by Doug Niles
“They will be coming very soon now,” she said in a tone of icy calm.
She was right, Jaymes saw immediately. Huge columns of ogres, three thick formations, had moved to within a few hundred yards of the city, remaining just beyond longbow range. To either flank, even larger formations of goblins advanced, but where the ogres held to their massive columns, the gobs formed a series of long lines ranked parallel to the city wall. These were archers, and their bows were strung.
Inside the area where the West Gate had stood, Jaymes could see several wide, smooth paths through the rubble, each of them protected by steep, high walls of rocks to either side. Those attack routes emerged into the plaza that had once been directly inside the gate. In that open square, the city’s defenders had erected a series of wooden barricades and stone breastworks. The line was manned by able warriors, their spears and swords bristling, but they were a paltry substitute for the fortress wall that no longer existed.
“I need to go down there among the defenders,” Jaymes said. “I must get ready to meet and face this monster, in close quarters, when it comes.”
“But you won’t be able to see through all the chaos,” Brianna countered. “Shouldn’t you stay up here until it materializes and then take up your position?”
“No, it will attack there,” he said, pointing at the manned barricade across the plaza, utterly confident in his ideas. “And I need to be blocking its path, right in front of it.”
“Go, then, and may the gods grant you protection and success,” she said, putting a hand on his arm. For just a moment her eyes softened, and he saw the warmth, even a hint of the need for intimacy that had filled her face last night.
“Thanks,” he said, nodding and holding still for her touch. Finally Jaymes turned and started down the tower’s interior stairway. A moment later he emerged at the base and proceeded to follow the street just inside the city wall until he came to the plaza.
Looking around the plaza, which was busy with defenders rushing back and forth, he loosened the flap on the pouch holding the helm. But as yet he didn’t put on the helm.
“You look like an able-bodied bloke; take up a place here on the left flank,” said a Sword Knight, apparently the captain of this section of the line. “Can you use that big blade you’re carrying?” the knight asked skeptically.
“Yes. But I want to be in the middle of the line,” Jaymes said.
“Suit yourself,” the man replied, eyes narrowing slightly. “Hey, are you the lor—”
“I’m a warrior and a swordsman, and I’m here to do my job like everyone else.” Striding past the officer, the lord marshal made his way to the center of the long breastwork. The barrier consisted mainly of overturned wagons and carts all nailed together with long sections of planking. Here and there, large square stones had been stacked together to make a more solid barrier. The men who were holding this line were gaunt and sallow soldiers, with some citizens mixed in. All wore determined faces.
The battle began as a faint stirring of noise that first came from sections of the city wall to either side of the plaza. Jaymes watched as a shower of arrows materialized, high in the sky. The missiles clattered along the parapets, many of them skipping off the stones to plummet into the city streets. He hoped the duchess had ducked inside; the tower where he left her was the target of a particularly dense volley.
Arrows flew outward as well, launched by the defenders lining the walls, but the volley was meager compared with the shower of missiles that flew from the goblins. At the same time, a steady drumming became audible; the ogres were on the march. The sound rattled the very ground Jaymes stood on, swelling in volume with the tempo.
“They’re comin’ at a goodly clip,” one gray-haired veteran declared sagely, to the nods of the men and boys around him. “Be here real soon, that’s my guess.”
But they had even less time than that before a monstrous shape appeared, towering over the piles of rubble that marked the site of the gatehouse. The king of the elementals was as tall as the city walls, Jaymes realized. The creature bore closer with a steady, ominous gait. Its two eyes burned outward from a massive face that resembled nothing so much as a craggy cliff.
Several of the defenders, boys too young to shave probably, began to cry softly as the monster neared. “Reminds me of Mina’s red dragons at Sanction,” the old veteran said conversationally, taking the time to spit on the ground. “Lotsa noise and fuss—they was really something to see, I tell you. But they’re just critters like the rest of us. Critters what can kill, but critters what can be killed too.”
The boys listened, wide eyed, and the man’s words seemed to calm some of their fears. Jaymes didn’t feel any need to dispute the fellow’s claim, though the king of the elementals seemed different than any “critter” he had ever witnessed.
Its torso looked to be solid rock. Its arms lashed about, supple as tentacles, translucent in color—and clearly powerful, as one reached out to smash at a chimney that had somehow survived the ruin of the gatehouse. Smacked by that limb, it crumbled like a toy.
Finally the whole of the monster could be observed as it stepped right into the plaza. Jaymes saw that it was balanced upon twin, whirling cyclones—black tornadoes of swirling, tumultuous air. The sight was terrifying and violent as its mere presence stirred up geysers of wind, spattered dust and rock across the ground, and rattled the heavy boards of the barricade. By all the gods—how was it even possible to stop something like that?
The lord marshal raised his sword and stared along the blade, seeking to make contact with the creature’s hellish eyes. When he did meet them, he staggered backward from the physical impact of the elemental’s raw emotion. Jaymes’s knees buckled and he went down, bracing himself with one hand on the breastwork, veering dizzily.
But he did not lower his eyes. He forced himself to stare into that monstrous visage, holding his sword aimed straight at the creature’s eyes, allowing the magic of the ancient artifact to find and grab the creature.
The elemental king’s gaze seemed like liquid fire being poured directly into Jaymes’s skull.
Fury.
He had never imagined such rage, such a thirst for destruction, vengeance, retribution. The violence of the elemental king’s emotions made him sick to his stomach, but still he would not look away. Jaws clenched, he stared, unaware that his own fingers were curling into fists. Staggering, he pushed himself up to a standing position, still leaning against the barricade, his knees bending as if in preparation for a charge.
Hate.
The elemental directed its anger to the very sky, and the sun that burned so loftily above. It hated the whole city of humankind, the thousands of souls that flickered and survived here, living and dying quickly in a way that this monster could never understand. The elemental king despised all living creatures, and it craved to end life. Deeper, Jaymes probed that hateful consciousness, seeking to penetrate its monstrous core.
Wrath.
Anger was fundamental to this seething creature. The elemental hated not just the humans, but it hated its own army. In particular, Jaymes perceived an image of the half-giant, Ankhar the Truth. There flashed another image of a man in a gray cloak—the Thorn Knight—and the withered, hideous visage of the hobgoblin shaman. Those were the beings, the marshal understood, for which the monster reserved its worst malice.
Fury … Hatred … Wrath.
All these emotions were focused, most forcefully, against those three beings, its own allies.
Why did the creature attack Solanthus, then? The answer seemed obvious: because it could not strike at the ones it hated the most. Jaymes perceived this basic truth amidst the elemental’s many churning emotions. The monster was restrained from attacking its most hated foes, so it inflicted utter annihilation on anyone within reach.
Moptop Bristlebrow poked around another corner and looked to the right then the left. The shadows of these dingy confines were broken here and there by a few shafts of sunligh
t. He stood ankle deep in water, not even noticing yet another of the many stagnant puddles that littered the city sewer system of Solanthus.
Which was, beyond any doubt, the most fabulous city sewer system the kender had ever seen. A beam of sunlight, grid-patterned because of the iron grate over the manhole above, offered him a chance to consult his map. Moptop made a scratch mark with his charcoal pencil then started along the left-hand tunnel, the passage that, he guessed, led either due west, or on some angling vector toward the north and east.
Altogether these tunnels formed a truly intricate maze, which he was having a splendid time exploring. He had been down here all morning, traipsing around, exploring, adding crucial details and highlights to his maps. And there was still a lot more to see.
This was even better than poking through the ducal palace, which had occupied most of the previous night. He had almost been thwarted in that endeavor, since he had quickly discovered someone had accidentally locked the door to his guest bedroom so he couldn’t get out. Strangely, though he could hear servants walking past, and though he had pounded and yelled for quite a while, no one had noticed the commotion and come to unlock the door. Fortunately, a drainpipe extended near his fourth-floor window, and it had been a simple matter to scamper up to the roof and climb down one of the chimneys.
Of course, the ducal palace was a fascinating place in its own right. He had enjoyed making the rounds during the night, investigating several bedrooms. There were lots of guards patrolling the halls, and though Moptop had frequently been tempted to introduce himself to one or two of them, they always looked so serious that he guessed they were very busy with guard stuff. So he had simply melted into the shadows and let them pass.
He had even found a secret passage! When he went over to Jaymes’s room to see how the lord marshal was sleeping, he had been surprised to find him missing. Then he had discovered a panel of the room’s wall that slid silently out of the way, and when Moptop had been poking around that particular passage Jaymes himself had emerged from another secret door, this one connecting to the room of the duchess. Here, too, Moptop had been tempted to say “hi,” but the lord marshal had looked so preoccupied that the kender had allowed him to walk right past without announcing his presence.
But after six or eight hours, Moptop had seen just about as much of the palace as he wanted to. In the cellar he discovered a drain, which someone had gone to the trouble of securing with a grate, which was practically tailor-made for a kender’s egress. He had slipped through then slid down a bumpy chute of slick, mossy stones—a fun ride, that!—soon finding himself in this far vaster network of places to explore.
He was just starting to skip westward—or north by eastward—when something shook the floor under his feet. Debris fell from the top of the sewer tunnel, bits of gravel and dust spattering onto the kender’s topknot. He saw concentric ripples in the puddles that had, up until now, been lying there perfectly still. A moment later he felt the shake again … then again, at a regular tempo. It reminded him of being in a house where somebody large and heavy was walking around on the roof or in a room right over his head.
“That’s what it is; somebody’s walking around up there!” he remarked, certain of his explanation.
Then his eyes widened: it had to be somebody very huge. After all, there were people and even horses tromping all over in this city, and he hadn’t heard so much as a single little whisper from any of them. This was someone thumping the ground hard with each step.
Moptop looked up and down the tunnel. There was still so much to see down here—miles and miles of sewer remained unmapped, at least as far as he knew—but curiosity about what was going on up above got the best of him. He hurried back to where the beam of sunlight arrowed through the sewer grate and scrambled up the rusty metal ladder on the side of the pipe. At the top he was able to poke his head between the bars, though they were too close together for him to slip out.
And—drat his luck!—the giant walker had just gone past! He saw a glimpse of a rocky shoulder and great, dark head looming high above the ground, but they vanished behind a pile of stone rubble almost immediately. Well, it sure was huge! Huger than anything he had ever seen, and he almost wept in despair at the thought that he missed his chance to get a really good look at the elemental king monster.
Fortunately, Moptop’s climb to the grate was not entirely wasted; he was thrilled to notice heavy hobnailed boots approaching at a clomp. Lots of boots! Ogres! A whole army of them! At least, that’s what it seemed like as they came marching along, tromping right past where he hid down in the grate. The kender was almost ready to wave a cheerful greeting but, as he lifted his hand, his foot slipped off the slick metal ladder’s rung and he dropped a foot, out of sight from above. By the time he climbed back up, they were marching past, and he thought it best not to disturb them.
Next he saw a pair of boots that were even bigger than ogre boots. Beside them strode a set of legs as skinny as toothpicks, with oversized feet wrapped in old leather sandals. Moptop lifted himself up, and realized that he was looking at the half-giant, Ankhar the Truth, himself! He was accompanied by an old hobgoblin wench, a gray-robed warrior, and a couple of swaggering Dark Knights that looked like bodyguards.
“Where is the king?” Ankhar demanded. “Don’t let him get too far!” He sounded kind of upset, even worried, to the kender.
“If you listen, you will hear. He is crushing the humans in the plaza. But he has not moved into the city yet,” came the reply from the man who wore the long, gray cape. “We still drive him before us!”
“Then I must find a place to see—a place where I can watch this city die,” crowed the half-giant.
Suddenly the sewer wasn’t so interesting anymore. The kender looked around, recalling another grate a little ways back that might be big enough to let him get out.
It seemed like maybe he better go and find the lord marshal.
“Move up—charge there, forward, and to the left!” Ankhar was advancing at a run, chasing the ogres that had spilled into the city’s plaza and swiftly overrun the pitiful remnants of the human defenders. This time, Truth willing, he was not going to let the elemental king advance out of his sight.
“Where is Eaglebeak?” he roared. “I need him and his damned archers up here now!”
Surprisingly enough, the hobgoblin captain appeared at his side only a moment later. Eaglebeak’s feathered headdress was askew, his ruddy cheeks flushed with the excitement of battle. “What are your commands, lord?”
“Bring your archers up as soon as Spleenripper’s columns have passed. I want a shower of arrows to bracket our advance, sweeping like a hailstorm on each flank.”
“It shall be done, lord,” declared the hobgoblin turning smartly and loping away to put the commands in motion.
Ankhar strode out of the avenue of cleared ground and entered the great plaza. The elemental king remained in view, having kicked through the feeble breastwork that the humans had erected.
Already the ogres were charging, bellowing in fury, heavy boots shaking the ground as they swept across the flagstones. Hobgoblins and gobs spilled after them. Spleenripper’s troops paused to gut, scalp, and otherwise mutilate the bodies of the humans who had fallen. But their captain was diligent and vicious, and freely wielded his whip to prod them on.
Within a few more moments, the attackers were spilling into the streets of Solanthus, racing this way and that with no coherent defense standing in their path.
His head throbbed. Dry, gritty dust filled his mouth. Jaymes spit—or tried to spit, but found he had no saliva—and struggled to remember where he was.
The smell of smoke was his first clue. As the ringing in his ears subsided, he heard men groaning in pain. Somewhere nearby a child was sobbing, utterly distraught. The marshal was lying on hard paving stones, facedown. The fingers of his outstretched hand touched something wet and his first thought was a keen longing: water! But almost immediately he realized the tex
ture was all wrong—this was a sticky, viscous liquid, warmer than the ground and the air.
Blood.
Then the memories returned. The elemental king had closed on the barricade in three steps, kicked it aside in one more. The planks had burst into flame and the old gray-haired veteran in the middle had been easily crushed when a massive, windswept foot had smashed down upon him. It was his blood, a smear on the plaza, Jaymes was touching.
He pushed himself upright, shaking his head and ignoring the ringing pain at the sudden movement. A weeping boy was nearby, huddled over the corpse of his brother. Drumming filled the air, and a glance beyond the smoking, smoldering barricade showed a whole rank of ogres advancing down the street. Their bloodlust raging, they roared in exultation as they poured through the shattered defenses, their drums’ rolling thunder urging them on.
“Come on!” Jaymes said roughly, staggering to his feet, lifting the boy by his shaking shoulder. “Run!”
The lad’s eyes widened as he caught sight of the lumbering ogres. When Jaymes started away, the boy followed, and the two raced together out of the plaza and into one of the many side streets connecting to the wide-open space.
Jaymes and the boy came upon the Sword Knight who had tried to recruit the lord marshal for the left flank of the wooden barricade position. The entire rampart was wrecked and burning, with many defenders dead, and the mustachioed warrior was wounded. He was sitting up, leaning back against a block of granite, wiping at a bloody gash on his head. A few other men, most of them bleeding, were picking themselves up and trying to reorganize.
The ogres were spilling through the gap in the middle of the wreckage, but none diverted from the main charge to come after these few limping survivors on the fringe of the battle.