He snorted derisively. “You plan on climbing near forty feet?”
“The walls aren’t so smooth, Rool. There are handholds.”
“Daft daft daft. Child, is there no end to your foolishness? Give this up, I beg you, while there’s still time.”
“Bastian,” she called with mindspeech, “I’ve attached a line to something that should stand in for a grapnel. Can you fly it to the top of the tower?”
“Say no,” Rool cried. “Refuse her, for all our sakes.”
“I’ve circled the tower twice, Rool,” the eagle said. “In this, I side with Elora. There is more within than you could sense. I think they have a prisoner.”
“If it’s no one we know, why should we care?”
“If you have to ask,” Elora replied primly, “why bother to explain?”
The eagle’s wings set up a furious backwash as Bastian swooped down to catch the proffered rope and carry it to its destination. Elora crouched in a huddle against the base of the tower, where cut stone merged with the natural substance of the modest bluff on which it stood. She didn’t feel anywhere near as confident as she made herself sound. Her heart pounded, her skin was chill with sweat, from top to toe she felt taut as a full-drawn bow.
She didn’t want to be here. She’d love more than anything to accede to Rool’s wishes and scamper pell-mell for safety. She knew she’d never be able to live with herself if she did.
She put weight on the rope to test how well it was anchored. No slippage. That was good. She’d have to walk the wall, taking consummate care to make no sound of footsteps. At the same time her arms and shoulders would bear the total strain of her climb.
She donned a pair of buckskin gloves, took a breath in a vain attempt to settle stomach and nerves, and lifted herself off the ground.
In fairly short order, she reached the parapet, sliding over it and onto the roof with smooth silence only a cat could best appreciate. She folded herself down by the seam where floor met wall and stayed very small and still, eyes open wide as they stared into the even deeper darkness of the stairwell. There were flickers of light and color from the illuminations farther below, and a mix of sounds that grated on her soul, not so much because of what was being said but from the underlying emotions. She’d never felt hatred in such a measure, nor so eager an anticipation to inflict pain and suffering on another.
Quietly she divested herself of her cloak and took her ax once more in hand, keeping her back flat to the wall as she crept down the curved steps. The darkness was no problem for her MageSight, which allowed her to see the room as clear as broad daylight.
All these aspects of myself I take for granted, she thought suddenly, MageSight, InSight, the ability to speak to the creatures and forces of the world, and to understand them in return—what happens to them once the Deceiver steals away the magic that sustains them?
She made a face at how automatically she had fallen into the trap of assuming that his ultimate triumph was foreordained. It was the tone she’d heard from so many others in talking about the Maizan and their leader, she’d simply followed their lead and assumed it for her own. If that’s how I feel, she told herself acidly, why even bother with a fight? Might as well give in and get things over with. The Deceiver surely wouldn’t mind.
She thrust the thoughts from her, to deal with another time, and picked her way across the floor with consummate care, trusting her feet to avoid any squeaky planks.
The tower had been ransacked as thoroughly as the town beyond had been destroyed. All that could be smashed, had been, the wreckage strewn about in helter-skelter fashion.
From the top of this landing she had a moderate view of the next level. No need for MageSight here, torches and a roaring blaze in the hearth cast more than enough light. Unfortunately for Elora, she couldn’t find all that much to see. She plucked her mirror from its pouch and lay herself flat to the floor, dangling the polished rectangle over the lip of the floor.
Four figures came immediately to view. Two were of Greater Faery, as Rool had told her, tall and lean in the manner of their race, whose outward delicacy of form and feature masked a strength of body that far surpassed the most formidable of Daikini. Their faces possessed an unearthly beauty that would never be mistaken for human, as though the concept itself had been pared to its purest essence. The High Elves, who made up the whole of Greater Faery, carried themselves with a natural hauteur that derived from their opinion of themselves as the greatest of the Realms that composed the Circle of the Flesh. In these two, that aristocratic mien manifested itself as a cruel contempt for the figure that lay bound before them. The irony, Elora could see plainly on their faces, was that they were no less disdainful of the denizen of Lesser Faery who stood with them as their ally.
As glorious as the two elves appeared, the goblin was their opposite. They dressed in fabric so sheer it might have been painted on their bodies. The goblin wore rags, stripped joyously from the corpses of the slain. Goblins were half as tall as Daikini, and were often mistaken because of size and manner for lost children, casting malefic glamours to make them appear to be exceptionally angelic in appearance. Only close up did they reveal the truth about themselves, faces so hideous that even trolls didn’t suffer by comparison. Mouths stuffed more full than any shark’s with teeth, and claws atop every finger and toe. They liked to braid their hair with shards of stone and crystal, honed to razor sharpness, so that they could flay a face to the bone with a sweeping turn of the head.
This one couldn’t hold its glamour, or possibly wasn’t trying very hard, as its countenance tumbled wildly from angel to monster and back again, sometimes presenting itself as a mixture of both. The prisoner endured both presentations without changing his own expression of defiance. He was bent back upon himself over an anvil, bound wrists to ankles so that his body was arched like a bow, with lines about his throat so that the only way he could draw breath was to hold that murderous position. Any attempt to ease the extreme pressure on his spine would strangle him.
He was naked save for a loincloth and Elora could see he hadn’t had an easy time of his captivity. Part of his face was swollen, one eye almost completely shut, and he was covered with a generous scattering of bruises and abrasions, painted with filth and blood. Some of the cuts were fresh, the goblin’s doing, as it casually flicked a hand across a stretch of skin to draw forth more.
“First he fry,” the goblin cackled, “then he die!”
“At the proper time,” one of the elves chided her, “in the proper manner.”
The goblin made a foul noise.
“His sacrifice will place our seal on this land and cast it for all time beyond the Veil. You may toy with him all you wish, so long as you do not disfigure him or inflict any mortal harm. Defy us in this, and his ordeal will pale in comparison to your own.”
For all the expression on the High Elf’s face, he might have been ordering toast for breakfast, yet the goblin cringed as though he’d used a lash to lay her open to the bone.
Elora had seen and heard enough. This had to be stopped, she had no idea how. She was just asking herself where the ogres had gotten to when a hand the size of her head rose into view before her to close on her arm and yank her from her perch.
It let her go as she fell. There was no chance of recovery before she crashed onto the steps, taking the impact mainly across her shoulders, the edge of a step catching her right in the gap between two vertebrae and making a portion of her body go tingly and stiff. Momentum kept her going, but she managed to kick herself forward so that she landed on the floor, close by the anvil where the Daikini lay bound. It wasn’t a gracious entrance, she ended up sprawled on her belly, with more shooting stars before her eyes than she’d ever seen in the heavens.
The ogre closed its massive hand about her head and yanked her up while the goblin waggled her claws in eager anticipation.
Neit
her creature was a great intellect, they hadn’t a clue whom they’d just captured. The High Elves, however, recognized her instantly.
One cried, “Kill her!”
The other, “No!”
That’s when Rool started shooting from the embrasure where Bastian had dropped him. It’s easy to scoff at brownie arrows, for those shafts are as diminutive as their archers. No one, however, sneers at their poisons, which can be so formidable that the merest pinprick can render a full-grown Daikini quite unconscious. Moreover, in extreme circumstances, brownies can imbue their arrows with a portion of their own life force, which in turn allows them to strike with the force of thunderstones.
Where an ogre was concerned, especially when a squeeze of the hand could crush Elora’s skull like a grape, Rool took no chances.
Faster than any eye could follow, three shafts were nocked and released, backed by all the fury the brownie hunter could muster. They left streaks of fire in their wake as they shot across the room. One struck the ogre at the top of his spine, one in the middle, one at the base, and in that instant his great body seemed no more than a rag doll as Rool’s terrible rage swept him the rest of the way to the far wall. He was dead before he struck.
That selfsame moment Elora used her own mastery over fire to smother every flame in the room. Torch, candles, hearth, all went out, right down to the palest coal in the firebox, leaving the room suddenly as black as the deepest Nelwyn mine. She lunged forward, arms rising to block the goblin’s attack with her elbows, Elora moving in too close for the smaller creature to lash at her with its spiked hair. She brought her leg forward in as hard a kick as she could manage and shoved the goblin aside, throwing herself toward the prisoner. The ropes were thick but the knife she yanked from its boot sheath was sharp and parted them with ease. She wasn’t gentle about the rescue. As soon as she could, she hauled the Daikini from the anvil and along the floor to tuck him into the woodbox built into the wall beside the hearth. He made no sound, for which she was grateful, even though it was a rough and bumpy trip. She prayed that didn’t mean she was too late and the Daikini dead.
MageSight was her salvation. She could see. The others, even though their eyesight was generally far superior to Daikini’s, couldn’t make the transition from light to darkness as readily as she. For a few precious moments their blindness was absolute.
She stuffed the handle of her knife into the prisoner’s hand, closed his fingers about it, then pitched herself back into the fray toward where her ax had fallen. The goblin snagged a foot in passing, dropping Elora in an ungainly sprawl that left her limbs tangled or pinned beneath her in a way that prevented a quick recovery. The girl sensed the swish of air as the goblin snapped her head around, hissed in pain as some of the shards sliced through clothes to skin. The goblin’s intent was to stab Elora right through from behind but she never got the chance as another of Rool’s arrows hammered her to the wall. With a hoarse cry, the prisoner reared out of his hidey-hole to plunge the blade she’d left him hilt-deep in the goblin’s breast.
Elora lunged once more for the ax, heard a tumult to the side, yelped in startlement as a pair of struggling bodies descended on her. The two High Elves were at each other’s throat, one as intent on slaying Elora as his companion was in stopping him. Sadly, her defender was the inferior of the pair at a knife fight. Even as the girl caught up her ax, the other elf’s bone dagger brought their battle to an end. The victor was off balance as he turned toward her, poorly placed to parry her attack as she brought the ax around like a mallet, swinging with both hands off her shoulder to strike across the leading edge of his face. She didn’t want him dead, she had far too many questions, and so hit him with the flat of the blade. He bounced once off the floor and didn’t move again.
Elora was on her knees, lungs pumping as hard as her heart, the beginnings of a grin on her face as the realization dawned that she and her friends had won. She’d quite forgotten about the last ogre.
It didn’t bother with the stairs, nor was it the slightest bit fazed by the stone flooring. One breath, all was well. The next, two massive fists punched their way into view, filling the air with pieces of shattered rock of all sizes that sprayed the room as shrapnel. Its roar sounded loud enough to smash the tower itself to bits, and a single sideswipe of its arm was enough to blast the anvil off its mountings and right through the tower’s wall.
Panic nearly drove Elora up the stairs to the parapet, but she couldn’t abandon the life she’d just fought so hard to save. The ogre levered one leg free of the hole it made, pivoting its massive body to keep her in view, marking her as the paramount threat. Rool had not yet responded to its attack and Elora suddenly feared that he might have been hurt by all the flying masonry. The ogre grinned, flashing huge teeth in anticipation of how she’d taste.
All she could think of then was the back room she’d seen under the hill, and what this creature, or another of his kind, had left behind. A stillness settled over her in that moment, a calm such as she had never known. She had lost none of her fear, she’d simply set it aside for the duration. She held the haft easily in her two hands, the ax itself at the ready, cocked over her shoulder, her body centered on the balls of her feet.
Come what may, the ogre would know it had been in a fight.
Bastian got to him first, swooping down the stairway from the roof with his distinctive hunting cry, so loud and piercing in this confined space that it actually hurt to hear it. Even the ogre was distracted. It turned toward the sound but Bastian was too quick for it, and the monster never saw the claws that stripped it of its sight. It screamed, arms flailing in a vain attempt to catch and crush its tormentor. Bastian was already moving clear, with an incredible twist of wings and body, but there was too little room to maneuver. The eagle swerved to avoid a wall, wings beating hard to maintain altitude, generating such a backwash of air that the ogre had no trouble following it to him. A slap caught Bastian square across the breast, only the tips of the ogre’s fingers but more than sufficient to leave the eagle stunned and helpless before it.
One hand marked the eagle’s position by touch, the other rose clenched into a fist to hammer it to a pulp. With a cry of her own, Elora sprang forward, sweeping the ax around to hook the back of the ogre’s knee. She heaved with all her might and tumbled the creature onto its back, but she knew that wouldn’t be enough.
She didn’t consider what had to be done, she merely did it. Muscles conditioned by hours upon hours of pounding iron into steel brought the ax up and over her head, and as the ogre hit the floor she brought its gleaming, well-honed edge down onto its neck.
Now she knew the battle was truly over, well and truly won.
No grin, though, as she released her hold on the ax. There was too much yet to do.
“Rool,” she cried, exertion making her voice sound more husky than normal. “Damn you, brownie, answer when I call—Rool!”
She denied the silence, rushed instead to Bastian’s side, to discover that the eagle had suffered no lasting damage. Bruised, he was, but not broken. The Daikini prisoner wasn’t so fortunate. His knife blow to the goblin’s heart had taken the last of his strength. When Elora tried to find a pulse, his skin was so cold beneath her touch that she was sure he’d perished. To her surprise, though, she found a heartbeat and the ghost of a breath.
Lastly she approached the High Elf.
“Take care, Royal Highness,” Rool cautioned. There was blood on the brownie’s face and tunic, but no weakness to the way he held himself, or to the bow drawn and leveled at the elf.
Hearing the honorific, the elf spat.
“He’s some piece of work, this one is,” Rool continued.
“He doesn’t look so well, Rool.”
“He’s dying.”
“You have slain me,” the elf said, his voice thready, “Cherlindrea’s Bane.”
“Don’t call me that,” Elora replied
sharply, before demanding of Rool, “What are you talking about, I hardly touched him.”
“You drew blood.”
“So what if I did? It couldn’t have been more than a scratch.”
“That blade is forged steel, Elora, anathema to such as he.”
“Truly,” the elf told her, “you are the destroyer.”
“No!”
“You are the Deceiver, who promises salvation yet will bring about the end of us.”
“No!”
“Compared to such as you, Bavmorda was a blessing.”
With each phrase, the light in his eyes grew more faint. Those last words took his last breath.
Elora didn’t seem to notice. She stood before him, just beyond his reach, glaring at him with such furious intensity that it was as if she could bring him back to life by sheer force of will so he could hear her one last denial. So she could make him believe it.
Rool lowered his bow, cast about for a way off the step he was standing on, to cross over to the elf and close his eyes. Elora was there first, and when she had seen to that elf she did the same for his companion, offering a quiet thanks for his sacrifice on her behalf.
“I told you,” Rool said when she found his gaze. He’d allowed himself to slump into the seam formed where step met wall and stifled a monstrous yawn as his body began to demand payback for the strain he’d put on it.
“He called me the Deceiver. And that other thing, about Bavmorda—!”
“Her rule was harsh, Elora Danan, but there was a structure to her world. Rules that ensured a measure of survival and, for some, prosperity. It wasn’t pleasant, but it was dependable. By comparison, the world we now inhabit is nothing but a chaos.”
“We’re trying to make things better, Rool!”
“I know. So did that poor soul.” And he indicated the other elf, lying at Elora’s feet.
“This is so wrong,” she said fiercely. “This is not what I thought things were supposed to be. This is not how the world should be!”
Shadow Dawn Page 15