by Troy Denning
“Earl Wynn said the veins in this mountain cross each other like a tangle of worms—and the tunnels follow veins,” Avner explained. “With any luck, we’ll connect to another mine and sneak out that way.”
As the front riders gathered their parkas and weapons, Avner began to close the cut on the exterior of Brianna’s abdomen. Without the front riders to pin her down, she flinched and jerked whenever the needle pierced her skin, but her motions caused him little trouble. The movements were not as severe as when he had been closing her womb, and even if his hand slipped, he was not likely to cause serious injury. He worked as fast as he could, spacing the stitches just tightly enough to close the wound. If the edges overlapped in places, he did not worry. There would be time to tidy up later.
Avner was only half finished when Raeyadfourne spoke again. “Running will do you no good,” the firbolg said. “Even if you escape us, the fomorians and verbeegs will be waiting at the other exits.”
“I never thought to see the day when firbolgs consorted with the likes of those scum,” commented Gryffitt. He and the other front riders had already slipped back into their parkas and gathered their weapons. “Have you taken a sudden liking to thieves and murderers?”
Raeyadfourne shrugged, and it seemed to Avner that the firbolg had changed somehow. The chieftain’s silhouette appeared somehow more feral and threatening.
“The verbeegs and fomorians are our brothers,” Raeyadfourne explained. “If you surrender the ugly child, you have nothing to fear from them.”
“Let me heal the queen, and give us the second child,” boomed a second firbolg, Munairoe. “He will not suffer at our hands.”
Avner saw a pair of green eyes peering around Raeyadfourne and realized what had changed. The chieftain’s beard now hung clear down to his belly. His hair had become a long, wild mane, and, most importantly, his huge shoulders no longer covered the tunnel mouth completely.
“He’s shrinking!” Avner gasped.
A guttural curse erupted from deep within Raeyadfourne’s throat. He threw off his bearskin cloak and pulled a four-foot hand axe from his belt, then scuttled into the tunnel. Although the chieftain still had to squat on his haunches, he was now small enough that his hands remained free to fight.
Blizzard went wild, filling the passage with ear-splitting shrieks. She whipped her head violently against her reins, drawing an ominous creak from the thick mining timber to which she was tied, and her hooves hammered the stone floor. The front riders ignored the angry mare and leveled their lances, moving forward to attack the chieftain.
“You men, wait!” Avner yelled. If the front riders attacked Raeyadfourne now, they would still be fighting when the rest of the firbolgs reached the portal. “Come back here!”
Avner pulled his hand axe from its sheath and hurled it at the post to which the Queen’s Beast was tied. The weapon tumbled straight to the timber and sliced cleanly through Blizzard’s leather reins. The angry mare hardly paused to gather her feet before springing up the passage. She bounded over Brianna and knocked the front riders aside as she barreled past to attack Raeyadfourne.
The firbolg’s hand axe rose and came down, burying itself deep into the mare’s flank. The wet snap of shattering bone echoed through the tunnel. Blizzard continued forward, bowling Raeyadfourne over and burying her teeth into his neck. She landed astride the chieftain, as a wolf might a man, and ripped a mouthful of flesh from his throat. Raeyadfourne bellowed in pain, a spray of blood erupting from the wound. He pulled his axe free and raised it to strike again. Blizzard lowered her muzzle to bite, and the vicious fight erupted into a bloody melee from which neither beast nor firbolg would emerge whole.
Gryffitt and the rest of the front riders returned to the queen’s side. Avner motioned for them to lift Brianna, then pinched together the unsewn edges of her incision.
“Let’s go.” The young scout used his chin to point deeper into the mine. “And someone grab my axe.”
The torch holder led the way, his light casting a flickering yellow glow over the craggy walls. The rest of the front riders followed close behind, carrying Brianna and Kaedlaw upon her cloak. Avner brought up the rear, with the queen’s knees locked around his waist and the edges of her incision squeezed between his fingers. His view of the tunnel floor was blocked by his patient’s makeshift litter, and he kept stumbling over loose stones and jagged knobs of rock.
The awkward procession had barely gone ten steps before a panicked whinny sounded from the portal. Avner glanced over his shoulder. Two firbolg warriors were dragging the queen’s mangled horse out of the mine. The beards of both warriors were extremely long, hanging almost to their waists, and neither of them looked much larger than Tavis. They passed Blizzard to someone outside, and the mare let out a shriek that sounded almost human.
The two firbolgs reached into the mine and grabbed their groaning chieftain beneath the armpits. Raeyadfourne was covered in blood from his jawline to his belly, and his body remained limp as the warriors pulled him through the portal. The pair passed their injured fellow to the green-eyed shaman, then entered the tunnel themselves. To fit into the passage, they only had to stoop over. “Faster!” Avner said. “Run!”
The torch holder broke into a trot, as did the men carrying Brianna. Their feet moved almost in unison, filling the tunnel with the martial cadence of tramping boots. Several times, Avner tripped and nearly fell into Brianna’s lap, and she soon volunteered to hold her own wound closed. For the first time, little murmuring sounds came from Kaedlaw’s mouth. He did not seem to be crying or groaning so much as calling the count.
The passage followed the crooked, winding course of a silver vein, and Avner quickly lost his bearings. They seemed to be traveling ever deeper into the mountain, but the young scout knew better than to trust his surface dweller’s instincts. For all he knew, the tunnel could be less than a dozen feet underground.
Avner soon found himself thinking in terms only of the area illuminated by the flickering torchlight; there was the murk ahead, warm and still and thick with the smell of musty stone and moidering wood; there was the floor beneath his feet, sometimes sloping up and sometimes down, often slick with mud and always strewn with loose debris and potholes; there were the walls around him, craggy and colorless, supported at regular intervals by crudely shaped arches of mud-crusted mining timbers; and most of all, there were the firbolgs coming up behind, clattering and cursing through the darkness, stumbling along without a torch, yet slowly and steadily closing the distance to their prey.
Avner waited until they rounded a sharp curve, then stopped and pulled his sling from inside his cloak. “Keep going,” he said. “I’ll buy us some time.”
“Avner, no!” Brianna sounded as exhausted as she did pained. “You’re all I have … left.”
“I’ll be along,” he promised. “Nothing’s going to happen.”
The young scout slipped behind one of the thick posts that supported the ceiling, then fit his last runebullet into the pocket of his sling. As the queen’s party moved off, he took advantage of the fading torchlight to eye the decaying timbers above his head. Although his runebullet was hardly as powerful as one of Tavis’s runearrows, he suspected it could still bring the roof down on their enemies. Unfortunately, the heavy bracing suggested that the rock above was very unstable. The rumble of even a small cave-in could start a chain reaction that would bury him—and perhaps the queen—along with their pursuers.
Avner looked down the tunnel toward the fleeing front riders. He could still see Brianna and her bearers, illuminated in the torch glow. If he stepped into the passage too early, the firbolgs would see his silhouette against the light.
The young scout waited, simultaneously keeping his eyes fixed on the receding torch and listening to his enemies’ approach. Their gaits were sporadic and heavy, punctuated by dull thuds, resonant clatters, and a constant rumble of angry curses. By the time the flickering torch had vanished from sight, the firbolgs were so clos
e that Avner could hear their parkas rubbing against the walls and smell their sweat in the damp air. He stepped from behind his post, whirling his sling over his head. An eerie whistle echoed through the mine.
“What’s that?” The firbolg’s cry seemed to come from the roof, directly above Avner’s head.
The young scout flung his missile at the voice, at the same time crying out, “ythgimsilisaB!”
There was an ear-splitting crack and a brilliant white flash. A firbolg shouted in terrible pain. In the same instant, Avner glimpsed the faces of the two warriors—one astonished, the other disbelieving—less than three paces away. The light vanished as quickly as it had appeared, leaving the scout with nothing but swimming white spots before his eyes. The rich smell of blood filled the tunnel and something warm splashed across his face. Avner barely leapt away before the injured warrior crashed down where he had been standing.
“Ethelhard?” called the second firbolg.
Avner did not hear whether Ethelhard answered, for he was already rushing down the tunnel. Unlike his enemies, he moved almost silently, his knees rising high to lift his boots over unseen debris, his feet coming down toe-first so he could dance away when he happened to land on unsteady footing. As he ran, he kept one hand pressed against the wall to give him some idea of the passage’s course. Although Ethelhard’s comrade had fallen silent, no doubt fearing another attack such as the one that had killed his companion, the young scout took no pleasure in his triumph. Now that his pursuers were quiet, he could hear the muffled din of more firbolgs coming down the tunnel. Judging by the steady reverberations of their boots, these warriors were moving swiftly and confidently. They had torches, and they fit into the cramped mine as well as the pair Avner had just stopped.
The young scout continued forward at his best run, expecting to see the flickering yellow glow of his companions’ torch at any moment. He felt the tunnel make several sharp turns, and the floor began to rise and fall at steep angles. Once, a breeze wafted over his shoulders as he ran through a curtain of cool air flowing down from someplace outside, and another time he passed through a humid stretch of passage that stank fiercely of stagnant water and bitter minerals.
But it was not until Avner felt a gust of hot air from the opposite side of the cavern that he stopped running. With his heart pounding like a double-jack against drill steel, he turned toward the tunnel’s other wall. He put out his hands and took one step forward, and two, then three. The breeze blew steadily into his face. With his next step, the floor seemed to vanish beneath his boot. He almost fell, then found solid stone a foot below where it should have been. He turned again, and that was when he felt it: a craggy, rounded corner where a side-passage opened off the one he was following.
Avner retreated back into the main tunnel—at least, what he hoped was the main tunnel. He had rounded dozens of sharp bends. How many of those had actually been junctions, like the one across the way? By following only one wall of the passage, he could have turned off the main pathway any number of times. Each curve might have been a fork in the tunnel, or it might have been just another bend in the mine. Somewhere back there, probably not far from where Ethelhard had fallen, the front riders had made a different choice than Avner, and with them had gone the queen.
6
The Drifts
Night had fallen; though the boreal lights bathed the canyon’s ice-draped rim in a rainbow curtain of dancing reflections, their ghostly rays could not pierce the abyssal gloom deeper in the gorge. The landslide at the bottom was cloaked in a mantle of dark, swarthy purple, and Tavis could hardly see the rocks beneath his feet. He had to climb by feel, testing each step carefully before trusting his weight to the slick stones, and even then he often braced himself on his bow to keep from falling.
Everything hurt. His shoulder ached so much he could hardly move it; each breath filled his chest with a swell of dull pain. His frozen feet burned with the dubious blessing of renewed circulation. The constant throbbing in his head felt no worse than having a battle drum pressed to his ear, and he could not string two thoughts together without a conscious act of will. In his belly, he felt the warmth of Simon’s healing elixir working its magic—but that was little comfort now. Tavis found his fist inside his cloak, grasping his second healing potion. He forced himself to withdraw his hand empty. It would be foolish to use the second vial before the first had finished its work.
As Tavis climbed the landslide, he remained alert for clues as to where his foes had taken Brianna. The fallen fire giants above were mere silhouettes, barely distinguishable from the huge boulders heaped along the crest of the slide. Beside some of the bodies flickered the orange glow of guttering fire swords, suggesting that the battle had ended less than an hour ago. The high scout saw no human corpses at all.
Tavis’s heart began to hammer. If the fire giants had left their dead in the canyon, perhaps Brianna had escaped after all.
About halfway to the crest, Tavis heard rocks clattering nearby, then an anguished cry too deep and resonant to be human. He dropped into a crouch, then crept toward the sound. A short distance ahead, a bushy-maned profile rose above a big rock. Though the head was little larger than the high scout’s, it had the wild mane of hair and beard typical of firbolgs. The figure groaned again, then pushed an arm over the boulder and clutched at the cold stone. It turned a pair of milky white eyes toward Tavis.
“Over … here.” Strained as it was, the deep voice sounded chillingly familiar. “Help me!”
Tavis neither showed himself, nor drew his weapon. “Galgadayle?”
The seer looked toward Tavis’s voice, then groaned in disappointment. “You?” He slipped lower behind his boulder. “Tavis … Burdun?”
“What are you doing here?”
“They didn’t … find … after battle,” the seer croaked. “Couldn’t yell … too much … pain.”
Suddenly, Tavis understood why the fire giants had left their dead behind. They had lost the battle. “The Meadowhome Clan is here?” he asked. “You killed the fire giants?”
“We … had to come,” the seer replied. “Must protect the tribe. The law … demands it.”
Galgadayle lost his grip on the boulder and slipped out of sight. Tavis crept up the slide, confident he was not being lured into a trap. The pain in the seer’s voice had been genuine, but more importantly, firbolgs were incapable of such treachery. They might wait in ambush or sneak up on a foe, but the same instinct that made it impossible for them to lie also prevented them from enticing an enemy to his death.
Tavis slipped around the boulder to find Galgadayle sitting in a hollow between several stones. The air was heavy with the reek of urine and fresh blood. The seer held one arm twisted behind him, pressing his hand against the small of his back. He was only about two-thirds as large as when he had visited Castle Hartwick.
The size change did not surprise Tavis as much as it might have. His mentor, Runolf Saemon, had once known an entire tribe of firbolgs to grow two feet in a single day. For a time, Tavis had pleaded with every firbolg he met to show him the trick, but they had all refused. The scout had finally given up, concluding that their law forbade sharing the secret with an outcast.
Tavis knelt at Galgadayle’s side and reached out to move the seer’s hand. “You’re smaller than I remember.”
“I’ve lost blood.” Galgadayle pushed Tavis’s arm away. “Finish me quickly … nothing to gain with torture.”
Tavis half-smiled at the attempt to change the subject. The seer was more afraid of breaking the law than of dying.
“I won’t torture you—or kill you.” The high scout did not blame Galgadayle for trying to capture Brianna. The seer was acting on his conscience. As wrong as he might be, that did not make him evil, and Tavis was not in the habit of killing people for their mistakes. “I’d rather help you, if you’ll allow me.”
Galgadayle glared at him with one white eye. “I have brought harm to your … family,” he said. “Why show
me mercy?”
“Because you’re no longer a threat,” Tavis replied. “Killing you would make me a murderer.”
“Perhaps,” Galgadayle groaned. “But the law does not require … nowhere is it decreed you must help an enemy.”
Tavis shrugged. “I have learned a different kind of law with the humans,” he said. “It comes more from inside than out, and it can be as nebulous and shifting as a cloud, but I must obey it nonetheless.”
Galgadayle considered this, then took his hand away, revealing a large, mangle-edged hole in his cloak. Though it was too dark to see more, Tavis smelled fresh blood. It was heavy with the scent of urine, a sure sign the seer would die without help.
“You’ll have to lie down so I can reach the wound.” Tavis gently guided Galgadayle onto his stomach.
“This changes nothing.” Despite Galgadayle’s words, there was a note of gratitude in his strained voice. “When the child is born … Raeyadfourne must still—aarghh!”
Tavis began to probe the wound, bringing Galgadayle’s sentence to a harsh end.
“What happened to my wife?” Tavis continued to work. His fingers came across the stub of sword blade that had been broken off just below Galgadayle’s kidney. “Who has her?”
The seer shook his head. “That I will … not tell you,” he groaned. “Leave me, if you wish. I’ll probably die anyway.”
“No, you won’t,” Tavis said. “I have a healing elixir.”
Galgadayle craned his neck to glance up at Tavis, his eyes flashing with a brief hope that quickly vanished behind dark clouds of despair. The seer gave Tavis a wry smile, then shook his head. “Keep your potion,” he said. “The cost is too dear.”
“I’m not trying to buy your knowledge.” Tavis had watched Brianna deal with her earls often enough to know there were more effective ways than bribery to learn a person’s secrets. “The potion is yours, but it won’t do any good unless I pull that broken blade out of your back. To do that I’ll need light”