“Be easy with him,” Cadderly said.
“As you were with them?” Danica asked, waving a hand at the pile of smoldering corpses.
Cadderly understood Danica’s ire. The battle had been rough, as the rising stench of burning flesh reminded them.
“Why didn’t you tell me what that orb would do?” Danica’s question sounded as a desperate plea.
Cadderly had a hard time sorting through a seeming reversal of roles. Usually he was the one who was too softhearted, who got them into trouble by not fighting hard enough against the declared enemies of the library. He’d spared Dorigen in Shilmista Forest, had let her live when he’d her helpless on the ground before him, though Danica had instructed him to finish her. And Cadderly had been merciless just moments before, had done as the situation demanded, against his own peaceful instincts. Cadderly held little remorse—he knew that all the humans in the fiery jumble were dark-hearted men who followed an insidious goddess—but he was more than a little surprised by Danica’s cold reaction.
She gave another tug on the prisoner’s arms, as if she was using the man’s pain to torment Cadderly.
“But he is not an evil man,” Cadderly said.
Danica hesitated, her exotic eyes searching out the sincerity within Cadderly’s gray orbs. She’d always been able to read the young priest’s thoughts and believed that he was speaking truthfully, though where he’d garnered that piece of information, Danica could have had no idea.
“And they were?” Danica asked somewhat sharply, again indicating the pile. “Evil men?”
“Yes,” Cadderly answered. “When I uttered the holy word, how did you feel?”
The simple memory of that wondrous moment eased much of the tension from Danica’s fair face. How did she feel? She felt in love, at ease with all the world, as if nothing ugly could come near her.
“You saw how it affected them,” Cadderly went on, finding his answers in Danica’s serene expression.
Following his logic, Danica lessened her grip. “But it didn’t adversely affect this one,” she said.
“He is not an evil man,” Cadderly reiterated.
Danica nodded and lessened her grip. She looked back at Cadderly, though, and her expression was cold once more, a look more of disappointment than of anger.
Cadderly understood, but had no answers for her. There had been human beings among the monsters in that group, men among the goblins. Danica was disappointed because Cadderly had done what was necessary, had given in to the melee. She’d been angry with Cadderly when he’d spared Dorigen, but it was an anger founded in her fear of the wizard. In truth, Danica had loved Cadderly all the more because of his conscience, because he’d tried to avoid the horrors of battle at all costs.
Cadderly looked back at the pile of corpses. He had given in, joined the fighting with all his heart.
It had to be that way, Cadderly knew. He was as horrified as Danica over what he’d just done, but he would not take back the action even if he could. The friends were in desperate straits—all Erlkazar was in desperate straits—and that danger was being precipitated by the minions of Castle Trinity. They, not Cadderly, would have to take responsibility for the lives that would be lost because of those designs.
But while that argument held solid on a logical basis, Cadderly couldn’t deny the pain in his chest when he looked upon the pile of dead men, or the sting in his heart when he saw the disappointment in Danica’s eyes.
“We must go!” Shayleigh said to Ivan, tugging on the dwarf’s arm and looking back to the corridor behind them, where the steps of many boots could be heard.
Ivan sighed as he regarded Vander, the firbolg’s head crushed and misshapen. A similar sigh behind him turned Ivan around to regard Pikel. He eyed his brother curiously, for something seemed out of place along the length of Pikel’s tunic and undershirt.
“How’d ye get away from the snake?” Ivan asked, suddenly remembering their past predicament.
Pikel gave a short whistle, and on cue, the serpent’s head streamed up from his collar and hovered in the air right beside his green-bearded cheek.
Shayleigh and Ivan fell back in shock, Ivan’s axe coming up defensively between himself and his surprising brother.
“Doo-dad!” Pikel announced happily, petting the snake, which seemed to enjoy the treatment. Pikel nodded to the side, indicating that they should be on their way.
“Doo-dad?” Shayleigh inquired of Ivan as Pikel hopped off.
“Wants to be a druid,” Ivan explained, moving to follow his brother. “He don’t know that dwarves can’t be druids.”
Shayleigh considered the words for a long moment. “Neither does the snake,” she decided, and with a final, helpless look at the dead Vander, she rushed off after her companions.
“My thanks to you,” the soldier whispered to Cadderly, all the while eyeing the charred mass of his dead allies. The pile fell apart then, resettling upon the floor, as Cadderly’s strange enchantment dissipated.
“Where is Aballister?” the young priest demanded.
The man’s lips tightened into thin lines.
Cadderly leaped past Danica, grabbed the man by the collar, and slammed him hard against the wall. “You are still a prisoner!” he growled in the surprised man’s face. “You can be an asset to us, and we will repay you accordingly.
“Or you can be a detriment,” Cadderly went on grimly. He looked back to the pile as he spoke, and the unvoiced threat drained the blood from the captured man’s face.
“Lead on to the wizard,” Cadderly instructed. “Along the most direct route.”
The man glanced at Danica, as if pleading for some support, but the monk looked away.
That gesture didn’t reveal the turmoil in Danica’s heart. Cadderly’s move and threat against the prisoner, a person he’d just declared was not an evil man, had surprised her. She’d never seen Cadderly so calculatingly cold, and while she could understand his determined actions, she couldn’t deny her fears.
The prisoner took them through a door to the side, halfway around the circular room. They had only gone a dozen steps when Cadderly grabbed the man again, pushed him up against the wall and began roughly stripping off every piece of his noisy armor, even to the point of removing the man’s hard-soled boots.
“Quietly,” he whispered to the man. “I have but one battle left to fight, a battle against Aballister.”
The man growled and pushed Cadderly away, and found Danica’s silver-hilted dagger at his throat in the blink of an eye.
“The wizard is powerful,” the prisoner warned, wisely keeping his voice soft.
Cadderly nodded. “And you fear the consequences of your actions should Aballister win out against us,” he reasoned.
The man’s lips went tight again, and he made no move to respond. Cadderly eased Danica away and again put his face close to the man’s, his jaw firm and unrelenting.
“Then choose,” the young priest said, his voice low and threatening. “Do you take the chance that Aballister will not win out?”
The man glanced around, nervous, but again said nothing.
“Aballister is not here,” Cadderly reminded him. “None of your allies are here. It’s just you and I, and you know what I can do.”
The man started off again immediately, his bare feet making little noise as he padded along the corridor with appropriate caution. They crossed several side corridors, often hearing the sounds of other soldiers rushing around, probably in search of them. Each time some group was around, Danica looked nervously to Cadderly, as if to say that the captured man, who could betray them with a simple call, was his responsibility.
But the man held true to the terms of his capture, moving with all stealth as they worked their way past one guard position or patrol group after another.
When they entered one long corridor, though, a group of goblins entered it simultaneously from the other end, and they found that they had nowhere to run. The goblins, six of the beast
s, advanced cautiously, weapons drawn.
The prisoner addressed them in their own croaking language, and Cadderly understood well enough to know that the man had concocted some lie about being on a mission for the priests, going to Aballister with some important information.
Still, the goblins eyed Cadderly and Danica dangerously, exchanging a few quiet remarks—doubts, Cadderly knew—amongst themselves.
Even the cooperative prisoner looked back, his expression showing sincere worry.
Danica didn’t wait for events to take their obvious course. She leaped out suddenly, punching the nearest goblin in the throat, circling around, her leg flying high to connect on the next one’s chest, and whipped a dagger into the face of yet another. She ducked low under a sword swipe and sprang up high from her crouch, double-kicking the sword wielder in the face and chest.
Two goblins rushed by her, more concerned with escape than with tangling with Cadderly and the soldier, but Cadderly got one with his walking stick, shattering its knee, and the soldier tackled the other.
Danica spun around and kicked again, sending one goblin flying into the wall. The creature smacked hard against the stone and bounced back. Danica, timing her spin perfectly, promptly kicked it again. Again it bounced out, and again it was launched backward by a perfectly timed kick.
The fourth time, the goblin was allowed to fall to the floor, for Danica sprang away, leaping over the prone prisoner at the back of the goblin that had slipped her grasp. One hand reached around to cup the goblin’s chin while the other grabbed the hair on the back of its head.
The goblin squealed and tried to stop and turn, but Danica rushed right beside it, twisting her arms viciously, and snapping the wretched thing’s neck.
“Down!” Danica called, coming around behind Cadderly.
The young priest fell to the floor and the goblin facing him was caught fully by surprise as Danica rushed by, connecting with a heavy punch into its ugly face. It flew backward several feet, hit the stone with a grunt, and Danica ran past.
The goblin she’d hit in the throat was up to its knees again, trying to find its footing. Danica leaped high into the air, coming down with her knees driving against the skinny creature’s back, slamming it down fiercely. She pulled her second dagger from her boot, grabbed a clump of hair with her free hand, and pulled the goblin’s head back, cutting a neat line across its throat.
She did likewise to the helpless goblin that had her other dagger sticking from its face, ending its misery. Then she turned back, to see Cadderly and the prisoner staring at her.
“I do not parley with goblins,” Danica said, wiping her blades on the nearest monster’s dirty tunic.
“You couldn’t outrun her,” Cadderly remarked to the prisoner, and the man, in turn, gave the young priest a nervous look. “I just thought I should mention that,” Cadderly said.
They set out at once, Cadderly and Danica anxious to put some distance between themselves and the scene of the slaughter. The prisoner said nothing, just continued to lead them at a swift pace, and soon the tunnels became quieter and less filled with rushing soldiers.
Cadderly sensed that the walls in that area were not natural, though they were lined by uncut stone. The young priest could feel the residual energies of the magic that had been used to carve the place, as though some powerful dweomer had pulled the natural stone from between the walls.
The sensations sent a mix of emotions through the young priest. He was glad that the captured soldier was apparently not leading them astray, glad that their search might soon come to its end. But Cadderly was worried, too, for if Aballister had created those tunnels, had magically torn the stone from the halls, then the storm at Nightglow only hinted at his powers.
Something else assaulted Cadderly’s thoughts then, a fleeting, distant call, as if someone was summoning him. He paused and closed his eyes.
Cadderly.
He heard it clearly, though distantly. He felt for the amulet in his pocket, which he’d acquired some time ago and with which he could communicate with the imp, Druzil. It felt cool to his touch, indicating that Druzil was nowhere around.
Cadderly.
It wasn’t Druzil, and Cadderly didn’t believe it was Dorigen, either. Who then? the young priest wondered. Who was so attuned to him that they might make telepathic contact without his knowledge or consent?
He opened his eyes, determined not to get sidetracked. “Keep going,” he instructed his comrades, taking his place beside them.
But the call remained, fleeting and distant, and what bothered Cadderly more than anything else was that it sounded somehow familiar.
SEVENTEEN
DWARVEN STEALTH
We must move quietly,” Shayleigh pointedly instructed her dwarf companions, what seemed to her an obvious precaution. Still, Shayleigh soon came to understand that her definition of “moving quietly” was apparently very different from Ivan and Pikel’s. The clomp of Ivan’s boots echoed loudly off the stone walls, and Pikel’s sandals double-slapped—once against the floor and once against his foot—with every pumping stride.
They rambled along several long, dark corridors, the only light coming from widely spaced torches hanging in iron sconces. Around a bend and through an archway, the three companions found the walls lined by fonts, filled with a clear, watery substance.
Ivan, needing a refreshing drink, paused and moved to scoop up some, but Pikel quickly slapped his hand away, waggling a finger in his startled brother’s face.
“Uh-uhhh,” the green-bearded dwarf implored, and he hopped up high and pulled a torch from its sconce. Still waggling the finger tucked under his arm, Pikel touched the fire to the liquid. The stuff hissed and sputtered, and a noxious gray cloud arose, making Ivan pinch his nose. Pikel hung his tongue out of his mouth and muttered, “Yuck.”
“How did he know?” Shayleigh asked Ivan when they had cleared the stinky area.
Ivan shrugged. “Must be somethin’ to this druid stuff.”
“Doo-dad!” Pikel agreed.
“Yeah, doo-dad,” muttered Ivan. “Or he just knowed that this place is for Talona, and Talona’s the goddess of poison.”
Sly Pikel wasn’t letting on. He just followed the other two, every so often chuckling, “Hee hee hee.”
Around a sharp bend in the corridor, the friends found a group of enemies waiting for them.
Shayleigh fired her bow between the bobbing dwarves’ heads, catching the leading orc in the chest and dropping it.
“Frog!” Ivan called, and Shayleigh didn’t catch the reference to a game he and his brother used to play.
Pikel rushed in front and braced himself, squared to the next leading orc, and Ivan leaped up from behind and straddled Pikel’s shoulders. Pikel fell forward, hooking Ivan’s feet and propelling his forward-flying brother into a downward arc.
The orc froze with surprise, stood there with no practical defenses, and Ivan’s axe cleaved its skull, drove right down through the stupid creature’s head so that it seemed as if it would literally be split in half.
The move left both dwarves sprawled on the floor, with several enemies still standing, unharmed, though after witnessing a comrade practically split down the middle, none of them seemed overly anxious to rush in. With the line of fire clear between them and Shayleigh, their hesitation was not a wise thing.
The elf maiden set her bow to furious work, hardly aiming, just firing for the mass of enemy bodies.
A few heartbeats, and a few arrows later, what was left of the enemy band was in full flight.
“Now, move quietly,” Shayleigh instructed through gritted teeth.
“Quietly?” Ivan balked. “Bring the whole damned bunch of them on, I say!”
“Oo oi!” Pikel cried.
The brothers turned together toward Shayleigh, to find the elf maiden back against the inner wall of the last corner, her bow up as she looked behind them.
“You may get your wish,” she explained. “Goblins, led
by an ogre.”
Ivan and Pikel rushed up to the corner beside her and nodded to each other, as if they already had come to a silent agreement on how to approach the next fight. Ivan stooped, and Pikel went up on his shoulders, leaning against the wall and putting one hand up high, fingers conspicuously wrapped around the edge of the wall, in plain sight of the approaching force.
Ivan nodded for Shayleigh to fall back a few steps.
The ogre came around the corner expecting, from Pikel’s high-placed hand, to find a tall foe. Pikel fell away as the monster spun around the bend, its flying club smacking harmlessly off the empty stone wall.
Ivan’s axe chop gashed into the thigh of its lead leg, severing muscles and tendons.
Unable to stop its momentum, the wounded ogre continued its turn, squaring its back to Shayleigh. Still backstepping, it jerked twice in rapid succession as arrows drove through its shoulder blades then it tripped, falling backward. One arrow shattered under the tremendous weight, but the other, angled perfectly so that it hit the ground straight up, plunged through the massive beast, through its heart, with the arrow tip bursting out the front of the ogre’s chest.
By the time the goblins, just two steps behind the ogre, came around the corner, they found their leader dead.
Not that the lead goblins even had time to register the scene. Pikel, crouched back in the corner, swiped his club across, smacking shins and sending two of the monsters sprawling—right at Ivan’s feet. The yellow-bearded dwarf, his axe chopping viciously, made quick work of them.
The rest of the force, with typical goblin loyalty, turned and fled.
“They will be returning from the front,” Shayleigh said.
“Yeah, and the stupid goblins will hear the fighting and come back the other way, probably with a hunnerd kin!” Ivan agreed.
“You may indeed get your wish, Ivan,” the elf answered. “The whole force of Castle Trinity might soon squeeze us between them.”
Shayleigh moved to the corner and looked back then ran up ahead and peered as far along as she could, hoping for a side tunnel, for something that could get them free of that tight area.
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