Strife & Valor: Book II of The Rorke Burningsoul Saga

by Regina Watts

  It was a true relief to know I had with me someone who could, if nothing else, hit a target when I needed her to. Valeria was good in a support role, but I wasn’t exactly keen to test her skills in combat anytime soon. My exchange for access to her healing and empowering magics would be keeping an eye on her for the duration of any conflict…and that was a potentially steep cost, however worthwhile.

  The highway from Soot to Skythorn and back again was one that would have been treacherous were it not so well-maintained. In fact, even with this maintenance in mind, I am sure many still lost their lives—and yet it was still, is still, the most beautiful region through which my travels have borne me. Our first time, Valeria had not been able to appreciate the sights around her. We had passed through during the daytime hours and, as a result, the most beautiful parts of the trip were those when she had been forced to keep her eyes shaded by her hood and a pair of welding goggles.

  Now, however, as we passed from the long stretches of farmland north of Skythorn and into the superlative mountains of the Cascadian wilderness, we did so in the evening hours of our journey’s second day. Her face filled with wonder, Valeria dared risk her eyes to behold the mountains of Weltyr’s careful sculpting. Glorious works crafted over time, with weather and fire and the interference of mankinds: all those tools with which the All-Father artfully coaxes the emergence of eternity from temporal existence. The mountains through which we followed long highways, with little rest for our poor horses or ourselves, were well worth the harrowing reason for our journey back through them.

  Although, I must admit, my heart was still filled with fear to see Valeria drawing back her hood when even a twinkling of Weltyr’s light still tinged the sky. And, in a paradox, the opposite feeling rose up at once: pleasure seized me to see her in sunlight for the first time, even if heavily filtered. Every rich hint of obsidion, almost bluish undertone to her flesh was evident against the turquoise-pink sky that melted into orange fire between the mountains. Those splendid hills, awash in seas of emerald fir trees, formed a sensual bed for the encroaching night. Their soft frame loaned a reassuring quality to the glittering darkness that promised, as always, to swallow the landscape.

  But the loveliest color of all was that which I found in Valeria’s eyes. Squinting at first in the low light of evening through which we rode, soon they managed to relax into the vision surrounding us. To my astonishment, I found that durrow did indeed have both irises and pupils. Against the pale lilac of her eyes, I marveled to recognize a white disk and, within that, a pupil roughly the same hue as her sclera. The effect was so subtle I wondered if it always appeared as such to the sensitive subterranean elves. I worried, too, that its appearance was the sign of some damage, and remembered Odile’s story of the blind durrow bard with grim concern. Valeria reassured me.

  “My pupils? Of course they’re always there, Paladin. Your eyes are too poor! Just like your ears. Who knows what else you’re missing in the world?”

  “That may be so…but what are we going to do if you go blind?”

  “Once, in light like this, won’t hurt me…and Roserpine will heal anything she desires to be healed. To see a thing like this is my reward for following her will…you understand that, I’m sure.”

  I did, indeed, understand that. Valeria was part of my own reward for following the divine commands that ordained my path. I could not help but feel, therefore, a certain impulse to protect her from her own decisions. Of course I knew that she was not some object to be carefully withheld from the world…

  But, given what we were coming up against, I could hardly help my concern for her wellbeing.

  There was no telling what would happen once we reached Soot, nor what state it would be in. Lively had precious little information on the subject since she was tossed out at the height of the gimlet invasion. With nothing to go on, we had to keep our eyes open some miles from the town. We were not far from Dardrie Ranch when the signs of devastation began to take hold.

  Tucked as it was amid the mountains, Soot was frequently foggy for long hours. However, as the horses dutifully carried us into the mountains cloaked in night, the cool and fresh mountain air was soon stained by the hard-edged scent of fire. When Valeria commented on the lack of stars, it occurred to me that the problem was not fog, but smoke; and, as we rounded the turn of a pass and saw Soot as a small scatter of lights off in the distance, Valeria gasped in horror to see what Branwen and I could not.

  “The fields! Oh, Rorke—I think they’ve been scorched—”

  With her own sharp intake of breath to hear such a horror, Branwen listed forward on her exhausted mare. “Is that what we’ve been smelling all this time? I thought I was dreaming it.”

  I shook my head. “I’ve smelled it, too. I guess we’d better hope Dardrie Ranch is still standing.”

  Praise Weltyr, it was. We left our horses tied in a thicket of trees about two miles south of the ranch and let them take a well-earned rest in relative safety. With them obscured in the trees and further protected by a fence of brambles that sprang from the ground on our druid’s command, we turned Odile’s lantern down to the bare minimum required for Branwen and I to see. Then, together, we three made our slow way to Dardrie Ranch.

  Until we were near enough to see lights glowing in the windows of the ranch house, the value of Valeria’s sensitive eyes had not fully occurred to me. Her arm extended out across my chest and stopped me in place. With a sharp hush, she peered into the darkness and whispered in a tone so quiet I strained to hear it, “Those must be your gimlets.”

  Amazed that she could see them, I shut the lantern off entirely and asked, “Where are they?”

  “Running about, doing something—wood,” she discerned at last. “A few are scurrying back and forth with logs of wood. Carrying them into the house.”

  “Trying to burn it down? The fiends!” I drew Strife at once, outraged and horrified to think of the poor Dardries. Like most of the citizens of Soot, they were simple folk who made an honest living and, so far as I could tell, bore ill will to none. They had been very lenient to us, we strangers, when renting horses, even given Erdwud’s good word; and they had asked no questions, nor shown any negative inclination toward the rumors of the durrow ladies allegedly in my company.

  I made my way to the property with my sword drawn. A kneejerk reaction—based, I see in retrospect, on emotion. At the time, bedraggled by our long travel, a seemingly endless chain of conflicts, and the fears Lively related to us about her husband and the people of Soot, I was not in any mood to patiently wait and see how things developed. Valeria whispered in a sharp tone after me, “There’s surely more than just the two I’ve seen rushing in and out!”

  “Then let me lead,” I told her, moving at a semi-crouch through the darkness and around the perimeter of the ranch’s burned property.

  Though Weltyr did not bless humanity with the sensitive dark vision of the durrow, he did see fit to allow gradual adaptation to the night. Therefore, in the absence of the enchanted lantern, I (and, I would imagine, Branwen) saw more of the property by the second. Shapes distinguished themselves from the darkness, aided by illumination in windows and something that I discerned quickly to be the stable’s stalls outlined in the structure of an outbuilding.

  Behind it all, the town still a mile off glowed as it never did so late at night. While I feared a fire yet burned there, my priority was preventing a new one.

  Luckily, we would be able to get from one place to another fairly quickly. We made it to the stable building undetected and crouched behind it on the side opposite the house. The horses had not been slaughtered yet, it seemed, and could be heard softly snorting and occasionally pawing the earth as they settled in for the night. While I wondered how it was that the terrain could be so scorched while the buildings remained untouched along with their animal inhabitants, another noise from within the stable made us all tense up.

  The yelp of a gimlet, chittering away as though laughing.


  With a hard look back at Branwen and Valeria, I nodded. Lifting her crossbow, Branwen nodded at me in return, then toward the open door of the softly lit stables. I indicated for Valeria to remain where she was.

  Strife raised, I swiftly rounded the doorway—

  And startled the gimlet who, poised upon a stool, giggled to himself while petting the nose of one of the Dardrie horses.

  The little fellow shrieked and fell from the seat that had boosted him up to the mare. While the horse whinnied with its own surprise, I faltered in the doorway and looked with open-mouthed surprise at the finding. Branwen, who had been about to hurry in behind me, bumped into my back and fell upon her heel.

  “What’s the problem?” She peered around me and lifted her crossbow, but I raised a hand to halt her.

  “Wait, you didn’t see him. Look! They haven’t hurt a single horse!”

  “So?”

  “I think he was petting that mare over there—hey, sh. It’s all right, my friend.”

  Seeing how the quivering gimlet had scrambled to his knees and clasped his hands for mercy, I sheathed my blade and showed my empty hands. The pupils of his watery lizard eyes grew more prominent, his fear fading to relief but his hands still clasped—now, to his heart. A terrible guilt washed over me for having charged in; I thanked Weltyr for giving me time and insight enough to spare the life of the creature who did not seem ill-disposed to life. The Bright God had truly answered my prayer for his help in dealing rightly with other beings. At least, he had begun to.

  “There,” I said, “now…I’m sorry to have surprised you, friend. Can you understand me? Do you understand the common tongue?”

  The gimlet nodded. I must confess I marveled a little at that, having expected to go through the process of some difficult interpretation to make communication even a remote possibility. What a relief to know that was not the case! I sighed aloud, in fact, and gestured toward the house.

  “Are those your friends in there?”

  Again, the gimlet nodded.

  “What’s your name?”

  The creature yelped. I grimaced back at Branwen. Lightly clearing my throat, said as politely as I could, “Well, “Yelp””—Yelp laughed at my approximation of his name, and I think we both felt somewhat more at ease with one another from then on—“my name is Rorke Burningsoul, and—”

  But Yelp’s eyes grew wide in disbelief. The little gimlet, barely tall enough to reach my chest, scurried up to grab my hand—all while jabbering so excitedly in his doglike voice that the horses grew uneasy and shifted in their stalls. While Branwen soothed the nearest one with a practiced hand and a loving whisper, the gimlet led me outside and pointed with his free hand at the glowing town.

  “What about Soot, friend?”

  Yelp pointed at his chest, then at me. Mid-gesture toward the town, he grew startled by motion in the dark. The gimlet leapt between me and Valeria, a short growl on his muzzle. I tried not to laugh, but Valeria did so openly.

  “You make friends very quickly, Burningsoul…it is your finest quality.”

  “I’d be inclined to agree with you, were the same not true of enemies…it’s all right, Yelp. Valeria is—my mate.” My choice of label earned a sizzling glance from the durrow while I happened to note Branwen’s profile in the darkness of the stable. “One of them, anyway.”

  “Aha,” the gimlet hilariously enthused, elbowing me with a wiggle of the crests above his eyes. He barked and yelped out a few more chains of laugh-like syllables before waving toward the town with both little lizard paws again.

  Finally, I gathered. “You want us to go with you?”

  Yelp nodded, tapping the tip of his nose, then pointing again to the town. I rubbed my jaw and asked him, “Why?”

  Now it was his turn to look rather thoughtful. Tapping his chin with one finger, the little lizard-dog-man then gestured toward the ranch house. He cocked his head questioningly. I nodded.

  “We did intend to go in there, yes. You and your friends can’t stay in the Dardrie house.”

  With a hefty sigh, the gimlet nodded as if to say he had known that all along, but that it had been a good time while it lasted. Gesturing with his hands that I stay behind, Yelp turned and took some steps toward the house.

  I followed.

  Hearing the steps I took, in part due to the plate mail, the gimlet stopped and turned with a bark. Perhaps he expected me to stop. I continued on. Yelp uttered another noise, a shocked little mewl somehow closer to a cat than a dog. He hurried up to me and tugged on my arm, unable to stay me by gripping me and digging in his heels. When he saw my companions following us, he panicked and hurried up to the open back door of the house.

  Owing to last time, I did not draw Strife, and I was glad I didn’t.

  Were I not concerned about the welfare of the Dardrie family, I would have found the scene somewhat charming—even comical. As it stood, I couldn’t help but find the sight of these gimlets pretending they were citizens of Soot to be somehow very morbid.

  No evidence of the Dardries’ actual presence was immediately clear to me. That was a point of great concern when I stepped into the living room and found a pair of gimlets stoking the hearth, yammering before the fire until Yelp successfully interrupted them with a wave of his arms and an urgent series of noises. They looked up—as did the one who, from Mr. Dardrie’s armchair, investigated the luminous illustrations of a printing press-quality book that completely swamped the creature’s small lap. This gimlet uttered a shriek to see me, the volume falling from its knobby knees. Only after a few iterations of Yelp’s frantic patter did they cautiously relax.

  One last lizard-creature appeared from the doorway to the kitchen, Mrs. Dardrie’s apron trailing around its waist in a fashion closer to an award banner at a village festival than a protective cooking garment. The spoon clutched in its hand dripped brown stew fairly close to the color of its wide eyes: aside from this so-called implement, not one of them was armed…though now I had to wonder if the brown trousers rolled up around Yelp’s knees really were his own.

  After moving from tense face to tense face, I looked back at Yelp. “Where is the Dardrie family?”

  The gimlets populating the house exchanged a glance. All of them, Yelp included, shook their heads or shrugged in variation.

  Exhaling in displeasure, I looked at the one with the spoon and said, “Finish your supper, then get out of this house and leave its animals alone.”

  The pair who had been seeing to the fire took my command immediately, scurrying past us to stumble out the door and vanish off into the night. Yelp, looking relieved that I was reasonable, said a few hasty things to his friends before hurrying to the door, himself. Rather than passing through, he paused on the threshold and gestured that we should follow him.

  This time, we did. We had planned to take the horses, but if the gimlets were open to persuasion and all (or even most) could understand the common tongue as well as the ones in the Dardrie house, coming in on horseback would add an unnecessary element of intimidation. Given how jumpy the creatures were—and how many there must have been to have successfully captured the town and held it for almost five days—anything I could do to reduce the odds of conflict would be a certain boon.

  After all…there was going to be enough conflict with their leader.

  When the city was, as Elishta-bet sometimes said, a stone’s throw away, we were relieved to see that the inundation of light was not from houses that stood ablaze. There did seem to be some wild bonfire burning in the town square if the halo of light arcing in the sky was any indication, but the vast majority of the light we had seen from the distance appeared to be from lamps and lanterns and candles and all manner of other things left burning in the houses.

  And inside all these brightly lit houses, moving about as though the properties were theirs and they had done such things for years, were the gimlets.

  But they were not just in the houses, we were soon to find. As we penetrated th
e boundary of Soot with our guide hurrying along the road before us, other gimlets became apparent moving about the streets. They went to and fro much like the ones Valeria reported before the farmhouse.

  These, however, carried items other than firewood. In the hands of one, for instance, I noticed a small box from which dangled a necklace fit with a small sapphire—perhaps the only item of value that the true owner of that box would ever possess. Another hurried with a few printed books, and one bore a thick fur coat plundered from someone’s closet.

  If they noticed us in their single-minded scurrying, they were far less afraid than the gimlets in the Dardrie farmhouse. I suspect their numbers gave them confidence. All around us, more lizard-eyes peered from cobblestone alleys and dusty panes of window glass. The town pulsed with activity due entirely to the little robbers.

  And I speculated wildly as to their intentions for us, for the town, for the citizens—until, at last, we emerged in the village square to stand before Gundrygia.

  THE WANDERER

  I DID NOT see her at first. The blaze of the bonfire raging in the square was so bright, so feverish, that it blinded me. And imagine poor Valeria! While the durrow hissed and threw her hands over her wincing face, I struggled to take stock of gimlets numbering fifty or more.

  Some playing flutes of bone and drums of animal hide, they danced and skipped and barked in jubilation around their fire—and, my eyes soon allowed me to perceive, a throne produced with pieces of furniture plundered from the cottages of Soot. Tables had been interconnected and chairs overturned so that the central seat rose high before the flames. The gimlet with the jewelry box scrambled expertly up this artificial incline and knelt at the left hand of the throne. There Gundrygia, resplendently arranged in a bright gown she had surely made with magic rather than condescending to steal, reclined like the languid sovereign she certainly was.

  “At last! At last—my knight has arrived. Hail, Paladin!” The drumming reduced to a steady beat as, permitting the gimlet to scale her throne and hang the necklace around her pale throat, Gundrygia called, “Hail, Burningsoul. Look, my little treasures! Your brother, Yelp, has brought the finest offering of all.”