by Cory Herndon
The elf girl examined her own ancient sword in the orange firelight. There still wasn’t a nick or scratch anywhere on it. Elven weapons were made to last.
“Bruenna,” Glissa said, “None of this is going to work if I don’t get to Yert.”
“And the guard said ‘vampires,’ I know,” Bruenna replied, fumbling with one of the pouches on her belt. “He’s here. I can sense him.”
Glissa closed her eyes, attempting to reach out to the energies of the Tangle. “I can too,” the elf girl said with surprise. “He’s like a void. And something else. Constructs. They’re making my spine tingle.”
Bruenna nodded in agreement. “Focus on Yert. The Miracore should lead you right to him.” The Neurok mage produced chain strung with a trio of different colored gemstones, and placed it in the elf girl’s hand. The mage explained that each one was infused with a specific magic and keyed to Glissa’s voice—Bruenna had prepared them that morning. The green one would transport her instantly to any location she named three times while holding the stone to her lips. Using the same method, the red one would return Glissa to Krark-Home, and the blue one would give her the ability to fly for a short time. Alone among the three stones, the blue flight gem could be used as often as Glissa wished, Bruenna explained with a hint of pride. Glissa thanked her, wrapped the chain around her forearm like a bracelet, and tucked the valuable stones up the long sleeve of her silver leonin tunic.
“I need to stay and defend Krark-Home, or this may all be over before it begins,” Bruenna added. “And you must leave for the interior as soon as you retrieve the Miracore. You must retrieve the Miracore. I shall help you with Yert as much as I can, but then you must go. Use the stones.”
“Oh, I’ll get the Miracore,” Glissa said, still gazing at her sword. “If I have to take Yert’s head off to do it.” She placed a hand on Bruenna’s shoulder and looked over at Lyese, who was still preoccupied with weapons and armor. “Afterward … tell her I’ll be back soon. No time for a long good-bye.” Glissa didn’t add that she wouldn’t be able to make herself leave, despite the dire circumstances, if her sister was fighting for her life at the same time. Yshkar had already joined the battle, and Lyese would not be able to avoid it.
“I shall. But now, we go,” Bruenna said quietly. “Remember, Yert is the goal. Until you have the Miracore, only fight whatever’s blocking your way.” Bruenna turned and headed out one of the dining room’s many exits. Sparing one last glance at her sister, so changed in such a short period of time, Glissa followed without a word.
Lyese looked up with her one good eye just in time to see the older elf girl’s booted foot disappear around a bend in the passage, and she set off after them.
The goblin tunnels that honeycombed the Oxidda Mountains were a complicated network of twists, turns, intersections, and more than one path to nowhere. Cavernous ventilation chimneys appeared at odd intervals, and a few deep pits opened here and there along the way. Unlike the chasm Glissa had crossed while hunting Yert five years before, these pits ended in bubbling orange smelting pools, part of the ongoing volcanic process that continually reshaped the Oxidda range. The goblins had learned to harness that power. But held deep respect for it. The tunnels led to several secret entrances and exits—which were not always the same thing, Glissa had learned—and the main entrance was moved by magic every few days just to be safe.
The nim seemed be in every tunnel at once.
It didn’t take long for Glissa and Bruenna to meet the first wave of invaders. The elf girl had hoped they might catch up with Yshkar, but the Kha and his men had apparently taken another tunnel. Glissa felt the empty void of Yert’s presence, and the tingling hum of what could only be the Miracore, was in this direction.
The hulking, black shapes of nim warriors filled the tunnel ahead of them. “I’d say they’re blocking our way,” Glissa said.
“Indeed,” Bruenna agreed. The mage closed her eyes momentarily, and moved her hands in a simple pattern. A wall of quicksilver materialized before the pair, blocking the nim—and the rest of the tunnel—from view.
“How are we supposed to—” Glissa began.
Bruenna raised one finger to her blue lips and flung her other hand forward as if hurling a stone. The quicksilver wall shimmered and a shivering, circular dent appeared in the center. As Glissa watched, the dent folded in on itself and then opened inward, forming a long, glowing silver tunnel just large enough for a crouching human and elf to fit through single file. The long cylinder ended perhaps a hundred feet ahead.
“This will get us past this first group,” Bruenna said softly, sweat appearing on her brow as the quicksilver solidified. Finally, she exhaled, and urged Glissa forward.
Glissa expected the magical metal to be slippery, but her boots found solid surface. She bounded down the tunnel, her sword held in front of her. Bruenna followed close behind. Glissa looked back over her shoulder and saw that the entrance was closing behind them as she ran, preventing unwelcome pursuit.
At the exit ahead, Glissa saw a pair of pale humanoid shapes standing crouched, ready to pounce. “Vampires,” the elf girl cried over her shoulder, pointing. She heard Bruenna mutter the beginnings of another spell as the vicious creatures stepped into the quicksilver tunnel. They looked even more ghastly than usual in the eerie magical light.
“Just keep running,” Bruenna said. “Get past them, they’re in for a surprise.”
Glissa raised her sword in both hands as if she was going to bring it down on the head of the lead vampire, which she was sickened to see had the lithe form and distinctive face of an elf. The vampire fell for the bluff and charged at her low to take advantage of what it perceived to be an opening. Instead of following through with her swing, she slapped her other hand onto the chain wrapped around her swordarm. “Fly, fly, fly!” Glissa shouted then jumped into the air. She was relieved when she didn’t come back down, and soared on over the diving creature’s head.
“Right behind you,” she heard Bruenna shout, “Keep going!”
As she shot from the end of the magical tunnel with Bruenna hot on her heels, Glissa slowed and looked back. The quicksilver wall shimmered, the surface perfectly smooth. The vampires were nowhere to be seen.
“Nice trick,” Glissa told Bruenna as the mage caught up.
“It should hold them long enough for us to get away,” Bruenna agreed.
Together, they bobbed and weaved through a surprised group of nim and goblins engaged in a life-or-death struggle. Glissa wished she could stop to help the defenders, but Bruenna was right. Yert was all that mattered. In the end, getting her hands on the Miracore would save a lot more people than one more sword in the fray.
“We’re getting close,” Bruenna said. “I can’t believe he’s made it this far into Krark-Home.”
The pair veered off at a three-way intersection where leonin and goblins were knocking an unending wave of nim into the smelting pools below. Bruenna steered them up a rising path that Glissa noticed was more brightly lit than the rest. It was also strangely empty.
“I don’t like this,” Bruenna said. “I know where this tunnel leads.”
“Where?” Glissa asked, ducking to avoid a hanging copper stalactite.
“The nurseries.”
The higher up the tunnel they went, the closer Yert felt. Glissa no longer needed to concentrate to feel the vampire necromancer.
The tunnel ended just ahead. They had yet to encounter anyone in this passage, friend or foe. Bruenna and Glissa slowed and pulled up short, hovering just in front of a set of double-doors that the elf girl would have to duck to get through. Bruenna shook the door latch, but it wouldn’t budge.
“I’ve got an idea,” Glissa said. “Stand back.” She floated back a few feet and reached out to the Tangle energies, calling on the strength of the forest. She felt a surge of physical power and felt her armor and tunic tighten around her muscles. Glissa felt strong enough to take the top off of the mountain with her bare hands.
Bruenna, impressed, floated aside. Glissa clenched her fists and flew straight at the door, fists held in front of her, a living projectile. Halfway there, she heard Geth scream.
The elf girl’s gloved fists connected dead center and shattered the crystalline locking mechanism, sending the small iron door flying inward with a tremendous crash. She plowed headlong into a stunned vampire. Glissa’s fists drove straight through the creature’s torso like a hot knife through lead. She kept going, willing herself onward, and ripped the vampire in two. Greenish-black gore blinded the elf girl momentarily.
When this was over, she was going to bathe in hot oil for a week.
“Stop!” a familiar, slithering voice bellowed. Glissa whirled in midair to face the voice and wiped foul, stringy goop from her eyes.
Yert stood in the center of the room, flanked by a quartet of vampires. He stood over a pair of leonin corpses in bloodstained white robes. Tiny figures—human children, goblin kids, and leonin cubs—were huddled in terrified clusters around the wall. Nim warriors blocked every exit except the one Glissa had just forcefully opened.
In one raised hand Yert clutched a crying leonin cub, in the other an even smaller goblin infant that wailed and kicked its tiny, flapping feet. Yert smiled and showed two rows of razor sharp teeth, and locked his blood-red eyes with the Glissa’s. As she watched, frozen, he licked his lips with a forked, leathery tongue.
Glissa raised her open hands wide and descended until her feet touched the ground. “All right, Yert. You’ve got me. Again. Put the children down.”
“The children are quite safe at the moment,” Yert replied. “I can’t say the same for the nursemaids.”
Glissa felt the chain wrapped around her wrist slide down her arm, and it gave her a terrible idea.
“You will come with me, of your own will,” Yert continued. “You showed me mercy, once. It was foolish of you, but I still feel ever so slightly in your debt. You helped make me the man I am today. And you did share that lovely repast with me.” Glissa felt a twinge where the wound in her neck was still not quite healed. Her heart leapt. With Yert’s arms spread wide, his robes parted and revealed a sliver of the Miracore on his chest, glowing a faint greenish-blue. So close …
“And so I swear,” Yert hissed. “These children and infants will not be harmed, if you come with me. Besides, I’ve discovered I have a bit of a sweet tooth. And you can’t enjoy your sweets all at once.”
Glissa nodded, but was doing her best to make eye contact with Bruenna, who finally caught her look. Glissa gave an imperceptible nod that Bruenna returned faintly. The entire exchange took a little over a second, and Yert didn’t seem to notice.
“I guess that’s the best offer I’m going to get,” Glissa said, casually lowering her arms and edging her left hand closer to her right. “But what are you going to do to me?” she asked, trying to inject fear into her voice, which wasn’t difficult.
As Glissa spoke, she rubbed her right wrist with her left hand as if trying to get her circulation going, but instead working her fingertips slowly up her arm to the gemstones. “Now hold on, Yert,” she almost drawled, “How do I know you won’t Bruenna catch the kids YERTYERTYERT!”
As the last “Yert” left her lips, she gulped a deep breath of air. The nursery, Yert, the vampires, and everything else flickered out of existence for a millisecond. When she reappeared, she was inside Yert’s body. And Yert’s insides suddenly had no place to go.
Corroded bone, brackish blood, wiry muscles, fetid tissue, and withered organs exploded violently through Yert’s ruptured skin and robes in every direction, tearing his body into tiny chunks of flesh, metal, and blackened bone. The elf girl punched upward, sending what remained of Yert’s head flying, then thrust her upturned hands out to catch the Miracore before it could hit the ground. She blinked foulness from her eyes for the second time in as many minutes and found herself in the center of the room. A quartet of very surprised vampires, horrified children, and Bruenna, who held a blood-spattered but still healthy pair of infants in her arms, stood gaping. Everything was covered in stinking bits of Yert.
Glissa didn’t give the other vampires time to recover. She swung the Miracore like a bludgeon, collapsing the skull of the nearest bloodsucking fiend, which stumbled over backward and collapsed. The traumatized children scattered and bolted for cover. Glissa shifted her grip and grabbed hold of the heavy chain strung through the artifact and whirled the Miracore overhead like a flail on a very short handle. The chain decapitated the remaining vampires in one clean sweep, and three lanky headless corpses flopped, twitching, to the nursery floor.
“Bet he didn’t see that coming,” Bruenna said, wiping Yert from her eyes and face.
“Bruenna, I didn’t see that coming,” Glissa said. “But it worked.” The elf girl gently set down the heavy artifact. She still had work to do. Her sword appeared in her hand, and she stepped forward to face the nim that blocked the other exits but saw they were motionless and silent.
“Meyr mill mooing mum mey—”
Glissa reached back for Geth’s pack, but it wasn’t there. She looked over to where she had been standing before teleporting herself inside Yert and saw it rolling lazily back and forth. She ran over to the mumbling bag as Bruenna tried to calm the children and herd them away from the nim and back to safety.
“They’re still doing the last thing they were told,” Geth’s head said. “Look at them, the beauties.”
“Bruenna,” Glissa said, lifting the heavy Miracore aloft. “Do you know how to activate this thing? Can we order them to leave?”
“I hope so,” Bruenna said. She took the heavy, asymmetrical disk of the Miracore and held it in two hands, and closed her eyes. As the seconds dragged into minutes, Glissa started to wonder if this was really safe. This was god-like power, and Bruenna was only human.
Finally, the mage blinked. She looked as if she had just walked a hundred miles. “It’s done,” Bruenna said, her voice a croak. As she spoke, the nim blocking the exits calmly turned and scuttled away down the tunnel, claws hanging at their sides.
The mage handed the Miracore back to Glissa, who slipped the heavy chain over her head. The artifact was awkward and would make swordplay difficult, but she didn’t have much choice. She scooped up Geth’s bag and slung it onto her back, and placed a hand on Bruenna’s shoulder.
“I have to go,” Glissa said. “Tell them about the nim. It might be enough. Get the children out of here.”
The mountain shook again, causing the children to scream in unison again, and almost knocked Glissa off her feet. She stumbled backward into a pair of waiting arms. As the tremor subsided, the elf girl turned to see who had caught her.
“You weren’t going to say goodbye?” Lyese asked.
“Lyese, what are you doing here?” Glissa demanded.
“Catching you,” her sister replied. “And checking on the children. But it appears you’ve saved them already. Big sister, always looking out for me.” Something about the way Lyese said “big sister” didn’t sound right, but Glissa didn’t dwell on it.
“My Khana, Yert is dead,” Bruenna said. “We have a chance to turn the tide, but Glissa must go.”
“I know,” Lyese replied and wrapped Glissa in a tight embrace. “There. Now you can go. Come back as soon as you can.”
“I will, Lyese,” Glissa said. “Now get these kids someplace safe. Good luck. Both of you.”
“And you,” Bruenna said. “But none of us should rely solely on luck.”
OLD FRIENDS
Glissa shot from the side of the mountain like a goblin flamerocket into the sky. As much time as she’d spent in the air since that night the levelers attacked her home, she still relished the freedom of unfettered flight. It was her only option for reaching Memnarch in time now—Bruenna had warned her the teleportation gemstone was a one-use-only spell, and the elf girl had used it up when she killed Yert. But since they’d found the vampire necromancer so quickly,
she still had plenty of time to reach her goal. She wore the Miracore tucked securely under her jerkin.
The flying elf cast her eyes down on the carnage that littered the battlefield. The mountains, flanked on one side by the shrunken Glimmervoid and on the other by the greatly enlarged Mephidross, were surrounded by chaos. Tiny black nim poured out of the mountain like needlebugs, following the orders Bruenna had given them through the Miracore. The nim collided with even smaller goblin and leonin warriors, who cut into the passive zombies with abandon. Great silver beasts chewed through the defenders, but so far the lines were holding—although they were starting to bend at some points. Glissa silently wished them luck.
The elf girl rolled and let her course gradually rise. She couldn’t afford to be delayed by aerophins or vedalken flyers. From this vantage point she could make out thousands of the construct beasts of every size and horrible shape. They hacked and slashed through goblin, leonin, and nim, leaving bloody body parts littering the field behind them. The giant, globe-headed vedalken that moved among them were unmistakeable even from Glissa’s vantage point. They were no longer holding back, and dozens of vedalken had entered the fray. Others rode hovering flyers, divebombing the defenders of Kark-Home and slicing into goblin, human, and leonin with well-placed bolts of blue energy.
No two constructs looked the same, and many looked big enough to swallow a goblin regiment whole. But those were insects compared to what the defenders had informally dubbed “quake-beasts.” Three of them clung to the sides of Krark-Home. The huge constructs had ovoid bodies with no discernible head, supported by over a dozen radial segmented limbs. The quake-beasts’ claws tore large chunks of raw iron from the side of the mountain as larger grasping legs dug deep into the ore, which gave them the appearance of enormous leechbugs on a mile-high vorrac. At each tapered end of the ovoid a pair of pitted silver hammers pounded the mountain mercilessly, sending tremors into the tunnels below.