Barton plucked spears from his arms and flung them away. He stomped at the advancing striders. The striders backed off, only to come back at him again.
“Georgio, we need to step aside,” Lefty pleaded. “I’m not like you. I can die from this.”
“I know, but it’s not right. Something is not right.”
“I don’t want to wait to find out. Just get out of the way.”
“I can’t. I don’t know why, but I can’t.” Georgio slowly shook his chin. He knew Lefty was right. They didn’t owe the giant anything, but Barton, though big, had the mind of a child. It seemed cruel to let him be butchered to death. “Forgive me, Lefty, but I’m making my stand.”
Lefty’s face paled. “You are choosing this giant over me?”
“You can surrender. I won’t hold it against you.”
The halfling’s shoulders sagged. He sighed. Remaining at Georgio’s side, he withdrew his dagger. “I can’t believe I’m doing this. Fight or die.”
Georgio grinned. “Fight or die.”
A shadow moved over them like a great cloud in the sky. A foreign sound followed.
WUMP! WUMP! WUMP!
Heads, man, strider, and giant, tilted toward the sky. A great black blot three times the size of Barton dropped down from the skyline. The striders scurried backward with their jaws clicking. In a panic, they ran to their camp.
“NO!” Barton yelled. “NO! NO! NO!”
A black-scaled dragon with a broad belly fastened its talons into the meat of Barton’s shoulders. With its long, powerful wings pounding the air, the dragon lifted Barton into the sky.
WUMP! WUMP! WUMP!
Barton kicked his legs and screamed, “Put me down, Blackie! Put me down! I hate you, Blackie! You stink, lizard! You stink!”
Unfettered, the dragon sailed toward the suns, higher into the clouds, turning from monster to little more than a bird in moments. Then, the dragon and giant were gone.
“Whoa,” Georgio said, searching the sky. “Did you see that?”
“Of course, I did. I’m not blind,” Lefty said. “I think that was a dragon. Now that’s worth writing about. Do you think it will come back for us?”
“It will be back,” a man with a rich voice said.
Georgio’s and Lefty’s heads snapped around. An old man in blue robes with a white moustache and shaved head stood with his hands on his hips.
“Boon!” Georgio said with elation.
The man’s eyes grew. “Georgio? Lefty? Call me an underling, but I never imagined I’d see the two of you again. I must admit, I’m perplexed. Yet, delighted as well. I hardly recognize either one of you. You look… horrible.”
Lefty threw his arms around the man’s legs. “I never thought I’d ever see anyone else I knew ever again! Aside from Georgio, that is.”
“Oh ho, boy, this world is full of surprises. They just aren’t usually pleasant ones, especially in this world filled with doom and gloom.” Boon peered off after the dragon. His nose twitched. He peeled Lefty from his legs. “Let’s walk. I’m not sure that Blackie will be back, but he sure scared the slat out of those striders. I don’t think you’ll have to worry about that tribe. They are very superstitious people.”
“Tarcot wasn’t,” Georgio said as he sheathed his sword.
“No, but he was from a tribe of a more-elevated position. Let’s go, before they become brave again.” Boon ambled away from the strider camp. “How on Bish did you wind up here? Blackie led me here. I wasn’t certain why, but now I know. He’s Barton’s fetcher. Yet now, we’re leagues from the action.”
“What action?” Georgio hustled up to Boon. “It’s Venir, isn’t it?”
“It’s always Venir these days, it seems. But yes, we are going to the City of Bone.”
“Bone?” Georgio’s haggard face brightened. “He’s in Bone?”
“Yes, the underlings have taken over the entire city.”
“What?” Georgio laughed. “No teasing, Boon. Really, is he in Bone or not?”
Boon stopped in his tracks. “If there is one thing I don’t jest about, it’s underlings. Their poison has seeped into the very pores of that foul city, just like the City of Three. You remember that, don’t you?”
Georgio nodded.
Lefty then asked, “But Venir’s alive?”
Georgio nudged him. “Of course, he is… isn’t he?”
Boon shrugged. “We won’t know for certain until we get there.”
CHAPTER 2
It was the first time in centuries that a host of dwarves had set foot inside the City of Bone. Now, the short stocky men went to work. Thousands of dwarves, accompanied by hundreds of willing royal soldiers, pushed the underling menace out of the streets, under the ground, or into the castles. But for the first time in months, one quadrant along the western wall was secured.
Venir stood on the top wall with his helmet tucked under his arm. The outland wind beat against his face. Standing above the West Gate, he looked downward. Tens of thousands of underlings waited outside the city’s wall. They’d killed everything that wasn’t an underling. The pyres of bodies were stacked higher than ever. The stench of death was heavy.
“They aren’t attacking. We can breathe for the moment,” Mood said from where he stood with some dwarven soldiers stationed a few yards away. The grizzled, dwarven blood ranger puffed on his cigar. “We will wait and see what their game is.” He blew a ring of smoke and pointed with his thick fingers. “We make better use of the royals’ equipment than they did. Huh, we built most of it for them, way back when.”
Venir spied the dwarves on the ramparts. The manned ballista and catapults lined up along the walls. The dwarves had even overtaken four castles, two to each side of the West Gate, and were stationed with long-range weaponry in the spires. “Your kin made quick work of those fiends in the castles. I’m not sure how grateful the royals will be though. After all, they are the fools that let them in. What kind of man trusts an underling?”
“Men are easily seduced by darker offerings. It’s been that way so long as I can remember.” Mood laid his hand on Venir’s shoulders. “Men like you, and some of your friends, are a rare thing. You may be fool enough to fight for what is right, but plenty of others won’t. It’s your nature.”
“Perhaps I should have been a dwarf.”
“No, you’re too ugly to be a dwarf. An orc, maybe.”
Venir huffed a slight laugh. Mood was the closest thing to a father that he had left. When he lost his family to the underlings as a boy, it was Mood who raised him. Mood taught Venir how to hunt underlings and kill them. “I never thought I’d see the day when an orc would be a welcome face.”
“Aye. Do you want a puff?”
“No. I could use some ale, though. I feel like I haven’t drunk a drop in a week.” He scoured the underling ranks. The gray-skinned fiends positioned themselves just outside of the ballista’s range. Many were bare-chested. Those were the badoon. But, most of the others wore black leather armor. Between the underlings and the wall stood a field of dead. Turkey vultures and the like circled above in the hundreds. Many of the birds were on the ground eating the carrion. Two hosts of the underlings broke off from the army. They marched in the opposite direction of one another, circling the rest of the city. “They are going to box us in.”
“That’s what I would do. There are three other gates to this city that the underlings control. They’ll just let their foul brethren in and try to force us out again.” Mood sucked in a lungful of cigar smoke. “That’s what I would do.”
“Yes, that was what I was thinking.” Venir traced the eyelets of his helmet with his blood-stained fingers. “When I have the helmet on, it feels like what we see is all of them. Is that possible?”
“Certainly. Look around. This is every dwarven fighter I have left. Only the women man Dwarven Hole now. That’s never happened before, in my time. We came to fight this fight. We just have to find a way to finish it.”
“I’ve
been in plenty of fights, but not many wars. Do you have any ideas?”
“If we’re going to win, we’ll need the royals. It’s the only way, but I warn you, they are tainted.”
“I never met a royal that wasn’t, in one way or another, but this is man against underling. They’ll have to see the light.”
“We’ll see.”
Venir looked down the inside of the wall. Billip and Nikkel were bundling up arrows and bolts with cords of leather. They turned them over to dwarves that hustled away with them. Venir called down, “Billip, find me Ebenezer.”
“Right away. I’ll send him up.”
Venir looked over the city. The buildings and roads made a straight line from one side of the wall to another. He could see the castles’ towers near the East Gate. The castles were spread out in the City of Bone with their backs to the main wall. There were dozens of them, great and small. “The one who rules the castles is the one who rules the wall,” he said.
“The underlings are ruling the castles. Most of them, I’d reckon,” Mood said. “They need to be exterminated. We could take them one at time and strengthen our position.”
“True, but it will be a hard fight to get in any one of them. They have to be taken from the inside out, but will there be enough royals willing to do that?”
“Not unless there is something better in it for them. We need to convince them that there is.”
“Agreed, but what might that be? What do royals value more than anything?”
“Control. That’s not something we can offer to them yet.”
Venir somberly shook his head. “I hate royals, but nothing like the underlings. We’re just going to have to convince them to fight.”
Mood knocked his knuckle on Venir’s helmet. “Or inspire them.”
CHAPTER 3
Melegal snaked his way through the hundreds of people making a pilgrimage to the West Gate quadrant of the city. Their bleak expressions passed right through his invisible body.
Such a shame that stealing isn’t the priority these days. I could have a field day with this vanishing ring.
There was a break in the ranks of people, leaving Melegal alone on the Royal Roadway before another wave of people passed. Gone were the prisoner wagons. The gallows were empty. The underlings had all but disappeared into the building. But they were replaced by dwarves and volunteer citizens ready to fight.
Melegal stood still in the road. A dwarf in chainmail and a man wearing the leather tunic of a royal walked by with hand axes in their grasps. The dwarf looked back over his shoulder as he passed. His eyes narrowed on Melegal’s position momentarily, but he marched on.
Perhaps I’m not as invisible as I thought, but invisible enough.
The dwarves set up blockades across every road and alley. Heavy crossbows were loaded and stacked in a line on the ground. There were long spears made for men. Swords and scabbards. Any citizen who wanted to fight could come and grab them. One man, a hefty fellow with a bulging belly, strained to buckle on a sword belt. A dwarf shoved the man’s belly in, while a second dwarf buckled the belt. They muttered in Dwarven, in a jolly sort of way, and handed the man a longsword and a helmet. The man offered a toothy smile.
Good for him. Every blubbery drunkard needs to fight something at least once in his life.
One with the streets, Melegal moved beyond the dwarven blockades. The few undamaged buildings he passed were shut up tight. The doors were barred and the shutters closed. The merchants’ carts had been abandoned in the streets, ransacked and empty. He kept his feet on the cobblestones. The wood decks on the storefronts were cracked. Melegal didn’t have any desire to bring any attention to himself. He was on a mission. He was scouting for underlings.
I can’t believe I talked myself into this.
Keeping his keen eyes sliding from the low to the high places, he didn’t see much of anything. He fully expected to see the spiders, but so far there had been none of them. There weren’t any underling patrols, either. It was just him and the empty streets. He moved on, slipping off the Royal Roadway into narrower streets, crisscrossing many directions, but angling east. Occasionally, small groups of people darted from one street or alley to another, heading west. The victory celebration at the West Gate was spreading.
Melegal picked his quick pace up to a trot when he crossed over the center of the City of Bone where the four main roadways crossed. A little more commotion could be heard on the eastern side of the city. Floorboards creaked inside the boarded-up walls. Eyeballs peeked through the shutters. Melegal moved deeper east on the open road he’d walked a thousand times before. His heart beat against his ribcage.
I’ve never felt this nervous in this city. I can’t even smell slat in the alleys. All that I smell is fear.
Traveling within a mile of the East Gate, Melegal came upon underlings. A small party of four burst out of a store and onto the porches. Blood dripped from their weapons. They chittered with pride and moved eastward down the street.
Melegal moved onto the porch and peered inside the doorway. A man and two women lay on the floor, slick with spilled blood. Red splatters covered the ornate clothes hanging from the racks around them.
Fiends.
Leaving the store, he moved on a few more blocks. About a quarter mile from the East Gate, the underlings had set up blockades of their own. Beyond those blockades stood hundreds of soldiers. Melegal climbed onto a rooftop. The two-story building on the outer corner of the Royal Roadway gave him a clearer view of things. The East Gate was open. The underlings from the outside poured in by the thousands. Melegal watched for over an hour. They kept coming. He adjusted his cap. His steely eyes popped a little when soldiers on horses rode in. His eyes narrowed. It was a host of orcs and ogres. They were accompanied by royal soldiers carrying banners from the outposts of Bish.
Slat! It’s getting worse by the minute.
CHAPTER 4
Inside the kitchen galley of Castle Kling, Venir drank from a tankard of ale. He wiped the froth from his mouth with his forearm. “Ah, there was a time when I could have enjoyed an ale as fine as this. Now, it does little to quench my thirst. Ebenezer, you’ve said little about anything. I need input.”
The commanding Ebenezer Kling, with flowing, graying brown hair and the hard-eyed edge of a warrior, stood a full inch shorter than Venir. He was chewing on a hunk of dried meat. He washed it down with wine served in a fine goblet marked with the symbols of Castle Kling. The dwarves had rousted everything out of the castle, and now it had become the command center for the rebellion to take back the City of Bone.
“Venir, I’m not confident there is anyone we can count on, aside from ourselves and the dwarves. I don’t say that lightly, either. There was a time when I could rally the help of a dozen castles with confidence, but not now.” Ebenezer picked at his teeth with a toothpick. His eyes drifted over the bloodstained floor. Huge cracks gaped open in the walls and floors. Beams in the ceiling had busted. Everything, it seemed, had deteriorated. Sections of the castle had fallen. “I don’t even have any men left.” His voice was empty of passion. “The underlings killed them all.” He glanced at Venir. “I’m the only one left. The royals won’t rally around me. No, they’ll see this as an opportunity to usurp more power.”
Venir set his tankard down on the kitchen counter with a noticeable clonk. “Like you would have.”
“True, there is no denying it. Mother and I, we thought to play along, but we became wise enough to know the better of it. We saw the end coming. Those eyes, Master Sinway’s eyes, are pools of death.”
Venir scratched his chest. The chill in Ebenezer’s voice let him know that the man did indeed understand that there wasn’t going to be any bargaining with the underlings. It was only a matter of time before they killed anyone who aligned themselves with the underlings. Humans, at least. The underlings were a little more compassionate with the other races. They made slaves of them.
Ebenezer sat down on the farm-table bench.
He leaned back. “You know, I never really believed in the underlings. I thought of them as more of a myth than a man. They seemed like little more than a story from the weak, most of the time. Even when Outpost Thirty-One fell, I scant believed it.” He swallowed. “Most royals are like me. We don’t notice until it’s right in our faces, and even then we might ignore it. We lust for gain and glory, and don’t care what backs we break to get it, so long as they are not our own. Venir, barring a miraculous change of heart, I don’t think any aid will come.”
“So, you think the royals grovel, then?”
The royal lord shrugged. “It’s all part of the game. Whatever buys them more time, that is what they will do.”
Refilling his ale, Venir let out a gusty laugh.
With a perplexed look, Ebenezer said, “What amuses you?”
“The underlings made an honest royal out of you. That’s worth drinking to.” Venir guzzled down the ale in a few loud gulps. “Ah!”
A smile crept over Ebenezer’s face. His dark eyes lightened. “I could use some of that ale, my mirthful ally.”
“If there’s one thing we can celebrate, I noticed there wasn’t a single cask in your wine cellar that was busted,” Billip said as he entered the kitchen. He had a small cask on one shoulder, and a wry smile on his face. “I had to fight a dwarf the size of a full barrel to get this one, though. He wasn’t too happy when I departed.”
“No, none of them were.” Nikkel entered with a full-size keg in his arms and a smile as broad as a barn and bright as the moon. “Let’s do some drinking.”
Over the hours, the men let their guard down. If there was a problem, the dwarves would let them know about it. For the moment, they were safe. Venir had his arm over Nikkel’s shoulder. “You’re going to be a bear of a man like your father. You know that, don’t you?”
“I know,” Nikkel said. “I have to carry on the legacy of Mikkel’s Mead and be a better shot than that knuckle cracker over there.”
The Darkslayer: Series 2 Special Edition (Bish and Bone Bundle Books 6-10): Sword and Sorcery Adventures Page 53