Vell clapped his hands on the troll’s forearm and squeezed tight, ripping the arm free of his scaled neck. He kicked the troll’s left knee then the other, sending it tumbling backward onto the leaf-covered forest floor. Before it could recover, he jumped onto it with all of his weight, landing with both feet on the troll’s chest. Troll bones snapped under his impact, and he watched its hideous face as the shock hit home, it eyes bugging out and its mouth spewing forth a plume of thick green liquid that splashed over its face.
Vell knew he shouldn’t finish the fight too swiftly. Though his sense of reasoning was weakened in his state, he had no intention of drawing the death blow yet. He was enjoying himself. When Vell shifted his attention to the other troll, staring up into the green-gray face topped with a wiry shock of black hair, he saw something he never would have suspected: fear.
The ground trembled around Vell as he walked. So it was with the beast shamans of his tribe when they called on the powers of the Thunderbeast and grew armor of scales.
Vell commanded the tremors to cease, to see if they would. And they did.
Hopping off his downed victim, Vell strode toward the troll slowly and it stepped backward, watching him intently and bracing for the attack. Armed with nothing but his own scaly strength, Vell plunged forward toward the troll’s middle, delivering a forceful punch. The troll withstood the blow and struggled with Vell, raking its claws through his tribal robes, ripping them to find any skin beneath not protected by those thick scales. Finding none, the troll brought its fist to the side of Vell’s head. The blow echoed like thunder through his skull and sent him flying against a fragile tree nearby. The trunk cracked behind him as the full brunt of his weight struck. The tree toppled into the clearing with a mighty noise.
The first troll’s regenerative powers worked to knit its shattered bones together, and the monster rose to confront Vell again. With his feet against the stump of the broken tree, Vell wrapped his arms around the fallen trunk and spun it in a circle, its branches breaking off as it struck other trees. This brought complaint from the treetops above, and even in his rage, he thought of Lanaal in bird form, likely dislodged from her perch.
Facing the two trolls, his arms still around the trunk, Vell used it as a caber, hurling it full on against the trolls. It struck them both in the midsection, knocking them both backward. Like a great pin it rolled, over their chests and faces, stripping its bark on their rough skin. And like an engine of destruction, Vell was on them, tearing into their bodies with foot and fist.
A high-pitched trill sounded above him, and Vell was partly drawn out of his blood fury to remember what he was here to do. Standing tall and straight, he summoned the heart of his courage, not the courage that compelled him to fight monsters, but that which let him look into the most frightening things lurking inside him. He clapped his eyes shut and searched his depths for the will to leave his body behind and fully accept the scales’ embrace.
Vell’s throat went dry and his mouth filled with the acrid taste of growing fear. Troll breath washed upon him, but he paid it no mind; the danger would make it easier, he decided. The beast within must emerge—this was life or death, just as it was when Sungar’s Camp was under siege. His blood coursed faster and thicker through his veins, his pulse throbbed in his neck like a drum beat, but the beast stayed sleeping. Vell’s mood disintegrated and his energy with it, and when he looked down at his hands they were pink flesh, the scales retreating as suddenly as they had come.
And two enraged trolls were bearing down on him.
A sword fell from above, landing with a thud at his feet. Vell reached down and grasped its hilt. It was an elegantly curved elven blade, thinner and lighter than he had ever used, but it cut deep as he sliced a neat slash through a troll’s neck—blood poured down its bare green chest. With a cry and a rush of air, a gigantic falcon swooped down next to him, tearing at the other troll’s face, claiming both of its eyes with its sharp talons. Blind and howling, the troll batted at the bird and stumbled through the wood, bashing into trees as Lanaal circled and occasionally dived to strike again.
How long has it been since I fought as myself? Vell wondered. He felt good as he tore into the troll again and again, moving quickly to avoid its blows. A glorious swell filled his senses, and his heart awakened to barbarian joy. The troll clawed at his arm and wounded him, and he welcomed this too, the human pain and the feel of blood trickling down his body. To defeat the troll without his powers? A greater achievement by any account, he decided, slicing through his foe’s leg and sending it toppling to the ground.
At last, he drew a small vial from a pocket inside his deerskin robes, also a gift from Lanaal. He uncorked it and emptied the contents onto the troll’s ugly features.
The liquid hissed and bubbled down the troll’s face, trickling off its chin onto its chest. It instinctively tried to soothe its wounds by wiping at them, but this only burned its hands as well. Its skin melted on its face, leaving gruesome black-green flesh showing underneath. Its features damaged by the acid and far beyond regeneration, the troll stopped struggling and collapsed on the forest floor.
Spinning around to find the other troll, Vell discovered that Lanaal had transformed back into an elf to finish off the lumbering monster. From her robes she drew a few darts and—with strength surprising for her thin form—drove them into vital places on the troll’s body. Each of them leaked acid that seeped into its body. Its agonized cries were deafening as it melted from within.
Lanaal walked over to Vell. “Vell,” she said. “By the Winged Mother, what went wrong?”
But Vell couldn’t stop smiling. “I haven’t felt this good in a long time. That was invigorating, fighting with my own body, my own skills. With the Thunderbeasts I rarely face foes except as part of a horde. I had forgotten the joy of it.” He looked down at the demolished troll. “My kill, not the Thunderbeast’s.”
Lanaal frowned. “You tried to turn into the behemoth,” she said, “but you lost the partial transformation that you had already achieved. How did this happen?”
“I think it rejected me,” said Vell. “Whatever’s inside me did not care to rear its head. Perhaps it did not deem the situation serious enough.”
“Or perhaps you did not call it properly,” Lanaal said. “Not seriously enough. You talk as if it’s something else. You need to think differently. Acknowledge that it is another side of Vell.”
“Are you in my head, elf?” asked Vell. “Do you know what I feel? Keirkrad, Kellin, Sungar, you, and everyone else think they know better than me. But who among you looks through my eyes?” He clenched his fist in anger—not the barbarian rage that he could sate with violence, but something much more complex and difficult to drive off.
“So you consider this experience a failure,” said Lanaal.
“No.” Vell smiled. “My eyes are clearer now. I tasted battle and felt alive again. No thanks to the enemy inside.”
“It’s not an enemy, Vell!” Lanaal protested. “Just a resource. A powerful one for good or ill—it will destroy you if you don’t make it obey you.”
“It’s a demon,” Vell proclaimed. “One I must strive to cast out.”
Lanaal breathed heavily, her bronze-tinged face streaked with redness. “It may not be possible to remove it, Vell,” she warned.
“I will strive nevertheless,” Vell promised. “Thank you for helping me, Lanaal. I hope I can still call you my friend.”
“Have no fear,” she whispered. Her smile was filled with concern. “I will help how ever I can. But if you are seeking answers to your puzzle, I don’t know if I can help you any further.”
“There may be other possibilities,” said Vell. “Rask mentioned something about the Fountains of Memory.”
CHAPTER 10
Sprites fell like hostile rain. The Antiquarians, Leng, Ardeth, and Gan held their ground against waves and waves of them. The sprites were joined by grigs playing their dreadful fiddles, gossamer-winged pixies, and
even some of the seldom-seen nixies. The fey climbed the trees, dived down on the party below, and launched their arrows. The battlefield rang with the grigs’ discordant music.
“If we were to surrender,” Ardeth shouted through the cacophony, “do you suppose they’d stop playing?”
Amid a duskwood grove carpeted in damp moss, the fey ambushed them and pressed the attack, seemingly unconcerned about their massive casualties. Each swing of Gan’s greataxe killed five of them at a time, and the blades of Nithinial and Royce swung unceasingly, slicing the small, fragile creatures with ease. Ardeth crouched with her crossbow and targeted the pixies with her deadly bolts, while Gunton used a net to trap them, then finish them with the point of a short spear. Fey blood pooled on the forest floor. Bessick swung his chains, snagging wings and ripping sprites apart with their cruel spikes. Vonelh blasted the creatures with huge gusts of wind that blew their arrows astray and toppled the smaller sprites, their wings beating hopelessly as the air funneled them hard against the trees.
“If only I could drop a fireball and let them all burn away,” Vonelh said, but he knew the danger to the trees was far too great.
Leng was responsible for the most damage. Laughing and cackling with the dark energy of an asylum inmate, he took perverse glee in killing his attackers slowly and painfully. Deep blue bolts of cold erupted from his hands that withered the sprites at a touch, their wings shriveling until their desiccated flesh seemed to slide off their bodies. Leng released dark waves of despair and grief that set some of them weeping. Walls of thorns erupted to rip them apart, and he conjured disembodied black claws that tore into the tiny grigs and pixies as a cruel child might torture a butterfly, plucking off wings and ripping bodies apart.
A flail hung at Leng’s waist, and many magical items were concealed in his clothing. But he had no interest in fighting with anything but his spells.
The Antiquarians watched Leng’s depredations in awe. He wore an expression of joy as he went about his vile work; his face showed no concern that they were fighting for their lives. This was sport for him; his companions even suspected that Leng could readily kill all the fey with much greater speed, but instead he was drawing out the pleasure, challenging himself to find new and crueler ways of slaughtering them. He almost seemed disappointed as the number of fey around them declined. Whether the large folk were really killing the small ones or if some had decided to flee—fey being notoriously fickle—they could not tell.
“The pixies may be waiting for us to let our guard down,” warned Gunton, skewering one on the end of his short spear. Although equally as small as the grigs, the pixies were far more dangerous foes. Leng and Vonelh tried to wipe out the creatures’ invisibility with spells, but the small folk easily crouched unseen in the distance and fired their arrows.
No fewer than ten grigs sprang cricketlike from various places at Vonelh. They all struck his upper body, prodding him with their tiny dagger-points. The surprise was enough to knock the wizard off his feet and disrupt the spell he was casting. Nithinial rushed over to help him, but not before five pixies took wing and buzzed over Vonelh’s prone body.
A well-placed sweep from Bessick’s chains tore most of them out of the air with cruel accuracy, but as Nithinial rushed to help Vonelh to his feet, he noticed the mage was in a strange state. His eyes darted wildly, and he looked at his companions as if he’d never seen them before. At the same time, all of the pixies, grigs, and nixies hovering on the battle’s edge seemed to turn tail and vanish into the forest.
Vonelh opened his mouth and began to chant some arcane syllables.
“Their magic has scuttled his mind!” shouted Leng. “Stand clear.” He spun to face Vonelh, took a few steps, and laid his hand on the wizard’s exposed forearm. As soon as he made contact, all life left Vonelh. His face and body went slack and he fell to the ground without ceremony or grace, his lifeless eyes staring up at his companions.
“What have you done?” howled Nithinial, standing only inches from Leng.
“He was going to drop a fireball on us all,” Leng said calmly.
Nithinial swung at Leng’s throat with his dagger, but he never made it. A few words from Leng, and the half-elf was paralyzed, a mask of anger frozen on his face. The dagger was nearly at Leng’s neck, but the priest did not flinch.
For a few moments, silence fell over the group as everyone tried to come to grips with the scene. Leng took a few steps back from the others.
“You didn’t have to kill Vonelh,” said Royce, stepping around his corpse and the living statue that Nithinial had become. The leader of the Antiquarians stepped forward, his sword lowered in a subtly threatening posture. “You could have dissolved the magic on him.”
“Or perhaps I would have failed, and we would all be dead,” said Leng.
“You have ruined this mission,” Bessick shouted, stepping next to Royce with his chains ready. “If you hadn’t killed that treant, we wouldn’t have every damned fey in the woods on our trail.”
“Oh,” Leng replied. “No, there’s a different reason for that. Is there not, Ardeth?” He bent over to pick up the blue-tinged corpse of a nixie, took a few steps, and tossed it down at the young woman’s feet. “Let’s ask Geildarr’s official representative among us. Why are we really on this mission? Nixies don’t stray far from their waters. So tell us all,” he spat as he looked into her dark eyes, “just how close are we to the Unicorn Run?”
Ardeth showed no reaction, only matched Leng’s steely gaze. But Gunton, Bessick, and Royce all let out gasps of surprise.
“Your hobgoblin’s dedication is admirable,” Leng went on, sending Gan a glare that made the hobgoblin grip the axe more tightly. “But his thespian skills leave something to be desired.”
Gunton rooted through Vonelh’s robes and found the silver coin Geildarr had provided. It was glowing slightly. “Are you saying that this is a lie?”
“Deliberately designed to mislead us, to send us off track, yes,” said Leng. “You may as well acknowledge your deception, Ardeth. Geildarr isn’t here to protect you now.” On cue, Gan stepped between her and Leng.
Leng only laughed. “Do you require further demonstrations of my power?” he asked, turning to face Royce. “Perhaps this one should fall next. Maybe that would be the best way to show for certain who leads this expedition now.”
“Are you saying that we were never meant to go to the Star Mounts?” asked Royce.
“Perhaps you, but not I. As it happens, I don’t care what’s at the Star Mounts,” Leng hissed. “This Sanctuary, Netherese magic, big lizards—there’s a much more tempting prize on the way. Geildarr counted on me thinking this way. He expected me to go to the Unicorn Run and die.” He craned his neck and peeked at Ardeth behind Gan, smiling. “Isn’t that the case?”
Leng rambled on in an arrogant tone. “Perhaps all of you together could defeat me. Perhaps not. Myself, I’d prefer that you live. You’re useful to me, every one of you. There’s no reason we should be enemies now. Why do you perform Geildarr’s tasks for him? For gold or power? Why not choose a greater glory? You can carve yourself a place in legend if you fight by my side.”
“That’s not what we do,” said Royce, knowing his words would have no effect. “We’re mercenaries and treasure-seekers. We’re not crusaders.”
“You’re nothing but Geildarr’s errand boys. This is a chance to become something else. Warriors of myth, maybe. Every child knows of the Unicorn Run. Perhaps soon they will know of the brave men who invaded the loathsome bastion, crippled it, and polluted it beyond repair.”
“It won’t work,” said Ardeth.
“The sweet maid speaks!” Leng shouted. “What has Geildarr’s pet to say?”
“You will die,” she said. “You overestimate your powers, Leng.”
“Don’t you mean ‘our powers’?” Leng asked. “But fear not. I feel quite certain that when I challenge the forces of the Run, my god will stand behind me and make me a vessel of his full po
wer.”
“What god is that?” asked Ardeth. “Bane or Cyric? You are a traitor to every god you’ve served.”
Leng scowled. Apparently, he had no idea that anyone knew of his conflicted loyalties.
“I think,” he spat, “if it means the end of the Unicorn Run, the two will find a common ground, and all the other gods of darkness besides. I will enjoy all their favor, and I shall have my victory.”
Leng spoke with mad credibility, and the Antiquarians did not know what to make of his claims. Could this be possible? What was certain was that Leng was a terrifying enemy. In some ways, Vonelh was the strongest of their group, and Leng had killed him with a simple touch. Already lacking one member, they could not afford to lose any more, or it might prove impossible to escape the High Forest alive. Perhaps it was best to do as Leng ordered.
Royce locked eyes with Ardeth, trying to communicate his confusion.
Nithinial’s paralysis ended abruptly. Still trembling with rage and clutching his dagger, he prepared to lunge at Leng again. Wildly, the half-elf squeezed his dagger’s hilt until his hand bled, waiting for the word.
It came from Ardeth. “We should move on before the surviving pixies return.”
“Where are we heading?” asked Leng, folding his arms across his chest.
Ardeth lowered her head in a false gesture of deference. “The Unicorn Run, of course.”
Leng ripped off his brown robes and let them fall among the dead fey. Beneath were the purple and silver robes of a high priest of Cyric. He wore them proudly as he led his reluctant troops toward death or glory.
A great white goose ascended out of the High Forest, the trees swaying beneath her. Lanaal, transformed, carried Vell and Kellin on her back, each of them gripping feathers to stay in place. Above the tree canopy, the immensity of the High Forest sprawled below them. Their destination, the squat green mounts called the Lost Peaks, was a familiar visage from some vantages north of the forest’s edge. Vell found his attention turning south to another group of mountains, a range he’d never laid eyes on before. Immense and towering, they were an arresting sight even to one raised in the shadows of mountains.
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