Measure and the Truth tros-3

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Measure and the Truth tros-3 Page 23

by Douglas Niles


  Where was she? How did she get there? Her eyes were open, but she saw only a vague, almost black grayness. Had she been blinded?

  She had the vague sense that a lot of time had passed since she had last been aware of her surroundings. Some memories returned, slowly… the smoke-filled inn, the exotic music… people were laughing- Selinda was laughing-overcome by hysteria. She recalled her dance of wild enjoyment, the boisterous cheers of the other patrons. That drink! A lotus… something…

  And Lame Hale.

  “Hale!” she called angrily-or rather, tried to call. But still her mouth seemed to be filled with cotton; her tongue, her lips were unresponsive to mental commands. She tried to move again and failed-and for the first time realized that she was physically restrained. Her vision was clearing slightly. She made out a growing illumination, a spot that might have been a window, and the shapes of worn planking on the ceiling over her head.

  She was lying on her back, on some sort of mattress. Her hands were over her head, each bound by the wrist to some sort of thick restraint. With a shudder of relief, she realized that at least she was still dressed; indeed, she was wearing her own clothes-she could feel the familiar, rare silk nestled against her skin. But what was happening to her? How had she come to such a pretty pass?

  “Ah, my dear. How nice to see that you are awake.”

  The voice came from very close beside her head, and she started in panic.

  “Hale?” she asked, recognizing the voice. “What did you do to me?”

  “Nothing… yet.” The smirk was evident in his voice. “You are worth far more to me intact than damaged.”

  “My worth? What in the world are you talking about? Are you planning to sell me?”

  “Very astute!” said the man. She could make out more details finally, and when she twisted her head slightly, she saw him out of the corner of her eye, sitting smugly against the wall of the room. Selinda tried to think, to clear the fog from her mind and hatch some sort of plan. But all she felt was a headache. “A splendid-looking creature such as yourself will fetch a fine price in the east.”

  “But-how dare you!” she spat. “Why, they’ll be looking for me!”

  “I haven’t failed to note that you invariably visit us alone, my dear. I am guessing, with a fair degree of certainty, that you haven’t told anybody where you are. So let them look for you-within a few days, you could be hundreds of miles away from here. I have only to give the order, to make the deal.”

  Selinda fought against the tears that threatened to blind her. She would not give him the satisfaction! Instead, she cast about for some idea, anything, that might give her cause for hope.

  “Of course, it may be that there are buyers closer to home who would be interested in possessing one such as yourself… a woman as beautiful as a princess, if truth be told.”

  Cold terror shot through her. Did he know who she was? Could he use that information to hurt her or the emperor?

  Or the city of her birth?

  And then, with a glimmer of optimism, she remembered her ring. She couldn’t see her finger, but surely the ring was still there-it must be there. If she could just touch one hand with the other, twist the ring on her finger three times, she would be able to teleport out of there, back to her palace room, that former prison that suddenly seemed so inviting and secure, a safe refuge against the many dangers of the world. She wasted no time in regretting her actions but tried to imagine a way to get the man to ease his guard.

  She let go a deep, unhappy breath and slumped back on the bed, motionless. Her despair was not an act, but her loss of strength was. Stretching her legs, she realized her feet were bound too. The room was shabby and plain, and she guessed it was probably somewhere in the back of the inn she had visited so many times.

  But nobody at the inn knew who she was, and nobody at the palace knew where she was!

  “That’s better. It will go easier for you if you don’t struggle so much. Those ropes can chafe terribly, I have learned.”

  “I understand,” she said meekly. “But I am terribly thirsty, and my shoulder is sore. Could you loosen those ropes, just a little? My feet are bound; you know I’m not going anywhere.”

  “I suppose a little slack wouldn’t hurt, so long as you promise to behave,” Lame Hale said with a sneer that made her skin crawl.

  “I promise,” she replied as sweetly as she could through gritted teeth.

  He leaned forward and pulled on the rope. Her right hand came free, and in the same instant she pulled it around to her left, groped with her fingers, felt for the metal band, her magical tool of escape. But she couldn’t feel the ring, couldn’t feel anything but her cold, clammy skin!

  “Oh?” said Hale calmly, reaching out to grasp her hand again, bringing it back to the post where he secured it tightly again. He showed her the glimmering circlet of silver, shining in his hand, and looked at her with mock innocence. “Were you looking for this little bauble?” he asked.

  Ankhar’s route took him and his column of ogres and hobgoblins right past a broken-down cabin near the upper reach of the mountain valley.

  “Do you remember this place?” he asked his stepmother, pausing to look at the wreckage, feeling an unfamiliar lump of emotion in his throat.

  “Yes,” she said in a muted voice. “Here I save you from Bonechisel. You were just baby.”

  He chuckled, touched. “Yes. Then I grew up. Nobody saved Bonechisel from me.”

  Proudly he showed the place to Pond-Lily. “I was born here! My first home!”

  The ogress was delighted and wanted to stop and ooh and ahh over the place, but Ankhar couldn’t spare the time for such trivialities. “We march now,” he said. “Come back later, after war.”

  They moved on up the valley toward the crest of the snow-covered mountain range. The ogres, draconians, gobs, and hobs of his army all followed behind, unquestioning of their lord’s intentions, strategies, and plans.

  “Even then, I saw greatness in you,” Laka said proudly. She put a withered claw of a hand in Ankhar’s, her bony grip barely wrapping around his smallest finger. “Now, you carry greatness for the Prince of Lies.”

  Ankhar proudly carried that greatness right up to the crest of the Garnet Range. The valley terminated in a couloir that was surrounded by looming mountain faces that were very steep but not quite precipitous. The half-giant himself led the way on a remembered goat path, kicking through a steep, melting snowfield for the last thousand feet of the climb. He came through a narrow pass between two great peaks and immediately started downward.

  The column of ogres and hobs trailed out behind him, moving single file over the lofty ground, snaking into a line more than two miles long. Ankhar was already out of the snow, picking his way around a clear, blue pond, while the tail end of his army was still waiting to begin its ascent.

  But the half-giant was in no great hurry. He paused at the pond’s outlet and, with a few deft stabs of his emerald-tipped spear, pulled a half dozen plump trout out of the water. Pond-Lily set about making a fire, while more ogres, as they arrived, spread out along both sides of the stream and tried to duplicate their chieftain’s success.

  By the time some two hundred drooling, snapping monsters loomed over the water, every one of the fish had been spooked, and the ogres of the advance entourage had to settle for watching Ankhar, his ogress, and his stepmother share the tasty morsels from the stream. That they did with remarkable patience, as the rest of the army continued to slowly make its way over the high saddle.

  The procession continued far into the night, and several hobgoblins fell to their deaths as cooling temperatures turned the slushy snow to ice. But the rest of the troops made it before dawn, and Ankhar woke well rested and ready to lead his army to lower elevations.

  “Move out!” he ordered cheerfully after a repast of leftover trout. He ignored the grumbles and complaints of those warriors who had just finished the previous day’s march an hour or two before.

&
nbsp; “Easy walk today,” he encouraged. “This is a wild place-deer and trout for all, if you keep eyes open. We go through woods all the way down to the plains, and there we can make war. No people until we come to the cities on the plains-and then we kill, and we feast, and we drink!”

  Heartened by that prospect, the army marched along easily, emerging into a larger valley, where the half-giant was startled to discover a smooth, paved road-a feature that had not been there in his childhood, nor when he had campaigned through there some four years earlier.

  Still, the road made for good walking, and the army fell into a semblance of a military formation, advancing three or four ogres abreast, lumbering freely down toward the plains. The half-giant did not waste any brain power wondering why anyone would build a paved highway through the wild valley…

  Until they came to a curve in the road and Ankhar stopped, utterly astounded by what he saw lying before him.

  “Huh?” he said to Laka. “Someone put a town here.”

  CHAPTER NINETEEN

  EMBATTLED COMPOUND

  The town of New Compound occupied the flat shore of a long lake resting in a steep-sided valley. Geography had defined how the town was designed. The precipitous mountain ridge to the west, which plummeted directly into the deep, clear lake, was too steep for building. The stream flowing out of the lake was deep and rapid, and curled back and forth through the valley leading from the town down to the plains. The stream cut across the entire valley, surging up against the cliffs on the east side of the valley. Consequently, the dwarves had built a sturdy bridge across the stream right at the edge of town. That bridge allowed easy travel from the town down to the plains, along a smooth, paved road.

  The bridge also provided easy access to the town for any invader coming from the plains, so it had to be defended. Dram’s dwarves had built two towers within the town that overlooked the bridge, while preparing trenches and a palisade on the far side of the span. As a last resort, the mountain dwarf had mined the bridge with many kegs of black power, rigged to fuses that could be ignited from either tower. If dwarves had to retreat across the bridge, then the stone structure would be exploded-they hoped while a hundred ogres were trying to cross!

  It was a good plan, except it didn’t take into account one variable.

  “You mean they’re coming down the valley? From the high mountains?” Dram asked Rogard Smashfinger in disbelief. The dwarf from Kayolin had just arrived with several hundred doughty warriors and bore that sobering piece of news.

  “ ’Fraid so,” grunted the forger-turned-steel-merchant. “We had to move out on the double just to get here before them.”

  Dram looked up the valley in dismay. They had erected no defensive positions in that direction. The stream flowing into the lake meandered there, but it was shallow and broad, with a gravel bottom. A four-foot-tall dwarf could ford it in any one of a hundred places; it certainly wouldn’t deter a charging band of ogres.

  Dram turned to his father-in-law as Swig Frostmead came up to the pair of mountain dwarves.

  “How many fighters do you have on the other side of the bridge?” he asked Swig.

  Dram was trying hard to remain calm, summoning the steadiness that had preserved him through dozens of battles in his life. But in those days, there wasn’t any threat to Sally or little Mikey-and worrying about them was making all the difference in the world. Dram Feldspar was shocked to realize his knees were shaking.

  “Steady there, son,” said the hill dwarf. “We need you now.”

  “Yes. Yes, of course,” Dram snapped, drawing a deep breath. “Now-answer my question!” he demanded with his customary bravado.

  “That’s more like it,” Swig declared, clapping him on the shoulder. “And we got about four hundred, to answer your question. What do we know about them brutes up the valley?”

  “One of our scouts spotted them yesterday, watched them come over the crest of the range,” Rogard explained. “He couldn’t get a count, but there’s thousands of ’em. Mainly ogres, it looked like.”

  “Great Reorx’s nose!” cursed Swig. “That’s a fair lot of muscle against our little town.”

  “And they’re coming down the valley,” Dram muttered grimly. He looked at the towers, the hastily erected wall, and the mined bridge ready to be demolished. Ankhar had stolen more than a march on him; he had rendered Dram’s entire defensive strategy obsolete.

  “Curse that stubborn daughter of mine!” Swig muttered grimly. “And what kind of husband are you-that you didn’t make her leave?”

  Dram snorted. “I was in the next room when you told her she had to go, remember? It was me that brought the ice pack for your eye.”

  “Aye,” Swig said, more than a little proud. “You’ve got yerself a prize in that girl, you do.”

  “I know,” Dram said, trying hard not to think about Sally, not right then.

  He, Rogard, and Swig stood on the town’s broad central plaza, a partially paved field overlooking the lake. The dwarves of New Compound were gathering around them, streaming from their houses and shops, coming down from the mines and forests where they had been working. Soon virtually every resident of the town, male and female, had answered the emergency summons.

  “All right, then,” the mountain dwarf said gruffly. “Let’s get to work.”

  He stepped up onto an empty barrel that had been rolled into the middle of the square, turning slowly through a full circle, meeting the eyes of as many townsfolk as he could. Their voices stilled. With a full-throated shout, he broke the news.

  “Here’s how we stand: eight hundred hill dwarves, two hundred and fifty mountain dwarves, and a hundred humans who’ve decided to stick around and fight on our side. We don’t know how big a force is coming against us, but a good reckon is that it will be twice our number in ogres alone. And they’ve got hobs along with ’em too. They’re just around the bend, up the valley, and will reach the town limits in an hour or two.

  “So the question is this: Do we pack up and skedaddle, getting out of here fast with whatever we can carry, and hope that these brutes don’t chase us down the valley faster than we can run? Or do we stay here and fight for this place, our town and our factories? Our bridge and our houses?”

  “Fight!”

  Dram didn’t see the female dwarf who shouted first, though she sounded an awful lot like Sally. That first cry was echoed almost immediately from a score-a hundred-throats, until the whole town was shouting its determination to give battle, to hold the ground they had claimed for themselves only a few short years before.

  And so the issue was decided.

  “Swig Frostmead, take three hundred hill dwarves down to the shore. You’ll stop ’em if they try to come along the edge of the lake. Rogard Smashfinger will take the mountain dwarves and hold the logging sheds and powder factory at the south edge of town. I’ll watch from here with the rest of us, as a reserve force, and we’ll counterattack where we can do the most good. Any questions?”

  “How do we make sure they save some ogres for us in the reserves?” quipped one burly lumberjack, a man who had taken well to life in a dwarf town.

  That provoked a laugh, and the meeting broke up, each fighter grabbing his favorite weapon and heading to his assigned position. Sally stayed behind with Dram; Mikey went with the other children, who were being taken by some of the elders up a narrow side valley, the only other easy route away from New Compound. It was a dead end, leading to a box canyon where a number of mines had been excavated, but they should be safe there.

  The children would take shelter in one of the deepest mines. If the dwarves were driven from the field, the survivors would seal off the entrances and hide in the mines along with the young ones. Enough food had been stored there for a month or more of siege.

  By the time they had spent a month in the mines, Dram firmly believed, the emperor’s armies would have arrived to free New Compound, and Mikey-and all the other kids of the town-could come out to play under the sun
and breathe the air of freedom.

  Either that or by that time, they would all be dead.

  The Nightmaster moved invisibly through the streets of Palanthas. He departed from his temple, a secret shrine beneath the ground near the center of the city, and rose up through a grate in the street. As stealthy as the wind, he flowed above the ground, unseen, unheard, not even sensed. The gate in the city wall was nothing to him; he simply drifted up and over the wall as a cloud of gas and continued toward his destination beyond the old city.

  Approaching the palace of the lord regent, the high priest of Hiddukel disdained the gates and stairways and courtyards. He rose through the air like a bird-or a bat-coming to rest on a lofty balcony. Though the night was warm, the doors leading into the palace were closed and barred. No matter: the Nightmaster dissolved into a pool of vapor on the paving stones of the balcony.

  Still soundless and unseen, he flowed through the narrow gap underneath the door. Within the chamber, he took a moment to coalesce, watching the man who was poring over a scroll, working sums and subtractions with a scritch scritch scritch of pen on parchment.

  Lord Regent Bakkard du Chagne had not weathered his change in status very well, reflected the Nightmaster. The lord, who had been the unchallenged master of Palanthas until the emperor had come to power, had grown overweight and round-shouldered. His hair, always thin, was nearly gone, the few remaining strands were pale and pathetically stringy. Though three bright lanterns were arrayed on his table, he still leaned low, his face near his writing, squinting as he studied his figures.

  Abruptly he looked up at the place where the Nightmaster was hovering invisibly. “I thought I felt you!” he snapped. “What do you want?”

  The high priest of Hiddukel sighed and materialized to stand on the floor, his features-as ever-concealed by his black mask.

  “Trying to squeeze the last drop of blood out of each coin?” he asked drolly, enjoying du Chagne’s flash of anger as the regent stiffened and turned his face toward his visitor.

 

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