The Grimoire of Yule (The Shadows of Legend Book 1)

by Adam Golden

  “The witch who’d unleashed destruction on her brethren,” Volundr spat bitterly. “Elphame, self-proclaimed Goddess of the newly minted Dawn Temple.”

  The old man rapped the side of his fist on the broken statue and spun to face his audience. “This, young Nikulas, is why, even if we wanted to, we cannot fight. There is no path to Alfheim any longer. We, and those overseers the priests saddle us with, are all bottled up here. All equally imprisoned, all cut off.”

  “There is a way,” Nicholas said. “You mine and craft for them, the products of your work get to Alfheim somehow.” The old man opened his mouth to speak, but Nicholas waved him down. “There is a way, Volundr. There is. You’ve all gotten too used to submission. You’ve grown comfortable in your nightmare. No prison is inescapable, no enemy cannot be overcome with enough time, effort, and planning. I will not rot away in this place! I will not have my legacy be one of failure, and I will not have my destiny stolen from me. There is a threat coming that you do not know, a danger to reality itself, and it is coming now. I need what the Light Elves have in order to face that threat, or all life everywhere will face a fate far worse than that of the Dokkalfar. I will do it on my own if I must, but I would rather help you and yours to take back your lives. What say you, Volundr?”

  The old man said nothing, he just shook his head with a sort of sad bemused smile, but in the distance, a faint scraping shuffle sounded as the stooped skeletal Dokkalfar, who’d shadowed them since they’d seen him at the fire, scurried away to spread the news. The new human meant to fight, meant to resist! Word would spread quickly in the resonant chittering undervoice of the dark elves. Most wouldn’t take the risk, but there would be some. The war horns would sound in Svartalfheim for the last time, and the Dokkalfar would march. Likely to their doom, but they would march.

  On the War Path

  Day dawns darkest down deep. Shuffle forward. Don’t slip. Day dawns darkest down deep. Shuffle forward. Don’t think.

  Nicholas was careful to keep his eyes on the ragged tops of the shredded remains of boots he’d removed from a dead miner earlier that day as he kept pace with the others in line. His mouth moved behind his recently cropped beard, working through the rhyme he’d taken as his mantra while he marched. The powerless sorcerer’s back was bent nearly double, his swarthy skin coated thickly with coal dust, and he was careful to mimic the grinding, shuffling plod of the Dvergr around him. It wasn’t that difficult given the huge woven basket of heavy leathers that had been strapped to his back. Down they trudged, down what felt like thousands of steep, narrow stairs from the dwelling caves above into the secured levels that housed the mine shafts, tool rooms, and forges that were the heart of the vast prison labyrinth of Nidavellir.

  Day dawns darkest down deep.

  Nicholas’ eyes shifted surreptitiously, peeking up through his knitted brows and scanning around him. The line trudged through a colossal gate formed of iron bars as thick as his forearm, and into the buzzing hive of work that filled the lowest floor of the vast complex of catacombs and mines. Dvergr slaves scuttled everywhere he looked, swinging picks and hammers, filling heavy push carts with raw stone and metal ores, clamoring over sheer rock faces with the ease of clinging lizards.

  The wizard’s first sight of an Overseer had been something of a shock. He’d just assumed the hated Overseers would be members of the mysterious Light Elves. Yet, far from being the brilliant alabaster and silver specimens he’d expected of the Ljosalfar, the Overseers had the same sharp angular features, high cheeks, and long thin aquiline noses as their captives, along with the same char black skin. The Overseers were tall, broad-shouldered, intimidatingly thick-chested, and strong of limb. They were athletic, strong looking creatures, yet Nicholas was sure they must be the same race. The Dvergr might be gaunt and haggard to the point of atrophy, but aside from the matter of their physical condition, the only difference the sorcerer could see was in the eyes. Their prisoners’ tilted and strangely lit orbs glowed with a faint wolfish gold, displaying a clear black pupil and iris flecked with grains of jet. The Overseers looked out from almond shaped hollows of an identical shape and yet their coloring was an unbroken, eerie liquid silver that showed neither iris or pupil.

  —

  “They’re Dokkalfar, or were,” Volundr confirmed when Nicholas finally asked, a week previous. “Those you see in the pits and mines were the same once.”

  “What? How can that be?” the sorcerer asked with an incredulous look at the scuttling, emaciated form of a passing miner.

  “Starvation, constant backbreaking labor, being trapped miles underground without proper light, fresh air, or clean water,” Volundr said with a heavy shrug. “What do you imagine you’d look like after a few centuries of that?”

  “Centuries?” Nicholas asked, and the old man nodded sadly.

  “Aelfkin do not die,” he said and smirked at the look of shock that came across the wizard’s face. “Oh, they can be killed surely enough. Gods know we see enough of that here, and they can grow ill, sometimes cripplingly so, but neither time nor disease hold any mortal threat for them. The Gods made them of surpassingly robust stuff, though whether that has been a blessing or a curse . . .” The old man turned his palms up and shrugged again.

  “So, they’ve all been living like this for . . .” Nicholas started.

  “A thousand years, give or take,” the man finished. “Every slave alive today remembers the day their city fell, remembers when their bonds were closed about their necks. The youngest of them was born the very day of the assault.”

  —

  Nicholas shook off the memory, shifted his eyes away from the towering, powerfully built Overseer he realized he’d been glaring at, and scoured his surface thoughts.

  Day dawns darkest down deep.

  The Dvergr had lost so much, fallen so far, and were denied even the escape of death. It was a monstrous injustice; the wizard could barely comprehend what a curse an immorality such as theirs must be. Still, Nicholas couldn’t deny the sense of destiny in what he’d found beneath the White Lady’s mountain. He’d been delivered the exact tool he needed, a perfect weapon. He could not have designed a better crucible for making zealous, committed fighters with just the right blend of fear, animal hatred, and self-destructive courage. He’d seen it in those first whispered planning sessions.

  The Dokkalfar of Nidavellir were worn down. They were tired, they wanted, craved rest from their labors and loss. Many were past caring, past fearing, they invited death, sought it almost as much as they sought revenge on those who’d made them thus. Nicholas would give them that revenge, and in so doing would gain everything he wanted.

  The floor of the great cavern was miles wide and alive with action and every kind of industry. Slave workers buzzed and milled in columns and clouds. A great chittering hive, a swarm driven by the will of a queen none of them had ever even seen. The barbed lashes, carried by the Overseers who bracketed Nicholas’ column, flicked out continuously, raking those who impeded the way with savage bloody gashes. A blessed few managed to scurry away unmarred, others got only a glancing caress from the whips’ steel talons, and were able to rise quickly enough to clear the way. The truly unfortunate fell and were trod underfoot by their fellows who were prodded onward by their handlers.

  Nicholas winced as his foot came down on the neck of a writhing skeleton of a Dvergr miner who’d been too slow. He felt the squelching pop under his foot as the unfortunate creature’s windpipe was crushed. A shudder of realization passed through the wizard as he plodded onward. He hoped the poor creature was allowed to expire rather than being forced to go on forever as the ruin he’d be once the column cleared his battered corpse.

  It took near an hour to cross to their destination, another great heavy gate set into the living rock of the mountain, this one stood closed and locked, and was manned by a pair of Overseers armed with cudgels, their quicksilver eyes staring, empty and unmoving, but seeing all. As the column approached, one of
them sketched an occult symbol in the air, and the heavy portal released with a ringing metallic clang and swung open smoothly.

  The scene inside the chamber beyond the gate was panic, noise, and confusion. A piercing shrill whistle screamed somewhere in the billowed clouds of steam that filled the entirety of the hollowed-out cavern. The ground was littered with dozens of twisting, moaning Dokkalfar clutching at limbs or faces, screaming in agony. Livid scalds and burns were everywhere Nicholas turned. Rashes of angry red blisters broke out on cracked and bleeding black flesh. Here and there flaccid dark flesh oozed from bone and muscle like the overcooked meat sliding from a soup bone.

  The heat was dizzying, the stench ungodly, and the very walls and floor of the great mountain chamber shook periodically as explosions sounded somewhere in the curtain of grey vapor. The Overseers’ statue-like stoicism and blank stares remained intact, but there was a palpable sense of unease, even from them, still they prodded their charges deeper into the scalding fog.

  “. . . done all I can do without workers properly outfitted to the task,” a voice that managed to be somehow both gruff and shrill said from within the humid cloud of steam close to where the column was halted. “The last batch went down too quickly to even reach the needed valves. It’s just too hot. If repairs could wait until the steam cleared.”

  “There will be no delay.” This voice rang with an otherworldly concussion, it reverberated through Nicholas like thunder. It was absolute and infinitely assured, the tones of an indifferent deity pronouncing it’s will without the slightest concern that said will would not be done. “All that you say you require is being provided. You will fix this, or you will fail, and another will be found who can succeed.”

  As his eyes adjusted to the gloom of the steam, and Nicholas made out a pair of brilliant sky-blue lights a few short paces ahead of his place near the front of the column. He lifted his head, working his stiff neck for the first time in hours, and strained to get a better view. It was an Overseer, standing before the twisted form of a gnarled Dvergr dressed in surprisingly well made and stout looking leathers from head to toe. The Overseer stood rigid, stretched and quivering as though laid out on an invisible rack. Its eyes were wide and beaming that strange pale blue radiance. Its mouth gaped open, the jaw extended further than a human could ever have done and the face was frozen in a mask of tormented agony.

  Nicholas bit down on the grasp that nearly escaped as he realized he was looking at a Light Elf sorcerer, not in the flesh obviously, but speaking through the possessed Overseer. This was how the lords of Alfheim controlled their slaves while leaving them closed away. The sorcerer wished he could see the threads of power that bound the spell in place. What an intricate working it would need to force an alien consciousness into a living, occupied body. What a weapon that could be . . . That line of thought broke off and the human wizard snapped his gaze back down to his feet as Overseer’s head jerked in his direction.

  Day dawns darkest down deep, the wizard panted mentally again and again, holding the rhyme central in his thoughts.

  The captured creature’s rigid, bulging neck muscles heaved and flexed, throwing its head from side to side spasmodically. Blue light faded back to the same quicksilver gaze as it’s fellows, and the body slumped into the regular, more rigid straightness of a strong body standing at rest.

  “You there!” the Dvergr in the leathers yelled in it’s strange high bark, pointing at the miner at the head of the wizard’s column. “Get that basket down off that great ox and pass out that gear. I want your crew outfitted before the next group arrives. Be certain everyone gets boots, leggings, and long gloves,” he started to turn away and then turned back as though recalling an afterthought, “and make sure everyone gets a set of heavy stockings. The inner chamber is hot as a slag pit, your boots will be seared to your legs without ‘em.”

  A half-dozen sets of strong hands wrenched the huge basket down off the wizard’s aching back, and the leader of the column went about handing out the contents to the others. There were neither leggings nor jackets for a person of Nicholas’ size anywhere in the dark realm under the mountain. The bundle that was pressed on him was a series of long thick forge aprons which, when placed just so and buckled around his girth, created a sort of thick shapeless hide casing from his shoulders to the tops of the heavy boots he managed to fold his feet into. The strange rigid outfit was completed with a pair of tanned hide gauntlets that covered his hands and arms to the shoulders.

  “You! You, Ox!” chirped the column leader, bustling over to Nicholas as he sat against one of the rock walls of the chamber trying to wedge his feet into the boots he’d been given. “You forgot your stockings!” the Dvergr spat disgustedly, prodding the human in the chest with a long, gnarled finger before he pitched a pair of the heavy greyish woolen things at his face.

  Nicholas’ fist closed reflexively around a large, rough-sided lump of raw coal from one of the piles that littered the floor, glaring menace at the little ebony-skinned demon.

  The monster sneered at the threat in the wizard’s posture and then turned and started barking at his charges again.

  A second and a third long column of workers were herded into the steam-filled outer chamber, their Overseer guards handing them over to the Dvergr in the fine leathers before stomping off again. Nicholas imagined there must have been nearly a hundred Dokkalfar in the fog-filled chamber by then, though he couldn’t be sure with the steam and milling confusion. The file leader of his column was busying prodding, pushing, and striking the members of his command back into some semblance of a line.

  “Remember!” came the shrill bark of the head Dvergr engineer, “keep yourselves covered. Work smartly but quickly. The masters demand results!”

  He nodded his skin-shrouded skull at the file leader who rasped a command, and the line moved toward a set of large heavy doors at the back of the chamber. The leader told off the first four bodies in the file to open the doors.

  “Get through quickly and get those doors closed again,” he yelled. “Enough damage has been done to the outer chamber, and they’re not protected out here!”

  The doors looked far too large and heavy to be budged by the scrawny, malnourished forms of the creatures who’d been tasked, but the Dokkalfar-designed portals were so perfectly balanced and weighted that they slid open effortlessly. A cloud of boiling hot, noxious smelling steam burst from the cracked door, and the file leader ordered the column through. Nicholas took a deep breath and moved along with his group.

  —

  “Day dawns darkest down deep,” Nicholas muttered to himself as the column filed in and the heavy doors boomed shut behind them.

  The three Dokkalfar holding the heavy length of thick hose that had blown the furnace exhaust through the door relaxed their arms and postures as the flow cut off and Nicholas’ file leader let out a raucous laugh as he came back and slapped a thin, hard palm down on the wizard’s shoulder.

  “Day dawns darkest down deep.”

  The line foreman laughed. “You can stop that now human,” he said with a grin meant to be friendly but which looked feral to Nicholas. “The Overseers need proximity to read your mind. Congratulations, the plan is working so far.”

  Nicholas nodded, the ruse was holding up so far, or so it appeared. Hopefully, the steam crew would keep anyone from investigating the main furnace chamber for hours yet to come.

  The sorcerer’s gaze swung toward the room’s central occupant, the great furnace of Svartalfheim. The massive bulb-shaped boiler furnace was at least a dozen strides from end to end and stood ten stories tall. It held enough water to fill a small lake at any given time, was fed by an underground river, and heated by a magma flow augmented by thousands of pounds of Dvergr mined coal. The incredible device had once provided hot water and heat to both the great cities of the mountain and still did so for the seat of the masters above.

  The furnace itself was impressive, but the wizard gave it only momentary study befor
e his eyes went to the reason they were there. The reason for the elaborate ruse that had taken days to organize and required dozens of volunteers to be scalded deliberately to sell the hoax. There, above the great dome that topped the furnace, was the highway that would see Nicholas and his Dokkalfar allies into the heart of the white city. The great outflow pipe which sent thousands of gallons of boiling water a day up to the central cistern of Alfheim, and from there, through the web of pipes that brought it to every building in the city. That flow had stopped almost six hours after an explosion that rocked the mountain and brought down showers of loose rock all over Nidavellir. It was reported as a catastrophic valve failure, though the valves did exactly what they were supposed to do when they’d all been closed hours before the explosion. The first teams that had been assigned to repair them hadn’t had much success, though Nicholas was pleased to see they’d had more luck with their true task: breeching the side of the outflow pipe above the furnace and setting up the long ladders that would be needed to reach it.

  “Assent teams check your gear and get moving,” Nicholas said, moving toward the ladders. “The second team will be on its way soon. Decoy teams, make it look good. It’s a long climb, you have to buy us the time or we’ll find sorcerers waiting at the top and we’re all doomed.”

  “They know their jobs boy, and they know the stakes better than you ever will,” came Volundr’s deep bass rumble as the old man came toward Nicholas, all but buried in his own set of heavy leathers.

  The old smith lobbed a chunk of coal the size of two closed fists toward Nicholas, who caught it easily and slid it down into the toe of the long woolen stocking he drew from under one of his aprons before swinging it around once experimentally. It would do. One of the first problems they’d realized during their planning was that there was nothing that could be used as a weapon on the dormitory levels, and storming a tool room would have given them away before they began. The improvised flails would be crude, but hopefully effective when combined with the element of surprise.