“Watch out!” Mavarin shouted as a bellow ripped through the chamber. One of the larger, insect-like brutes had bullied its way into the melee, crushing several of the smaller hounds blocking its route. It had locked onto the two Dunwarr, its demented, hungry eyes blazing as it broke into a bull-like charge.
The thing lunged for Raythen. He brought his shield up, but found himself rooted to the spot, staring into the half a dozen yawning maws bearing down on him.
Just before they could snap shut, something arrested them. The creature shrieked from every mouth, then made an abrupt, ugly choking sound. Raythen watched in awe as it slowly began to rise up into the air, its many, twisted limbs thrashing, its orifices opening and closing, as though gasping for air.
He turned and saw Astarra, her staff raised, aquatic blue light pulsing from it. Her face was a rictus of concentration, her braided hair drenched with ethereal water as she reached out with her other hand and, with what looked like terrible effort, slowly clenched her fingers into a fist.
The demon crumpled. Black ichor burst from its maws as its insides were crushed, its spiny exoskeleton crunching and splitting as it was pulverized by the pressure of a fathomless depth, summoned up by Astarra’s runestone. She released the invisible waters surrounding it, letting it flop to the cavern floor.
“By Fortuna,” Raythen murmured, as Astarra bent double, panting.
There was no time to check she was alright. Several of the hound-beasts were already scrabbling to get over the obstruction caused by the broken body, their eyes wild, their huge jaws clacking and snapping. Mavarin slashed at one with his dagger, bellowing a Dunwarr war cry.
Raythen charged to his side, shield raised, and battered at the other beast, the heavy ironoak shuddering as it beat against the thing’s jaw. He lunged at it with his dagger, holding it like a short sword, going for its eyes and throat. Talons from a second yipping horror scraped at his armor, gouging rents in the metal but failing to find flesh. He responded by hacking into its muzzle, sending it shrieking and reeling back.
As he brought his battered shield up again to receive another set of claws, he decided he was never going to try and escape from the Dunwol Keg ever again.
•••
“This was what you were born to do, sweet Shiver,” murmured the voice in Shiver’s ear.
He’d started to shake uncontrollably, straining at the sorcerous chains that bound him. He could hear the sounds of battle all around, the terrible, yipping shrieks and howls of the demonic swarm and the screams of the elves as they were torn apart, one by one. He could sense Astarra’s runemagic, the Turning responding to her demands. But it all felt so distant, completely separate from his current reality. It was like a memory, and nothing more.
“You know what you have to do,” she urged him.
He collapsed to his knees, groaning. He could feel the Ynfernael coursing through him, like an infection gnawing at both body and soul, leaving him blackened and rotten like the twins. The portal blazed, its shadows full of whispers as they coiled thickly from its edges, filling the cavern, bleeding out into the surrounding tunnels and up, towards Thelgrim. It wasn’t properly open yet, not quite, but it was achingly close.
“The runewitch,” he heard one of the twins say in his warped voice, momentarily breaking through Shiver’s horror. He looked at the corrupt dwarf, and realized he was holding a device in his hand – a dark green stone, its edges coarse, partially encased by a metallic band. As the twin raised it, Shiver felt its power flood his senses, its essence unmistakable.
It was a Star of Timmoran. The Hydra Shard.
“Go,” said the other dwarf. The one holding the Shard turned and stepped down from the bone dais, entering the melee beyond.
“No,” Shiver stammered, trying to get back up. An invisible hand – her hand – thrust him back down, black talons cutting deep into his pale shoulder. He still had the scars there from when it had happened.
“You will do as I command, slave,” her voice snarled.
“You will do as we command, slave,” snarled the remaining dwarf, the words spat from the portal.
“Open it.”
“Open it.”
He tried to answer, but there was blood in his mouth, forcing him to spit. In front of him, the heart of the rift had started to coalesce and solidify. In the middle of the churning confluence of Ynfernael power, something was a forming. A lock, made of pure darkness.
With trembling hands, Shiver raised his key.
•••
“Ataqua imedego,” Astarra roared, slamming her staff forward. The surge of runepower flung a demon hound off the body of a deep elf before it could sink its fangs in, knocking it back into a knot of its braying kin.
She strode forward and helped the bloodied elf to his feet. The powers of the Deeprune were coursing through her. Her eyes glowed with aquatic luminescence, and her clothes and hair were floating, as though caught in an underwater current. She stood alongside the elf and smashed her staff’s haft against the muzzle of another of the Ynfernael horrors, the invisible, localized pressure of the ocean crushing its skull with a gristly crack.
She’d lost sight of Raythen and Mavarin in the press. Shiver was still visible ahead, on his knees, framed by the terrible light of the portal. She had to reach him. She had to stop him, before he opened it.
“Ataqua imedego,” she snarled once more, and drove into the Ynfernael swarm. Her staff parted the writhing, warped creatures on either side of her, clearing a path towards the mound of bones and the hellish corona of light above it. Just before reaching it though, her power was checked. She gasped, her step faltering, a shockwave of Turning energies shivering through the whole cavern.
A wall of energy had met her runemagic and repelled it. She righted herself and focused ahead, along the channel the tides of the Deeprune had cleared through the Ynfernael swarm. There, at the end of it, stood Korri, his silver beard clasp glinting in the unnatural light of the portal. Shadows coiled like living creatures around the corrupt Dunwarr, but they could not obscure the power of the object held in his hand.
Astarra sensed it immediately. Its power was unmistakable. In a lifetime spent hunting runeshards, she’d experienced it only on a few, brief occasions. It made the energies she could call upon pale in comparison.
It was a Star of Timmoran, the Hydra Shard, and it was wholly under the Ynfernael’s control.
Her heart quailed. She couldn’t fight that. None of them could. A Star of Timmoran was everything her magics were not. The fragments inscribed with the runes were locked to a single form of magic, their potential only running so deep. The powers of a Star though, were almost limitless.
“You go no further, runewitch,” hissed Korri, in a voice that was not his own. “Your power is worthless here.”
“Release Shiver,” she shouted, defiance flaring at the Dunwarr’s words. “Stop this insanity before it’s too late!”
“We are not the ones holding him,” Korri cackled.
Astarra lunged forward a pace and summoned up another of the Deeprune’s crushing waves, hoping to catch the Dunwarr off guard. She drove it at him, once more slamming aside the demons recovering on either side, snapping bones and shattering spines.
With a swipe of his hand and a snarl of effort, the dwarf cast the surge aside, sending it ploughing up into the cavern roof. The whole space shook, and dust and dirt cascaded down into the melee below.
Astarra’s step faltered once again, and she was forced to clutch her staff to steady herself. Korri let loose an ugly laugh.
“I warned you, weakling sorceress. Let me show you true power.”
The Dunwarr grasped the metal band that ran around the Shard and twisted it. Immediately its luminescence changed from a lustrous green to a smoldering, dark orange. Astarra felt the heat radiating from it.
Without even a w
ord of power, Korri raised the stone towards her. Fire roared into being, jetting down the cleared channel as though blasted from the gullet of a great drake.
“Salus darn,” Astarra shouted in desperation, calling up a wall of unseen water in front of the tongue of flames. It evaporated in the searing heat, but not before it had taken the sting from the flames, the conflagration extinguished with a piercing hiss.
Astarra fought to stand upright, her limbs trembling with the effort. She realized Korri was laughing again.
“I thought I would make things simple for you at the start, and still you almost failed!”
The dwarf turned the Shard once more, its glimmer shifting to a searing white light. Astarra looked away with a growl, momentarily blinded. She sensed the power of the Star surge, followed by a sudden, sharp pain in her right leg, forcing her down onto one knee.
Korri was standing over her. The white brilliance had consumed him, and he had reappeared right before her, teleporting through the cavern.
He kicked her leg from under her, and was turning the band that controlled the Shard once more, changing the innate focus of its powers using the Dunwarr-made device. The white light turned a pale, cold blue.
She managed to get back onto her feet before the power of the Hydra surged again. This time it delved into bitter, icy depths, the twin of the chill magics commanded by Shiver. Swift as a racing heartbeat, a thick rind of ice materialized over her feet, lower legs and the bottom of her staff. She found herself fixed in place, pinned by the sorcerous cold.
She couldn’t win this. In pure desperation she reached into the pouch at her waist and grasped the Ignis Shard.
“Talatha ignis,” she cried out as she felt the heat ignite through her body. Fire surged down the length of her staff, and the ice around her feet evaporated in a searing flash, steam wreathing both her and the dwarf.
Korri simply laughed once more, an ugly, sick sound. He was toying with her.
“Are you sure you can handle two runestones at once, little sorceress?” the demons within him mocked. More ice surged from the ether, fashioned by demonic malice into a hundred wicked shards that hurtled at Astarra from all sides.
The first few sliced at her before she was able to fully marshal and control the energies of the Ignis, its power warring with the Deeprune in her staff. One shard cut her cheek bloody before the flames fully responded and melted the remainder from existence before they could impale her.
The rage of the Ignis was within her now, fully realized. She let it loose, feeding her exhaustion and her pain into it, channeling it into a raging firestorm that leapt into being all around her.
“Your power is built on a lie,” she roared, flames licking from her eyes and throat, the fury of the runestone given voice. “It takes decades to master a Star of Timmoran, yet you think you can can control its abilities?”
For the briefest instant, she felt the power of the Ynfernael before her quail. She drove home her advantage, summoning the elements of the Deeprune and the Ignis Shard as one. The magical fires lit the swirling energies of the deeps, igniting like burning oil. She launched the pyroplasmic blaze at Korri, her whole body shaking and suffused with the twinned power of the runes.
The corrupt Dunwarr drew upon the power of the Star, but without true mastery of it he could only access so much. A wall of ice met the surge of burning energy Astarra had cast, but it wasn’t enough to stop it, only checking it before it might reduce him to charred ash.
It gave him time though, time to twist the Hydra and summon its white light. Just as the last of the ice evaporated the brilliance consumed him, and suddenly he was there no longer.
Astarra roared with frustration. The lance of liquid fire surged over the nearest demons as they closed in on the bloodied remains of the daggerband, its flames searing away flesh and bone where before it had been unable to touch them. But Korri was no longer there. He had re-emerged in a blink of light back before the portal and its gristly mound.
She turned her rage towards him, fresh fires blazing, their roar drowning out even the howls of the burning demons surrounding her. The Dunwarr brought up the Hydra Shard once more, its light now gone, replaced by a void-like opacity.
Astarra unleashed her fire, slamming the channeled flames towards Korri. As she did so darkness rose from the Hydra Shard, drawn forth by the Dunwarr. It was the blackness of the Ynfernael, twinned with the Star’s energies, corrupting it. The shadows yawned into a maw that met Astarra’s flames, consuming them. The two energies met with a thunderclap that shuddered through the cavern.
A scream of pain and effort ripped from Astarra’s lips. It wasn’t going to be enough. The darkness of the Ynfernael was driving towards her, eating up her flames as it went, pouring forth endlessly from the shard in Korri’s hand. Behind him Shiver was still slumped before the portal, framed by it as it went into a psychedelic frenzy of colors. She could see shapes writhing behind it, trying to break through the final, thin skein protecting reality from their hellish dimension.
She couldn’t beat it with two runestones. But she had three. She’d never tried channeling them all at once. It was madness, certain death. But it was certain death if she didn’t. Worse even. She wasn’t going to let their souls become playthings for these demonic horrors.
She delved into her pouch one more time and clutched the Viridis Seed, holding it in the same hand as the Ignis.
With a crack, the energies surrounding her redoubled. Her scream became a howl. Her staff was shaking, splitting in her grasp. The fire that had been surging around her began to burn her skin. Light blazed from her eyes, her mouth, from beneath her very skin. It was the power of the Turning unleashed, and it was not enough.
The shadows were checked, but they did not retreat. They fought with Astarra’s magics, now a bolt of pure, crackling energy, consuming it, feasting on it. Their hunger was insatiable.
Astarra felt herself slipping away. Her very soul was being eroded by the unchecked power of the three runebound shards, hollowed out by the effort of trying to channel them. The pain had gone, her human senses overloaded. She couldn’t remember her own name, or where she was. All she could see was directly ahead, to the clashing energies and Korri beyond them, the stolen shard held aloft.
Maelwich came from nowhere. The deep elf was a blur, darting between the writhing, embattled chaos surrounding her.
Elven steel flashed. For a second, Astarra thought she had opened the throat of the tainted Dunwarr. But she hadn’t. She’d struck at the Hydra Shard and, more importantly, lashed out at the device controlling it.
The band of metal fell, scythed cleanly in two. Astarra saw it come apart as though in a dream.
The effect was instant. The black shadows recoiled, turning in on themselves and evaporating. A concussive blast ripped through the cavern, Astarra’s own energies detonating like one of the Dunwarr blasting charges. She was thrown through the air, losing her grip on both her staff and the other two runestones.
Dropping them saved her life. The power that had been channeling through her evaporated in an instant, like a torch being plunged into icy waters. She landed on her back and arched her spine, gasping. Her whole body was in agony. Her skin was tender from the searing heat of the Ignis, and every muscle felt as though it had been ruptured and torn.
She moaned, trying to find the will to rise, even just to sit up. A shadow fell over, and for a second she feared she’d look up into the slavering, distended maws of one of the demon hounds, coming to avenge its master.
Instead, she found herself looking at Raythen. The one-eyed dwarf was practically dripping with foul, black ichor.
“It’s Shiver,” the Dunwarr thief panted. “He’s still going to open the portal. We have to stop him.”
Chapter Twenty-Eight
“Get up,” Raythen panted. He grasped Astarra under one arm, looking to Mavarin for help.
The inventor was too busy driving back a snapping hound with wide, slashing sweeps of his dagger. He was grinning manically as he did so, as spattered with demonic viscera as Raythen.
“We have to reach him,” Raythen added to Astarra. “We have to reach Shiver!”
The sorceress had managed to get onto her knees, clutching at her fallen staff and runestones. She looked dazed. Korri had been hurled back by the magical blast into the bone mound beneath the portal, but he was rising. There was no sign of the Star. Behind him Shiver was hunched over the heart of the portal, its shifting light now blinding.
“Shiver,” Astarra murmured, her eyes finding a degree of focus.
“I’m going to try to get to him,” Raythen said. “But if I don’t make it, it’s down to you. Understood?”
“Yes,” she said more firmly, clutching at her staff. It was close to splitting apart, but the light was still pulsing from its tip, however fitfully.
Raythen helped her to her feet and looked back towards the portal. The desperate struggle between the elves and the Ynfernael had spilled across the channel ploughed by Astarra and Korri’s magics, blocking his route. Momentarily, he caught sight of the one the leader had called Talarin, the elf’s auburn hair marking him out amidst the press, along with the glint of steel. His knives were unbloodied.
Raythen didn’t have time to register his surprise. Behind him, he heard Astarra snarl a runeword.
•••
Shiver felt the power of the Verto Magica in flux behind him, threatening to tear apart the entire cavern. He couldn’t look though. As much as he tried, he couldn’t rip his aching eyes from the portal, now right in front of him.
The Gates of Thelgrim Page 27