by Ed Greenwood
A field chimed and retreated before her enspelled bracers, letting her reach a fistful of daggers unscathed. Simply scabbarded, with push-home hilts, hefting nicely … Nodding, she dropped a pair down either of her boots, inside and out, trotted a few steps to make sure they’d not hamper her, and then ran back out of the room, seeking the nearest stairs down. If no one was guarding the tunnels that led to the Forgerift …
No one needed to, she discovered a few panting descents later. The inner gates of the tunnels were twisted and buckled to the floor, a pool of Nifl blood spreading from underneath one of them. Something had brought the tunnels down in collapse, spilling rock rubble half across the chamber. No foe would be charging or skulking into the Eventowers from here.
So what had become of her Dark Warrior, and all the weapons he’d been crafting?
“Spew of Olone,” she muttered, turning back. Well, either she’d have ample time to discover that later—or no time at all, and it would matter to no one important, if House Evendoom fell or Talonnorn itself was lost.
And lost, Olone damn all, to whom?
Who was attacking, and why? Talonnorn was the mightiest, proudest city of Olone, and Evendoom the greatest House at the heart of it! Which meant many unfriends, yes, but—
Warsteel clanged and skirled on warsteel, and Taerune ran toward that sound of fighting. The clamor led her up some stairs, around a corner into growing light, and along a passage into—
Alauntagar’s Hall, she was standing in now, blade in hand and pausing uncertainly, but it was an Alauntagar’s Hall much changed from the last time she’d seen it.
The smallest of the grand vaulted halls of Eventowers—it could be fitted into the glossy-tiled Long Hall seven times over, but then, the Hunt could find room to fly around the Long Hall!—Alauntagar’s Hall had always sported a row of soaring, glossy-polished pillars sculpted into sinuously exquisite representations of the rising Rapture of Olone. Until now, however, those pillars hadn’t risen out of a floor decorated in sprawled fresh-slain Evendoom warblades—and the hall itself hadn’t lacked a front wall.
Through that huge smashed opening, and the heavy cloak of stone dust still swirling around it, Taerune found herself gazing—no, gaping in disbelief—out at what had been the central garden of the Eventowers.
It, too, was much changed.
“How can so much,” she whispered incredulously, “be swept away so swiftly?”
The many-hued glowing fungi she’d seen flourishing all her life were largely flattened or gone, familiar curving paths and benches gouged and heaved aside in great scatterings of earth—or buried under the huge dark coils of dead deepserpents. Corpses lay everywhere, most of them Niflghar in Evendoom livery.
One of the gate towers now stood alone, blazing like a torch, and intruders were pouring into the Eventowers past its billowing flames and smoke.
The enemy.
Mainly terrified slaves, by the looks of them, urged and goaded on by Nifl rampants in motley armor, many of them scarred or even disfigured. Just like those she’d seen in the armory hall—only there were more of these, far more, and they just kept coming!
Olone spit, what could one defiant daughter of Evendoom do against so many?
Well, not run and hide, that much was certain. Before Olone and all the Elder Gods, she’d not—
One lone Evendoom-she still without her Orb, damn it! Not that it held many battle spells, but still! Why did she never remember it, in her rush to snatch sword and get into battle? It was back in her chambers with her whip and her armor, secure behind her gleaming new Door of Fangs!
Well, she’d soon see just how much use she could be. How long she’d last, to put it more bluntly. There were so many of them that surely some would come running in this direction, into the opening that was so large that they could hardly help but see it. It might look more deadly than an unscorched door—but then, if Taerune Evendoom had been running into an enemy castle, she’d prefer a way torn by recent battle over a possibly trapped and guarded door, every time.
Yet these were gorkul and human slaves, with a few Nameless Nifl, not Taer—
As she watched, Evendoom castle guards in full, gleaming battle armor came trotting into view, hastening along the outer wall of the castle to form a line across the front of the breached hall. The air flickered and flared where their personal wardshields grazed each other, arcing where they intersected. They were making a living wall of defenders, two Nifl deep, to meet the enemy gorkul and Hairy Ones.
Taerune smiled grimly. These were veteran Evendoom warblades, and some of them hefted spellblades that were igniting, as she watched, with baleful radiances of their own. This should be good.
The foe sent up a ragged roar as they rushed to meet the warblades, and Taerune took two swift sideways steps to where she could see better, sheathed her sword, and folded her arms across its pommel in satsifaction. And now for the slaughter.
Gorkul and humans were both so clumsy when they fought, so frenzied and graceless, limbs and blades jerking and slicing the air wildly, nothing like the fluid grace of … dying Nifl …
She couldn’t breathe. She couldn’t make a sound. This wasn’t happening. They couldn’t …
They could. With shocking ease the shouting, grunting, staggering invaders were hewing down senior Eventowers guards, who were lunging and fencing and slicing out throats and eyes in their usual dances of death—but being overborne and hurled down, or transfixed by enemy blades or casually hacked and hewn by gorkul blundering past, or humans leaping and rolling in and under their guards and—
This shouldn’t be happening! Even as she watched, a half-naked human—still wearing manacles at his wrists and ankles, with a few ragged links of chain flailing the air at his every movement—rushed forward, ducking under a warblade’s elegant slash so that it sliced away half his scalp, in a gory spray of blood and hair, and tackled the Nifl, hurling him down and back to the heaped rubble of the fallen wall. The human punched the dark elf’s throat viciously and then wrestled against the Nifl’s failing strength to get his longblade. The warblade’s back was broken and his shattered throat left him no way to breathe; it took the bleeding, maddened Hairy One less than one of Taerune’s disbelieving gasps to wrench free the Nifl’s longblade and turn and hurl it at the backs of the knees of the nearest Evendoom warblade who staggered, driven off balance, and got a sword slash across his face from the human he was fighting.
Evendoom Niflghar were suffering similar fates everywhere she looked; Taerune swallowed—it was closer to a sob—and peered up and down the line, trying to see how many defenders of her home and family were left.
How few …
Seven—no, six, now, and the last few were beset by dozens and would be overwhelmed in another breath or two. Trying not to weep, Taerune snatched out her sword again, and—
There came a great groaning sound, so loud that it set her teeth to chattering against each other and shook her to numbness, a mournful rending of stone that seemed to be above her and behind her and all around her, echoing off stone walls everywhere.
Those echoes were shattered by sharp crackings, so loud and fierce that Taerune fell to her knees, sobbing and trying to cover her ears.
And then, with a shriek that deepened into the loudest cry of agony she had ever heard, half of the Eventowers tore free and came crashing down to bury the intruders.
7
Battle and More Battle
I see no bright future for our House.
No immortal ballads, noble statuary,
Innovations or marvels of garb.
Just battle and more battle,
And the same bloody deaths
As all other Niflghar seem so eager to greet.
—words of the character Lord Vorth Drear,
from the play Bright Houses Fallen
In the shattered, sagging ruin of the smithy, cloaked in thickly coiling smoke from the fiery deaths of things that had half-fallen into the ever-hungry
Rift, Orivon Firefist worked frantically by the angry glows of the gate runes, sorting out and snatching up the best weapons he’d been working on. Armor that might fit him was farther along the Rift, well beyond the side walls that had shut him off from the other slaves, but there had been more than a few screams and shouts from that direction—followed by some horribly loud biting and munching sounds.
If Talonnorn was truly shattered, this might well be his chance. If it was conquered swiftly, new captors might crush his hopes of freedom in their gauntlets. Yet if, as he expected, House Evendoom recovered itself and hurled back this attack, he might have only a little time to achieve just one thing.
Hiding some weapons and tools in those clefts in the cavern wall, in the area the Nifl shunned.
Of course, they might shun it for a reason that would be deadly to him, too … but then, he was little better than dead anyway if he willingly undertook to live out his entire life just hammering things, here on the hot lip of the Rift.
He had to work fast, and trust that no one would see him in all the tumult and fighting—or if they did see him, be slain, so no one would come to torture or flog him, slay him outright, or spell-scour his mind to uncover what he’d been doing.
And he had nothing at all to carry things in but his hands. Then again, that might well be all he would have at a later attempt to escape.
That escape might happen right now, if he reached the clefts unseen and battle was still raging fiercely enough that a pursuit by the Hunt—or the raudren—seemed unlikely.
The breeches and boots still fit him, but he needed something to cover his shoulders for warmth; the Wild Dark wouldn’t be nearly as warm as the ever-raging Rift. A cloak snatched off a Nifl corpse, one of those tabardlike garments some of the spellrobes wore—Thorar, even a gown! The tight jerkins and hose male Nifl wore would never fit him. Shards and rockfall, he didn’t even know the Nifl names for those garments!
And with that little exasperation making him shake his head and smile, Orivon Firefist filled his arms with a few choice weapons and tools, wrapping them in his breeches, and hastened along the edge of the Rift, trusting that Grunt Tusks wouldn’t be trudging his usual rounds along that narrow, well-worn way.
He’d have to watch out for any and every beast that might come charging out of the smoke into him, of course—one staggering step in that direction and he’d be greeting the flowing rock face-first, in a first kiss that would also be his last.
He slipped once or twice in blood, feet a little clumsy in his unaccustomed boots, and passed a lot of tumbled tables and anvils—and once, a long ankle manacle that ended not around an ankle but in a churned and talon-raked puddle of mud and blood—but met with no foe, thank Thorar.
And then he was at the end of the Evendoom forge, and feeling the warning prickling and tingling in his limbs that meant the ward-wall was still strong. Barring his way, and forcing him to turn back and dare to duck out the open, crackling-with-leaking-power gates.
He did not waste his breath on a curse—a curse that might well alert someone or something in this accursed smoke to his presence—but felt his way along the unseen barrier as quietly as he could with a bundle of unscabbarded tools, swords, and daggers in his hands.
Sudden fire flared ahead of him before he got to the corner where the invisible barrier would turn to run back toward his forging ground, parallel to the Rift.
Orivon halted, crouching low, trying to see what was causing the sudden blaze. Something dark was waving wildly in the heart of the radiance. Something—
Blackened gorkul arms, waving in wild agony, as their owner—who must have blundered into the wall—died in eerie silence. When the torso was crisped, the arms fell off and tumbled their separate ways.
Orivon’s stomach heaved. He stayed motionless in the restored darkness of roiling, evil-smelling smoke, warsteel bundled in his arms, and waited. That gorkul had died because it had ended up off balance, falling through the very magic that seared and pierced it, impaled and helpless to win freedom. Had it just stumbled? Or had something forced it forward, into the wall?
He heard faint sounds from the smoke-shrouded darkness ahead, the other side of the wall. Hissing, gasping … no, someone was sobbing. Short, sharp, tremulous sobs, born of pain and not grief.
“May the Ice deliver me!” a voice moaned faintly. It sounded like a Nifl, but the speech was subtly different in accent from the Talonar Orivon was used to hearing. “Ah, but that hurt!”
A new glow kindled, and Orivon was glad he was crouching down. The radiance was faint and wan yellow in hue—and it was centered on two long-fingered black hands. Black fingers, black nails; Nifl, without doubt. Those hands were weaving air, cupping emptiness in smooth caresses that shaped and outlined a sphere. A sphere of nothingness that suddenly held tiny twinkling lights of its own, many of them, dancing and swirling as the Nifl muttered words over them. They changed hue, going a sudden vivid blue-white, then a rich amethyst.
As they changed once more, spinning back into gold, the Nifl raised them in one cupped hand and hurled them right at Orivon.
Jalandral Evendoom shook the last enemy Nifl body off his blade, Nifl blood smoking down its dark and slender length—hmm, smoking; that meant this foe had recently downed a powerful potion of some sort—and turned to call, “Well, Orsyl, that’s the last of them! Shall we seek elsewhere for more sport? Hie ourselves back to the front, so to speak?”
Weary warblades stared back at him, but Orsyl made no reply.
“Orsyl?”
“Dead, Lord,” one of the Nameless Nifl said reluctantly, stepping back to point with his spellblade. The faint glow from its tip showed Jalandral the features of a severed head lying among tangled limbs of the fallen. Though they were twisted in pain, eyes wide in disbelief, the heir of House Evendoom knew them. Orsyl would cry warnings no more.
He shrugged, smiled, and told the warblades around him—and how had they become so few?—“Olone greets us all, sooner or later. It’s merely a matter of when, and how we please Her, before and at our passing. Or so they tell me.”
“Or so they tell me,” a veteran warblade echoed, sounding bitter.
Jalandral shrugged again and waved his sword at a passage that led to the front of the castle. “Come! This way is as good as any, and better than most: there’s a guest chamber along it that should be crowded with decanters I haven’t emptied yet! Care to join me?”
“Ah. Bribery,” an aging Nifl—an Evendoom, one of Jalandral’s half-forgotten uncles, Presker by name—growled. “I like that. First thing that’s gone well since the worms came. Heh. If we drink enough, perhaps we’ll all stop seeing worms!”
Jalandral wagged a finger. “One decanter each. I want you to fight like raudren, not stagger about as half-blind, helpless targets!”
Presker snorted. “You chose the wrong House to be born into, then. Right now, we’re all targets here.”
The hurled motes of the Nifl’s spell struck the unseen wall and scattered right and left along it, racing wildly, their movements making the barrier glow; a light that grew and grew with astonishing speed. Spreading more slowly in their wake was a darkness, a flame-edged darkness where the magic of the barrier was melting, or burning away. So it was that increasing darkness shrouded Orivon and the Nifl spellrobe, as the golden glow of the revealed barrier retreated to right and left.
Still silent in his crouch, Orivon could hear the spellrobe stepping forward, loose stones clattering underfoot.
“Now,” the Nifl murmured, “we’ll see what treasures await! Surely—”
He spun sudden handfire, a palm-sized sphere of soft white light that he tossed into the air ahead of him to light his way.
And promptly showed him Orivon, crouching almost at his feet, staring silently up at him.
“Icefire!” the Nifl cursed, hands flashing into frantic patterns of casting, an incantation bursting from his lips that sounded cruel and vicious in every syllable.
Oriv
on did not want that incantation completed. He surged to his feet in a lunge that brought him hard into Nifl knees, toppling the spellrobe over him with a startled shout. Warsteel clattered loudly as he flung his bundle aside, snatching one blade out of bouncing hilts to whirl and drive it deep into the ribs of the struggling spellrobe.
The dark elf screamed, stiffening around the cold, cold sword through his side, clawing at it in a vain frenzy that ended in a sudden slump, gusty sigh, and slow sag forward to greet the stones.
“Where are you from?” Orivon asked, tugging his sword forth. The Nifl jerked under his hand, moaning as the blade came free, and gurgled, “A human! Slain by a Hairy One …”
“Where are you from?” Orivon snapped, digging his fingers deep into a robed shoulder and shaking the spellblade hard.
A face that spat blood lolled over to look at Orivon with watering, clouded eyes.
Eyes that went staring even as they met his.
Orivon shook the dying Nifl again, and the spellrobe slurred “Ouvahlor forever!” and turned his head away, in the last deliberate movement he’d ever make. Much blood had drooled out around those words, but they’d been clear enough.
So Ouvahlor was smiting Talonnorn, city invading city, in a battle blow strong enough to shatter the Eventowers. Well, now …
Whatever day or night this might be up in the Blindingbright, it might well be the day Orivon Firefist escaped from Talonnorn.
Now, if he could only slaughter a few Evendoom dark elves on his way …
Such as a certain whip-wielding Taerune.
They were crowding in at her now, the gorkul, their bulk and strength numbing her arm at every parry. Her blade bent more than once under the force of their sword slashes, and she’d been lucky to slice open the arm of the one who’d been hewing with an ax, so that it had fallen useless, leaving his neck open to her well-bloodied point. Axes she could not handle.