Friendly Fire

by Dale Lucas

  “This is why they hate us,” the watchwarden said, seeming to address only Eldgrim, and no one else. “We break before we bend. We’d rather die fighting than change and live in peace.”

  Eldgrim stepped forward, closing the distance between him and Torval. He held out his hand and let his oppressive gaze sweep over the captain and his gathered guardsmen.

  “Someone give me their sword,” the ethnarch commanded. “Let me see this forsaken outcast silenced.”

  “Husband,” Leffi said, and there was real love in her voice, sincere worry. “Kill him and we’ll have the whole city in arms against us.”

  “Probably not, milady,” Torval said, still staring at Eldgrim. “You overestimate my importance.”

  “Give him what he wants,” Leffi continued, still addressing the ethnarch. “End this.”

  Bjalki waited, reminding himself to inhale and exhale with each passing silent moment. Gods, how had it all spiraled so far out of control?

  Eldgrim licked his lips. “Your son will be delivered to you, once he’s returned from his day’s work,” he said to Torval. “But let this be the end of his place among us, as well as yours. If you take him, under these terms, he will never again be welcome among us, nor shall you, nor shall any who share your blood. Dwarven tradition has been challenged once too often by you, Son of Jarvi. Henceforth there shall be no room for you or for your whole blighted line within it.”

  Torval raised his head, studied the lot of them for a moment, as if he hoped—or expected—someone to counter Eldgrim’s pronouncement. No one did. Bjalki was especially ashamed of himself. He knew that all of this—the conflict, the bitterness, the inability to forgive or forget—was wrong. Why could they not simply give him what he asked? Why could they not understand that the watchwarden only feared for the safety of his son? And that he was right to do so?

  Because this is not our way, he realized. Negotiations, capitulations, compromises … none of these are the dwarven way. Our codes and mandates stand, unchallenged, from the holy scrolls, and unbending dwarves wielding power like a hammer on an anvil—dwarves like Eldgrim—make sure that all challenges to that way are shattered, utterly, before they can change us.

  And why could Bjalki himself not find the strength to speak his mind, and shame them all into the right course of action?

  “Your decision will cause my boy much grief,” Torval said finally. “Myself? Not so much. Piss on the lot of you.”

  He spat on the floor then, turned, and left the audience chamber. A long silence fell upon them in his absence.

  “My lord,” Godrumm finally said. Bjalki could not tell if he was concerned about the ethnarch or asking permission for some unspoken action.

  “Leave him be,” Eldgrim said. “What concern is it of ours what one exile does with his whelp? In any case, Captain, you have more important things to do.”

  Godrumm looked as confused as Bjalki felt. “More important …?”

  “The Swords of Eld shall take to the streets,” Eldgrim said. “Liveried, armed, expressly under my orders.”

  “Husband,” Leffi said.

  “Silence!” the ethnarch snapped. “You are fortunate, good wife—so fortunate—that I can forgive weakness and folly in you, no matter how great.”

  The veiled threat in his voice—the clear disdain—kept the Lady Leffi silent.

  “Now,” Eldgrim continued, “I don’t give a fig for what that bastard does with his own brood, or on his watch for this city, but the dwarves in this domain are my responsibility! Curse the wardwatch, curse the city guard, curse the whole bloody Council of Patriarchs and Circle of Alders—I will not let my people be threatened! If those longshanked bastards out there want a war, we’ll give them one.”

  Bjalki felt sick. He looked to Godrumm. The eyes of the captain of the guard betrayed his hesitation, even if his words did not.

  “Your orders, then?” the captain asked.

  “Take to the streets,” Eldgrim said. “Day and night. The only business humans have among us is to trade coin for goods—that’s all. Any one of them so much as spits in the mud or utters a harsh word during a haggle, I want them broken and ejected from the quarter, so that their fellows can see what happens when our people are not respected! Am I understood?”

  “As you command, lord,” Godrumm said with a nod.

  “As you command, lord,” the guards parroted.

  Bjalki turned back to the table and hung his head. They were going to start a war in the streets. What should he do? What could he do?

  The Kothrum, he thought. It still has men to hunt, retribution to deliver. Perhaps—just perhaps—I can finish this. If I can send it after the rest of them—all of them—tonight and provide Eldgrim with proof that the perpetrators have been punished …

  What then? Eldgrim would relent? The ramping tension in the city could be dispersed?

  No. This can’t be the way. More death—more blood—cannot be the way, even if it’s the blood of the guilty.

  But standing there, listening as Eldgrim barked commands at the Swords of Eld, then turned on his wife and his councilors and gave them each a tongue-lashing in turn, all his fury and ire directed at them and what he took to be their disloyal hearts, Bjalki started to realize that more death, more blood, was, in fact, the only way.

  Let the Kothrum lay their heads at his feet, he thought sickly. Let him see the beast, and its filthy work, in all its hideous and awesome glory.

  Perhaps that is all that will settle him … all that will silence him …

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX

  Einar Egulsson, sergeant in the Swords of Eld, was one hundred and twenty one years old. By dwarven reckoning that meant he was well out of adolescence, but still young and untried. He boasted neither wife nor children, for he had spent the last several years as a member of the ethnarch’s elite house guard, hoping that such a posting could, in the fullness of time, win him trust and respect sufficient to return to the Ironwalls and his renowned warrior clan. Serving an ethnarch, wearing the livery, proving one’s mettle and loyalty, were all honorable undertakings, after all, even if they were not terribly exciting.

  Presently, for instance, he stood stock-still on a street corner in the Warrens, on the lookout for malfeasance. The dwarves of his squad were spread out around him, having adopted a similar stance and mien: shoulders squared, weapons at their sides, raptors’ gazes scanning the knotted streets for any threat of violence. Such work—police work—was, in Einar’s estimation, far beneath a warrior of his quality, or the combined quality of his squad. But this was their duty, as ordered by the ethnarch and their captain. Patrol the streets, keep the peace, meet all hostility or wrongdoing with force and fury.

  A war hammer to squash a gnat, Einar thought. But his was not to question. His was to obey. And he would obey, for there was no other path to honor, glory, and a journey home.

  It was after dark, and the streets of the dwarven quarter were subsiding toward emptiness and silence. Einar was certain that the night would prove so banal and unexciting that he might not make it ’til sunrise with his sanity intact.

  That’s when he saw the man.

  There was nothing special about him, no singular quality of appearance or movement that would mark him as special (and all the tall folk looked alike to Einar, anyway—gangly things, with their long, sticklike legs and almost dainty feet). This man walked alone, singing low to himself some old drinking song from the bygone days of his father or grandfathers. All around the strolling man, activity unfolded in the little beer halls and taverns that lined the avenue, interspersed with a number of shops that had been closed and barred for the night, their windows gaping into the cold, wintery streets like staring, somnambulant eyes. The man moved in a more or less straight line, right down the center of the deserted street, heading, apparently, toward a fountain that stood alone in the little square at its far end.

  He’s drunk, Einar thought. That bloody longshanks is going to fall headlong into
that icy water, I’ll bet, and we’ll have to fish him out.

  The man reached the fountain. He stood for a time, seeming to study it. Finally, after a good, long survey of the fountain—one of hundreds in the city, neither its most memorable nor its largest, nor even its most frequented, Einar wagered—the man stepped up onto the stone lip of that fountain, quickly unlaced his trousers, pulled out his tackle, and loosed a strong, yellow, steaming stream of piss into the water of the fountain.

  Einar was frozen by shock for a moment—just a moment—before he finally found his voice.

  “You there!” Einar shouted, breaking into a run toward the fountain. Without orders his squad followed behind him, murmuring and snickering among themselves about the man pissing in their fountain, the man they were about to beat bloody and make an example of, the man who had chosen to muck about with the wrong dwarves on this particular night.

  Einar reached the man first. He drew his blade and leveled it.

  “Get down from there!” he commanded. “Just what in the sundry hells do you think you’re doing?”

  The pissing man raised one hand, one finger: Wait, please.

  The others arrived, fanning out around Einar. Einar stepped forward and reached out for the man with one mailed fist.

  “I said, get down from there!” he barked, grabbed a handful of the man’s tunic tail, and yanked. The human toppled from his perch with a yelp and hit the mud a moment later, coughing as the wind was knocked from his body.

  Einar stood over the man and leveled his sword. I cannot believe this, the dwarf thought. I am a warrior—I aim to be a slayer of orcs and the scourge of mountain bandits. I should not be here, arguing with these fool tall folk, especially one with his sluuk dangling about.

  “What did you think you were doing?” Einar demanded of the downed man.

  The man, still on his back, blinked and shrugged a little. “Pissing,” he said, then went about stowing his tackle back in his trousers.

  “That’s a public fountain,” Einar said. “People drink from that.”

  The man struggled to his feet, looking a little perturbed but hardly threatened by the armed dwarven soldiers who now surrounded him.

  “People don’t,” the man said to Einar. “Your kind do … tonker.”

  Einar blinked. Had he really just called him that? To his face? When Einar held a sword and this fool held nothing but his gods-damned trouser snake? Einar stepped forward, feeling a strange mix of furious impatience and honest puzzlement.

  “Go,” Einar finally said. “I’ll forget what I’ve seen, and I’ll forget what you said.”

  The man looked around as though searching for someone to back him up. There were none of his kind apparent. He crossed his arms.

  “I won’t,” he said. “I’ve just had a good piss, and now I’m eager for a little tot and tipple. Where are the brothels, pray tell?”

  Einar shook his head. His anger was rising now. Once more he leveled his sword and shook it as he spoke, to punctuate his orders. “There are no brothels here. Now, you need to—”

  “Not a one?” the man asked incredulously. “Are you all eunuchs? I know you’ve got womenfolk! Where are you hiding them?”

  “Now see here,” Einar began.

  The man lunged and spat in Einar’s face. Einar had barely registered the insult before the pissing man turned and broke into a desperate sprint.

  I’ll kill him, Einar thought, wiping the gob of phlegm and saliva from his face. Then, without even giving orders to his men to fall in behind him or follow their prey, he pursued. A moment later he heard his three squad mates pounding the mud in his wake.

  The pissing man hurtled, fast and loose, toward the far end of the street. Once Einar caught their quarry glancing back over his shoulder, a peculiar look on his flushed face.

  He’s not frightened, Einar thought, but smiling. There’s something wrong here—

  Then the fugitive cut right, disappearing from the main street into a long, dark alleyway between two tenements. Einar and his dwarves altered course, their chase never flagging, and Einar’s momentary foreboding was lost in the headlong rush of their pursuit.

  Barreling down the length of that long, narrow alley, the man called back over his shoulder.

  “I’m sure they’re down here!” he shouted to his pursuers. “Those womenfolk of yours! I can smell their mushroom-scented cunnies from a mile off!”

  Einar increased his pace. Behind him the rattle of his fellows’ scale mail told him they matched his speed. Up ahead the alleyway split, like a tree limb with two forks. At the intersection, their quarry rushed into the smaller passage that veered right.

  Einar led his dwarves on, leaning into the turn as he rounded the corner … then skittered to a halt. Frozen and dumbfounded, he struggled mightily to arrest his forward momentum and nearly landed on his face. His three squad mates all slammed into him from behind, bunching them up as a group in the narrow, darkened alleyway, mouths agape, eyes wide.

  There were men in the right-hand fork, waiting for them. Thanks to their dwarven night vision, the lot of them saw their statuesque human frames, their broad shoulders, their dusk-colored cloaks, and their bland, pale masks easily. The pissing man had run right through the cordon of masked marauders and waited on the other side, gasping for breath.

  As Einar stood there, trying to decide how best to extricate himself and his men from this situation while not trading the greater measure of his honor and good name, there came a strange sound just behind them—the scraping of flint on steel. Before Einar could even turn to see what was happening, he heard a breathless whoosh, then saw the alleyway filled with light, heat, and the stink of sulfur and hot pitch. Already suspecting what had transpired, Einar turned to take it in.

  A raging fire now burned just before the intersection of the two forking paths, its high, hungry flames blocking their exit via the main alleyway. A human stood beside those flames, face covered in the same strange mask as their ambushers’. The man stared at Einar and his dwarves, daring them to retrace their steps through the inferno.

  From the left-hand fork, another threat appeared, drawn out of the dark by the firelight: more men, six of them, all masked and cloaked like their silent companions. Einar turned back to face the ambushers before them. He counted six more.

  Three exits, two blocked by the masked men, one by a raging wall of flame. Twelve masked men in all, against him and his three guardsmen. Worse, every one of their adversaries was armed. Most bore blunt melee weapons—hammers, mauls, maces, even stout wooden staves—but a few carried humble swords, long knives, even a woodsman’s ax, every honed edge gleaming horribly in the undulating firelight.

  This is how you die, Einar thought calmly. Tonight you may breathe your last, but make them pay for your murder.

  “Sergeant?” one of his dwarves whispered. “Orders?”

  Einar fell into a half-crouching battle stance and faced the adversaries directly ahead of him.

  “Let us pass,” he said. “We have no quarrel with you.”

  “But we’ve got a quarrel with you,” a masked man at the front of the band said. “With every stinking stump among you.”

  Einar swallowed. One of his soldiers shouted from over his shoulder.

  “Sergeant, they’re coming up behind!”

  “Make them pay dearly to put us on our backs,” Einar said, then charged the knot of men before him. They were ready for his attack and guarded themselves well against it. One or two revealed that they carried shields, and they rushed forward now, lifting those shields to block Einar’s blows and arrest his advance while their companions closed on his undefended flanks.

  A stone’s throw away, Einar’s fellow dwarves had fallen into savage combat with the men from the adjacent alleyway. In moments the muddy floor of the alley, gilded by the lurid fire lit to prevent their retreat, was awash with churned mud and hot blood, clanging and clamoring with the sounds of their voices, their curses, their calls for a
id, the rattle of their scale mail and leather harnesses. Einar’s ears rang with the sound of steel on steel, wood on flesh, bone breaking under heavy blows.

  Einar fought, his compact frame working to his advantage in the cramped space. But the men who beset them knew they had the edge—overwhelming force, along with superior reach. Time and again their ambushers worked in concert, several occupying Einar or one of his men, keeping him pinned while their masked companions sneaked in for furtive blows when the dwarf’s back was turned, his attention drawn elsewhere.

  Einar felt something sweep against his right leg. It knocked something loose, painfully, and down he went, hitting the mud hard on the ruined joint before pitching over and roaring in pain. He tried to hold on to his sword, but someone snatched it from his hands. As the humans closed in around him, their bludgeons rising and falling, their blades poking at him, drawing blood but never daring to give him the blessing of death, of release, Einar rolled and searched and managed to see what had become of his men. He saw broken spears, his dwarves on their knees or on their backs, fighting with ruined weapons or bare hands. In moments the masked marauders would have them subdued, and the killing blows would finally come.

  Curse me, Einar thought. That’s why I caught him smiling! It was a gambit—a trap—all along! I should have anticipated it, suspected it, but instead I led us right—

  Someone screamed. Searching the chaos that hemmed him in, above and beyond the tumult and turmoil, Einar watched as a man’s body arced right through air—through the very flames blocking their retreat—then heard bones crunch as the masked man slammed into an alley wall and slid to the cold, muddy ground, lifeless.

  Everyone froze, man and dwarf, searching every approach to their narrow, muddy little battleground, wondering just what could have yanked that man off his feet and thrown him so forcefully. Einar struggled where he lay, trying to see what, precisely, had happened—who, precisely, was responsible.