by Doug Niles
“Bear southward,” he said to Alhana, who tugged gently on the reins. Anticipating the direction, Stallyar veered slightly, wings stroking powerfully as he lifted them gradually higher. With just enough altitude to clear the neighboring ridge, the griffon once again allowed them to glide, descending slightly while the valley floor dropped quickly below.
Now they had two ridges between themselves and the wing of blue dragons, but even so, the elves did not relax their vigilance. Porthios guided them along the course of this deep valley, making sure that they flew below the summit of the ridges that ran in serpentine crests to either side. Slowly the vista of the sea grew before them, with the brightness of the setting sun reflected in almost painful brilliance from the broad swath of water.
It was out of that brightness that death came seeking, a blue dragon and its black-armored rider plummeting right out of the sun. Porthios suddenly sensed menace there, vaguely saw the terrible wings extending to right and left out of the blazing sunset. He shouted an alarm, but Stallyar had perceived the threat at the same time. The griffon banked to the left hard and dived toward the treetops.
“Fly, Lord Porthios!” cried one of the other elven warriors, an archer who was alone in his saddle.
“And you—try to escape!” shouted the outlaw prince, sensing his loyal man’s intentions.
But the elf’s course had been chosen. Somehow he had his bow out and shot an arrow straight into the snout of the beast. The subsequent bellow of rage seemed to shake the air in the sky, a forceful onslaught of sound that rocked the griffons sideways and threatened to press the elves out of the saddle.
Next came the blast of lightning, and Porthios didn’t have to look to know that his bold warrior had been slain. The stench of burned flesh carried instantly to his nostrils.
Now the treetops were whipping past, and Stallyar was gasping with the effort of flying with his double load of riders. The two other couples were nearby, their mounts, too, showing the effects of the burdened flight. All three infants were squalling loudly, frantic and afraid. With a quick glance backward, Porthios saw that the remaining warrior of their escort was angling upward and away, shooting arrows and attempting to draw the dragon after it.
From the thunderous bellows of rage, it seemed likely that the monster was going after the pesky archer, but the elf also heard the harsh commands of the knight, who was struggling to bring his serpent after the greater concentration of enemies. He looked again, saw that the wyrm was reluctantly wheeling, preparing to dive after the three griffons and their riders now gliding right through the lashing branches of the trees.
It was a pursuit that could only have one outcome, and Porthios desperately sought some tactic that would give them a chance of survival.
“There, land!” he shouted as a tiny patch of clearing opened before them. “We’ve got to go on foot!” he shouted to the others.
All three griffons plunged to the soft ground, and the warriors and their women tumbled from the saddles, the men frantically cushioning the falls of their children and wives.
“Now, go!” shouted the outlaw captain, waving frantically to urge the riderless griffons into the air.
The dragon roared again, and Porthios looked upward. He saw that the knight was now slumped in the saddle, an elven arrow jutting from his back. The four griffons swirled about the azure serpent until those horrible jaws gaped again, spewing a lightning bolt that shattered one of the brave creatures with a direct hit. The elves groaned, and Porthios felt a sickening lurch in his heart. Because of the sun’s glare, he couldn’t see if the stricken griffon had Stallyar’s distinctive, silvery sheen on its wingtips.
“Into the woods! We’ve got a slight chance, nothing more!” he said, propelling the three women and two warriors ahead of him. They stumbled onto a narrow deer trail and jogged away from the clearing as quickly as the females could move. The babies, exhausted and numb, had again fallen silent.
After ten minutes they paused, gasping for breath, and Porthios scrambled up a lofty pine tree. He saw the distant figures of the dragon and at least two griffons, the smaller creatures leading the wyrm on a frantic chase. They were heading west, toward the sea, and the elf murmured a silent prayer to Paladine, thanking the god for their escape and begging his aid to help the brave griffons to escape.
Finally he dropped down from the tree to report on what he had seen. He looked at the somber, strained faces of his companions and knew that the course of their flight had been drastically changed.
“We’re going to have to reach Splintered Rock on foot,” he told them. “If we set an easy pace we should be able to do it in two or three days.”
With the fortitude born of months of living as outlaws, the others quickly agreed. Porthios led and one of the other warriors brought up the rear as the elves continued through the forest. Where the deer trails worked in their favor, they followed them. For a while, a shallow streambed gave them a path. When the underbrush finally closed in, the men took turns hacking with their swords to open a path.
As night fell they found a large willow tree, with a trunk that had been hollowed by years of decay. Using their swords to expand the makeshift cave, the elves managed to make a shelter that allowed all three women and infants to sleep with some degree of protection from the elements. The men hunkered down outside the entrance and took turns staying awake during the dark, silent night. A short rainstorm washed over them sometime before dawn, and though the warriors were sodden, their wives emerged from the shelter dry and at least partially rested.
One of the warriors took time to collect some wild berries, and these provided at least minimal sustenance before they once more started on their way. Their luck seemed to be improving, however, for within an hour, they stumbled upon a wide path that seemed to bear more or less in the direction they wanted to be going. Porthios led the way again, holding his wife’s hand in his own as he held his weapon at the ready, trying to peer into the shadowy forest that pressed close to each side.
The first clue of the ambush came from a waft of wind that brought the scent of stale, acrid sweat to his nostrils. The other elves sensed it, too, and instinctively looked in alarm at their leader.
Porthios had his sword in his right hand, while his left still gripped Alhana’s tense fingers. He stared into the woods to both sides. He realized that the shrubbery was very thick here, and that the ground sloped up both to the right and to the left. Intuitively he sensed a trap and was about to turn to order the elves to backtrack when the first brutes crashed from the woods.
In a moment of frozen panic, he saw a male elf go down, skull crushed by a massive club. The warrior’s woman screamed and bent over her man, only to be cut in two by the brutal sweep of a massive sword. Dozens of the monsters charged, coming from all directions, and in a moment of crystalline clarity, he saw his wife and child beneath the threat of those crushing blows.
His perceptions, his whole world, twisted violently in that instant. Caution and practicality vanished in a cloud of pure fury.
Like a whirlwind, he flew past Alhana, stabbing one brute through the belly, then cutting the throat of another with the backslash. A club slashed at him from the side, and instinct warned him to duck. He felt the gust of air as the blunt weapon whipped past his scalp and tore at his hair. Lunging to the side, he drove his blade into the flank of the club wielder, sending the creature tumbling backward with a ragged bellow of pain.
Alhana’s scream galvanized him, and he whirled to see a brute’s blue hand wrapped around her wrist. Silvanoshei was swaying in his cradle, crying again. Before the attacker could pull his wife into the underbrush, the prince’s weapon came down and Alhana screamed again, this time at the sight of the dismembered paw still clutching her arm. Clutching her baby, the elf woman fell back, leaning against a stout tree trunk, flailing her arm until the gruesome remnant broke loose and fell into the underbrush.
Porthios lunged past his wife, the bloody blade flashing in a deadly dan
ce, driving several brutes backward with such haste that they tumbled over each other. The sword of his ancestors flashed, drawing howls as he gouged his enemies’ massive legs, but then the prince retreated to stand before Alhana. She was sheltered against the tree trunk, two broad limbs reaching around almost as if to fold her in a protective embrace, and Porthios drew several ragged gasps of breath as he looked at the circle of looming figures.
He was vaguely aware that the other elves had disappeared, slain or captured by the blue-skinned attackers or perhaps escaping into the woods during the initial confusion of the ambush. At least a dozen of the monstrous warriors now faced him, forming a ring that closed off any hope of escape.
“Porthios … get away—over them, through the branches of the tree,” Alhana whispered behind him, her voice taut as a bowstring. “They’ll take me prisoner … you can come for me later.”
In a flash of emotion so strong that it all but burned through his heart, he saw how much he loved her and this child, this son who was the hope of the elven nations through the coming years.
His eyes were clear, his body immediately restored by the power of his emotion. The brutes were all panting, and some of them held hands over cuts and gouges that dripped blood and smeared streaks of blue along their limbs. With a sense of vague detachment, he saw that the creatures were actually covered with paint, that their natural flesh was more like a human’s. They loomed as tall as he was but much more solid, and the growls and barks emerging from their throats showed that they were angry and ready to take their revenge. Clubs were raised, swords readied, as the brutes cautiously closed in.
Porthios did the one thing they didn’t expect. He attacked, throwing himself bodily toward the center of the ring of blue-skinned horror. His sword flashed out like the flicking tongue of some metal-mawed dragon, and in a whistling flash, tore open the bellies of the two nearest brutes. Groaning piteously, hands struggling to contain their spilling guts, the creatures staggered backward and collapsed. The other brutes gaped, momentarily astonished at the audacity of this elf who had charged them so recklessly.
Porthios continued his attack, whirling through the rank of his foes, stabbing one in the back and cutting the hamstrings of another. With a final, skull-splitting blow, he hacked through a fifth brute and once again stood before his awestruck wife, intent on protecting her with every sinew of his body, every drop of his blood. He danced forward, waving the blade, and the remaining attackers actually took a few steps backward.
Still, the ring of deadly warriors remained solid, fully enclosing the elves, though the enemy was a little more cautious about pressing in. When Porthios rushed forward, the brutes fell back quickly, this time stumbling out of reach of his lethal steel. From the corner of his eye, he saw that one of the monsters lunged toward Alhana when he advanced, and like lightning he whirled, cutting the thing down with a stab to the throat.
A red haze filmed his vision, and he vaguely wondered if he was wounded. But it was the heat of his own emotions, the rage possessing him, turning him into a lethal fighting machine. Rushing forward, he had enough control to bluff a charge to the right, then whip to the left and stab another brute before the creature could raise its weapon in a parry. Again he repeated the maneuver, and another monstrous attacker fell back, bellowing in anger and clutching hands over the deep cut in its belly.
Four more remained, and the next time he rushed forward, they stumbled backward in a frantic attempt to avoid his cutting steel. Now they were a dozen paces away from the tree, a loose ring that he could have dashed through with a sudden sprint. But still, there was Alhana and Silvanoshei—they couldn’t run, and he couldn’t leave them.
So he resolved to finish this fight with the same cold violence that the brutes had used to commence it. Porthios charged forward again, faster and farther, and this time he caught one of the brutes before it could retreat. A single slice ended that ugly warrior’s life, and at the sight of the newest corpse the other three turned and raced away, smashing through the brush like panic-stricken cattle.
The jagged bluff known as Splintered Rock rose from the depths of the forest, the spiked promontories reminding Porthios of the towers of a distant elven city. As he and Alhana plodded closer, however, they clearly saw the frost-cut cracks in the face of the stone, the heaps of talus piled at the foot of each weather-beaten spire. The meeting place served its purpose well, for it was far from any roads or well-used trails, and yet the elves could see it from a long distance away.
Slowly, over the course of several days, the refugees from the bandit camp had trickled into the meeting place, gathering around the deep, clear lake at the foot of the bluff. Tarqualan and his griffon riders were already here as Porthios, now carrying Silvanoshei, and his wife dragged themselves wearily into the grassy meadow at the lakeshore.
The outlaw prince surprised many, even including himself, when he burst into tears at the sight of Stallyar. Many feathers of the griffon’s right wing had been blasted by a dragon’s lightning bolt, but the creature held his eagle’s head up proudly, yellow eyes flashing as Porthios wrapped both arms around the strong neck. Stallyar dropped his beak into an affectionate peck on the elf’s shoulder, then settled down to rest. Tarqualan told Porthios that the mighty creature had been tense and agitated until the moment when his master had appeared. Only then did it seem that Stallyar would allow himself to relax.
“My lord, you can well imagine the consternation we all felt upon your mount’s arrival. There is not an elf here that did not pledge his life and his sword to avenge your death. Indeed, there are many parties of warriors in the woods, both searching for you and exacting whatever vengeance they can against the Dark Knights.”
Porthios described his encounter with the brutes and learned that similar ambushes were experienced by many of the refugees. Samar had led dozens in a fighting retreat, running a gauntlet of attackers and wounding a blue dragon with his lance. Finally he had led the group here, arriving a few hours before Porthios with many wounded in tow.
“The attack plan was worked out with an eye toward strategy,” the prince realized. “The enemy general only sent his dragons against our camp when his troops were already in place in the surrounding woods.”
And, tragically, it was a tactic that had proven lethally successful, for even four days after the appointed time of the rendezvous, barely two-thirds of the elves who had fled the encampment had arrived at Splintered Rock.
It was with relief and delight, on that fourth evening, that Porthios and the rest greeted Dallatar and his band of Kagonesti. Not surprisingly, the wild elves had made their way around the enemy’s traps, even turning the tables on several companies of brutes who had been lying in ambush alongside well-traveled trails.
But Porthios was surprised by the news Dallatar shared as the two of them sat around a small fire later that evening. Alhana reclined nearby, resting uncomfortably as she nursed her baby, still trying to recover from the rigors of the flight. Samar, too, was present, watchfully eyeing the dark forest. Porthios felt a pang of guilt as he saw that the warrior-mage seemed to take care to avoid sitting at Alhana’s side.
Porthios asked the Kagonesti chieftain if he had made contact with his spies in Qualinost.
“Yes, I did. As you expected, they surrendered to the Dark Knights without a fight. The city has been occupied, though the senators and nobles have been allowed to keep their wealth and stations, except for a few of the more independent thinkers. The senators called Queralan and Anthelia, for example, have been arrested and imprisoned in a camp outside of the city.”
“And what about the common people?” Porthios asked.
Dallatar shrugged. “There, again, those who have the courage to speak out against the occupation have been arrested, their property—such as it is—confiscated.”
“Who is the ruler of the occupation forces?”
“A lord called Salladac. It was he who commanded the operation against your encampment. He was ai
ded by Palthainon, who revealed the location of your band. Rumor has it that the lord knight is quite pleased with the attack. However, it might please you to know that another Lord—Haldian, I think they called him—who originally commanded the invasion of the west was sentenced to death, executed by order of Salladac.”
“No great loss … he was a fool,” Porthios declared grimly. “Better for us if he had been left in charge. Are your own agents safe?”
“My agent is my daughter … and, yes, thank you for the inquiry. She is well. In fact, in addition to a belated warning about Palthainon’s treachery, she sends a message for you.”
“A message?” Porthios felt so separated from his previous life in that place that he had somehow brought himself to believe that his own existence was no longer relevant to the elves of the city. “From whom?”
“From the Speaker of the Sun, your nephew, Gilthas.”
Porthios spat scornfully, drawing a sizzle from the embers of the low fire. “What does he have to say to me?”
“He begs the honor of a meeting with you.”
Now the outlaw sat up straight. “Why? So he can turn me over to his puppet master, this Lord Salladac?”
“I don’t know why he wants to speak to you, but the question was phrased as though he asks you for a favor.”
“And why should I grant that favor? This is a transparent attempt to trap me. After his dragons and his brutes failed, Lord Salladac is obviously turning to my own kinsman to use against me!”
Dallatar was noncommittal. “My … agent seems to feel that the young lord is sincere, that he feels genuine disgust at the betrayal of his homeland.”
“He was a part of that betrayal!” Porthios declared passionately. “He wears the medallion that I gave up—gave up because a Qualinesti arrow was pointed at my wife’s heart.”