The air crackled. A shimmer of Sinway’s power coursed through the room. Seeing his finger bones pop from his skin, Melegal thought, This is it. He took one last glance down the corridor. There was no Venir to save them this time, and there was nothing they could do to save themselves. All he could do was unleash an uncustomary scream. “Stop!”
Master Sinway held the staff and prepared to deliver the final lethal blow. His face lit up with pain. A dagger with a tip that glowed blue like hot iron burst through the front of his chest. Out of nowhere, Lefty appeared. He stood on the table just behind Sinway’s shoulder. Waving his arm backward, Sinway flung Lefty into the fireplace.
Melegal renewed his concentration the moment Sinway’s guard went down. Stop! Stop! Stop! The coils of energy dissipated from Kam and Fogle’s body. They landed on their feet. Kam screamed, “Die, you fiend!” She and Fogle flung all of the radiant power they had left at the underling.
Sinway’s body locked up. The wave of energy consumed him. His body withered and bowed. His robes caught fire. Shiny bracelets fell from his limbs and rattled on the floor. Sinway was falling to pieces, but his sharp mind pulled his busted body together. An amulet glowed white-hot on his chest.
Melegal summoned all the strength he had left and charged Sinway. Gripping his sword with bleeding fingers, he unleashed a swing just as the last of Kam’s and Fogle’s fires went out. “Yaaaaaaaaaaaah!”
The blade sliced through the air. Sinway’s head lifted from his shoulders. The body flopped over. Sinway’s head floated like a living thing. The glimmer in his eyes faded. Voice cracking, Sinway said, “I might have lost this battle, but you are overrun. Bone is lost. Mankind is doomed. You will all perish soon—”
Kam struck the underling’s head with the Staff of Manamus. The skull exploded. “Shut up.”
Melegal helped Lefty out of the fireplace. “Are you all right?”
“I’ve been through worse,” the halfling said.
“Good, now give me my ring back?”
“I was only borrowing it. I didn’t know it would make me or you invisible. I thought it was pretty. Ew.” Lefty’s face soured. “What happened to your fingers? And why is your shoulder drooping?”
“The same thing that’s going to happen to yours if you don’t hand the ring over.”
“Fine.” Lefty handed over the ring. Melegal tussled his head.
“What are you doing?” Kam said to Fogle.
The wizard was searching the remains of Sinway. He recovered the bracelets and amulet and a pair of iron eyes. “They are warm. We need to destroy them.”
Kam stepped back. “Definitely.”
“Can somebody help me up?” Ebenezer said. He had a busted leg and arm. “If I’m going to die, I want to die in my castle.”
They headed down the corridor and into the portal, arriving instantly where they left at Castle Kling. Rayal gasped. “Thank Bish you are here!” Terror filled her voice. “The underlings have gone mad! We are overrun!”
They rushed to the end of the terrace. The underlings poured over the castle wall, slaying everything in sight. The streets were filled with them as far as the eye could see. They came like a nest of angry hornets. Bone’s last stand was down to its final moments.
“Slat,” Melegal said, “all of that work and we are still doomed, just like Sinway said.”
CHAPTER 38
By the time Venir made it to the battlements, he knew the helm was gone. Billip and Nikkel stood by his side, searching the underling forces below. The exhausted men’s expressions were blank.
Venir moved to the other side of wall, overlooking the inside of the West Gate. Brak and Chongo were fighting for their lives against a growing force of already-superior numbers. Brak was alive, wild-eyed and berserk. He swept underlings aside in three and fours.
“I’m all out of arrows,” Billip said, drawing his sword. “Shall we join the frenzied fray?”
“Fight or die,” Nikkel said, casting aside his crossbow. He picked up his studded club and slipped on his skullcap. “It’s time to fight or die, Billip. Get your slat ready!”
A shrill cry of chittering went up from the ranks of the underlings. A new surge of anger pushed them to their limits. It came from the back ranks toward the front in a new upheaval. Something was wrong. The well-oiled machine of killers was mad. their mission personal. More and more bodies crashed through the quavering dwarven wall of flame.
“What madness is this?” Billip said. “They attack with wild abandon! Every breath we take, the world gets worse!”
“Let’s make it even worse for the underlings!” With Brool in hand, Venir started for the ladder, determined to fight side by side with his son and Chongo. A shadow crossed over his face. Fully expecting an underling, he looked up. A great white owl with pink feathers dropped an object from its talons. It was Helm. Venir caught it. He smiled. Venir climbed to the topside of the West Gate. For some reason, he stole a glance toward the black columns. A long row of dust was coming their way. “Billip! Get the gate open!”
“What? Why?”
“The Jung and the striders are riding for Bone!”
“That’s no reason to open the gate.”
“Do as I say!” Venir gave them one more final order as he lowered Helm on his head. “Fight or die!” He buckled the chinstrap. His senses caught fire. He felt the hate of every underling within a league. Standing on top of the West Gate, he bellowed out toward the city, “HOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO!”
Venir’s enhanced voice carried like rolling thunder. Birds scattered from the spires. All of the underlings within earshot froze in their tracks and cast their eyes at Venir. For the longest moment, all the fighting stopped. Even the exhausted dwarves and men stopped. Venir stood, a titan of muscle and metal. He called down, “I’m going to kill all of you filthy underlings.”
Screeches of fury exploded from the underlings’ mouths. From both sides of the wall, they came for Venir like moths to a flame. They trampled men and dwarves in their path. All they wanted was the man in the helmet. The King of the Last Call. The Murdering Enemy. The Scourge of Underling Kind.
As they ran with wild abandon, Brak the Berserker clubbed the frenzied flock. Venir, fighting his own all-consuming urge to attack, did the opposite. He hopped from the top of the West Gate onto the parapet’s walkway. He ran. The underlings followed. Along the parapet, the underlings jumped into his path.
Slice! Slice! Slice!
The ravenous underlings were no match for the blinding speed of his steel. Every life he took fed Helm’s hunger as well as his own. Venir cleared a path all the way to the South Gate, where a host of underling magi waited in the air. Lightning spewed from their fingertips into Venir’s body. The crackling fires engulfed Venir, but did little more than tickle the blood-mad warrior. The shield covering his back and shoulders absorbed it all.
Propelled by the power of the armament, Venir launched himself into an underling mage floating twenty feet away. Its glaring emerald eyes became bigger than saucers when Venir plowed his hulking frame into it. With Venir’s hand locked on its throat, they drifted toward the ground, where a vicious flock of underlings waited.
Venir’s viselike grip crushed the underling mage’s windpipe. He hit the ground swinging. His underling attackers’ limbs went flying. The huge warrior moved faster than the shifty fiends. His strikes were sudden death. Helm throbbed. The armies of the enemy converged on him from the east and the west, numbering in the thousands. Helm wanted to drive Venir into the massive army. For the sake of all of Bish, he fought against it. Not yet! On feet swifter than a deer’s, he ran eastward toward the Mist. Every underling for miles followed.
***
Venir’s flight left Billip and Nikkel gaping. Billip slapped Nikkel on the chest. “You heard him, let’s get the gate open!”
Witnessing the most bizarre event he’d ever seen in his life, Billip climbed down the ladder. The underlings moved in a single-minded mass in the direction of Venir.
Among the chaos, he caught sight of Mood, who was cutting down the underlings that ran by. “Mood! Get the gate open. Just let them out!”
Mood made a sharp whistle. Before Billip could say “sonuvabish,” the dwarves had the West Gate rising. A current of underlings flowed, by the hundreds, through the gap. Billip climbed back on the ladder Nikkel was coming down. “Up! Up! Go back up!”
“Do you want me up or down?” Nikkel said.
“Up!”
At the top of the wall, another battle unfolded. The black-bearded Jung nomads, riding like thunder, galloped into the mindless swarm of underlings. The long-limbed, four-armed, fast-running striders descended on the underlings, lancing them with spears. The battle lasted for a few minutes before the Jung and the Striders pulled back. The underlings, one and all, poured out of the city, taking the same eastward path, not giving the Jung or the Striders the slightest glance. Hundreds of the horsemen were left scratching their heads. So were Nikkel and Billip.
“What in Bone just happened?” Nikkel loaded his last crossbow bolt. As he did, a limping underling warrior ran out of the city. He crossed through West Gate and turned along the wall going east. All of the underlings and spiders were gone. Nikkel shot the underling in the back. “They’re all gone.”
Billip surveyed their surroundings. Only a few living men and dwarves were among the battlefield of the dead. Brak and Georgio sat back-to-back. Brak held his hand over his neck. Georgio sat with his severed hands in his lap. Elypsa’s body lay in the street, trampled. Billip climbed back down the ladder and said to Mood, “What just happened?”
Mood swung his bloody and battered body into Chongo’s saddle. “I don’t know, but I’m going to find out.” He rode off.
CHAPTER 39
Resisting the urgings from Helm to turn back and fight, Venir ran on, with supernatural endurance fueled by the armament. He didn’t slow until he neared the wall of Mist, which rose as high as he could see. The last time he went in, he barely made it back out. He turned his back to the Mist that licked at his tail end. The underlings came in a black tide, numbering in the tens of thousands.
The leather on Brool’s handle groaned in his sweaty grip. He stood his ground. The underling army came. At the forefront, a juegen in full-metal armor rode on the back of a spider. Its ruby-red eyes locked on Venir. It shouted in Underling, raised its sword high above its head, and sped forward. The underlings closed within one hundred feet.
Helm tried to send him into the speeding mass of the enemy. Venir growled. His neck veins pulsed. The underlings gnashed at his heels and backside less than twenty feet away. Not yet. Venir went into the Mist.
The underlings didn’t slow. They ran right in.
The landscape changed. The foggy air was all around. The terrain was slippery with hard rock and shifting dirt. Venir lost all sense of direction, but he didn’t lose sense of the underlings. Blind as bats, they wandered through the smoke, searching for his face. Venir led them deeper into the murky soup. His rage began to boil over. Helm fed it. He’d been holding back. Now his time had come to give in. He let his will and helm’s become one.
Now!
Brool sang.
Underling clavicles were chopped through. Legs came off at the knees. Faces and chests were gored. Venir moved like an angry spirit of steel-wielding death. He smote down the underlings from the unseen. They fell, one, two, and three at a time to his fatal strikes and thrusts.
The armament propelled him deeper into the confused fray. He spun through them like a tornado. The fiends thrust back. At close proximity, they saw him; by the dozens they closed in.
Clang! Slice! Chop! Glitch! Jab!
Edged weapons sliced at Venir’s legs and arms. The scale mail held, at first, but the dwarven links were weakening. Venir clobbered down one fiendish knot and hunted down another. The death toll rose into the hundreds. Venir, in a body ravaged by the armament’s desires, pressed on. Venir delivered an overhead two-handed chop that split an underling in two.
“Yaaaaaaaargh!”
His guttural outbursts cost him. Through the misty murk, the vengeful underlings closed in with overwhelming numbers. They ripped the armor from his body. Their weapons slid into his body. His blood spilled into the unseen sand. There was burning, hot as fire, as searing slivers thrust into his body. Venir’s heart slowed. Thump… thump-thump… Thump… thump-thump…
Underlings circled him. Though lost, they cavorted around him with foul chittering gestures. Flat on his back with blood pumping out of his body, Helm brought a new light. His skin, strands of muscle, and bone mended. He sat up as if rising from a coffin. He unleashed his rage on the underlings who put him down. Brool broke up the celebration and chopped it into bits.
Slice!
The war in the Mist raged. Back and forth, a lone man fought against the underlings. Unrelenting, he crept into their ranks and killed. Other times, he charged in like a wild berserker. By the hundreds, they fell to his mighty axe day by day, but time was lost in the Mist. And Venir’s death came more than once. Helm sustained him.
***
Boon and thirty dwarves journeyed down the Current into the dead-quiet Underland. Lit up by the underlight, the vast complex of homes and castles rivaled in majesty the very castles of Bone. Walking the evacuated streets, even the dwarves’ jaws hung a little. Huge castle-like homes made from black onyx, marble, metal, and stone stood proud from their ledges.
“Be wary,” Boon said. Life scurried in the shadows. Dark things crept and crawled in the darkness as they moved into the heart of the Underland. They passed through a garden of statues filled with horrific images of people on the surface world being conquered and mutilated. “The evil in the underlings is bone-deep, clear through the marrow.”
In the center of the vast underground cavern was a gargantuan column where an ancient stalagmite and stalactite met. A trail wound around the natural formation, from the bottom of the city up to where the centers met. Stroking his moustache, Boon said, “I knew there would be a spot. There always is.”
They began the long trek up the stalagmite to the sound of dripping water. A few steps into it, ghastly women with spider-like bodies ascended from the blackness in the streets. Three times the size of a man, the vile creatures came at the dwarves. Boon knew what they were. He was one of the few that did. They were pregnant female underlings, who became fat, hairy, bulging monsters during their nine years of pregnancy. They redefined the meaning of scary.
From the darkness, a female latched her legs into a dwarf’s chest, bit deep into his neck, and sucked the blood from his body.
Boon raced up the winding stairs. The women scurried up the stalagmite in howling pursuit. They would defend their home, their nest, the Underland, with their very lives. A female blocked Boon’s assent. He cast an arc of energy into her body, knocking her from the column. Behind him, the dwarves fought valiantly, but they were severely outnumbered. The spider-like females came from all directions below.
“I told Mood I needed more men!” He released an arc of energy, knocking two more from the column. He had to save his energy. He’d need his full power to cast the quake. Finally, hundreds of feet above the streets below, he came to where the formations met. There was only him and a couple of dwarves. The black-beards struck out with deadly precision, but they’d perish soon.
Boon found a deep purchase in the cleft of the mineral rock. He took in a deep breath. “This is it. It’s time to finish the underlings forever!” Closing his eyes, he channeled his power into the rock. The magic of the spell’s power flowed from his heart into his shoulders and into his arms and hands. With mystic words he chanted, “I summon the quake!”
The rocks cracked. Fragments chipped away.
A female slung the last dwarf aside, crawled up, and latched onto Boon’s back. She sunk her fangs into his neck, draining the life within his body.
Boon’s will would not be conquered. Pushing every ounce of magic out that was within him, he said
, “You will not win! I WIN!”
The entire column split from the bottom to the top and fell away in massive chucks. The females screeched and scrambled. Huge hunks of rock splattered them into the cavern floor.
Being pulled away with the magic fading from his fingers and the blood being sucked from his body, Boon descended into the darkness, laughing.
The subterranean floor from the mountains above cracked in all directions. Boulders rained down on the Underland and all that lived. Finally, in a world-jarring crash that could be heard in the above world for leagues, part of the mountain range came down on the entire Underland.
***
Three months later, Mood, riding on the back of Chongo, returned through the West Gate of the City of Bone. Every sign of underlings, be it flesh or metal, had been scraped from the city streets and burned in the furnaces, but the stench of their rotten flesh still lingered. With heavy shoulders, Mood dismounted Chongo and walked through the ravaged gates of Castle Kling, where a handful of dwarves were still working.
“Mood,” Kam said, rushing across the courtyard. She threw her arms around his waist and squeezed. Erin hugged the blood ranger’s leg then moved onto the back of Chongo. “I’m glad you have returned.”
“Aye, good to see you.”
All of Venir’s friends who had survived arrived in the courtyard as well to greet him. Brak had an ugly scar on his neck. Jubilee held his hand. Georgio’s hands had grown back. His eye was fine. Melegal and Lefty stood side by side, petting Chongo. Billip and Nikkel were as well as any. They stood by a cart of supplies and were eager to get moving. Fogle shook his hand. Ebenezer and Rayal waved from the back of the pack. Elizabeth held the cat Octopus in her arms.
Dejected, Mood said, “If Chongo and I can’t find him, no one can. His home, or tomb, is in the Mist now, and all of the underlings with him.”
The Darkslayer: Series 2 Special Edition (Bish and Bone Bundle Books 6-10): Sword and Sorcery Adventures Page 65