by A. Giannetti
“Do not believe all that you hear,” whispered Lurio contemptuously. “There are rumors that the war is not going well. I have heard that the horse herders crushed our forces in Tarsius, slaying countless Mordi and mutare, and you have seen for yourself that the Dwarves of Galenus continue to resist our every attack. If things turn sour, I mean to jump ship. There are still places in the Broken Lands out of the Dark King’s reach.”
“You'd best keep that thought to yourself,” said Brada in an uneasy voice. “You never know where Torquatus is going to pop up. I was playing with a prisoner one time trying to get information and when I looked up there he was, hanging in the air as if he was looking at me through a window and enjoying the show.”
“Cut the chatter and pay attention,” Gorgonius suddenly snarled over his right shoulder before Brada could reply. The two Mordi immediately fell into a sullen silence. Following like a shadow behind the Wood Goblins, Elerian knew that he could delay no longer.
“I must take them now while they are preoccupied with their anger,” he thought to himself. His mind made up, he rushed silently up behind the two archers, a silver-hafted knife in each hand. There were two brief flashes of white light as the blades struck home, each one burying itself in the base of a Mordi’s slender neck. Warned by the sound of the limp bodies of the Wood Goblins falling heavily to the ground Gorgonius spun around to confront Elerian. Deceived by the illusion spell that Elerian wore as a matter of habit, he mistook him for a Tarsi.
“I do not know from whence you have sprung, horse herder,” Gorgonius hissed, glaring contemptuously at Elerian, “but those blades will not protect you from my wrath. Be assured that your death will not be an easy one.”
Casting aside his bow, Gorgonius drew two black bladed knives from his belt, holding one in each of his long hands.
“My knives will give me no advantage in this contest,” was Elerian’s wary thought when he examined the Uruc’s weapons, for intricate threads of argentum suffused with a crimson glow were inlaid in their blades.
The victor of hundreds of knife fights over the course of his long life, Gorgonius approached Elerian with a fluid, confident stride, his pointed teeth bared in anticipation. Just out of knife range, he turned smoothly sideways, standing lightly balanced on the balls of his feet with his right foot forward. Right arm extended, he menaced Elerian with the long knife he held point up in his right hand. His left hand was hidden behind his back. Elerian’s eyes narrowed when he saw the black, viscous material coating the edge of the Uruc’s blade.
“His knives are poisoned,” thought Elerian to himself. “One scratch will slow me down enough for this creature to slay me, however slowly he wishes to do it.”
With blinding speed and snakelike grace, Gorgonius suddenly sprang ferociously at Elerian, striking first with the blade in his right hand and then with his hidden blade. The ring of steel on steel filled the night air and then suddenly ceased as Elerian and Gorgonius locked both their knives together at the hilts. For a moment, the four blades grated harshly together as Elerian and the Goblin strained powerfully against the other. The Uruc’s eyes suddenly shone with a crimson light as the knife in Elerian’s left hand flew into the air, loosened from his grip by a powerful, clever wrench of Gorgonius’s right hand and wrist.
“He is stronger than any Goblin I have ever faced before,” thought Elerian to himself without panic as he deftly grasped Gorgonius’s right wrist with his left hand. With a sudden surge of the sinewy muscles in his hand and arm he tried to break it, but the steely muscles beneath the Uruc’s pale skin resisted his every effort. Eyes burning like coals and the tendons in his neck standing out like cables, Gorgonius struggled mightily to free his right hand from Elerian's iron grip on his wrist. Well versed in the ways of Goblin infighting, Elerian kept his eyes on the Uruc’s face. When Gorgonius suddenly thrust his head forward, intending to bury his sharp teeth in Elerian's throat, Elerian cracked his forehead against the Goblin's, momentarily stunning the Uruc. Dropping suddenly backwards, Elerian pulled Gorgonius with him, tugging mightily on the Goblin’s right wrist with his left hand.
When his back struck the ground, Elerian planted both his feet in the surprised Uruc’s stomach. Releasing the Goblin’s wrist, he thrust powerfully with both legs. As Gorgonius flew through the air over him, Elerian heard the brief grate of steel as the knives they still held locked together came apart. Gorgonius twisted like a cat in midair, intending to land on his feet, but Elerian had cleverly directed him toward a chestnut tree whose thick trunk rose up like a woody wall before him. Before he could land on his feet, The Uruc’s face and chest struck the tree’s rough bark, stunning him and driving the breath from his lungs. As the Goblin slowly turned around on unsteady legs, both knives still gripped in his long hands, Elerian leaped lithely to his feet and hurled Rasor through the air with his right hand. The knife’s slender, leaf shaped blade buried itself to the hilt in the left side of Gorgonius’s chest, piercing his heart.
For an instant, the Uruc stared in disbelief at the knife hilt protruding from his chest, unable to comprehend that his wicked days had finally come to an end. Then, a look of insane rage in his crimson eyes, he cast both his knives at Elerian. With an inhuman quickness, Elerian twisted his body to his left. One Goblin knife fanned his face with the wind of its passage. The second blade scored the leather tunic covering his chest, leaving behind a smear of viscous poison.
With cold gray eyes, Elerian watched as the scarlet fire slowly died in Gorgonius's eyes. When he was sure the Goblin had breathed his last, he pulled Rasor from the Uruc’s chest with his right hand, the magical blade emerging bright and unstained by the black blood that flowed from the wound it had inflicted. Carefully, Elerian slipped Rasor beneath the iron collar the Goblin wore around his neck. When he cut through the dark iron with a sudden flick of his wrist, the argentum inlaid in Rasor’s blade flared white, and Elerian felt a sudden drain on his power. He struck again and the collar fell to the ground in two pieces, its power broken.
“Only luck saved me in this encounter,” thought Elerian somberly to himself as he straightened up and examined the poisoned stained slash on his leather tunic. The leather was cut completely through. Only the thickness of the linen shirt he wore beneath it had separated his flesh from the Uruc’s poisoned blade. As he carefully cleaned the venom from his tunic with a handful of leaves, his thoughts turned to the two lupins which were still somewhere ahead of him. By now, they might have already discovered the presence of the Dwarves on the hidden road.
“They must be dealt with before they alert their masters to the presence of Ascilius’s company,” thought Elerian to himself, “but I cannot do it in the shape that I am wearing now.”
After retrieving Acer from where it had fallen, he hid both his knives in a clump of ferns. He then took the time to throw the bodies of the three Goblins he had slain into a deep ravine, covering them with leaves to conceal them. Elerian buried the collar in with them, using a stick to pick it up, for he did not want to handle it in any way. Casting a shape-changing spell, he then transformed himself into the familiar form of a large gray panther. His powers of scent in this body were not as acute as a lupin's, but he was still able to pick up the unpleasant odor of the shape changers where their scent lay thickly on the ground ahead of him. Moving on padded feet, he followed the two lupins higher into the hills. When he was close to the Dwarf road, Elerian bunched his powerful, supple muscles and leaped high onto the trunk of a mighty oak. Digging into the fissured bark with his powerful claws, he drew himself up into the tree's thick branches until he was high above the forest floor with a network of thick branches spread out before him. Padding silently over the rough bark of the limbs, he made his surefooted way from tree to tree, bridging any gaps with long, graceful leaps.
Elerian found the lupins a short distance from the road and the sleeping Dwarves. As he crept over the pair on a wide branch, he smelled the fresh scent of blood in the air. Looking over the
edge of the limb, he saw that, nearly twenty feet below him, the two lupins were crouched over a Dwarf, who lay unmoving on the ground between them with his throat torn out. The shape changers were quietly lapping up his still flowing blood with their long red tongues, their eyes glowing like coals in the dark.
Baring his teeth in anger, Elerian stepped off the branch. After plummeting silently through the air, he landed squarely astride one of the lupins. A quick bite behind the head, a shake of his own head and powerful neck, and the Goblin was dead. As Elerian released the foul, fur-covered skin of the lupin, the creature’s companion lunged forward, seizing him by the throat with its powerful jaws. He tried to shake it off, but the lupin clung stubbornly to his neck, its powerful jaws grinding closer and closer to the great veins in his neck. Desperately, Elerian tried to strike at the shape changer with his front paws, but the crafty creature, whose strength matched his own, pulled him off balance whenever one of his feet left the ground. Unable to breath, Elerian felt himself weakening. He tried to form a spell, but a red haze now filled his mind and the words refused to come to him.
“My luck has finally run out,” was his last coherent thought.
Sensing that his enemy was weakening, the lupin squeezed its jaws tighter, savoring the blood now flowing into its jaws from the wounds its sharp teeth had inflicted on Elerian’s throat. Then the shape changer’s pleasure abruptly turned to panic when a pair of powerful hands suddenly seized it by the neck, and steely fingers, hardened by years of toil, closed off its windpipe. Squirming frantically to free itself, the lupin let go of Elerian and tried to reach over its right shoulder with its jaws in an attempt to rend this new enemy with its long fangs.
Clamping his powerful fingers tighter around the lupin’s hairy neck, Ascilius stiffened his arms, preventing the desperate shape changer from reaching him with its jaws. Pin points of red floated in his dark eyes as he continued to throttle his enemy, his hatred of the Goblins and all their allies lending even more strength to his immensely powerful hands and arms. Then, as if from a great distance, he heard Elerian speak in his rough panther’s voice.
“You can let go now, Ascilius, unless you mean to squeeze the creature’s head clean off its neck.”
Coming back to himself, Ascilius easily cast the heavy, limp body of the lupin off to his right. He frowned at the great cat crouched at his feet, a disapproving look on his face.
“I see you still managed to find trouble in spite of my warnings,” said Ascilius reprovingly. “It is fortunate that I was making the rounds of the sentries and heard the sound of your struggle with the lupin.”
“Say rather that trouble found me,” replied Elerian dryly, his breathing still labored from his exertions. Blood stained the sleek gray fur on the sides of his neck, flowing in crimson streams from the wounds the lupin had inflicted on his throat. Even as Ascilius watched, the deep punctures stopped bleeding and closed over as Elerian healed himself. Ascilius waited patiently until Elerian was done, knowing that his companion would be withdrawn and silent during the healing process. Abruptly, Elerian’s panther shape became fluid as his body flowed back into his native form. A moment later his Elven features were masked by the illusion he wore out of habit, so that once more Elerian resembled a middle aged man with dark, graying hair and clear gray eyes.
“I encountered a party of Goblins near the river that were making straight for your company of Dwarves,” said Elerian to Ascilius. “I slew three of them, but these two managed to reach the road. They killed this unfortunate fellow before I caught up with them.”
“His name is Bolanus,” said Ascilius sadly as he closed the dead Dwarf's eyes with gentle fingers. “It is a short season for some with an early harvest at the end of it. His death likely saved the rest of us, however, for if the lupins had not stopped to make a kill and feed, they would have been on their way back to their master by now with the news of our presence.”
“We will not be safe for long if there are other patrols,” observed Elerian in a troubled voice. “We have one more day before we reach Galenus, more than enough time for them to discover us.”
“You cannot find and destroy them all,” replied Ascilius warningly. “We will have to trust to luck to see us through to the castella.”
“We will not need luck if I can discover is a way to make the Goblins leave these hills,” said Elerian thoughtfully. A smile slowly quirked his lips as a solution came to him. “I am going to retrieve my knives from the forest,” he said to Ascilius, disappearing into the trees before the Dwarf could object.
Grumbling quietly to himself over Elerian’s recklessness, Ascilius wrapped Bolanus carefully in his cloak and carried him to the middle of the forest road before covering him with rocks from a nearby streambed.
“Those who follow us will pick up his body and bring it to Galenus,” he thought to himself as he completed his task. “If fortune favors us, he will be laid to rest properly in Galenus.”
After making the rounds of the sentries and warning them to be doubly cautious, Ascilius returned to the head of the column of Dwarves sleeping on the road. Dawn was still hours away so he sat down, drawing his cloak closely around him to ward off the night air.
“Where is that dratted Elf?” he wondered to himself, his eyes growing heavier by the moment. Concern for Elerian kept him awake as a slow, tortuous hour passed with no sign of his companion. Then, gradually, Ascilius’s bearded chin slumped down onto his broad chest, and he slipped into an exhausted slumber.
After leaving Ascilius behind, Elerian climbed high into a huge oak tree. Standing at ease on one of its massive limbs, he extended his right hand and cast a shape-changing spell, watching with his third eye as a flow of golden light spilled from his fingertips, covering his body from head to toe. His body shifted, changed, and shrank, taking on the feathered form of a great gray forest owl. He would have preferred his familiar hawk form, but the large, round eyes of his owl shape saw better at night, perceiving the black and white world around him as clearly as if the sun was high in the sky. Leaping into the air, Elerian rose through the branches above him on silent wings. Flying west over the foothills he opened his third eye, looking for the telltale red of Goblin shades. All too soon he found another patrol traveling north into the hills toward Ascilius’s hidden road. In the distance beyond them, he saw other shades glimmering redly in the trees.
“There are too many of the enemy abroad in the forest tonight,” thought Elerian anxiously to himself as he cupped his wings and drifted down through the canopy to the forest floor a little distance ahead of the Goblin patrol. “Ascilius’s company has no chance of remaining undiscovered if my plan fails.”
Changing back to his own shape, he veiled himself in the illusion he had selected for his night’s work. Stepping behind an enormous oak tree, as wide as three tall men, he waited for the Goblins to approach. Soon he heard their faint, almost imperceptible footsteps. Peering around the trunk of the tree which concealed him, Elerian saw several Mordi approaching, moving like shadows through the wood. Clearly, they did not expect to discover anything in the forest tonight, for their pale faces looked both bored and unhappy, reflecting their discontent with the task assigned to them. Smiling in anticipation, Elerian suddenly leaped out from behind the tree, exposing himself to the view of the startled Wood Goblins who froze in their tracks. Their eyes grew wide and round with fear, showing white rings around their dark irises, for before them, they saw a red dragon which Elerian had modeled after Eboria’s dragonet.
Elerian roared, the sound amplified by the illusion, until the tree leaves overhead trembled. The fanged mouth of his illusory form suddenly gaped open, and red flames spouted out causing all of the Mordi to throw themselves flat on the ground. Extending his right hand, Elerian watched with his magical eye as a golden orb of light flew from his fingertips, coming to rest in the air about six feet above the prone Goblins before bursting into red flames. Elerian let the Goblins feel the scorching heat of the mage fire
for a long moment before extinguishing it.
As Elerian’s illusion closed its fiery mouth, the Mordi leapt to their feet. Casting aside their weapons, they spun around and ran for the cover of the trees in front of them, fear and panic lending wings to their flying feet. For a second time, Elerian extend his right hand, and a second orb shot from his fingers, striking the seat of the nearest Mordi’s leather pants. The spell was weak, barely raising a flame and a puff of smoke, for Elerian wished to only to frighten the Goblin not kill him. Feeling an intense heat on his posterior, the Mordi released a blood-curdling scream from his throat which froze the blood of his fleeing comrades. Certain he was about to be roasted alive, he bounded past his two companions, skimming over and around every obstacle in his path in a way that was wonderful to watch, wisps of smoke still trailing from his breeches. Regretfully Elerian stood and watched as the Wood Goblins vanished into the forest. It pained him to remain where he was, for in other circumstances, he would have chased the Mordi all the way back to Galenus, reveling in their screams and pale frightened faces.
“There is no time for sport tonight, for I must still deal with the other patrols,” thought Elerian to himself as he changed back into an owl. Still disguised by his dragon illusion, he leapt into the air. Flapping his powerful wings, he rose effortlessly above the treetops. When he was high in the sky, he roared again, spouting illusory flames that he hoped would be visible all the way to Galenus. From the forest below, he heard shouting and the harsh braying of Goblin horns. In the distance, more horns took up the refrain. With his magical third eye, Elerian saw flickers of red through gaps in the leafy canopy below him, all of them swiftly retreating north toward Galenus or west toward the Catalus.
“In a few hours, there will not be a single Goblin stirring in the forest east of the river,” thought Elerian cheerfully to himself as he cupped his wings and dropped back down to the forest floor. Resuming his own shape, he returned to where he had cached his knives, smiling grimly every now and then over the fright that he had given the Mordi. Returning to the hidden road, he slipped past the sentries and lay down to rest near Ascilius who now lay on his side, deep in slumber. Drawing his cloak around him, Elerian slipped into the half sleep of the Elves, certain that nothing would disturb the Dwarf company for the remainder of the night.