

  The wizard cackled. “As with your moniker, mine is a travesty borrowed from these highland brutes, something chosen to invoke the divinity they needed to believe to follow me. You may call me Ango Morug.”

  Jayce nodded, recognizing the bastardization of the name of one of the Skinners’ heathen gods. His gaze flicked to the staff in Morug’s hands, the polished blackwood taken from an Idran jungle, the winged skull pewter head piece cross-hatched with runes of power. Recognition—and calculation—flared through his mind. He nodded again and pointed at the item. “Who gave you that?”

  Morug’s smirk faltered and he drew the staff possessively to him. “No one gave it to me; it was won from the hands of fools too cowardly to unlock its power!”

  “A Staff of Saeyed,” Jayce said, noting the other’s discomfort. “Stole it, did you?”

  “Earned it!” Morug howled, flapping back his cloaks and brandishing the staff before him. Cyan flickered in the eyesockets of the skull and the wings seemed to flex.

  “I see, now” Jayce said. “You have come north to this place where you expected none to see you for what you are: a petty trickster buoyed by an artifact he does not understand.”

  Morug’s face went slack as fury brought the silver of his eyes to a white-hot incandescence. He raised the staff before him, its head piece blazing to a globe of coherent light.

  “Understand this!”

  A shaft of cyan leapt from the staff. Jayce caught the bolt on his palm, redirected the blast into a nearby tree that shattered with a thunderclap. He turned away as a wave of splinters and cinder washed over them. The severed trunk thundered into the undergrowth behind Morug.

  “What I understand,” Jayce rasped through settling fumes, “is that the Staff of Saeyed is an abomination, containing the souls of failed Acolytes of the Sun, the energies of their torment distilled into pure energy. The vile men who fashioned it did not understand that life feeds the cosmos that wizards tap. They believed only in the power of death and they perished for their arrogance, drawn as their victims were, into the artifact they’d crafted—” Jayce managed a flick of the eyebrows “—as you soon will be.”

  With a shriek, Morug slashed the staff before him, its passage birthing a scythe of bloody-hued power that ravaging forth. Jayce stood still, clapping his hands together and whispering words of defense. The energetic blade passed through him with little more than a tingling in the gut, ravening onward to cleave a shattering path through the woods behind them before sputtering away in flames and thunder on the open grasses of the battlefield.

  Jayce took a breath, the endurance needed to resist the Staff of Saeyed’s heinous power at this close a range dr
aining him well into his reserves. But rising confidence held back fatigue, as did the knowledge of how he was going to win. “I know something else,” he called out.

  “Silence!” Morug screamed, his hands tightening to mottled claws about the staff’s shaft. “I will hear no more of your sermonizing!”

  “It would do you well to listen,” Jayce said with a taunting tone, feeding on the other’s rapidly deteriorating control. “When the Staff is drained, as it must certainly be close to, with your prodigious use, it will begin to feed upon the one wielding it...until it consumes him.”

  Morug opened his mouth for another curse but stopped. He blinked, something that might have been fear holding his words at bay. For a moment, his death grip on the staff loosened and the glow about the head piece fluttered.

  Got him... Jayce stepped towards Morug, forcing a master’s tolerant smile to a wayward apprentice as he held out his hand for the staff. “Give it to me.”

  The clatter of Illah’s whirlwind duel drew both wizards’ attention for an instant. Behind Jayce, the din of the battle rose, Horns of the Hunt bawling, voices shrill with fear, fenzy, and pain.

  “Give me the staff,” Jayce repeated, more sternly. “Give it to me before it is too late for you.”

  Morug shook himself and shrank back from Jayce, the mask of hate and power-lust sliding back over momentarily human features. He thrust the staff before him, its light intensifying to its former glare.

  “No going back,” Morug growled.

  The staff vomited hellfire.

  THE SKINNERS HELD BACK momentarily, a dozen brutes sizing up Vohl and Dodso’s little band. Expressions were impossible to read behind their death masks but Vohl was certain he saw disdain, even amusement in their eyes as they closed on them.

  “Behind me,” Vohl said to Dodso and Wendynn as he side-stepped to the left, hoping to avoid the Skinners’ encirclement. Dodso followed, hovering at Vohl’s hip while Wendynn stayed well to their rear, but so too did the Skinners, a pair of them lunging to stay ahead of their would-be prey.