“No, Lorace, your birthday is the first day of the Moon of the Lady. In a few days, you are going to turn six years old. Today, I am twelve years old.”
Lorace turned his head toward the window and saw that it was still dark outside, but he squinted at the brightness of a sky full of stars. There was a note of sadness in his brother’s voice rather than one of celebration which Lorace found disturbing, for his mother as well had been growing sad for many days now.
Lorace turning back toward his eldest brother, “Is something wrong, Bartalus?”
“I am going away today. I want to make a bargain with you first.”
“You are leaving? Is that why mother is so sad?” Lorace frowned with concern.
“Yes, and that is why I want to ask you to do something for me, for mother,” Bartalus said with a familiar daring look in his eyes.
“A bargain?” Lorace asked, sitting up in his bed, interested in making a deal with his nodding brother. The last time they made a bargain, Lorace was rewarded a carved wooden sword and all he had to do was keep it a secret. “What do you want?”
“I want you to stay by mother. She is going to be sad for a while and miss me, but I will be fine. You must also promise not to look for me with your sight. Where I go today is a secret. Will you do that?”
“What do I get?” Lorace asked.
“I will share the secret of your first gift with you. It is the best gift of all. Is that a deal?”
“I swear to stand by mother and keep her from being sad,” Lorace said without hesitation.
“And...?” Bartalus prompted with a raising of his dark eyebrows.
“I swear not to look for you with my sight,” Lorace said with a thrust of his hand toward his brother.
Bartalus clasped his hand with a smile. “Thank you, Lorace. Now, the secret I promised you. Reach out and feel the air around you, it is eager to serve you.”
“What? The air?” Lorace asked, curious and confused.
In answer, Bartalus stepped back and struck the wood frame of his bed with a closed fist, shaking Lorace’s bed rudely.
“Hey!”
His eldest brother struck the bed again and again, with a rhythm of alarm and danger.
Lorace started awake, the sending stone beneath him reverberating to a distant pounding rhythm. He set the many questions his dream brought forth aside as around him the dwarves were awakening and putting their palms to the stone, feeling the message that was being sent to them. Tornin still stood beside the fire. It remained early evening, very little time had passed since he shut his eyes.
Oen was the last to wake just as the sending in the stone died away, to travel ever onward through the stone of the world.
“It is a call for aid,” Ralli said with a look of fear crossing his stoic face. “Vlaske K’Brak is under attack! Demons have broken the wards of the gates!”
Lorace’s sight revealed a number of large black demons rushing through the shattered doors on the mountainside high above. The last of them crawled directly over the face of the mountain, not even having used the winding roadway. His fists clenched and he stifled the urge to howl in rage at himself for not searching the mountainside above.
Lorace surprised himself as he barked out commands, “Take up only your weapons and water; we must run to the aid of Vlaske K’Brak. There are many of them!”
He delayed only long enough to ensure that the godstone sphere was still within its satchel when he placed the strap over his neck and shoulder, before he turned and began running up the steeply ascending road.
“It is a day’s journey up this road,” Oen said with apprehension.
“A days walk; we will run.”
“We cannot run straight up this mountain,” Oen argued, already breathing heavily.
“We can and we must, Tornin bears the means,” Lorace said with a gesture towards the tall guardsman’s drawn blade.
For all that their legs were short, the dwarves were hard to keep up with as their churning feet took them effortlessly up the steep road.
“I never looked ahead of us, I never thought the demons were making for Vlaske K’Brak,” Lorace moaned.
Thryk hollered back toward him. “They mean to destroy the forge stone! To stop you, they will destroy our people. You heard what that demon of fire said, you are the one.”
Lorace gritted his teeth at acknowledging Thryk’s words as truth. He was determined to halt these demons before they could exterminate the dwarven hold. He pushed himself to run even harder.
They ran until Oen and Lorace were struggling for breath. When they staggered to a stop, Lorace gestured for Tornin’s sword. The young guardsman handed his glowing sword toward him holding it by the blade. Lorace grasped the hilt, and immediately the runes down its length flared to golden brightness and impossible vitality flowed into him, slowing his heart and relaxing his breathing almost instantly.
Lorace released the hilt and pulled Oen’s hands forth to grasp next. Oen’s reaction was as immediate as Lorace’s, and they took off at a dead run once more in the wake of the apparently tireless dwarves.
“Take as much water as you can,” Oen said, passing a deerskin flask of the precious liquid to Lorace while they ran.
As tempting as it was to look ahead with his sight, he was too wary of the narrow road and the steep drop off. He focused his full attention on willing himself to keep up with the dwarves. Tornin’s long legs were eating up the road effortlessly, but he maintained a position just behind Lorace.
Before too much longer the dwarves began to tire as well. They gladly accepted the offered hilt of Tornin’s blade, restoring them to full vitality.
“I do not doubt now that the gods know the weave of all that is to come,” Oen said with a gesture toward Tornin. “The blessing upon that sword is exactly what destiny required of it. Lord Aran believes strongly in that young man.”
They slowed many more times during their run to share in the vitality of Tornin’s black sword and empty their water flasks. At each such pause or delay, Lorace feared more and more for the defenders ahead. It was near midnight when they arrived before the broken gates of Vlaske K’Brak—their ornately carved stone surfaces cracked and shattered. All gathered around the dark and ominously quiet entry to again clasp the hilt of Defender of the Youngest.
chapter 12
the weight of air
Twenty-Sixth day of the Moon of the Thief
-in Vlaske K’Brak
Oen spoke the words of the Ritual of Light, and a silvery illumination spread out before them, centered upon the priest himself. Its light showed only a few dwarven bodies as they stepped within the grand entryway. Tornin held aloft his black sword and called it into brightness as well. It was enough to prove the fallen dwarves were beyond healing.
They proceeded further into the hold, passing few other bodies. Soon they heard the sounds of combat echoing up the broad passage and hastened their steps toward it. They came to various side passages and found the first living dwarves tending to the wounded. They waved off Oen’s offer to heal, and urged them instead to make all haste to the defense of their people.
“I think they are trying not to kill,” Ralli reasoned as they ran in pursuit. “This limit that the demon of fire spoke of must be influencing them all.”
“They want to destroy the Forge Stone before the last of them is forced back to Nefryt,” Thryk said with dread. “Before they have killed so many that the weight of their victim’s souls pulls them back to their realm.”
“We must hurry!” Lorace cried, breaking into a renewed sprint.
“Will we catch them before they reach the forge?” Tornin asked.
“We must catch the demons before my people discover they can sacrifice themselves to stop them,” Thryk said through gritted teeth. “This is why we run now.”
The sound of many dwarven voices, chanting in battle, rose from below as the broad passage began to descend.
They raced down the passage, dousing
their magical lights when they began to see illumination ahead. The hall turned several times with many side passages, but the sound of combat and chanting was their unerring guide. They rounded a final corner and the hall opened into a broad, level avenue of pillars and archways.
In front of them was a group of large black creatures of nightmare. Nine demons writhed and darted, filling the passage that twenty men could walk abreast. Beyond their twisting forms, a wall of rectangular dwarven shields held fast, overlapping one another so that no warrior was exposed.
“Raise high your shield, be the wall of strength!” the dwarves sang in their tongue of crashing consonants. “Hold them, halt them!”
Lorace tried to comprehend what he saw of the demons. They were hard to single out. Each of them was a different shape, and the glossy blackness of their hide only served to break up their outlines as they shifted among each other—pushing and striking at the wall of shields.
One of the demons kept to the rear of its fellows, setting it closest to Lorace. It had undulating spines that launched off its back to fly like a flock of darting birds. They swooped down at a second group of shielding dwarves beyond the first. The flying spines made several diving attacks to clang off their shields like heavy arrows, before returning to implant themselves back onto their host. The moment they did so, the shields dropped to reveal a robed dwarf who began casting a Ritual of Banishment. Before he could speak more than a few words, however, another volley of spines forced him to duck behind the shields of his defenders once more.
The spines harried the lone priest too much for him to cast any ritual, even the much briefer Ritual of Binding. Lorace discarded the idea of casting the same spell himself, the line of dwarves was far too close—the enveloping planes of force could crush them along with the demons.
Lorace wracked his mind for a solution, knowing any action they took would alert the demons to their presence. As he stood in frantic thought, Ralli, Thryk, Petor, and Tornin arrayed themselves to defend Oen and himself.
Bartalus’ words came to him, “Reach out and feel the air around you, it is eager to serve you.”
He had long been aware of the air and wind. It had bonded with him on his march to Halversome. The air within the dwarven halls had a presence. It was warm with the heat of distant forges, and vibrating with the sound of claws raking on stone and steel. It was alive with the chanting of the dwarven warriors, flowing in and out of their lungs and through passages and shafts all around. It touched everything, with a pressure that sang to Lorace’s awareness, as he reached out to it.
The shimmering bolt that had slain Hurn had split the air before him. No, the air before him had become the bolt. His panic and desperation had squeezed and molded the air into a needle-like spear and drove it through Hurn. It had happened in an instant, without thought or design.
Focusing now upon the air of the hall, Lorace gathered it up with his will. It was eager to obey by him. The air understood the shape that Lorace wished, a tapering spike, like the dwarves vranka, but as long as his arm. He felt more air rush through the halls to fill the void he created. The bolt of compressed air became visible as a watery shimmer reflecting the illumination of the great hall.
Lorace held the bolt before him until it was formed to his satisfaction, then he drove it into the demon of flying spines. He focused his complete will on propelling the bolt as fast as he could, and the effect upon the demon was instantaneous and devastating. Like Hurn, a great hole drove clear through its black body. The ensuing crack of thunderous sound shook the halls of Vlaske K’Brak with its echoes. The surprise on the face of the dwarven priest was visible through the head-sized hole in the demon before its dead body collapsed to the stone floor and its spines fell out of the air.
Lorace breathed heavily from the effort of using his gift, it was strenuous where his gift of sight was effortless. He smiled in satisfaction at what he had achieved. He knew now how the nightmare he had in Halversome had thrown everything in his room into chaos. It was this, his first gift, reacting to his cries.
“Part the wall for the Fist of Steel!” the dwarves sang, renewing the fight while the demons were still confused at this explosive assault from the rear. A gap opened in the shield wall and several dwarven warriors leapt forth.
The hammers, spears, and axes of these emerging dwarves did nothing to the black hide of the demon they assailed, but they did draw it to stoop downward to impale one dwarf on its long spike-hands. Before it could rear back up again, one dwarven attacker, swinging an enormous shining maul, struck it a massive blow upon its bulbous head, felling it. The maul wielder and the remaining dwarven attackers leapt back within the gap in the shield wall, which closed into a solid barrier again. When the demon did not rise, a great cheer went up—two demons felled within a brief span of moments.
Lorace heard the dwarven priest begin a Ritual of Banishment, and called for Oen to do likewise, pointing out a demon that was a mass of tentacles and mouths. It used its tentacles to try to pry apart the shields of the dwarves, severely challenging their strength.
Several of the remaining demons turned toward the foe that threatened them from behind. Ralli, Thryk, and Petor did not bear shields and had to bat aside or evade the claws and limbs that swung at them. One of the larger demons bore down on Tornin with two long, backward-jointed legs that ended in crescent-hooked claws. Everywhere those claws landed they found only empty air as Tornin darted side to side, avoiding the demon’s ponderous strikes.
Once he had regained his breath, Lorace formed another bolt to drive a killing hole through another demon. This particular abomination had been pressing his dwarven companions back with its thick, battering-ram arms. This gave them a reprieve from its onslaught to tighten their defensive formation, but the attack left Lorace even more exhausted.
The next demon to assail them was a bat-winged horror with a low-slung body and a long, serrated tail, which slashed back and forth. Before its tail could slash into the Petor, the demon vanished with a pop of rushing air as the dwarven priest completed his Ritual of Banishment. A moment later, Oen’s casting of the same spell completed, and the fiend of tentacles and mouths likewise vanished.
Only four demons remained and another loud cheer came from a chorus of dwarven throats. Tornin closed in on the claw-legged horror he faced and slashed at its body with his great black sword, but it failed to penetrate the demon’s knobby hide. He dodged back out in a blur.
“Unleash its will, Tornin,” Lorace gasped toward the tall guardsman, who had been holding his sword to a dark quiescence.
Brilliant sunlight flashed in a glowing arc behind the sweep of the black blade. The demon fell dead in two halves, cut from shoulder to crotch with a wound that burned cherry red along its edges. Tornin dropped back beside Lorace to slap the hilt of Defender of the Youngest into his hands. Lorace’s vitality returned while the three remaining demons regrouped and Oen began another Ritual of Banishment.
“Left shields, carry your defense to our allies!” the dwarves sang, and split their shield wall down the middle. The left flank of dwarves charged past the remaining demons to array themselves in front of Lorace and his companions. As they parted and moved across the line of battle, the dwarven warrior with the powerful maul and his fighting comrades, rushed to the legs of one of the remaining demons. Working as a team, they clasped hold of the beast’s backward jointed ankles and heaved to one side, pulling it off balance. The maul wielder leapt onto its back as it fell and charged up to its shoulders to slam his weapon down on the demon’s head, crushing it so hard that the ornate stones of the floor shattered and collapsed beneath it.
Before the new shield wall of dwarves could form up, one of the two remaining brutes disrupted their formation with it mass of long, many-jointed arms. Through this gap, it lunged toward Lorace, but Tornin was there to intercept, his sword tracing an arc of blazing runes as it sliced clean through a reaching appendage.
Thryk bashed another arm aside with
his hammer as Tornin closed with the demon once more, his sword now glowing white with energy. He cut deeply into the demon’s flesh, and it pulled away with a shrill scream. It attempted to fling Tornin back with the slash of another arm, but the guardsman evaded the blow with a flicker of movement.
Tornin advanced on the demon like a storm of light. He slashed apart each intervening arm until he was close enough to remove its horned head in another flash of brilliant sunlight. Now the field was clear of all but the last remaining monstrosity.
The final demon was a huge insect-like form. It moved swiftly on many sturdy legs, the front portion of its body towering above them. Its arms ended in massive crab claws, one long and wickedly sharp, the other broad and heavy. It had been driving at the original dwarven shield wall, beating them back to where the dwarven priest stood, but now it turned, studying the sudden reversal of their onslaught with its intelligent black eyes.
Sufficiently recovered, Lorace formed and launched another bolt, but the demon deflected it into the ceiling with a lightning quick parry of its broad claw. While chunks of stone rained down, the demon charged into Lorace’s shield bearers, knocking a gap in their loose ranks. One dwarf fell back into Oen, interrupting his Ritual of Banishment.
The gleaming black eyes of the demon were intent on Lorace. It had marked him as the prize. He withdrew a step and the demon leaned forward, tracking his every movement while its slavering mouthparts twitched and writhed. Almost too fast to see, it lunged with the long, tapering blade of its other claw, but Tornin matched its speed, parrying the attack and interposing himself between the demon and its target.
The brave maul wielder leaped in to deliver a heavy blow upon the rear of the demon, but his effort did nothing to its hard-shelled body. The demon laughed off the attack and threw the dwarf back with a twitch of a rear leg, bowling several dwarves down, and disrupting their priest from his ritual.
Gifts of Vorallon: 01 - The Final Warden Page 13