by Doug Niles
The cold hilt of the sword in his hand was not comforting—it could do little against the looming, otherworldly presence. His loyal Freemen, the two dozens knights of no sign who had sworn loyalty to him personally and now rode alongside him, did not show any hesitation to accompany their commander on his steadfast advance. Captain Powell had his own broadsword bared and held the blade across his lap, ready for use.
But Jaymes had no plan. He skirted the pockets of furious battle as much as possible, fixing his attention on the solidifying figure of the elemental. Now he could see the lashing tendrils of its liquid limbs, and he knew it was preparing for an attack. On the far side of the action, the lord marshal reined in, watching and waiting for the being to move.
“What can we do, my lord?” Powell asked, reining in close, his low voice urgent. “We Freemen are yours to command.”
“I know,” replied the lord marshal. “I wish I had an order for you. I fear that our only course will be to harry and flee, but that idea galls me more than I can say.”
Something glimmered off to the side, barely a dozen yards away. It was the Thorn Knight in the gray robe, blinking instantaneously into view. Jaymes saw that the man’s hands were gesturing, his eyes flashing hatred as his gaze focused on the lord marshal.
“Beware of sorcery!” cried Powell, wheeling his horse around and raising his sword. But he was on the wrong side of Jaymes and could only attempt to shoulder his commander out of the way as he spurred his mount into a charge toward the Thorn Knight.
“Kill the Gray Robe!” shouted another of the Freemen, spotting the enemy magic-user. He and a companion spurred their horses toward the man, who took little notice of them as they galloped threateningly toward him.
Instead, the Thorn Knight stared at Jaymes for the length of a breath then gestured and shouted a guttural sound. Jaymes’s roan whinnied and reared, and something solid struck the lord marshal in the solar plexus, knocking him from the saddle. The wind was driven from his lungs as he slammed to the ground.
The pair of Freemen reached the Gray Robe but, with a final gesture, the Thorn Knight disappeared a moment before they could cut him down.
Gasping for air, Jaymes sat up painfully as he tried to catch his breath. The roan was nearby, looking at him with upraised ears, nickering curiously. Sergeant Ian of the Freemen reached him, helping Jaymes to rise unsteadily to his feet and brushing the commander’s tunic.
Only then did Jaymes see the other knight, who was wearing the white tunic of his personal bodyguard. The Freeman was obviously dead, still and blue, his eyes locked open in an expression of … what? Not horror or fear, as the lord marshal would have expected. Instead, the knight’s dead face was frozen into a leer of great, almost inexpressible joy.
“He was killed by death magic,” Captain Powell suggested, dismounting and looking ruefully at the dead Freeman. “This was Sir Benedict. He tackled you, drove you from the saddle before the wizard’s spell could reach you. It was he who took the blow.”
“Taking the magic on himself instead,” Jaymes realized, shaken. “A very brave man.”
He wanted to say more, much more, but now the elemental king started to move.
Hoarst teleported back to the half-giant, who stood with his emerald-tipped spear planted beside him and the upraised wand in his meaty fist. Ankhar had been glaring in awe and consternation at the fully materialized elemental king and started slightly as the Thorn Knight appeared.
“Oh, there you are! Did you kill him?” he asked.
“I’m not sure,” Hoarst replied in his usual unflappable way. “I used a powerful spell, but he is very well guarded. It may be that the lord marshal survived.”
“No matter,” barked the half-giant. “I am ready to send the king against the knights!”
Ankhar swept the wand through a half circle, gesturing toward the elemental, forcing it to recoil, to lumber away from them. “See how it obeys my will!” he crowed exuberantly. “Go! Kill! Attack at once!”
The force of the magic caused the elemental king to roar and immediately turn away. It lumbered toward the enemy army, kicking through any soldiers hapless enough to find themselves in its path. The battlefield dissolved in terror as the troops of both armies scrambled madly to get out of the way, men slashing at men who stood in their path, ogres doing the same to other ogres. The panic was general and all consuming.
One cyclonic limb kicked through a group of dwarf axe men, sweeping dozens of them hundreds of feet through the air. A fear-maddened ogre was plucked from the ground by a pinch of vaporous fingers, lifted high above the ground, then dropped, screaming, into a knot of his fear-crazed fellows. Almost as if it were dancing with joy, the huge monster swept from one leg back to the other, spinning faster and faster until the twin tornadoes of its lower limbs melded into one screamingly powerful storm.
As many goblins and ogres as humans died in this violent vortex, and the line of battle was cleaved in two by the massive monster’s passage. All combatants fled, their petty quarrels forgotten in the face of certain extinction. Horses and wolves raced away at full speed, ignoring the commands of riders who tried to steer them. Back and forth along the front, the monstrous being wreaked its doom until a cloud of dust—shot through with lightning and stinging droplets of water—obscured much of the chaos on the ground.
Ankhar stood watching, his jaw slackened by awe, as the beast killed and destroyed and rampaged. Only after several moments did he remember the slender talisman in his hand. Finally he lifted the wand, waving it broadly before him and striding purposefully forward. The force of the magic device repelled the king of the elementals, and with a screeching roar—a sound unlike anything in nature—it began to move away.
Hoarst and Ankhar continued to advance, the half-giant still wielding his wand. The monster continued to move, and in moments it was wading into the bulk of the Solamnic Army, those units that had been held in reserve behind the front and had been observing, frozen and horrified, the irresistible onslaught of the elemental king.
Those valiant warriors—knowing they could do nothing against the monstrous presence—turned their backs and ran or put spurs to their steeds and galloped from the fight.
Dram picked himself up. His ears were ringing; he was covered with soot. The clear stream he had been drinking from was now a muddy sludge, and the green meadow had blackened around him. He looked up the hill and saw that all the trees had been flattened by some terrible force, the ridgetop itself swept clear of everything.
Groggily and in growing terror, he scrambled up the hill. He had to climb over the charred trunks of trees that had been knocked over to completely block the roadway that had been utterly clear when he descended a few moments earlier. Now the ridgetop was a hellish landscape, scoured clean of wagons, bombards, supplies—everything was simply gone.
He saw bodies scattered around, blackened and broken. Sulfie was there, charred and lifeless; only her diminutive size allowed him to recognize her. Gently he rolled her over, his tears falling on the tiny, blackened corpse.
“You deserved better, little gnome,” Dram said quietly. He thought of Jaymes, then, and it was not a friendly thought: his companion had used the three gnomes, taken their knowledge for his own purposes. One by one they had fallen in a cause that was not their own. As for Jaymes Markham, would he even take note of the sacrifices made in his name?
Dram knew that he wouldn’t.
There was a spot of whiteness in all the smoldering ruin. The Lady Coryn lay huddled in a ball, her white robe, somehow, still curiously unsullied. Dram knelt beside her, touched her, and gasped with surprise when the white wizard moaned.
Somehow she was still alive. Her eyebrows had been burned away, her face and hands were burned red, but her flesh, wherever her robe had covered it, seemed all right.
“Coryn—what happened?” Dram asked frantically. Her only reply was a low moan. He knelt, touched her hand, and her eyes flashed open. The cowl of her robe fell back, re
vealing that her black hair had not been burned. Somehow, the dwarf realized, she had cloaked herself in just enough protection to save her life in the midst of the blast.
Again she moaned, looking at Dram, her tongue appearing between cracked and blistered lips.
“Water! I’ve got to get you water!” he jumped up, looking around. There had been water wagons to the rear of each bombard, but those—like everything else on this ridgetop—had been blasted to oblivion.
Weeping in frustration, he ran all the way back to the stream. He filled the small waterskin he carried with him and ran back to the wizard. Dram brought it up to Coryn’s lips, giving her a few drops.
“Here,” he said. “Drink a little. Everything’s going to be all right.”
But the smoke had cleared enough for him to look at the battlefield, and even as he spoke them, he knew the words were a lie.
The four wings of the Army of Solamnia had fallen back before the irresistible monster. They had scattered from the field, troops simply trying to survive. The Army of the Rose was retreating to the north, while the Crowns and Swords were fleeing westward. There was little sense of formation or purpose—the men were terrified and wanted only to get away. The horsemen moved fastest, while the more heavily armed footmen threw away armor, equipment, even weapons in their haste. All of the army’s supply wagons were abandoned, and the wounded were left to fend for themselves.
The Palanthians, on the south flank of the original position, were forced to withdraw into a valley of the Garnets, moving to higher ground, and it was this wing that the elemental king pursued. Jaymes rode past the creature as it swept through a rank of crossbowmen, the cyclonic winds of its lower limbs tossing the armored humans around like chaff in a strong wind. It seemed to be loping along with these troops, crossing over a ridge and crushing a wide path through a forest of pines then settling back to the valley floor.
The lord marshal rode just ahead of the looming horror, sweeping into the valley where the legion had fled. He found General Weaver trying to organize a line of defense.
“Stand, you wretches!” the officer ordered his terrified troops, who retained enough discipline that many of them actually obeyed the order. They fired arrows at the elemental, but those arrows vanished, without effect, against the massive torso. A small band of knights charged with lances, but the elemental’s winds tossed them back.
“General!” shouted Jaymes, riding up to Weaver’s prancing stallion. “You’ll have to fall back; your men can’t fight this thing!”
“Run? By Joli, I cannot, sir!” he protested. “By the Oath and the Measure, we must make our stand here!”
“General!” barked Jaymes. “That’s an order—withdraw! Lead your men up into the mountains. Break them into small groups—see that as many survive as possible!”
His sorrowful eyes showing his frustration, the Rose Knight obeyed his lord marshal, pulling his men back from the elemental and urging them higher into the mountain range. They scrambled over the rocky ground, some of them splashing up the streambed, others sprinting through the woods as fast. As if toying with them, the elemental king hesitated, pausing at the mouth of the valley. The grim, lofty face scanned its helpless targets.
The men kept fleeing, completely abandoning all discipline, but the legion’s flight was thwarted a half mile away. The retreating troops rushed around a bend in the narrow valley and halted in consternation and panic. A sheer cliff rose directly before them, blocking any further progress into the mountains. Then the elemental king, his pursuit at an almost leisurely pace, came into view, striding resolutely forward.
Jaymes turned to General Weaver.
“We’ll stand here, my lord!” declared the general. “Est Sularus oth Mithas!”
“Yes,” agreed the lord marshal bitterly. There was no way out of this place, and it seemed certain many thousands of brave men would pay for that reality with their lives.
“Hey, Jaymes! Sir Lord Marshal! It’s me; I’m back!”
Jaymes whirled in his saddle, his jaw dropping in amazement as Moptop Bristlebrow came scrambling right out of a nearby rock pile to stand on a boulder at the foot of the cliff. The kender waved cheerfully then looked around at the soldiers he had startled with his sudden appearance. “You guys are a little jumpy, aren’t you?” he asked.
It was then that the elemental king uttered a thunderous roar that rolled up the valley, echoing between the cliffs and resounding through the air.
Moptop hopped down off the rock and sauntered toward Jaymes. He waved nonchalantly at the monster looming into the air barely a mile away.
“Oh, him again,” he said. “I guess I got here just in time.”
CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN
THE MARCH OF THE ADAMITES
For several breaths Jaymes Markham was utterly speechless. He simply stared at Moptop, stunned by the kender’s appearance on the battlefield. The pathfinder’s air of utter nonchalance was incongruous against the backdrop of death and mayhem, and it took the lord marshal an act of will to shake his head and convince himself that he was not imagining the bizarre scene as the kender ambled cheerfully down from the rocks toward the army commander.
A glance over his shoulder showed Jaymes that the monster was pressing the advance, as if it sensed the helplessness of the trapped humans. Another bellow exploded from the elemental king, this one a thunderous convulsion that shook the ground and caused a small rockslide in the valley. The noise finally startled his tongue into action.
“Moptop! What in the name of all the gods are you doing here? Where did you come from?” the lord marshal demanded when he finally regained the power of speech.
The kender grinned happily. “Well, I found another path. But it’s not like it looks—I mean, I didn’t just magically walk through the rocks, like we did at the Cleft Spires. I went back underground like you asked me to, and I had to look around for a really long time. But I found my way back out again!” He chucked a thumb over his shoulder, indicating the tumble of large rocks at the base of the cliff. “See, there’s a cave down here, and I came out of the hole.”
“Of course.” The lord marshal thought quickly. He looked up and saw the looming form of the elemental king, its black shape etched against the sky and two fiery eyes fixed upon the milling soldiers of the Palanthian Legion trapped here in this valley. They were hard up against the cliff. There were several thousand men in here, many hundreds of them on horseback. Brave and willing to fight to the last man, they were nevertheless incapable of battling the looming monster. Their only hope of survival was escape.
Looking at the sheer cliff, the rock wall looming a hundred feet in the air, capped by a cruel overhang that would have prevented even a skilled climber from attaining the top, Jaymes could see there would be no further retreat on the ground. Even though the kender claimed to have found a cave at the base of that precipitous barrier somewhere within the great pile of large boulders, Jaymes couldn’t spy any opening.
“You say there’s a cave in there. Is it large enough for these men to escape into it?” Even as he asked the question, he felt the looming presence of the giant elemental and knew it was a futile hope.
Moptop confirmed that knowledge with his first words. “Not really—it’s pretty small and narrow. If they left these horses outside, they could go in there one at a time, I guess, if the cave wasn’t filled with adamites. But they pretty much block the whole thing up.”
“Adamites?” Jaymes felt a flickering of hope. “So you found them? And they came with you?”
“Yes—and you were right! They all followed me right along, the whole army of them, after I told them what you told me to say. They’re lined up down there right now. Here they come!”
The lord marshal saw the proof emerging into view even as the kender spoke. Grayish white, the color of naked rock, the first of the stony warriors came out of the hidden cave to appear between a pair of large, square boulders. The stone-skinned warrior slid nimbly down the shelf to st
and at attention on the floor of the valley. Another warrior came behind the first, and still another followed, both of them dropping to the ground to flank the first of the statuelike warriors.
The file of adamites emerged from the cave in eerie silence, their heads capped by the antique, bristling helmets, each bearing a small round shield in its left hand and the stout, sturdy spear in its right. But they came quickly; in no time at all, there were more than a dozen standing there, and this rank took a step forward as still more emerged to fill out a second rank just behind the first. The second group marched to the side to take up a position beside the first, extending the front to some twenty-five warriors—and twenty-five sharp, sturdy spears—while more and more and more of them continued to climb out from the narrow cavern.
“My lord!” cried General Weaver, approaching with his sword in his hand. He glared worriedly at the adamites as the first rank took another few steps away from the cliff wall to make room for yet more of their comrades. “Are we being attacked from behind, as well?”
“No, General,” Jaymes replied, holding up his hand to dissuade nearby knights who had turned about to face these new arrivals, their weapons at the ready. “If I have guessed correctly, we’ve just been reinforced.”
“What in the name of the gods are they?” Weaver said.
“I don’t know if we can call them allies, but I do believe they’re the sworn enemies of that thing,” the marshal replied, pointing up at the elemental as the monster took another step closer. One of the cyclone legs kicked into a formation of legionnaires, knocking the men of Palanthas down like stacks of straw. Horses neighed shrilly, rearing and bucking. A volley of arrows flew from a company of archers, vanishing without effect against the great swath of the elemental king’s belly.