Skulduggery 10: Building a Criminal Empire

by Logan Jacobs

  If the magic casters had tried to put out the flames, it hadn’t taken them long to realize that they were up against someone with much stronger magic than they possessed. Of course, it also didn’t hurt that I froze the flames in place every now and then, just to make sure that none of the elves with magic were able to affect them at all.

  Then, as the fort started to burn with Leif’s orange fire as well as Clodia’s blue flames, I heard the gate rumble open up ahead, and the steady drum of footsteps started to move forward toward the mountain pass.

  I raised my sword to tell the troops to make themselves ready, but I knew that we needed to be patient. We had to wait until they were far enough outside the fort that they wouldn’t be able to easily retreat once we attacked, but I hoped that by the time they tried to pull back, the fort would be a smoking pile of rubble, so they would have no choice but to move forward and fight us.

  The light of the burning fort cast its glow on the elven troops as they exited the fort in their usual neat rows and columns, and I was actually impressed that they had kept their organization even in the panic of the fire. It wouldn’t help them very much in a second, but I had to give them credit for their ability to regroup and keep cool under pressure… even if their sense of order was about to be put to the ultimate test of chaos.

  From what I could see in the firelight, most of the elves had on leather armor, other than a few elves in full metal armor. They had to be the commanders, and I guessed that we needed to remain extra alert around them, since they were likely to have a lot more magic than the rest of the elven soldiers.

  I kept my sword raised as the elves continued to march in our direction, but so far, they hadn’t seen the army that waited for them in the darkness inside the mountain pass. Their vision must not have recovered yet from the fire, and I guessed that we had about ten seconds before they saw us.

  But by then, they would be more than close enough.

  Beside me, Ava had already fitted an arrow to her bow, so she could shoot a few elves before they got close enough to shift to her daggers instead. She breathed steadily, as if it was the most natural thing in the world to be pregnant and poised to fight an entire secret elven stronghold beside her king, but then again, I wasn’t surprised.

  Ava was the fiercest fighter that I’d ever known, and our child was sure to be one hell of a fighter, too. As the elves took another few steps forward, I glanced over at the blonde assassin, and she smiled back at me like I had just given her the world’s greatest present.

  “For our child,” she whispered.

  Instantly, I dropped my raised sword back to the ground.

  As soon as I gave the attack signal, the archers on the mountain paths above us opened fire, and Ava released one arrow after another into the elven force before us. An entire row of elves dropped before they recovered and raised their shields, but even as they started to block our arrows, Clodia turned her attention from the fort to the rear of the elven force, and all the leather armor and shields in the world weren’t quite enough to block the magic fire that she unleashed.

  The elven commanders shouted to their troops, so then the whole elven army rushed forward into the mountain pass. The further into the pass they ran, the harder it was for our archers to shoot them, but they continued to rain down arrows onto the back half of the elven troops, at the same time that our soldiers on the ground prepared to meet them.

  Just as the elven soldiers met us inside the pass, their magic casters finally launched their counterattack. Blue and purple flames hurtled around us left and right, but every time a new wave of fire blasted toward us, I froze the flames in mid-air just long enough for my troops to get in a few blows against our enemies. I couldn’t freeze the entire elven force at the same time I froze their magic flames, but every time I suspended their fire before it hit my own troops, I could almost feel the wave of shock that rippled across the elven soldiers and commanders.

  I guessed that these elves had never seen human magic before.

  Skam and Ava whirled into the fight like they had both been born for this moment, and at the sight of their courage, all the rest of our soldiers followed suit. Skam slung his war axe in every direction, so that it seemed like each time he inhaled, he dodged an attack from the elves, and each time the tattooed dwarf exhaled, the axe found a new target in an elven soldier’s stomach.

  Ava moved so fast that it was almost impossible to keep an eye on her, but every few seconds, I saw a flash of blonde hair in the darkness, followed by the strangled scream of the latest victim to fall underneath her blades. But all the time, no matter how many elves she killed or how quickly she moved, she never strayed too far away from my side.

  It didn’t take long to figure out the formation of the elven troops. As I swung my sword back and forth to spill open my enemies’ intestines and to slice through their exposed throats, I noticed that the bulk of the magic casters were positioned at the center of the elven force, so the regular ground troops surrounded them to help protect them while they threw fire down the mountain pass toward us.

  It made sense to keep them protected there, but it also told me that they were more vulnerable than the rest of the elves, and I didn’t really give a shit why. I just knew that I was about to use that to my advantage.

  So far, most of the elves were still at the mouth of the mountain pass, and only a few of them had managed to push past our front lines. Because the pass was so narrow, they had a hard time moving past us, so we were able to cut down one after another as they tried to stream forward and overwhelm us with their numbers.

  Every time the elves lost a few of their fighters at the front, more ground troops spilled in to replace them, but whenever one of my soldiers fell or was wounded, more of my soldiers moved forward to replace them, too. Since we had the advantage of the pass and the high ground, we were pretty evenly matched, so I really needed to shift our odds more into our favor.

  As I continued to swing my sword to carve through elven limbs left and right like they were made from water, I slowly started to feel the same impulse rise inside me that I had felt when I flung my own sphere of white energy at the temple to protect Penny. I didn’t know how I did it, but as the archers and Clodia continued to rain down death from above, I felt a flood of white-hot heat explode into the palm of my right hand, travel down the length of my sword, and then consume my entire blade so that it looked like it was made of pure fire.

  That ought to be enough to shift the odds into our favor.

  If I thought that my king’s sword carved through elven armor like butter before, it was even more true now. Each time I swung my blade toward an elf, he cowered away from the white flames, just before my sword sliced him into pieces. White flames continued to lick his body even after he fell to the ground, so then when the next soldier tried to leap over his dead companion, the flames licked at his ankles and started to catch him on fire, too.

  The elves continued to push forward deeper into the mountain pass, but only because Clodia continued to light up the fort behind them, to make sure that there was nowhere else for them to retreat to. The elves’ own magic casters started to hurl flames up at Clodia and the archers, but there were plenty of rocks for them to take cover behind, and whenever the flames began to look like they were getting too close, I froze them until the archers could retreat to a safer location.

  When Skam’s unit started to look like their swings weren’t as fast and their blocks weren’t as sharp, the tattooed dwarf signaled to the next unit commander to move forward. Then once a fresh batch of human troops moved toward the front of the pass, Skam signaled his own unit to pull back for a rest.

  I glanced at Ava as I carved my sword through another elven soldier, but she seemed to have as much energy as ever, and I suddenly wondered if our child that she carried actually gave her more energy instead of less. She grinned at me as she stabbed two daggers into either side of an elf’s throat, but by the time she ripped them out in a spray of blue blood
, she had already spun away toward her next opponent.

  My blade continued to dance with white-hot flames, and the more elves I cut down with it, the more the fire seemed to consume their clothing until the whole pass glowed with white and blue magic fire. Every time I felt myself pushed back by the force of the elves, I pushed forward against them with my shield, found my footing again, and carved my sword through another one of my opponents’ limbs. And every time it seemed like we were all about to be overrun, I froze the front row of elven troops just long enough for us to regain a little bit of the ground that we had lost.

  Ava and I were an unstoppable force at the head of our troops, and the Elite as well as the rest of the human soldiers fought like a well-disciplined team that had trained together for years, not just months. But even though we had made a lot of progress against the elves, I saw that we had slowly been pushed back deeper into the pass by their sheer numbers, so more elves now spilled into the pass than we could cut down at one time.

  And as far as I could tell, their magic casters were the chief force behind their forward push. I couldn’t catch every flame before it found its target, just like Clodia couldn’t take down every magic caster on her own, especially not the elven commanders. They seemed to be everywhere all at once, and their flames were more purple than everyone else’s blue fire.

  At least that would make it easier to pinpoint their locations.

  But before I could strike against them, I decided to let the elves think they had won the advantage. It was the best way to get more of them into the narrow pass, and once there were enough of them right in front of me, then I was confident that I had a way to take out a whole hell of a lot of them at one time.

  “Fall back!” I shouted.

  Ava gave me a curious glance, but she didn’t hesitate to obey my orders. Instead, she kicked her current elven opponent with her spiked boot, so she ripped a hole into his leather armor, and then she thrust one of her daggers into his vulnerable spot. He gurgled and fell to the ground, and then she started to help me guard our troops as we retreated deeper into the pass.

  The elves shouted in triumph and pushed forward, but even as our troops all turned to flee in the opposite direction, Ava and I continued to back up so we could keep our eyes on our enemies. Clodia and the archers had moved into a better position up high, so they released as much firepower down onto the elves as they could, but when the elves pushed too far forward, they had to pause until they could regroup and get a better aim from the trails high above us.

  Finally, when I estimated that most of the elven troops were now inside the narrow pass with us, I called a halt and a sudden about-face, just as I froze the front few rows of elves in place. It gave my own soldiers long enough to turn around and find their footing against the elves again, and it also gave me enough time to single out the elven commanders and magic casters that needed to be eliminated.

  When the first few rows of elven soldiers came back to consciousness, I made my move. On Ava’s orders, my troops flung themselves forward to protect me, while I hurled my shield high up over the center of the elven force. The moment that it was in the air right above them, I froze it in place, and then I immediately raised my sword to let white-hot flames stream from the end of it up toward the suspended shield.

  As the flames continued to pour out from the end of my sword, my magic stream of fire hit the round shield in the air and instantly burst apart into dozens of smaller flames that all fell down onto the elven troops like snow in the middle of a winter blizzard. It took all my concentration, but I forced the shield to stay frozen in place, so more white-hot fire could stream forth out from the end of my sword, bounce off my shield, and then shatter into dozens of flames that blanketed the elves in a sea of white flames.

  One elven commander after another dropped when my flames consumed them, and when Clodia added her own fire to mine, the whole pass before us lit up with blue and white fire. The elves screamed and tried to push forward or backward so they could be at any place except for where they were, but my own soldiers saw our advantage and poured forward like an unstoppable wave.

  By the time my shield plunged to the ground, my forces had moved so far forward into the pass that every remaining elf found themselves surrounded by two or three human soldiers. They should have surrendered when they saw that they were now outnumbered and outflanked, but there were no commanders left to lead them, and the elves couldn’t seem to do anything but panic and lash out in pure desperation.

  But the more they panicked, the more we pushed forward.

  When I reached my shield again, I raised it back up and let a new surge of white flames pour into my sword as I continued to carve it back and forth into the elven troops. There was no more purple fire from the elven commanders, and almost every magic caster among the elves was dead, too, so only Clodia’s blue flames and my white fire lit up the mountain pass now.

  After our final push forward, it only took a few more minutes before every last one of the elves laid dead at our feet. When the last elf fell, the pass grew so quiet that it was like we had all stumbled into the realms of the dead, but we quickly glanced around until we realized that it wasn’t just a dream.

  We had actually won the battle.

  Instantly, my soldiers all shouted and beat their swords against their shields in victory. I raised my sword up high as my troops cheered, Clodia fired a blue flame up high into the air to let Leif know that victory was ours, and Skam pushed his way back through the crowd to rejoin Ava and me.

  “Well, I’ll be damned,” the tattooed dwarf said. “We really did it!”

  “Hell, yes, we did,” I said with a grin.

  “So, um… I guess the only question is, what do we do now?” Skam asked.

  “I wouldn’t be mad if someone wanted to immortalize our battle today in a song,” I laughed, “just as long as it doesn’t sound like any of that elven poetry nonsense.”

  “I’ll get right to work on that,” the tattooed dwarf chuckled. “We dwarves aren’t exactly known for our way with words, but I’ll see what I can do.”

  “Of course, I’m only joking,” I said. “That was just the warm-up for our real battle against the elves under Tevian.”

  “Maybe we’ll be able to take out all the wilderness forts before he can unite them,” Skam said.

  “There’s only one way to find out,” I said. “We’ll have to get back to the Blood City and see if there have been any updates while we’ve been gone.”

  “I’m not worried,” Ava said as she wiped some blue elven blood from her cheek.

  “No?” I raised my eyebrow.

  “With you as our king,” the blonde assassin said as she went up onto her tiptoes to kiss me, “nothing can stop us.”

  Chapter 15

  Before we could return to the Blood City, we had to set about the grim business of taking care of all our dead. There were far more dead humans than there had been in the attack on the Gold City, but of course, in the Gold City, we had mostly been hidden behind the walls.

  The battle today had been an entirely different matter.

  I tasked two units of my soldiers to care for the wounded, while I tasked the rest of them to gather up our casualties and record their names before we burned their bodies. It would be hard to leave them here in the mountain pass, but we couldn’t bring their corpses back for a burial. For now, we could only burn them to honor their sacrifice, but one day when the war was over, I would be back to build a fitting memorial in their honor.

  After we had done the best that we could, I ordered my soldiers to move out and head back to the boats with Leif. It was just before dawn now, and as we trudged forward across the rough terrain, the sun slowly rose above the horizon, and we saw Leif ahead of us with all his forces.

  We were only halfway back to the river by now, so it was a welcome relief that Leif’s men could help carry the wounded back to the boats. Then, since his soldiers hadn’t seen much of the fighting, Leif split up h
is troops among all the boats so they could row my exhausted soldiers up the river and back to the city where Skam was stationed.

  We left Skam and the human guards of his city and headed straight back through into the portal, but before I went to the Blood City, I sent Leif, Clodia, and the Elite on ahead of me, while Ava and I made a quick stop in the Capital itself. Leif would make sure that all the troops were fed and rested, Clodia would make sure the Blood City temple was still secure, and they would both check in with Penny to see if she needed anything else.

  I would be right behind them, but first, I wanted to get Cimarra to come along with us to the Blood City. I knew that the raven-haired dancer already had her hands full, but I was also confident that she could handle another task for me, and I couldn’t think of anyone better to take an inventory of all the supplies that the Blood City had available.

  After all, if we did somehow end up in a siege situation, I wanted to be damn sure that we had plenty of food to last long enough to defeat the elves once and for all. Since she had such a good head for figures and logistics, Cimarra would be able to study the situation and make the best determinations, and I was willing to bet that Arlix, the former second-in-command of the Blood City, would be happy to help her with any necessary details.

  By the time Cimarra, Ava, and I traveled to the Blood City, it was mid-afternoon. We headed straight for the garrison, and while Ava and I changed out of our battle gear in the former bedroom of the captain of the guard, Cimarra went to check in with Leif, Penny, and Clodia.

  When Cimarra returned, she slipped inside, shut the door behind her, and handed us each a pork-filled turnover, dried fruit, and water to restore some of our energy.

  “Any news?” I asked as I gulped down the water.

  “Clodia is still at the temple,” Cimarra said, “and Penny went with her, just to keep an eye on things, but I think they mostly just want to reinforce the defenses. There haven’t been any reports of trouble from the temple since you left.”