by Morgan Rice
CHAPTER THIRTY TWO
Alva stood before the fissure, holding his staff before him, and he could feel his power waning. His arms shook from the hours of effort, and yet still the trolls came, thousands and thousands more, a never-ending river of monsters. Alva knew time was of the essence, now more than ever, and yet, his powers had reached their end. He could not hold them back much longer. The fate of Escalon no longer rested on him, but now, on the Unfinished Sword. If Kyle and Kolva and Alec could restore it in time, then they’d have a chance. If not, all was lost.
Alva struggled with all he had, and yet despite all his efforts, he could no longer hold up his arms. They lowered by themselves, his staff dimming, and as they dropped, he watched with horror as the fissure began to seal again.
There came a great roar as thousands of trolls, invigorated, jumped over the closing fissure, charging right for him. At the same time, the trolls overwhelmed Kyle and Kolva on the rubble of the tower, swarming them from all sides. Their battle, he knew, was lost.
There came yet another shout, and Alva spun and was horrified to see Vesuvius himself appear, surprising him, charging him from behind as he led thousands more trolls. Vesuvius had clearly circled around and waited for the perfect moment to attack. In that moment, Alva knew his life, after centuries on this planet, was over. He could no longer withstand an attack by an entire nation of trolls on his own.
Alva wielded his staff as the first wave of trolls came, stepping forward and slashing. With a great cracking noise he knocked a dozen of them back in a single blow. He spun and swung again, and felled more.
Yet still they came, thousands upon thousands, snarling, eyes red, filled with bloodlust. Even Kyle and Kolva could not hold them back anymore—they deflected deadly blows with their staffs, but then they stumbled and fell, overwhelmed. At the same time, Vesuvius broke through the ranks, rushing forward and setting his sights on Alva. Alva watched as Vesuvius raised his immense halberd high and lowered it for his head.
Alva raised his staff, turned it sideways, and blocked it—yet as he did, he heard the sickening noise of his staff cracking in two. Alva stared at the broken shards in disbelief. That which could not be broken had been broken. That could only mean one thing: the heart and soul of Escalon was broken, too. There was no hope left for any of them.
Vesuvius grinned and raised his halberd again, and this time, Alva knew the next blow would kill him.
Alva did not try to resist. He had lived long enough to meet his fate calmly when it came for him. He stood there proudly, greeting the end of his life not with fear, but with resolve. If that was what the universe wanted of him, then so be it.
As Vesuvius stepped forward, suddenly, Alva stumbled, as the earth quaked beneath him. The quaking grew more intense, and Vesuvius and the trolls stumbled along with him. It was a tremendous earthquake, gaining in strength, feeling as if the entire core of the earth were being shook.
Alva fell to the ground, the thousands of trolls with him, wondering what was happening as he tried to regain his equilibrium. And then, suddenly, he realized. The Unfinished Sword. It had been returned to its home. Kyle, Kolva, and Alec had succeeded.
The earth shook and shook, as if all of Escalon were being reborn, and suddenly, there followed a great hissing noise. Alva looked to the north and already on the horizon he could see the glow, growing brighter by the second.
The Flames were being restored.
Alva heard a rumbling, and he looked over and watched the rubble of the tower collapsing upon itself. All that remained of the tower was sinking into the earth. Kyle and Kolva leapt out of the way just in time, before being sucked down with it.
They rushed to his side, as Alva regained his feet and began to feel his own energy return. The three of them raised their staffs, and as one, they all faced off with Vesuvius.
Vesuvius stumbled to his feet and stared back, wide-eyed. For the first time, Alva saw real fear on his face. Clearly, he had not expected this. In the distance, the air was filled with the shrieks of his troll nation, millions of them, being burned alive as they migrated south and were trapped in the new Wall of Flames. Behind them came the cries of millions more trolls, now trapped behind the Flames, trapped in Marda forever, their dreams of invading Escalon crushed for good.
Vesuvius clearly realized in that moment that he was trapped here now, on this side of the Flames, cut off from his nation, his army. That all his hopes and dreams were crushed. That all that remained of his troll army were these few thousands, trapped here inside of Escalon. All demoralized, all knowing they had lost, that they could never return to Marda.
Alva reached out his arms, and as he did, his staff rose in the air and came back together, the two parts mending perfectly as he regained his strength. He, too, felt reborn. Beside him, Kolva and Kyle raised their staffs, and the three of them, with a new energy, faced off with Vesuvius.
Vesuvius raised his halberd, uncertain for the first time. He stared back at them all in shock as the three of them charged. Alva swung first, knocking the halberd from his hands, while Kolva swung his staff and cracked him in the chest. Kyle stepped up and kicked him, knocking him down.
As he lay there, defenseless, Magon stepped forward out of the mist, and rose his palm towards Alva.
Alva nodded to Kyle and Kolva and they turned and ran off into the crowd, pursuing the other trolls as they tried to escape back to the Flames.
Magon stepped forward, and raised his palm, scowling, as if to kill Alva.
But Alva, feeling more powerful than ever, merely stepped forward, took Magon’s hand in his, made a fist and crushed it. Magon shrieked, yet it did little good. Alva kicked him, sending him flying back thirty feet, into the closing fissure, with an awful shriek from hell. Dead.
Alva alone stepped forward and faced Vesuvius. This was his battle to fight. His and his alone.
*
Vesuvius felt a wave of panic for the first time in his life. As he watched the Flames restored, he knew it was over. Everything he had fought for, had lived for, had fallen apart. The Flames, inexplicably, had somehow risen again. This, he had never foreseen. And now, this was a battle he could not win.
Seeing Alva bearing down on him, Vesuvius scrambled to his hands and knees, turned, and for the first time in his life, he fled.
Alva pursued him. As Vesuvius ran, he watched Kyle and Kolva charge into the trolls and swing ferociously, driving what remained of his nation all back, north, for the Flames. His trolls, demoralized, fled, trying foolishly to return to Marda. They all shrieked and fell as Kyle and Kolva caught up with them, felling them one at a time.
Vesuvius ran, too, senselessly back toward Marda, knowing there was no way out yet needing to see it for himself, to see the Flames up close. He burst through a patch of woods, Alva on his heels, and finally he stopped in shock as the great Flames roared before him, glowing, sparking. He could feel their heat on his face even from here.
He stood there staring, aghast. It was true. The Flames had risen once again. His nation was cut off from Escalon, this time, he sensed, for good.
Vesuvius watched as Kyle and Kolva swung their staffs ferociously, smashing trolls on every side, killing them dozens at a time as they sent them into the Flames. No one could stand up to their power, and his trolls were too terrified to do anything but attempt to run back home.
A few trolls finally stopped at the Flames, turned around, and put up a fight. But it was half-hearted. Kyle and Kolva fought like men possessed, destroying what remained of his nation in a dizzying whirl of prowess. He watched them knock out twenty trolls before even one could raise a halberd.
Vesuvius finally stopped himself. He turned, his back to the Flames, cornered in, and faced Alva.
Alva approached calmly, staff before him, as if cornering a wounded deer. Vesuvius stood there, and he felt ready. He was ready to make amends for his lifetime of crimes, for all the raping and pillaging and murder, for all the pain and agony he had inflicted
on others. He knew this day would come. He had just not expected it so soon.
Vesuvius felt a deep regret and shame. He had failed all of Marda, as had his forefathers before him. The trolls would never have Escalon. They would always be contained in Marda.
Yet Vesuvius had one last flash of anger, of defiance. If he was going to die, it would be on his terms. He wouldn’t let Alva have the satisfaction.
As Alva approached, Vesuvius, with one final battle cry, turned and threw himself into the Wall of Flames. He shrieked as he felt himself burning, being consumed alive. He felt demons descending, taking his soul, preparing to drag it into the darkest depths of hell and tear it to bits.
His agony, he knew, had just begun.
CHAPTER THIRTY THREE
Kavos led his men up the icy cliffs of Kos, all of them clinging to the side of the mountain with their ice picks, barely managing to hang in the face of howling winds. Kavos, swaying after a particularly strong gust, glanced over to see Bramthos beside him, and hundreds of his men below, all climbing as fast as they could to beat out the Pandesian army.
The air was filled with the chorus of ice chipping, with the sound of arrowheads and spearheads chipping the ice wall, rising even above the wind, cast by the Pandesians. Kavos looked down and was relieved to see they were out of range of now. The Pandesian army, unable to climb like they could, were powerless at the bottom, only able to fire arrows that fell short or were diverted in the wind. After all, these mountains were for the men of Kos, and the men of Kos were not faint of heart.
Kavos craned his neck and looked back to the horizon and saw the ground filled with men, tens of thousands of them, the entire northern legion of the Pandesian army. Though he had but several hundred men at his disposal, he was unafraid. This, after all, was his terrain. He remembered what his father had once told him: Terrain, not manpower, won wars.
If Duncan could manage to kill the entire southern legion of the Pandesian army in the Gulch, and if Seavig could manage to destroy the Pandesian fleet in Ur, then the final battle against the Pandesians would be waged here, Kavos knew, in these icy mountains of Kos. If he and his men could win this battle, then they would rid the land of the last of the Pandesians, and Escalon would be free once again. It was a dream he harbored with all his heart—and he was determined to make it happen.
Kavos knew what was at stake, and he did not hesitate as he climbed higher and higher, despite his shaking arms, his numb hands, scaling his way up the cliffs like a goat. His muscles burned, tore at him from every side; he could no longer feel his nose, his cheeks, yet still, he did not stop climbing. He would rest when he was dead.
Finally, he reached a broad plateau of ice jutting out from the cliff, the halfway point to his home high above. He collapsed for a moment, lying on it gratefully, arms shaking, as all the others caught up with him. They all lay there, catching their breath, relieved to be alive in the howling wind.
Kavos finally gained his feet, nodded to his men, and they raised long, curved horns from their waists, leaned back, and blew. It was the sound he remembered, the special horns reserved for the warriors of Kos, horns which only fellow men of Kos would understand. The sound echoed over the very cliffs, reaching every contour.
As they sounded them, there came a great rumbling high above. It was the rest of his warriors, he knew, the ones he had left behind to guard his homeland, to act as reserves when the time came. Kavos looked up and as he knew he would, saw hundreds of his men, dressed in battle furs, grabbing their ropes and quickly rappelling down the face of the icy cliffs. They moved like lightning, all heeding his call. They wielded the long, sharp instruments of his people, special weapons forged for centuries by the men of Kos. They resembled pikes, twenty feet long, with long, shiny silver handles and pronged, steel-reinforced tips. They were built to withstand the cold, and to puncture the one thing they had in abundance: ice.
Within moments, they landed beside him, hundreds of men, joining his men on the broad plateau, tripling the size of his force. His men embraced.
Kavos felt all eyes on him. He walked to the edge, joined by Bramthos, and looked down the cliffs. He watched the tens of thousands of Pandesians below pathetically try to climb the cliff. Most slid back two feet for every foot they gained. Yet still, they were foolish enough to come.
“Man the shelf!” Kavos commanded, shouting over the wind.
His men spread out and ran to the edge of the plateau, each grabbing a pike. Kavos grabbed one, too, admiring the weight of the long silver staff. All the others carried the long, heavy instruments in groups of two, but Kavos needed only himself.
Its weight was tremendous, but Kavos finally managed to hoist it to the edge of the cliff. He stood there, face against the howling wind, and he looked left and right to check his men’s positions. He looked up at the massive icicles overhead, hundreds of them, some of them fifty feet long and just as thick. All of them pointing straight down, an overhang over the cliff, like weapons of death. These icicles of death were the crop of Kos.
Kavos looked back down at the Pandesians below, still climbing, oblivious to what was about to come. The time had come to let the terrain do the fighting for him. All his life he had prepared for a day like this.
“NOW!” he cried.
With a shout his men rushed forth with their pikes, Kavos leading the way, Bramthos beside him, and they stabbed the great icicles clinging to the side of the cliff. Kavos stabbed again and again, until the pronged tip began to puncture the thick slabs of ice. Soon, a sharp cracking noise began to spread.
All around them icicles began to separate and fall. There came a whooshing noise, and Kavos felt a great wind rush past.
Kavos looked down and watched as the stalactites fell on the first wave of Pandesian soldiers. Even above the howling of the wind, shrieks began to fill the air. Hundreds of them, halfway up the cliffs, cried out and fell as they were pierced by the ice. Hundreds more, gathered below, were crushed by falling ice and bodies.
Again and again the icicles fell, landing far below with explosions that shook the world, even up here. An avalanche formed as immense ice boulders broke off the mountain and began to roll into the army. Thousands more fled, but not in time, crushed by the mountain of ice and snow.
The Pandesians, panicked, sounded horns and retreated from the mountain face, clearly stunned by the loss of so many men so quickly.
Kavos would not give them time.
“The ice shelf!” Kavos yelled. “Now!”
His men ran all the way to the very edge of the icy plateau they were standing on and, following Kavos’s lead, each man grabbed a rope. They then raised their pikes high and smashed them down on the very shelf they had been standing on.
All at once, the shelf gave way, the massive plateau separating from the mountainside. It fell not straight down, but leaned over sideways, a huge slab of ice, falling far out from the mountain face, like a pancake, coming right down for the Pandesian forces.
Kavos felt the weight of it disappear from beneath him, and with suddenly nothing left to stand on, he held on tight to the rope, as did his men around him. Dangling in mid-air, he looked and watched the entire shelf land on thousands more soldiers, crushing them with a great cloud of ice and snow. There followed an awful rumbling as an enormous cloud of ice spread like a wave, engulfing the rest of the Pandesian army. They tried to run, but could not outrun it. As Kavos watched, thousands more men were crushed.
The Pandesian army was now entirely in panic and disarray. Kavos would not give them time to reassemble.
“MEN!” cried Kavos. “WE FIGHT!”
There came a great cheer as his men joined him in rappelling down the mountain. They slid down to the ground in no time, ran across the ice, and made right for the scattered Pandesian forces. Kavos hurled a javelin, sending it skidding along the ice, and it took out three soldiers, puncturing their legs, before it even slowed.
All around him his men hurled spears, taking out dozen
s of soldiers. They soon closed the gap on the fleeing soldiers, and as they did Kavos drew his sword and threw himself into the enemy, as did the men around him.
They hit the Pandesians like a tidal wave, his several hundred men attacking an army in shock, an army still reeling from the avalanche. Some Pandesians tried to put up a fight, but they slipped on the snow and ice, not used to the terrain as the men of Kos were. They could barely raise a sword against the men of Kos, who hacked down man after man after man as they tore through the remaining forces like a whirlwind.
In but moments, thousands of Pandesians were felled—and the ones who were not, turned and fled.
“Catapults!” Kavos commanded.
His men sounded their horns, this time in a series of short blasts, and they were answered by horns high atop the cliffs. Barely had the answer come when the sky was suddenly filled with the sound of whistling. Kavos did not need to look up to know what it was, but he craned his neck anyway to watch: his other men, high above, as commanded, were unleashing the catapults of ice.
Before them huge boulders of ice fell from the sky like hail, each the size of ten men. Explosions followed, the first with enough power to make the earth quake and send Kavos stumbling off his feet.
Within moments, what remained of the Pandesian army was decimated.
Finally, the catapults stopped, and Kavos cried: “CHARGE!”
Kavos led his men on a charge through the remnants of the army, killing any dazed soldiers they found left.
Before long Kavos reached the Pandesian commander personally, one of the last men alive. The coward turned and ran, and Kavos hurled a sword at his back.
It impaled him, and he fell face first and went skidding across the ice.
Dead.
Kavos’s men let out a great cheer. It was a cheer of victory. A cheer of vengeance. The northern army had been routed.