“Close the hatch behind me, and get dressed before you come down,” I told Elin. “We’ll probably need you to heal.”
“Right,” she nodded. “I’ll be down in just a minute.”
A glance through the hatch showed nothing but the deck below, so I wrapped myself in a force shield and jumped through.
An enormous fist of stone intercepted me halfway to the floor, and smashed me into the back of the bridge so hard it dented the bulkhead.
The whole armored windshield at the front of the bridge was gone, torn away by what looked like some kind of stone golem. The giant construct was crouched over the front of the ship, peering in through the hole. But that wasn’t the only threat. In the darkness outside blasts of flamer fire showed the girls squared off against a bunch of short figures covered in bulky metal armor.
In the moment it took me to take in that much the golem opened its jaws, and a blast of noxious vapors roared out to surround me. I choked. My eyes burned, and I couldn’t breathe. Tear gas? Damn it, I was going to get killed at this rate.
I threw myself into the cold air rolling in from outside. Another tremendous blow caught me in midair, and sent me skipping across the ground and out into empty space. I fell, bouncing over boulders and through bushes, until I finally landed in a snowdrift.
My coat and safe fall enchantments negated the impacts, but it was disorienting as hell. I just laid there for a moment, letting my force shield collapse so I could grab a lungful of clean air while I healed my eyes.
Then I reformed it, and sat up.
The blizzard was still going full blast, cutting visibility to nearly zero. At least the steep slope told me which direction the top of the hill was in, but climbing in a gale wasn’t going to be easy. I shivered. Damn it, maybe I should have taken a minute to get fully dressed. The warmth spell on my coat wasn’t enough protection against this level of cold.
No, there was no time to worry about that. I might feel like I was freezing, but my amulet would keep the cold from doing any real damage. I needed to get my ass back in the fight.
I had to do most of the work with magic, holding myself against the rocky ground and shaping handholds as I went. It took long minutes to climb back up the hill, worrying the whole way. By the time I reached the top I was cursing under my breath. Were the girls alright? If something happened to them… well, I’d just have to make sure it didn’t. They were tough, and there isn’t much I can’t heal. They’d be alright.
I pulled myself over the edge of the hilltop, and looked around as best I could. Erratic flashes of fire lit the darkness in the distance, along with weaker glows that reminded me of Elin’s faerie fire. I could vaguely make out the bulk of the Intrepid through the blowing snow, with the hulking figures of several golems around it. Beyond that, I had no idea what was going on.
Well, killing the enemy is generally a good move. I readied my weapons, and headed for the nearest flash of fire.
I found a roasted body in the snow, and rolled it over. Bearded face, burly as hell and maybe four feet tall. I would have said dwarf, but he also had a pretty substantial pair of tusks jutting up from his lower jaw. Whatever he was, the heavy plate armor he wore hadn’t been much protection against a flamer. The metal was still hot to the touch.
A bellow and a distinctly feminine war cry drew my attention. I hurried towards the sound. A snow flurry blinded me for a moment, and then I found Daria wrestling with two more of the creatures. Her flamer lay broken in the snow, next to a bloody body with long hair.
She kicked one of her opponents in the face, rocking him back and giving her a chance to stab the other one with her force blade.
“Die, you murdering bastard,” she screamed. “Die! Die! Why won’t you die!”
Her force blade just fizzled out when it struck the creature’s armor, doing no damage at all. It must be enchanted with a protection against magic, but she was too far gone to notice. Her opponent punched her in the face with one armored fist, and his buddy was coming back in with a rope in his hands.
I thumbed Grinder to life, and rushed in to lay a wild blow across rope guy’s chest as he turned in surprise. Sure enough the saw blades fizzled and reformed instead of biting, but the plasma in my weapon’s blade left the heavy steel breastplate glowing orange with heat. He stumbled back, screaming in agony as his own armor cooked him.
I gave him a shot of the plasma jet to make sure, and turned back to find that Daria had thrown her opponent to the ground and was now beating his head against a rock.
His hand curled into a fist, and a dagger popped out of a sheath on his forearm. He stabbed her in the belly, and pulled his hand back to do it again.
“Daria!”
I threw my earth talisman at him. The lump of stone became a manacle midflight, wrapping around his wrist and pulling down to pin it to the ground.
Daria ignored her injury, and kept bashing. I had to pull her off him so I could roast him with a plasma jet. Then she threw herself against me.
“He killed Embla!” She wailed.
“The fuck he did. Her head’s still in one piece, she’s not dying on my watch. Pull yourself together, Daria.”
I stopped her bleeding, and knelt over Embla. Half the bones in the poor girl’s body were pulverized, and she wasn’t breathing. She must have gotten hit by one of the golems. But her heart was still struggling to beat.
I didn’t have time to put her broken body back together right now. I banished the broken bones that had punctured her lungs, stitched them back together and stopped the worst of the bleeding. She jerked, gasped and started breathing again.
“There, that will hold her for a few minutes. Get her to Elin, and she can keep her going until I have time to finish healing her.”
Daria stared at me. “She’s breathing? Good gods. You can raise the dead, milord?”
“No, it just takes longer than you’d think for people to finish dying,” I told her. “Do you know where Cerise went?”
She shook her head. “I can’t see a thing with all this snow. I think I heard her over that way.” She pointed towards the rear of the ship.
“I completely lost my head there, didn’t I?” She went on. “I’m sorry, my lord. I’ll do better.”
Well, I couldn’t really blame her. She was just a city girl with some magical upgrades, and no military training to speak of. But life doesn’t care how justified your mistakes are, and things were looking bad enough without Daria getting herself killed in a fit of berserker rage.
“You’ll have to, because Embla needs you,” I told her. “Stay behind me, carry her back to the ship, and make sure nothing else happens to her until Elin or I can get her healed properly. I’ve got a golem to kill.”
Easier said than done. If these guys had armor that was protected from my magic, the golems probably were too. They were too big to melt with Grinder, and they were too close to the ship for explosives. That left my earth talisman.
I formed it into a heavy iron spike four feet long, growing out of a ball of stone that probably weighed three or four tons. Enough mass that the enchantment strained to lift it all, but that was fine. I pulled deep on the mana from my amulet, grabbed the implement in a fist of force magic, and strode towards the ship.
I’m not sure what I expected to find, but this wasn’t it. Instead of fighting someone, the golem at the front of the ship was busy ripping up the bridge. Several sections of hull plate and support beams were stuffed into a giant sack slung over one of the construct’s shoulders, and it was working another length of aluminum free.
Aluminum. Mithril. It stopped to loot? Golems weren’t smart enough for that, but… was that a hatch on the construct’s back?
I raised the spike I’d made, and slammed it into the golem’s back with all the force magic I could muster. Iron struck stone with a deafening crash, and penetrated. The golem’s back caved in, shattering around the point of impact to reveal a hollow space inside.
The point lodged in the
golem’s breastplate, and I immediately made it sprout a forest of spikes growing out in all directions. There was a muffled cry from somewhere inside the war machine. Then it stopped moving, and slowly toppled over.
I shrunk the talisman back to normal size, and sent a jet of plasma into the opening just to make sure. But there was no sign of Elin. There was a ragged hole where the hatch to the loft should have been, and another where the door to the hold had been ripped off. A swirling mass of that noxious gas filled the hold.
“Stay here for a minute,” I told Daria, and made my shield airtight again. She nodded, and I stepped into the cloud.
I figured no one would expect a threat to come through the cloud at this point, so I turned off Grinder and tried to move quietly. The fumes were opaque enough that it was hard to see, but the hold definitely wasn’t full of people anymore. They must have bailed out the back to get away from the gas. Hopefully my little improvised fort had held up better than the airship.
No such luck.
I emerged from the gas cloud to find that the whole structure had collapsed into mud. Obviously the work of an enemy earth mage. Some asshole had done a pretty good job of ripping the aft end of my ship apart, and the cargo ramp was missing. There were bodies on the ground, a few elves and a whole bunch of the short guys. A golem, too, that looked like it had been cut to pieces. But what caught my attention was the standoff at the far end of the mud patch.
A pair of golems stood to either side of a guy in especially heavy armor, who was holding Sefwin prisoner. She was on her knees, her wrists in shackles behind her back, and he had the blade of a massive war axe at her throat. There were another dozen or so short guys in armor nearby, forming a loose half-circle around their opponents.
Tavrin stood in the middle of the frozen mud patch with a bloody sword in his hand, bleeding from a dozen shallow wounds and looking absolutely murderous. Irithil and half a dozen other elves were with him, which made me wonder where the rest had gone. There weren’t nearly that many bodies on the ground.
Elin was standing next to him, surrounded by a furiously swirling vortex of water. She was bruised and battered, and seeing her made me want to murder every one of these little bastards. But she was on her feet, and apparently making good use of the power source I’d given her.
“-sudden moves, faerie lady,” the guy with the axe was saying. “We wouldn’t want anything to happen to the cute elf girl, would we? The Sons of Ivaldi hold the field today. You can surrender with the elves, or you can walk away, but the mithril skyship is ours.”
Chapter 13
Sons of Ivaldi? Those were the guys who’d made half the magical artifacts in Norse mythology. So they really were dwarves, then.
A couple of them had already noticed me, so there was no point trying to hide. I stepped forward with Grinder in my left hand, and my revolver in the right.
“You have until the count of three to let the girl go and back off, or I’m going to kill every one of you little bastards,” I growled.
“Daniel!” Elin gasped.
“No!” Tavrin said. “Daniel, I won’t risk her life.”
“There’s nothing he can do to her with an axe that I can’t heal,” I said coldly. “One.”
My eyes raked over the enemy formation, looking for openings. I couldn’t give these dwarves a hint that I was concerned about Sefwin, but considering the attitude the dark elves had about kids I doubt Tavrin would forgive me if anything happened to her. Two golems and a dozen dwarves was a lot of enemies to deal with, too. I needed help to pull this off.
Aha. A familiar magic was bleeding into the dwarf leader’s shadow. That’s my girl.
“One wizard against an entire clan of dwarves?” Axe guy scoffed. “Ego won’t bring you victory today. Your vassals have already fallen to our might, and my brothers are carrying them off in chains. Hurry off to Kadur Osh, and maybe you can buy them back on the slave market. Or you can stay here and die beneath the axes of the clan, and we’ll take your mithril ship anyway. Isn’t that right, boys?”
There were grim nods all around, and some of them started chanting. “Kill the wizard, kill the elves, take the mithril for ourselves.”
It was all the distraction Cerise needed.
She seemed to form from the shadows behind axe guy, with her hand already on the haft of his weapon. She wrenched it away from Sefwin’s throat with a grunt of effort.
Sefwin reacted instantly, ducking and twisting out of her captor’s grip like a greased eel. In the blink of an eye she was tumbling away from him, rolling to her feet and dashing for safety. I’d been hoping for something like this, and threw myself forward with a burst of force magic. I managed to get between her and the dwarves just as one of them threw a hand axe at her unprotected back.
The weapon passed through my force field like it wasn’t even there, and the edge sliced through even my coat to cut a nasty gash into my chest. Damn it, was everything the dwarves used immune to magic? At least it had taken most of its momentum to penetrate my barrier coat, but if one of those things hit me in the head this fight was over.
I thumbed Grinder back to life as a distraction, and opened fire on the dwarves with explosive rounds. That disorganized them nicely, and then I wasn’t the only one fighting. A wall of water rushed past me to engulf several dwarves, and a barrage of colorful spells lashed out to strike one of the golems.
The other one opened its maw and vomited out another cloud of that noxious gas they used. I stepped back, and blew the gas cloud away with a burst of force magic. I caught a glimpse of Cerise splitting the head dwarf’s skull with his own axe, but then there were three more dwarves trying to close with me behind raised shields.
An explosive round knocked them on their asses, and I played Grinder’s plasma jet over them. They screamed, and tried to scramble away for a few seconds before the heat overcame them. Then they were down, and I had a moment to see where I was needed.
Apparently I wasn’t.
Elin was floating in the middle of a ball of water twenty feet across, which had completely engulfed one of the golems and was somehow tearing it apart. Tavrin was perched on the other golem’s back with his sword buried in its head, sucking out the magic that animated the war machine. Cerise was merrily carving a bloody swath through the dwarves with their leader’s axe, putting her superhuman strength and blinding speed to good use. The rest of the elves were engaging the dwarves around the periphery of the fight, and while that was a more equal contest they were holding their own.
For a moment I thought the fight was over. Then a feathered shaft sprouted from my chest.
Agony blossomed an instant later, muted by my amulet’s automatic pain block but still as bad as anything I’d ever felt. Acid flooded my veins, a death spell attacked my tissues, and a cacophony of uncontrolled mana tried to scramble my magic.
Fortunately the jamming effect wasn’t strong enough to shut down my amulet. It flooded my body with a tidal wave of indiscriminate healing, fighting the spells that were trying to kill me. Good thing, too, because another wave of dwarves was charging in out of the darkness.
I ignored my injury for a few precious seconds, hosing down the middle of the enemy formation with explosive rounds. Once again their magical defenses proved inadequate against purely physical force, and while their armor was heavy enough to provide some protection it didn’t stop the fiery blasts from knocking them around. A half-dozen shots reduced their dense wedge formation to a disorganized mob, with most of the dwarves blown off their feet while a few others staggered forward unsupported.
The fire in my chest was spreading. I found myself on my knees, with the world starting to spin. I had to get this thing out. I groped at my chest with fingers that were starting to shake.
Sefwin knelt next to me. “The head of the bolt is sticking out of your back,” she said. “I think I can push it all the way through, and get it out.”
“Do it,” I gasped.
She set herself, an
d abruptly threw her slight weight behind the shaft.
“Kyaaa!”
Martial arts crossbow bolt removal? I could swear she’d actually practiced that exact move. It didn’t hurt much with the pain block on, but feeling the shaft sliding through my chest was a damned unpleasant sensation.
Sefwin ducked behind me, set her foot on my back and pulled in one fluid motion.
“Hyaaa!”
The bolt came free, and its destructive spells lost their hold on me. I focused my own healing on the wound for a moment, to stop the bleeding.
A shaped loomed above me. A dwarf with his axe raised to strike. I reached for force magic, realized it wouldn’t do any good, and fumbled for a split second.
Sefwin lunged at him, thrusting towards the eye slits in the dwarf’s helmet with a slender blade that I hadn’t even seen her pick up. He turned his attack into a block, but the move distracted him long enough for me to gather my wits. I grew my earth talisman into a basketball-sized chunk of iron, and slammed it into him.
That worked pretty well. A hundred pounds of iron was too much weight to block, and the dwarves weren’t much good at dodging. Good thing, too, because my attacker had been the first of a whole squad of them. I found myself fighting side by side with Sefwin, frantically smashing away with the talisman in an effort to keep them from closing with me.
We made a pretty good team. My talisman swerved and spun unpredictably, striking one dwarf after another with crushing force. Sefwin ducked and wove around our enemies like some kind of elven Bruce Lee, seemingly unhindered by the shackles binding her wrists together. While their armor was proof against her sword my efforts gave her plenty of openings for fancy moves. Twice, she managed to dart out and stab an enemy through his helm’s eye slits before retreating behind the cover of my talisman. Neither of those dwarves got up again.
But there were too many of them, and I had exactly zero training in any kind of melee combat. A thrown axe bit into my shoulder, and the distraction let one of them get close enough to land a blow on my side with his axe. My coat only partially blunted the force of the blow before the edge cut through, and gave me another deep cut.
Extermination (Daniel Black Book 3) Page 20