The Obsidian Mountain Trilogy

by Mercedes Lackey

  “They’re out,” Kellen said to his troop, grimly. “There are multiple exits from the cavern. Let’s go.”

  He could “see” the battlefield nearly as well as Jermayan and Ancaladar could. As Redhelwar had hoped, the sight of their Elven enemy drove the Shadowed Elves to attack recklessly. They swarmed from their cavern like hornets from a nest—and not just from the exit the Elves and Vestakia had first identified. They were burrowing up out of holes concealed by ice high on the mountain as well, attacking the defenders there.

  But Redhelwar did not want to contain them or push them back. He wanted as many of them to come out as would come. So the Elves offered little resistance to the attack of their foes, falling back before them.

  In Redhelwar’s tent, it had seemed a simple plan, with little that could complicate it.

  Kellen’s first hint that things were about to go badly was the arrival of the Deathwings. They’d never flown at night before but suddenly an enormous flock of them appeared.

  Half of them went after Ancaladar. The other half swept in low over the army, through the areas of heaviest fighting, but in a few moments it became clear that to attack the Elves was not their purpose.

  Again and again they swooped down, snatching up the Shadowed Elves by ones and twos and bearing them over the Elven lines and away. Ancaladar could do nothing to stop them; he and Jermayan had their own battle to fight. Any archer not actively engaged in combat shot at the ghostly targets—aiming for the Shadowed Elves, rather than the Deathwings, as the Shadowed Elves were easier to kill—but it didn’t seem to help. If they managed to kill or wound one of the Shadowed Elves, the Deathwing simply dropped its burden and went back for another. And the Deathwings themselves were nearly impossible to kill with simple arrows.

  They have a cache of armor and weapons hidden somewhere else for just this emergency. Kellen knew that with a sudden sinking feeling, without knowing either how he knew it or—worse—knowing how to find it. He only hoped that whatever else the cache contained, it did not contain any of the white rings of metalfire.

  Follow them?

  No.

  It was tempting, but if he pulled his unit out of the outer ring to follow them, he would break the wall of Redhelwar’s defense. And he’d received no clear warning from the Wild Magic that there was a crucial need. It would be the height of folly to go charging off without a direction—leaving a hole in the lines that the others were counting on to be filled.

  And without Jermayan in the sky to tell Redhelwar how the battle was progressing on the ground, Kellen was needed here more than ever. He felt Jermayan and Ancaladar being driven further and further away, leaving Redhelwar essentially blind so far as the battle was concerned.

  Suddenly he knew what he had to do.

  “Ciltesse, take command here. Don’t let them break through, whatever you do.” He touched his spurs lightly to Firareth’s sides, and rode to find Redhelwar.

  He’d gone less than a quarter mile when he encountered Shadowed Elves that had broken through the ring. Their tactics against mounted Knights were savage but effective: they struck first against the destrier, if they could, shattering its legs with heavy clubs, and then springing on the downed Knight, using poison, or acid, or thin-bladed knives to destroy the armor’s defenses and kill the Elf within. Every Knight they killed gained them new Elvensteel weapons as well as eliminating an enemy.

  The Shadowed Elves swarmed toward Kellen and Firareth. Kellen had an instant’s warning as he felt the stallion gather himself. He took in a sharp breath, and a shiver of energy ran through him; not quite fear, but a close relative—

  And then Firareth plunged into the midst of the Shadowed Elves, spinning and striking with hooves and heels and teeth. Kellen struck as well, reaching with his sword what the destrier could not.

  Once—it seemed a long time ago now—Jermayan and Valdien had showed him what an Elven destrier was capable of on the field of battle. Kellen had been sure then that he’d never master the intricate cues that would tell his mount what to do, and in fact, he didn’t know them yet. But Firareth obviously knew exactly what the situation called for, and after Master Belesharon’s training—and Shalkan’s—Kellen could stay in the saddle no matter what his mount chose to do.

  And Elven-made equestrian armor was just as flexible as anything the Elves made for themselves. So he let battle-sight and Firareth tell him what to do.

  It was a dance, a dance in which two moved as one. A deadly dance of hoof and steel, and one that the Shadowed Elves were not prepared for. Firareth might have had some form of battle-sight himself, the way he anticipated what the enemy was going to do next, and met the threat before it could even evolve.

  It was over before the Shadowed Elves realized that they were outclassed and outmaneuvered; not one of them escaped.

  “Good fellow,” Kellen said a few moments later, patting the side of his mount’s neck—armor against armor, but it would have to do. Firareth turned to look at him—with, Kellen imagined, an air of equal approval. Then he snorted, and looked about, head high. The stallion was excited, obviously looking for more targets.

  The Shadowed Elves were trying to break through the line, drawn by the Calling Spell and by the nearness of their enemy. With the arrival of the Deathwings, there was no more question of luring them out—it had become a matter of killing them before they escaped, and everywhere Kellen looked, the fighting was heavy. The skirmishers weren’t armed with the Elven lance, but the line units were, and for all its unwieldiness, it proved their most effective weapon against the Deathwings.

  Kellen saw one Elven Knight stand in his stirrups, heft his lance, and fling it skyward like a javelin. It transfixed the body of one of the Deathwings and brought it crashing to the ground. The others with him rode quickly forward, their mounts trampling the creature until they were sure it was dead.

  The fighting was frenzied now, but Kellen did his best to detour around it. His goal was to reach Redhelwar.

  He found the Elven general on an outcropping of rock overlooking the cavern mouth. Redhelwar was surrounded by his personal guard, and by mounted messengers, whose purpose it was to take orders to the various units engaged in battle.

  “Sir!” he called, to catch the commander’s attention.

  He caught it, all right. The Elven commander turned in his saddle to stare. “Why are you here?” Redhelwar demanded.

  “Jermayan can’t see the battlefield for you,” Kellen said, as his battle-sense and Wildmagery told him just how far they actually were. At the moment Jermayan and Ancaladar were far to the west of Ysterialpoerin. Kellen could locate them as easily as his own right hand. “The Deathwings have driven Ancaladar off. But I can tell you what is happening. The Shadowed Elves are breaking through our lines. And they have weapons and—something—cached somewhere between here and Ysterialpoerin. I don’t know where.”

  “If you can see the battlefield, then tell me what you see,” Redhelwar ordered sharply.

  Automatically, Kellen closed his eyes, responding to the command as if he’d been bespelled himself. For a moment the world seemed to spin, then everything steadied, dreamlike and impossibly tiny, a pattern in his mind, in colors that only Elves could see. As if it were nothing to do with him, as if it did not matter, he heard himself reciting the places where the line was weak, where units had been decoyed out of position—or slain entirely.

  THEY had assumed the numbers of the Shadowed Elves would be similar to what they had encountered in the first cavern—doubled, of course, since they were facing the warriors of two caverns here, but of the same order.

  They’d been wrong.

  There were far more of them here. The Shadowed Elves thrived on darkness and cold. And they’d been preparing for this battle for a very long time. If Redhelwar had fallen into their trap, and lost a third of his force in the nearer cavern, tonight wouldn’t be a battle at all. It would be a slaughter.

  Redhelwar was giving orders to his messengers
now, and they sped off like arrows from an Elven bow, but Kellen didn’t listen. The important thing was to see the picture and report it. Would a time ever come when he could see and fight?

  “They’re behind the line,” Kellen heard himself say. “They’ve really broken through now; they’ve driven a gap in the lines.”

  “Where?”

  “East and north.” Not just the few dozen that the Death-wings had managed to carry over their line, but a number that could pose a serious threat to Ysterialpoerin. “A hundred, perhaps more.” He could see how they’d done it—the long perilous climb over the glacier, the bitter clash with the High Reaches warriors, then down the side of the mountain and into the night.

  “Go. Find them. There’s little more you can do here,” Redhelwar said.

  Kellen opened his eyes, drawing in a deep breath of icy night air, and for a moment the battle spun crazily around him before everything settled again. The world seen only through his human senses seemed oddly flat and simple.

  But now urgency tightened his gut, and he had orders to follow. With a quick salute, he turned Firareth about and rode back to his men.

  The fighting was heavier now, and several times Kellen was delayed, though he went as quickly as he could. By now the skirmishing units had been drawn into the fighting, called up to replace fallen comrades and to draw the ring of Elvensteel tighter around the enemy.

  Kellen located Isinwen—he did not see Ciltesse—at the head of the troop. They had obviously just withdrawn from a clash with the enemy, and were looking about for fresh foes. Isinwen was not riding Cheska, but a strange destrier whose caparison and barding was drenched in blood.

  “Ciltesse?” He did not want to know, yet he must ask.

  “We were separated,” Isinwen replied, voice cracking and hoarse from shouting. “I have not seen him since.”

  There was no time to worry about a single member of the troop. He would either be alive, or dead, and they had a job to do. “Disengage! We have orders! Come with me!”

  Isinwen raised the warhorn to his lips and blew a short call. A few moments later a few more members of Kellen’s troop came riding up, their swords black with blood even in the blue light of the Coldfire. Ciltesse was not among them.

  “Follow!” Kellen called. “They’ve broken through the lines! We’ve orders to stop them!”

  Kellen set a hard pace, and the others followed him in the direction of where the Shadowed Elves had broken through the lines in his battle-vision. Kellen wasn’t sure what their plan was. Escape? To attack Ysterialpoerin? It didn’t matter—whatever they planned, he had to stop it. If he could do no more than warn the defenders of Ysterialpoerin, that would be enough. If this was not completely familiar land, it was familiar enough now, with the Coldfire to help, that he dared take them at a hard canter. They pounded through the soft snow, a growing urgency in him, though no direction as yet.

  By now he’d lost all track of time. Athan had not cast his spell until the moon had risen above the mountains, so the battle had begun several hours after sunset. At a guess, it must be after midnight now, but the clouds were denser than ever. The only illumination was the crowns of blue fire each of them carried with him, casting blurred and changing shadows over the snow and against the trees. Only the nearer trees and undergrowth had any definition at all; a few yards away, everything blurred into an insubstantial misty grey.

  He carried the map of the terrain in his head—half memory of the maps in Redhelwar’s pavilion, half memory of what his battle-sight had shown him. Their path and the path of the fleeing Shadowed Elves should intersect somewhere ahead.

  The forest made pursuit more difficult. Kellen never thought there’d come a time when he’d be wishing for the open icy plains that led up to the nearer cavern, but he did now. He would have been able to see for leagues there, and they could have let the destriers run all-out.

  At last Kellen could sense open space ahead. He raised his hand, slowing the horses to a walk.

  With the Coldfire, they didn’t have the advantage of surprise, but whatever was there, he wanted to see it before they rushed to engage. And the animals could use a breathing space, even if only for a few minutes.

  They reached the edge of the trees.

  Ahead of them stretched a long shallow valley. All was black, without even the shadows of trees to give it shape. In the distance, his battle-sight showed him piles of dirt-covered snow, where the Shadowed Elves had dug all the way down into the frozen ground. Two sets of ropes were attached to something beneath the surface of the snow, and the Shadowed Elves—the ones that the Deathwings had lifted over the lines earlier, he thought—were pulling with all their strength. Axes and shovels, and unused coils of rope, were scattered over the surface, discarded when they were no longer needed.

  Not a weapons cache. Or if that, then more. A tools cache. But why?

  What was buried here that was so important to them that they would dig down through ice and snow and frozen earth to get to it in the middle of a battle? And why now? Why not earlier?

  There was something beneath the ground as well. Kellen couldn’t quite make it out, and knew he didn’t have the time to spend trying. The Shadowed Elves were trying to get to it, which meant it would be very bad for the Elves.

  “I don’t know what they’re doing, but it doesn’t matter. They want what’s there. We must stop them from getting it,” Kellen said to Isinwen—and, with his heart leaping into his throat, gave the signal to charge.

  THEY rode down the valley toward the work party of Shadowed Elves. The second group of Shadowed Elves caught sight of them and began shouting in their strange barking language, running toward them.

  “Isinwen, who has the fastest horse?” Kellen shouted, over the sound of their snow-muffled hoofbeats.

  “Nironoshan’s Cerlocke is fastest,” Isinwen answered without hesitation.

  “Nironoshan—ride to Ysterialpoerin—now—and tell them the Shadowed Elves have broken through our lines. They may expect company!” Kellen ordered at the top of his lungs. His party was outnumbered six to one—at least—and at those odds, it was a more than equal fight. And he dared not assume this was the only group of Shadowed Elves that had broken through Redhelwar’s careful defenses.

  “I go!” Nironoshan spurred Cerlocke off at an angle from the main charge, the pale destrier he rode quickly drawing ahead of the others.

  Kellen expected the Shadowed Elves to go for weapons as his troop bore down on them, but they only increased their desperate hauling on the ropes. Soon he was close enough to see them by Coldfire instead of battle-sight.

  And then to slaughter them.

  It was almost too easy. The only difficult thing for him and his troop was reaching them to attack, as the piles of earth and snow on either side formed a natural bulwark that made them difficult to get to. But even while they were being cut down, the Shadowed Elves would not relinquish the ropes leading down into the pit, not even to defend themselves.

  And a few seconds after the last of them fell dead, the second wave of Shadowed Elves reached the pit’s edge.

  Unlike the others, these were well armed: in the light of the Coldfire, Kellen could see the gleam of looted swords and daggers in their hands.

  “On foot!” Kellen shouted, vaulting from Firareth’s saddle and giving the destrier the command to leave the field. Mounted, the Elves were vulnerable to attacks against their horses—the Shadowed Elves had proven that to them time and again this night.

  On foot, a chance against these greater numbers. Perhaps.

  Once more, his world narrowed to a series of feints and targets, as Kellen’s mind forced his aching cold-stiffened muscles to obey. Each foe he killed was one less for his war brothers to face, and no matter what they did here, Ysterialpoerin was warned.

  In a distant part of his mind—the part that must assess things, even now—he knew the battle was going against them. Time and again he felt his comrades die, and fed his fury at the
ir deaths into the fight. Though it cost him dearly in his exhaustion, he summoned Fire, and set a dozen of the enemy burning like torches.

  But fire was easy to put out in the midst of a snowfield, and in the moment he was distracted by setting the spell, two Shadowed Elves got past his guard, swarming him like starving rats. It was his cloak that saved him as much as his armor—the coldwarg fur was heavy and thick; it tangled their blades, buying him the vital moment he needed to throw them off.

  The ground began to shake.

  Kellen hadn’t thought there was anything that would make a Shadowed Elf break off an attack once one of the creatures had begun. But the two that were attacking him actually cowered back, and in their moment of inattention, Kellen killed them both.

  Suddenly the pit behind him exploded upward and outward as if it were a stopped-up fountain, spewing ice, stone, and earth high into the air.

  And something was rising with it.

  Kellen’s first confused impression was “snake”—and he hated snakes—but this was only as much like a snake as the Deathwings were like true bats.

  It was the white of dirty snow. It had a head vaguely similar to Ancaladar’s, but there all resemblance ended. The eyes were dead black and malignant, the body that of a serpent’s—if a serpent were large enough to swallow bulls without choking. It radiated cold like a palpable force—the temperature dropped quickly enough to make Kellen’s face hurt, and the pooling blood on the bodies of the Shadowed Elves he’d just killed froze solid with an audible crack.

  “Ice-drake!” Sihemand shouted.

  One of the creatures Shadow Mountain had bred in the Lost Lands. They radiated cold and exhaled poison.

  “Get to the horses!” Kellen ordered. Suddenly it was difficult to talk.

  He looked around. The rest of the Shadowed Elves were gone, faded into the darkness. They’d run the moment the ice-drake had burst free.

  And the temperature was still dropping. He’d thought he’d been cold before. Now he knew he’d never known the meaning of the word. The ice-drake radiated a cold as intense and deadly as a forging-furnace’s fire. He backed unsteadily away from the pit. His blood-drenched surcoat was frozen to his armor; it tore like paper when he moved.