by Troy Denning
Thatcher and the other front rider were bait. If there were firbolgs hiding outside, Mountain Crusher’s light would draw them out. The resulting commotion would serve as an alarm, and the queen’s party could slip away during the turmoil.
Kaedlaw’s growl became a fierce, echoing howl.
“Is there any way to keep him quiet?” Tavis asked.
“What do you want me to do, smother him?” Brianna snapped. “If the firbolgs hear him, you’ll just have to kill them.”
Tavis clamped his jaw shut and tried to listen past Kaedlaw’s howling.
“I didn’t mean to snap, Tavis,” Brianna apologized. “But he nearly died the last time I tried to keep him quiet.”
Tavis felt her tug on the cloak he had laid over her legs, then she tucked it around Kaedlaw. The child’s howling quickly abated, leaving the tunnel to the relative silence of dripping water.
“That’s better, isn’t it?” Brianna whispered to the infant. “But when we’re outside, you’ll have to give your father’s cloak back to him.”
Tavis was thankful for the darkness, for it prevented the queen from seeing the grimace that creased his face. How could his wife and the front riders think he had sired the hideous infant—or even call the child by a name suggesting it resembled him? Galgadayle’s prophecy was at least partially correct; the brutish child was not Tavis’s offspring, but that of the Twilight Spirit’s imposter prince.
“Maybe we’ll let the front riders carry me,” Brianna said, still talking as though she were speaking to Kaedlaw. “And your father can wrap you inside his cloak so you both stay warm.”
“He’ll be warmer with his mother,” Tavis said. “And you can keep my cloak to be sure. I’ll be fine.”
Brianna stiffened in his arms. She was silent for a long time, then said, “Lord Scout, if I didn’t know better, I’d think you were reluctant to hold your son.”
Tavis’s mouth went dry. “I-I’m holding both you and K-Kaedlaw now.”
“That’s not what I mean. You haven’t actually touched him since you found us,” Brianna said. “In fact, you’ve hardly looked at him. What’s wrong?”
Tavis wanted to turn the question back on his wife—to demand how she could possibly think he had sired the hideous thing, to ask whether she was blind or took him for a fool—but he fought back the urge. Despite the baby’s grotesque appearance, Brianna was convinced he had fathered the child. Now was hardly time to tell her otherwise. Besides, it would take more than a half-reliable prophecy to make him betray the oaths he had sworn to the queen.
“Well, Tavis?” Brianna pressed.
“We—uh—should—uh—”
A pair of anguished wails reverberated out of the opposite drainage tunnel, sparing Tavis the necessity of saying more. The screams did not end, but continued to echo through the darkness, randomly changing pitch and volume, as though the bodies from which they came were being played like living instruments. The gruesome music carried a steady undertone of crackling and splashing, and the basal throb of deep-throated chortling.
“Hiatea have mercy!” Brianna gasped. “What’s happening in there?”
“I don’t know, Majesty,” said Gryffitt. “But we’ll put an end to it soon enough.” He started to splash toward the tunnel, with the other two front riders close behind.
“No!” Tavis ordered. “Stay with the queen.”
“Begging your pardon, Lord Scout,” said Gryffitt. “But if that was me up there, I’d want some help.”
“If we try to help them, we’ll join them.” The two front riders had walked into an ambush, as Tavis had half-expected, but it hadn’t been firbolgs. “You men take the queen and start back up the tunnel. I’ll hold them here.”
“Them?” Brianna demanded.
“Fomorians,” Tavis answered. “Galgadayle told me to watch out for fomorians and verbeegs.”
The wails continued unabated.
“Galgadayle told you?” Brianna sounded stunned.
“I pulled Avner’s sword out of his back,” Tavis admitted. “He won’t be doing us any more harm.”
“He has done more than enough already,” Brianna growled. “How—”
“If the fomorians catch you, they’ll do more!” Tavis thrust Brianna toward Gryffitt. “Take her and go.”
Several pairs of hands reached up to take the queen. “We’ll wait at the drift where we heard the water draining,” said Gryffitt.
“Don’t wait,” Tavis replied. “And if you must stop to hide, do it well. Fomorians see in the dark better than we see in daylight.”
As the front riders waded away, Tavis started toward the opposite drainage tunnel. He stopped when he heard Brianna uttering a spell. A pale silver light flared behind him. He turned to see his wife lying on the shoulders of her three bearers, a glowing dagger in her upraised hand.
“I thought we should see as well as the fomorians,” she explained. “And Tavis, try to come back. I’d rather Kaedlaw grew up knowing his father.”
“I’ll do what’s in my power, milady.”
The tortured screams of the two front riders finally died. Tavis waded into the darkness ahead and slowly made his way to the wall. He placed himself between a pair of rough-hewn support timbers, chimneyed up the side of the tunnel, and braced himself between the ceiling arches. He freed one hand long enough to draw his sword, then settled in to wait.
As the last sloshing echoes of Brianna’s departure faded away, Tavis saw a familiar blue glow flickering across the turbid waters below. Mountain Crusher. He grasped his sword more tightly and tried not to think of the fatigue burning in his thighs and shoulders. The magical light grew brighter, illuminating bands of blood swirling in the orange river. The weapon itself floated into view atop the water, spinning in the current and sweeping the walls with its cold, shimmering light.
The bow remained in one piece, with Thatcher’s hand still gripping the handle. The wrist was cocked at an impossible angle. The arm jigged and jagged in three different directions, then came to an abrupt end at the mangled elbow.
Two foul-smelling mangles of flesh and bone drifted into view. They had been twisted into grotesque parodies of human bodies, their limbs bent against the joints or torn off entirely. Organs that should have been safely tucked inside the torsos now hung outside. Tavis looked away, fighting the urge to retch.
Mountain Crusher brushed against a timber, then spun into the opposite wall and caught its string on a rock spur. The two bodies slowly bobbed past, lingering beneath Tavis so long that it almost seemed the spirits of the two front riders were torturing him for sending their bodies to such hideous deaths.
The crest of a gentle wave rolled down the tunnel, carrying the corpses away. A sweet, musky scent rose off the water, mixing with the smell of sulfur and musty wood.
A stubby, gray-skinned hand came into view. It had only three gnarled fingers, each ending in a sharp, broken nail that protruded from the tip like a muskrat’s claw. The appendage itself was as large as a human torso, its ashen hide mottled with black warts and crimson boils. The twisted thing advanced at a glacier’s pace, reaching out to dislodge the glowing bow. Tavis heard no sloshing water, no wheezing breath, no sound at all.
At length, a fomorian’s warty, pear-shaped head came into view. Like all of his kind, the hunter was hideously and uniquely deformed. One eye hung in the center of his forehead, and the other rested atop his pate. From one side of his head dangled a pair of drooping ears. His broad nose ended in a single cavernous nostril, and an ivory curtain of crooked teeth jutted over his thick lower lip. Though the brute was squatting on his haunches, he was so large that the wiry hair on his back brushed the ceiling in front of Tavis.
The fomorian’s two eyes worked independently as he advanced, one searching the tunnel ahead, the other scanning the walls and ceiling. One of the dark pupils swept past Tavis’s hiding place, then stopped midway down the wall and started to rise again.
The high scout leapt from his corn
er, aiming his sword at the eye atop the fomorian’s head.
The hunter flinched and turned away. Tavis’s blade drove straight through the thick skull. A torpid shudder of death ran down the brute’s crooked spine. The misshapen body went slack and slumped into the murky waters, filling three-quarters of the passage even lying on its belly.
A puff of hot, rancid air wafted over Tavis’s shoulders. Without pausing to dislodge his sword, he jumped off the corpse, angling toward the rock spur where Mountain Crusher had snagged. From the darkness behind the dead fomorian came the boulderlike fist of a second hunter. The blow caught Tavis in midleap and sent him hurtling down the passage into a timber post. He heard the muffled snap of cracking ribs, then lost his breath and dropped into the water.
A shower of rock dust, pebbles, and splintered wood splashed down around his shoulders. Tavis looked up. Above his head, the end of a rotten beam was sagging beneath a ton of broken, growling stone. A frustrated hiss sounded behind the dead fomorian as the second hunter tried to shove aside his companion’s bulky corpse. The high scout pushed himself away from the tunnel wall, less concerned with his angry pursuer than the drooping beam overhead.
The ceiling did not come crashing down, but continued to pour into the water in a steady stream of stone and dust. Suddenly, Tavis saw the mountain above him not as a solid mass of granite, but as a colossal heap of pulverized stone being slowly ground to dust beneath its own immense weight. Keeping one eye on the drooping beam, he reached out and lifted Mountain Crusher off the rock that had snagged its string.
A growl of rage sounded upstream. Tavis spun around, already pulling a wet arrow from his quiver.
A pair of silver eyes were glaring over the dead fomorian’s back. The orbs were as large as bucklers, and set so close that the edges almost touched. Tavis could barely see the rest of his foe, a creeping black silhouette slipping across the corpse’s humped back. To fit through the narrow space, the hunter had flattened out his body as though he were a mouse crawling beneath a door.
Tavis nocked his arrow and pointed the tip between the two gleaming eyes. The dark shape of a huge webbed hand interposed itself between the arrow and its target. The high scout drew his bowstring back, groaned at the pain in his cracked ribs, and loosed the shaft.
The arrow tore through the shielding hand with a sound like ripping leather, then crackled into the narrow band of cartilage between the fomorian’s eyes. A deafening screech echoed through the tunnel. Tavis nearly gagged on the rancid odor of the hunter’s death rattle.
The fomorian’s eyes, now dull and glazed with death, continued to move as another hunter tried to work the body out of the cranny.
Tavis retreated to the fork and waded up the tunnel, each step a struggle against the pain in his ribs. This time, there would be no quick cures for his anguish. He had given the last of Simon’s healing potion to Galgadayle, and Brianna had no more mending spells left. The high scout clenched his teeth and reminded himself that his agony was nothing compared to the torture Thatcher and the other front rider had suffered.
Soon, Tavis saw the silvery glow of Brianna’s magical light spilling from a passage ahead. He waded up to the tunnel and found Gryffitt crouching in the entrance. The corridor was scorched and rubble-strewn, with the jagged tips of boulders jutting out of the opaque waters. Loose stones dangled from the ceiling like stalactites. About twenty paces behind the front rider, the queen and her escorts were crouching in ankle-deep water at the edge of a gaping hole.
“I told you not to wait,” Tavis chided. “There are more fomorians behind me.”
“And we heard firbolgs up ahead,” Brianna countered. “Now come here, before they see that glowing bow of yours.”
Tavis slipped past Gryffitt and clambered over the submerged rocks toward the queen. The passage was clearly the route through which the fire giants had entered the mine system, for the walls were coated with fresh soot. The pit where Brianna had stopped was easily ten paces across. A steady flow of water poured into the hole, splashing off stones somewhere far below and filling the battered passage with the eerie sounds of a subterranean cascade.
“Do you have any runearrows left?” Brianna asked.
Tavis nodded. “About half a dozen.”
“Good.” She gestured at the disintegrating ceiling. “Nock three and stick them in the roof.”
From the mouth of the drift, Gryffitt called, “There’s a torch coming down the tunnel.”
Tavis glanced across the pit, and his heart sank. The hole was too wide to jump, and it would not be long before the fomorians cleared the opposite fork of the drainage tunnel. He looked back to his wife.
“If you’re thinking of bringing the ceiling down on us—”
“I’m not.” Brianna tossed her glowing dagger into the pit, revealing a huge tunnel about fifteen feet below. The passage was more than ten feet in diameter, with smooth, soot-coated walls. “We’re going out the back way—and you’re going to close the door behind us.”
* * * * *
Avner stood well back in the drift, spying upon several giant-kin and their captive, Marwick. The young scout held his throwing dagger in his hand, and his eyes were locked on the prisoner’s terrified face.
The throw would be a difficult one. Marwick was kneeling about twenty paces away, in the center of a large, irregular cavity where a tangle of drifts merged from above and below and every other direction. The front rider’s captors sat around him, crammed into the mouths of the nearest passages like bears into badger holes. Two of the ’kin might have squeezed into the hollow with their prisoner, but the cavern was too small to hold all five.
Avner could silence Marwick easily enough, but escaping so many ’kin would be difficult. The three firbolgs—Raeyadfourne, Munairoe, and Galgadayle—had shrunken to a size not much larger than Tavis. Despite the cramped drifts, they would not have much trouble running him down.
The two verbeegs were another matter. Even squatting on their haunches, they had to tuck their chins to fit into the passages. Unfortunately, they each carried a big crossbow and a quiver full of barbed, nasty-looking quarrels. To make matters worse, they had also put together a crude sketch-map of the mine. Their knowledge of the terrain would give them a sure advantage.
“Human, I warn you not to lie,” Munairoe said, speaking to Marwick. “If I must call the wind spirit into this dank place, she will not take pity on a scofflaw.”
“I told you, the queen bore only one child,” Marwick insisted. “Your seer was wrong.”
“Galgadayle’s dreams are as right as a firbolg’s tongue,” insisted Munairoe. “It is humans who lie.”
“Not this time.” Marwick kept his gaze fixed on the floor. “One child. I saw Avner take him from her womb.”
“Raeyadfourne, enough of this!” hissed a verbeeg. He was a slender, gray-haired male with features as sharp as spearheads. “Make us a gift of your prisoner, and we shall know the truth soon enough.”
Raeyadfourne glowered at the verbeeg. “Torture is a breach of the law, Horatio.”
Horatio’s lip curled into a contemptuous sneer. “Your law.”
Raeyadfourne scowled. “Must I remind you—” The verbeeg raised his hand. “I know, I know.” There was an air of resignation in his voice. “We agreed to obey your law. Carry on.”
Horatio pulled a parchment map from inside his cloak and unrolled it on the floor. He began to examine the document as though the interrogation no longer interested him.
Raeyadfourne looked back to Marwick. “If the queen bore only one child, was it handsome or ugly?”
Marwick’s eyes flickered from the ground to the chieftain’s face, then back again.
Avner prayed the man to remain quiet. When the firbolgs captured Brianna and found only one infant, there was still a chance they would think their seer had made a mistake. But if Marwick told them about the child’s transformation, Raeyadfourne would realize, as Avner did, that the twins had entered the world in a sing
le body.
When Marwick did not answer, the second verbeeg’s hand shot out and covered the captive’s face. Avner grimaced, for the huge arm blocked his shot at both the front rider’s heart and throat. A quick kill was no longer possible.
“Since you have no use for this jaw, you won’t mind if I crush it,” growled the verbeeg. He was much younger than Horatio and, save for his harelip, too handsome for his race. “Speak!”
Raeyadfourne grabbed the verbeeg’s arm, but could not pull it away. “You’re perilously close to a breach of the law, Jerome,” the firbolg warned. “And harming the prisoner will not guarantee his honesty.”
“There are ways to learn the truth even from liars.” Jerome started to the pull the front rider toward him. “And I promise not to break any of your darling laws.”
Avner considered throwing his dagger into Marwick’s stomach, but that would not silence the front rider for long. The shaman Munairoe would simply heal the prisoner, as he had already healed the wounds of both Raeyadfourne and Galgadayle.
Raeyadfourne grabbed Jerome’s arm with both hands, refusing to let the verbeeg drag Marwick any farther. “You do not know the law, Jerome,” the chieftain said. “How can you promise not to breach it?”
Avner saw that a narrow angle was opening to Marwick’s throat. The throw would be difficult, through the crook of Jerome’s elbow and perhaps under Raeyadfourne’s forearms, but it was his only chance. The young scout raised his arm and waited.
A series of muffled steps sounded from the drift behind Raeyadfourne. “We’ve found them!” yelled a booming voice. “Tavis Burdun is with them!”
Raeyadfourne and the verbeeg both released Marwick. Avner lowered his dagger, biting his cheeks to keep from crying out in joy. He had never truly believed Tavis was dead—it would take more than a fire giant’s boot to keep the lord high scout from fulfilling his oath to Brianna—and now Avner knew everything would be fine. Tavis had found his way back to the queen, and as long as he was with her, no harm would come to either her or Kaedlaw.
Raeyadfourne crawled out of his drift and turned around to face the messenger, nearly crushing Marwick against the wall. “Found them?” the chieftain demanded. “Where?”