Iron Elf - A Race Reborn (Book 2)

by Klay Testamark

  We reached Starinpeaks sooner than I thought possible. The tops of the mountain range rushed toward us. The dragon released and then I was rolling on the ground.

  I shook myself. I was cut in a dozen places and both my arms were bleeding. The dragon was circling to land. It glittered in the moonlight, its scales like polished metal. It was as large as Cruix had become, and dragons don’t get big by being cowards. They’re known to fly their prey to a mountaintop so they can eat in peace.

  I pulled sword and mace out of hammerspace. I got to my feet and faced the airborne beast. It was huge, forty feet long and eight tons light. It moved like murder. It flared its wings, flapping backward as it hit the ground running. Dust and small rocks flew. I charged, pouring energy into spell-glyphs. The sword in my right began to glow. The mace in my left began to spark.

  The Mace of Shock was one of those rare dwarven items whose enchantment could be turned off. I could use it as a normal weapon without painful feedback. I turned it on anyway, because against a dragon, a normal weapon was not enough. It saw me too late. I slashed its nose and let it have the mace.

  “Aaaugh!” The shock turned my arm rigid. I grit my teeth and pulled back for another swing. The dragon showed its teeth and lunged. I sidestepped and pierced its tongue with the red-hot sword.

  The roar was incredible. The dragon batted me with a wing and when I tried to get up it hit me with a blast of ice. It was like falling through a frozen lake. “C- crap!” I called up a fireball glyph. I was about to throw it when the dragon said, “CEASE THIS FOOLISHNESS.”

  “I’m not going gently! I’m going to be the worst thing you ever ate!”

  “I CAME TO HAVE A CONVERSATION, NOT A POOR EXCUSE FOR A MEAL.”

  “I knew dragons played with their food. I didn’t know they insulted it!”

  “I AM NOT YOUR ENEMY. I AM CLOSER TO YOU, IN FACT, THAN THAT MAN YOU ONCE CALLED FRIEND.”

  I was silent. Because I knew, with utter certainty, that this was true. It was like looking at a painting and just then noticing someone in the background.

  “Who are you?”

  The dragon never did answer my question. But we managed to have a civilized chat. First, I introduced him to the concept of indoor voices.

  “BUT WE’RE OUTDOORS.”

  “Not all species perch on different mountains to have a chat.” Dragons don’t actually talk—they’re not built for it. But they simulate speech by vibrating the air. “And in case you haven’t noticed, we’re on the same mountain!”

  “How’s this?” he said.

  “Wow. That is one punchable voice.” I thought about it. “It’s my voice, isn’t it? So what are you?”

  “I’m a dragon.”

  “No, what you are is impossible. Cruix is the last dragon alive in my world, and in this world he’s probably lining a road or something. So how do you exist?” No answer. “Eh. I’m probably still hallucinating. Maybe you’re supposed to be from a world where up is down, light is death, and backwards talks everybody. You’re the good Cruix.”

  “Can we focus on how you’re THROWING YOUR DEATH AWAY.”

  “… or maybe you’re the less-subtle version,” I said, when my hair settled and my ears stopped ringing.

  “It was your choices that brought you here. It is your people that you fight for. You are wasting your time on could-have-beens and never-weres. You are running from a fine and noble destiny.”

  “What’s so noble about getting killed? Hafgan will expose my guts and that’ll be the end of me! I’ll fight, briefly, and then I’ll be dead. Not turned to stone, dead!”

  “Since when did you value life more than honour? Listen: If you run away, you will never stop running. You will carry that ache forever, one day at a time.”

  “Is that what you are? An overgrown, armour-plated conscience?!”

  The dragon looked at me. “You may never again do something this meaningful. You would be betraying yourself if you didn’t do this. To say nothing of your friends.”

  I fell to my knees. I left my weapons in the dust and cradled my face in my hands. It was a while before I could lift my head again.

  “It’s just that I had plans, you know? I wanted to build stuff. And my friends… so many things undone and unsaid. This prince business got in the way.”

  “You are mourning a life unlived, and yet you have no idea what you’re losing. You may have a wonderful life. You may have a miserable one. You may live ten thousand years, you may die before you reach the portal. What is a single spark, weighed against the light of a species?”

  “Are you talking about elves or caprans? Will I save both of them?”

  “I don’t care about past or future. To my senses they do not exist. I care only for your actions in the present. Seldom does a man get the chance to make his death a gift to the world.” He curled up and made himself comfortable. “You don’t really want to run away. You only need time to accept the truth.”

  “And what is the truth?”

  He rubbed his nose. “Why did you attack me when you knew it was hopeless?”

  “I thought I was trapped. I wanted to do some damage before I died. It was the only choice I had.”

  “And so you gave me a taste of steel. Angrod, the truth is that you are fated to fight this duel. Between Arawn and your own conscience, there is no other option. Win or lose, you are committed. Accepted it. You are already dead.”

  I don’t remember falling asleep. Most people don’t notice when a dream ends and another begins. I was back in my makeshift camp, a half-empty bottle between my knees. The fire had gone out. “Hello?”

  I was alone. I looked in the distance for the cottage but all I saw were rocks and shadow. If there had been a house there, that was long ago.

  I checked myself. You don’t survive a few elven parties without developing the habit. Aside from the usual risk of waking up in a strange bed (“Is that a woman on your left? Is that a man on your right? Is that a watchman’s helmet?”) there’s always a chance you’ll wake up a different species. We put a lot of magic into our entertainments. It’s not uncommon to find yourself in someone else’s body, and not in a fun way.

  So I took stock. I wasn’t covered in fur or feathers. My plumbing was in order. I wasn’t missing limbs or teeth. My head was still elf-shaped. This was a relief—I knew a water mage who went around making an ass of people who’d passed out drunk. He’d lower their blood alcohol level, change their features to that of a donkey, and leave a cigar in their pocket.

  I was sure I’d gotten cut by flying glass, but I wasn’t even scratched. My right arm was as cold and metallic as it had been the day before. I had been dreaming. I stood up, and that’s when I saw the giant footprint on the other side of the fire. In the footprint was a familiar pipe axe. It was halfway buried in the ground.

  Dagonet woke up. She stretched. It was light already. She sprang upright. She hadn’t meant to sleep so deeply, and she would have been alerted if someone tried to hit her with a sleep spell. She got on hands and knees and went to check Angrod’s camp. She was just in time to see him riding toward the palace.

  I got back that evening. It was as if I’d never left. But then, it was still the weekend. I left the stables and walked back to my apartments.

  Vitus met me in the hallway. “Been out hunting?”

  “Y-yes,” I said. “I mean, yes!”

  “Can we expect anything new for dinner, or did you not catch anything?”

  I threw out my arms. “Not a thing. But I’ll see you tomorrow.”

  Boar hunting is as dirty as hunting gets. A boar is bad news. There’s no better way to train a cavalryman than to focus his skills against something as fast, tough, and dangerous. We chased those hellbeasts through forest and brush. We chased them through muddy hill and harvested field. Vitus and the others galloped alongside but the killing blow was always mine, whether it was delivered by arrow, lance, or spear.

  The less said about my archery the better. Eve
ryone thinks elves are born with bows in our hands, but that’s ancient history. I was born in a city. (All I was holding was a clot of blood, according to Auntie Marilla. That’s just gross.) So I never mastered the bow. I never hunted my food, and certainly not from horseback. After months of practice my shots went in the right direction but they didn’t hit anything. They came close, but that only counts in horseshoes and fireballs. Damn, but I missed magic.

  And let’s not talk about my horsemanship. Vitus had enough to worry about. Again, I’m a city elf. I’d improved, but not by capran standards. It was one of the few times I wish I were Mithenian—they were said to be born in the saddle. Anyway, I did rather better with a lance. There were fewer moving parts. I’d put in the practice, tilting at rings and tent pegs and those things that swing and hit you. I’d practiced with heavy lances, outsize lances, and hollow lances that sloshed with every step.

  I’d charge across the field with my nine-foot pigsticker and do my best to nail a target that was low to the ground, as fast as a horse, and knew how to jink and swerve. You had to get them behind the shoulder and in the heart, or at least through the lungs. Difficult, since most males were armoured with scars. Many a lance was wrenched from my hand.

  At least I kept my seat. You didn’t want to be unhorsed near a four-hundred-pound tusker that was likely to gore you. Unlike a lot of game animals, boars fought back. It’s why I wore chainmail chaps and the dogs wore leather vests.

  We always brought around six hounds. Like capran horses they were also a little magical. They had speed and staying power, good eyes and good noses. They excelled as bay dogs and catch dogs. They could corner a boar and they could also seize it by the cheeks, holding it for the killing stroke. They were good-looking as well, with long limbs and white fur. The eyes and the inner ears were a brilliant red.

  When the dogs had a boar at bay, that was the time to dismount. You could bring it back alive but the stress tended to ruin the flavour. Unless you planned to castrate the hog and fatten it, you wanted to process it as soon as possible. My first time, they had to coax me out of the saddle. Grahothy gave me a boar-spear. “Pick a tree,” he said. “In case you need to run.”

  I faced the beast and tried not to shrink away. It stood in a mudhole—bristly, black, and evil-smelling. It seemed full of hatred. I’d rather have stared down a wyvern.

  The boar was merely cornered. It wheeled, scattering the dogs. It fastened its mad eyes on me, lowered its head, and charged. Lister said, “Now, Angrod! Now!” I sidestepped, thrusting as I did so. I got it in the ribs but it kept coming. “Push! Push! Don’t run, push!”

  I scrabbled for better footing. The dogs nipped at it and it wheeled. I thrust again. I worked the spear into its lungs, pushing it on its side. Its grunts turned to screams. The mud turned red. I planted a boot on it and bore down on the spear, pushing it in up to the crossbar. I pulled it out and hit it in the heart. It was screaming. The world was screaming. I was screaming.

  My first time had been messy.

  Today I faced a beast much like the other one. The dogs had taken hold of it but it was a struggle. I stood to the side but knew it could see me. It looked at me with one small yellow eye.

  “What do you want?” I asked it. It gnashed its tusks. The upper ones honed the lower ones, which were nine inches long and sharp as a sword. I drew my knife, but then I looked at the animal. “A fair fight? Is that what you want?”

  Laraib rode up. “Don’t take any risks. Nothing fancy. Vitus didn’t teach you so you could get killed like this.”

  I switched to my Sight for a moment so I could see the boar’s heart. It was low in the chest, a small target. I stabbed it once and the animal collapsed.

  CHAPTER 22: MEERWEN

  “So it’s a portal?” Mina asked. “And Snow Mountain is no mountain, but a gigantic structure?”

  “It uses wave power to ventilate the shaft and pump water to the temple complex,” I said. “But its main purpose is to trap anything that comes through the portal.”

  Angrod told me about the fairy ring in Deepwood. That one was connected to the world where every humanoid race had originated. The one under Snow Mountain was a lot more dangerous because it only went two ways. This made it a priceless asset to any army looking to establish a foothold on the other side. As Olympia had explained, the Order of the Gentle Fists had three reasons for existing. First, it protected the stable portal between Brandish and the Northlands. Second, it was a haven for shield maidens tired of war. And third, it rescued escaped slaves.

  Slavery didn’t exist in Brandish. Not on a large scale. It’s not that elves were more enlightened. With our magic, we simply didn’t need them. The Northlands was completely dependent on them, however, and this drove much of our conflict. To humans, farming was not man’s work. Very little was except for piracy and war.

  I preferred to keep an ocean between me and those people. If the human chiefdoms gained control of Snow Mountain we could expect more than the occasional inland raid. We could be looking at an invasion.

  “Angrod picked the right time for a vacation,” I said. “He’s probably having so much fun. For sure he’s not dealing with anything like this.”

  We looked into the pit. At the bottom, a small horde of Northlanders looked back. They weren’t happy.

  “What do your elf-eyes see?” Mina asked.

  “The same thing your dwarf eyes see. Torches and angry eyes.”

  Nobody was surprised to learn that we had climbed an artificial mountain. Elves could raise such megastructures, although we built them more often in the past. The old Imperial roads were an example. So were Pithe Canal, Lamemheth Dome, and Drystone Harbour.

  The last two were roughly contemporary. My grandfather built Drystone Harbour. Not personally, of course. Father was the first mage in the family. “Have I ever told you how—”

  “Your granddad built Drystone Harbour? You already told me. Twice.”

  “I didn’t know I was repeating myself. Some people will never forget that my family started as fishermen…”

  “I understand. At least you earned your gold through honest trade. That’s almost as good as digging it out of the ground! These snobs of yours, where did they get their plunder? That’s right, from dwarven hoards and dwarven treasuries. And by hoards I mean life savings.”

  An artificial mountain wasn’t an unreasonable way to contain a two-way portal. Even if hostiles managed to take over the Northland side, they wouldn’t be able to do anything.

  “Imagine you’re ants,” Olympia had told us over dinner. “I just dropped you into an empty bottle. How do you get out?”

  “I climb the sides to sweet, sweet freedom,” Yang said.

  “Wrong. The glass is too slippery. Also, the bottleneck is two miles long.”

  “That’s a lot of wine,” Conrad said.

  “Why would it be wine?” Sandy asked. “Why not beer?”

  “I smash my way out of the bottle!” Borlog said. “With my trusty club!”

  “Wrong. The glass is too hard to tunnel through. You can’t even scratch it.”

  “What did ants ever do to you?” Borlog asked. “Seems a cruel and unusual punishment, unless there’s still wine on the bottom.”

  “Beer!” Sandy said.

  “How do you normally access the portal?” I asked Olympia.

  “With a crane and a very strong rope. You could fly out of there, but the mountain was only designed with my fellow humans in mind. Besides, what an elf could make, another elf could unmake.”

  “I’m still not clear on who built Snow Mountain. He had to be an earth mage, but what was his name?”

  “That’s not important. What’s important is that this situation can’t last. The Northlanders will find us eventually. They will send as many ships as it takes. There is a way to shut down the portal, but it’s on the other side.”

  “… What if I filled the bottle with water?” Yang asked. “Then we could float to the top. Or what if
we brought building materials?”

  “It’d drain out the same way,” Mina said. “Two-way portal, remember? And how could you build anything without the nuns seeing it? Rocks fall, everyone dies.”

  “Well, how would I know?” Yang said. “I’m an ant!”

  There was a vault in the Northlands temple. A vault that, when triggered, would collapse the temple into a volcano. The portal would be useless to anyone who couldn’t swim through molten rock.

  Whoever that nameless earth mage was, he hadn’t done things by half-measures. Unfortunately, the attackers must have taken the Northlands temple by surprise. There was a distinct lack of smoke rising from the shaft. The barbarians at the bottom were also a giveaway.