by Dave Dickie
“I took a guess from some of the things you have shown me. When it appeared the trolls were going to attack you, it was the only thing I could think of to try.”
“You are lying,” said Beldaer. “The commands to lock out a specific location are complex. There is no possibility that you could have guessed them from the limited set of commands I taught you.”
Daesal had been thinking furiously since the confrontation with the trolls, and she had settled on using something the troll had said. “I have an edge. I know a spell that pulls meaning from underlying languages. It worked well enough on the gate commands to point me in the right direction. The rest was luck. But it also allowed me to hear what you were saying in elvish. I heard you tell them not to speak in common.” She put up a hand to stop Beldaer, who was about to say something. “I am not angry. I know you could have abandoned us, and I know you risked yourself to try to make a deal with the trolls that would allow all of us to leave. I do not know why you said it, but I trust that your reasons were good. I am merely asking for that same trust in return.” Which made her feel small, since she had been lying.
“It is not a matter of trust, Daesal,” said Beldaer, and he didn’t sound angry any more. There was more despair in his voice than anger. He closed his eyes and his chin dropped. When he looked back up, fatigue written in the lines of his face. “We will deal with the trolls, and if that works, if we escape from here, we will deal with this then. If we don’t come to terms with the trolls, it doesn’t matter. Did you show anyone else the gate commands? It is important, Daesal.” She shook her head no. “Good. Please do not, I beg you.”
“As you say,” she said. Stegar had pages torn out of the ledger with the gate command notations tucked behind his buckler, under leather padding. She hadn’t taught them to him. It wasn’t a lie. Not really. She said, “To the trolls, then, as the first order of business.”
The two trolls were in the ledger room. Gyeong, Stegar, Hantlin and Grim stood outside the door. Stegar had the artificer’s weapon they had taken from Gruggrul under his cloak, but for the moment everyone was acting peaceably enough. Gyeong was a little cross because Daesal had forbidden him from challenging the trolls to single combat. Stegar was stoic. Hantlin and Grim looked nervous. Stegar touched his sword while looking at Daesal and glaced at Beldaer. He’d noticed Beldaer’s anger, knew something was up. She gave a tiny shake of her head.
She and Beldaer entered the room where the trolls were talking quietly. “...disaster if we do not get the password. We will try diplomacy first,” one troll was saying to the other. They were sitting cross-legged on the ground, since there was only one chair in the room. Even so, they towered over Beldaer by at least a foot, and he towered over Daesal by two. The trolls stopped talking when Daesal and Beldaer entered. The first troll bowed, managing to make it look graceful even from a sitting position. “I am Hurrdrl, and this is Brufuldor,” he said in Old Empire.
“Beldaer,” said Beldaer. “And this,” he continued, “is Daesal.”
“Beldaer and Daesal. Elf and Human. We have maintained some knowledge of the outside world. We know your relations are cordial. I will admit I find this somewhat surprising given the events of the great war.”
Daesal frowned. “Human and elf did not turn on each other during the fall. The elves helped save millions of people during the collapse of Tawhiem. It was only the trolls we fought, and that at great cost to both our races.”
Hurrdrl looked at Brufuldor, who was sitting quietly, clearly not understanding what was being said. Beldaer looked impassive, but Daesal could pick up a faint odor from him, acidic and sharp. Nervousness, disagreement, general anxiety. “How have you survived all this time?” Beldaer asked. He said it too quickly, like he was trying to change the subject. “Gruggrl said he had fought in the great war. Have you found a way to use the gates to stop aging?”
Hurrdrl shook his head. “We are in a pool of time, a place where the seconds pass slowly. To us, only fifty days have passed since we first entered that place. There is food and water there, and we have shelter, but there is always one of us out here, sending in notes to explain what they have found from their research, what is happening out here, and providing things we cannot create on our own. Medicine, tools, things of that nature. Eleven of us have so done, and when each of them grew too old, they returned and another took their place. So we have labored fruitlessly for more than four hundred years.”
Beldaer nodded. “The slow time. Yes. We know of it, but it has been nothing but a curiosity to my people. I should have guessed that is what you had done. But why? Gruggrl said the humans had tampered with the gate at Vrargron Mard Chazun. I swear to you, we did not know, did not help. And the humans today have lost what knowledge they had of the gates. You cannot hold them responsible for their ancestor’s ancestor’s actions.”
“We can. We do,” said Hurrdrl. “When one troll speaks, it is for our people. If we do not agree as a whole, no one speaks.”
Beldaer nodded. “I have been taught about the troll republic, where every great troll has a vote in every major decision. I have often wondered how you accomplished that. But you must know that human, elf and orc do not govern ourselves the same way.”
“And yet we must hold someone accountable. This human may not have corrupted our gate, but she belongs to the race that did.”
“Across four centuries? The people that were responsible have been dust for hundreds of years. And you still have this gate, a gate that seems fully functional.”
“This is a secondary gate. It does not support all the commands of a main gate. Without a primary gate, we cannot perform the ritual of transcendence.”
Beldaer cocked his head. “And what is this ritual of transcendence that it drove you to this?” Beldaer had seen the mosaics in the temple at Vrargron Mard Chazun, but he had not drawn any conclusions from them. Daesal had not volunteered what she and Stegar had surmised. Before the troll could answer, Beldaer continued, “Why did you abandon Vrargron Mard Chazun? If this is a secondary gate, it is not only the ritual of transcendence you have lost.”
Hurrdrl sighed. “The ritual is how great trolls come into existence. We did not lose the ritual. It was… changed. We did not know. When we did the ritual, what returned from the gate was not a great troll. It was something deadly, something dark. It killed many, and it ran. But it came back, hid in the shadows, and found ways to ambush individuals one by one. It had great power, and it was invisible to our detection spells. We decided to leave, to hide. After a hundred years, we returned, and it had left, but we fear that it may still be there, that permanent occupation would see it return.”
Beldaer looked stunned. “Your… your kind is gate-forged?” He shook his head in disbelief. “We did not know. But then, why did you lock yourselves away from the world?” asked Beldaer, clearly puzzled. “Even with a secondary gate, you would have remained a power to be reckoned with. And we would have helped you.”
“Really?” said Hurrdrl. “At what cost? And that is if you were not helping the humans in the first place. They could not have found a way to corrupt the gate by themselves.”
Beldaer glanced at Daesal, then turned back to Hurrdrl. “The humans are clever. More so than I think either of us gave them credit for. Why did you give them access to your gate in the first place? Even when our races were at their most cordial, you never allowed an elf to see or know the location of either of your gates.”
“A human fooled us, emulated a great troll so perfectly that we did not suspect them until it was too late.”
Beldaer raised an eyebrow. “A human fooled you into thinking they were a great troll? I find this hard to believe. Even our best illusion spells could not make a six foot tall human appear to be a twelve foot tall troll.”
“It was not an illusion,” said Hurrdrl. “It was Morpangler.”
Daesal and Beldaer both stood for a moment, amazement written across Daesal’s face, something akin to horror on Beldaer’s
. “Morpangler, one of the twelve great swords?” Daesal finally managed.
“Impossible,” said Beldaer at almost the same time. “All the master swords were destroyed, along with the human’s gate, in the explosion that started the great war. You did that. It could not have survived. They could not have survived.”
Hurrdrl shrugged. “There is no other explanation. At least one of the master swords survived. With it, a human could take on not only the appearance, but the persona of a great troll they captured during the war.”
Beldaer’s normal impassive expression had deserted him, and he looked horrified. He smelled terrified to Daesal. Beldaer said, “Those abominations cannot still exist. They will corrupt anyone that uses them. Anyone that comes in contact with them, that is close to them for any length of time.”
“We captured the human. We have Morpangler in shallow time with us. It is Morpangler. We keep it at a safe distance and do not use it.”
“There is no safe distance!” shouted Beldaer. “You must destroy it!” But the troll’s expression had turned hard.
“Ah, yes, and the elf shows his true nature. Always willing to lend a helping hand, if you merely agree to a few stipulations first. Stipulations that somehow always turn out to be in the elves’ favor. Do not lecture me about safety, elf.”
Daesal could sense things taking a turn for the worst. The troll’s smell was different than human, or elf, but she could still sense some things, and what she smelled was … wrong, somehow. Like a bad perfume, artificial and somehow tainted. She put her hand on Beldaer’s arm. “Beldaer does not mean to push you where you do not want to go. Morpangler is not the issue. The issue is this corruption of the main gate you speak of. You have tried for four centuries to remove it. Perhaps the elves can help, or perhaps I can help. There are human records that survive from those times. There may be clues to what was done in some of them that I can find.”
Hurrdrl sat back, but he didn’t look mollified. ”And why would you do that? We know you invaded Kom. We know you are at war with the lesser trolls.”
“That war ended more than a year ago,” said Daesal.
“Which is about the time it takes to heat water to a boil in shallow time,” said Hurrdrl. “Fifty days ago, you sentenced my entire race to die!” He was yelling now, face angry, face red, hands clenched around his artificer’s weapon.
“Calm,” said Daesal. “Calm. Be still. Be calm.” She could see Hurrdrl struggle to get his temper back under control. “Not all agreed with that war. I did not agree with that war. And there was no talk of genocide. The lesser trolls…diplomacy was tried may times. They could not be reasoned with. They have no government, no ruling body, no structure. They fought amongst themselves constantly. Many thought we were doing them a favor, trying to put rules in place, trying to civilize them.”
“Make them more like humans, you mean,” said Hurrdrl, but he sounded calmer.
“Yes. But it seemed better than constant warfare.”
Hurrdrl sighed. “Without us to guide them, they turn brutish.”
“Then let us help you return so that you may guide them again.”
“And this is you, speaking for all the humans, helping us out of pure altruism?”
“It is me speaking for me, and yes, altruistically. If you let us return to human lands, I will do this. Although if we do find a way to undo the damage to your gate, there is something else I would expect in return.”
Hurrdrl’s eyes narrowed. “And that would be?”
“I want to know your history, your art, your culture. There are hints today. I know you were accomplished musicians with lyre and flute, in notes so low that humans could not play them. I know you were great philosophers, painters, sculptors. But so little of that survived the fall, what you call the great war. I want to see them, hear them, feel them for myself.”
Hurrdrl’s expression had changed to one of amazement. Beldaer was wearing a similar expression. Hurrdrl blinked and finally said, “I think that could be arranged. It will take time to recover. Most of what is on this side of shallow time has turned to dust and ashes during the centuries, and we took only necessities with us through the gate.”
“I will wait,” said Daesal.
Hurrdrl stared at her for a few moments, as if trying to see what was behind her eyes. Finally, he nodded. “Then let us talk terms.”
Chapter Twenty Two
Stegar watched the great trolls talk to the normal trolls, the kind that Stegar had seen once in awhile in Kethem. The lesser trolls were huge, lumbering things, slack-faced, clearly in awe of the two great trolls in their burnished, magicked armor. The lesser trolls’ faces looked like half formed lumps of clay compared to the chiselled features of the great trolls. The ones in Kethem were big, dull brutes, slow, incredibly strong and generally docile. But he’d heard stories of a few that had gone berserk, and when that happened, people died and things were damaged. There was a saying in Kethem, “don’t poke the troll,” and there was a good reason for it. It was difficult to imagine the lesser and greater trolls were the same race, except for their size. But perhaps they were not, perhaps the gate did more than make them smarter. Perhaps it changed them into something else.
They were outside the gate complex, which turned out to be a large, squat building cut from a dark stone. There were buttresses that ran down the outside, curving out from the walls in long arcs. There were watch towers, narrow structures standing straight up from the middle of the roof, and the buttresses extended up their sides as well. It made the building look like a pyramid, even if wandering inside indicated the building was a square. The watch towers were only accessible from outside the building via staircases that ran up the outside wall, which made little sense to Stegar, but the building had not been built with defense in mind.
Rolling green hills covered in grass and scrub brush surrounded the complex. If it had been Kethem, it would have been cleared, fenced, and hosting herds of livestock. Here, other than a dirt track that lead to the front of the building, there was no sign of intelligent habitation. Stegar had asked Nyjha if it seemed familiar, but Nyjha had said no.
It seemed like the conversation between the trolls was winding down, which was good. The sun had just dipped below the horizon, and long shadows from the hills were starting to shroud the area in darkness.
Stegar rolled his shoulders. He was a little sore, but it was a welcome pain from exercising muscles that had grown lax while he had been recovering from his injuries. Stegar had never been one to let wounds keep him from his responsibilities, never been one to let anything keep him from his responsibilities. He’d joined the Hold at eighteen, been recruited into the wardens because of his skill with arms. He’d become a Gold Ring at thirty-two, when most who gained it were ten to twenty years older and were daughters or sons of Holders to boot. He’d done it with a single-minded devotion to the job that left little room for anything else.
Now for the first time, he wondered if it had been worth it. It had all gone south on him with Ferren, and that was a wound that went deep, but he’d never doubted the path he had been on up until that point. His men had been good, well-trained, loyal. He would have trusted his life to them. Had on many occasions. But they were not his friends. He looked at Daesal, who stood with a serious expression on her face while listening carefully to everything the trolls were saying. Gyeong, Grim and Hantlin were nearby. Gyeong was teaching the other two a Stangri Tea ceremony of all things, using a monstrously sized troll tea set, part of his attempt to ‘civilize’ them. Nyjha had opted out of that, but he looked on with interest, keen black eyes flitting around like a bird watching for a cat. Beldaer was near Daesal, listening to the trolls as well, but with his eyes on her.
Stegar frowned. The elf had been more taciturn since Daesal had locked the world gate, and while his face remained impassive, Stegar felt there was a conflict going on inside the elf’s head, a conflict that centered around Daesal. And yet Daesal had told him everything the elf
had done, how he had once again put himself in harm's way for them when bargaining with the trolls. So Stegar waited and watched, and hoped if something did happen, he could respond fast enough to protect Daesal. It wasn’t his preferred approach to problems. His solutions tended to be direct and brutally efficient, building defenses to counter threats, both the real and the potential; waiting to see if something developed was not his style. It was particularly disconcerting because the elf was fast and agile. If he moved against Daesal, there might be nothing Stegar could do. It was an uncomfortable feeling, a lack of control that Stegar had avoided so fervently since Ferren. When he was sober, at least.
Since that time, he had dealt with things that were right in front of him, unambiguous, where the steps that could be taken were straightforward and the outcome would be the outcome, but you would never look back and wish you had made a different choice.
That luxury had recently been taken from him. There was nothing clear these days, nothing that told him who was on what side, the rules of the game all convoluted and murky. The only thing that was clear was the mission, and that was to get Daesal, Grim, Hantlin, Gyeong and Nyjha back home.
The troll conversation ended, and Daesal turned and walked to him. Beldaer watched her go, staring at her back, frowning. Stegar did not like that look. Then the elf looked past Daesal and locked eyes with him. They stared at each other for a moment, and it was Beldaer that finally looked away.
“We leave on the sun’s rise,” Daesal said as she walked up to him. “Teleport to somewhere in the Nuffiok mountains using one of the teleportals. Hurrdrl and a few of the lesser trolls will travel with us through the paths of blood to the edge of Tawhiem in case we run into any trolls or other kinds of trouble.”
Stegar frowned. “I thought they weren’t operable? They would not activate for us when we first searched the complex.”
“It turns out the trolls put them in a dormant state to save mana since they are not used much.”