Defenders of the Valley

by K. J. Coble

Rising-Gale met the man’s eyes, distrust in his gaze that spoke of past quarrels between man and centaur. “They may be.”

  The centaur bearing the body came up and Jayce stepped to his side. A tall, lithe form sagging over his spine, draped in a Arhem blanket of deerskin, fringed at the corners with the multicolored beads females of their tribe preferred. Jayce lifted the blanket and the figure, a woman he saw, groaned. A blood-matted mane of auburn hair dangled feebly from her head. Jayce put a hand to the side of her face and felt the burning beneath the skin of a fever. Gently he drew her hair back to get a look at a bloody tangle of bandages and drew in a shocked breath as he beheld pointed ears.

  “She’s Yntuil.”

  “An elf, yes,” Rising-Gale said without inflection. His people’s relations with the elfin religious order were friendlier than those with humans, but not much more.

  “You said there were fires north,” Jayce said. “Have you had contact with the Watch Tower?”

  “No. We have been hard-pressed just to move our kin out of the defilers’ way.”

  “We’ll need to know how many,” Fletcher said in a rush. “If it’s an uprising, we’ll need to contact Eredynn, summon the Valley Legion.”

  “We need to keep moving,” Rising-Gale said without bothering to hide disdain. “There are not so many of us as there once were.”

  “Oh, what generous neighbors we have!” Fletcher spat.

  Rising-Gale ignored the Speaker, looked instead at Jayce. “May we leave the elf maiden in your care then?”

  “Yes, certainly,” Jayce said. He eased the elf woman from her bearer’s back, groaning at her surprising weight. Holding her in his arms now, he could see she was nearly his height and solid with muscle. “Thank you, friend Taul.”

  “And you, friend Jayce,” Rising-Gale replied with a deep bow that folded his forelegs. The chieftain turned and nodded towards the tree line. The Arhem folk vanished into the gloom as if they’d been images of fancy seen out of the corner of the eye. The chief and his escort wheeled about to follow.

  “Drop off your troubles anytime!” Fletcher called bitterly after them.

  The wounded elf moaned again, said something, a name perhaps. Jayce shifted to better support her weight and caused her head to loll back. Bruises and blood crust obscured what might otherwise be a beautiful face. He looked up to find Taul Rising-Gale gone, leaving the cluster of men shivering in the shroud of rain with their new charge and new fears.

  Chapter Three

  Journeys

  “He’ll be trouble for us,” Muddle said, exhaling a luxuriant plume of pipe smoke as he reclined against the River Imp’s mainmast. The cloud lingered about his head, smelling of spices and nuts—and some said the sweat of slaves on Ylonian plantations who labored under a sultry, semi-tropical sun to bring the mildly-hallucinogenic weed to market.

  Vohl grunted as he tilted a barrel of Westport’s finest upright on the deck of the river ship. Mopping sweat from his brow, he glared at the half-breed. “You could’ve helped with that.”

  “I did it all morning,” Muddle replied, offering Vohl a toothy grin. “I loaded more than any three men.”

  “And you take a trio’s worth in breaks, too, don’t you?”

  Muddle chuckled and jabbed the pipe stem back into his fangs. With another draw on the Ylonian weed, his fiend-like features grew serious. “You didn’t answer my question.”

  “That’s because it wasn’t a question.”

  “Vohl...” Muddle groaned.

  “He’s a friend, all right?” Vohl said, meeting his partner’s gaze with stern eyes. “Your friend, too, I might add. He brought us here, after years of doing other people’s killing for them for a few bloody copper pieces.” Vohl turned to stride back down the boarding ramp where the last of the wine casks waited on the dock for him. Clasping the barrel in calloused hands, he tilted it on its side and rolled it up onto the deck. That completed, he added, “Friendship is worth that, don’t you think?”

  “It’s a good thing we’ve got going here, is all I’m saying.” Muddle shrugged mountainous shoulders. “Be a shame to have to fight our way out of another town after putting down roots.”

  “Nobody’s fighting their way out of anywhere,” Vohl said with a dismissive wave of his hand. But the half-breed’s words clung to the back of his mind the way dung does in hobnails, its stink lingering long after the initial mess. He turned away from Muddle to plant a boot on the gunwale, leaning on his leg as he looked out over Lake Remordan.

  Mist clung to its surface, only now beginning to glimmer with early sunlight. Voices carried disembodied across the still waters, fishermen already at work aboard their small cutters, arguing and jockeying for the best spots. The haze thinned near the docks of Eredynn, the piers sparsely-occupied with local craft, river traders not yet common as spring warmth had only just broken up the ice flows that made travel and trade through the Valley so treacherous in winter.

  Vohl and Muddle had purchased the River Imp to capitalize on that trade, adding revenue that their often cash-strapped tavern couldn’t always promise. She was a plain craft with main and mizzen lateen rigs for travel on the gentle breezes of the lake and a shallow draft for negotiating the shifty sandbars of the Aleil and Talos Rivers that bore most of the Valley’s waterborne traffic. In many ways, her sleek hull reminded Vohl of the galleys that dominated the Pellessian Sea between Ylonia and Thyrria, ones that had carried a much younger Vohl Rhenn with the Legions to far-away and deadly lands. He put a hand to the scarred wood of the gunwale, cherishing the battered but serviceable craft almost as much as his tavern.

  Fishing a hand into his belt purse, Vohl found a bent copper piece that he turned over once in his fingers before flicking into the lake. “For a safe journey,” he whispered to the Voynok, ancient figure of his peasant-roots superstition. Supposedly the disgruntled husband of the Dagda Maur, the creature was a bent, bat-winged fiend of foul and fickle temperaments who ruled the rivers and lakes—and for whom the River Imp was named.

  “Bah!” a voice said from the docks. “Superstitious waste!”

  Vohl smiled and turned. “You’re late.”

  Dodso grinned from the dock. A bulging knapsack nearly as large as he was dangled from one of the gnome’s shoulders. Sweat on his brow showed the effort of carrying it. Hangover colored his huge nose bright red.

  “It doesn’t do to anger the Father of Waters, Dodso,” Vohl said, holding out a hand.

  “Bah, again!” Dodso replied, tossing his sack to Vohl and coming up the ramp. “Spirits and gods; what’s the point of believing in any of them? I didn’t think you did.”

  “One never knows,” Muddle growled from the mainmast.

  “Well, I’ll need to remember to thank one of them for Teelee,” the gnome said as he came to stand on the deck, wiping sleep-crust from bloodshot eyes. “It was only because she woke me at the Imp that I’m here at all, since you reprobates forgot.”

  “I’ll have to remember to fire her,” Vohl said with a chuckle, dropping the knapsack with a clatter.

  “Very funny.” Dodso glanced over the ship. “When do we leave?”

  “Now,” Vohl replied. He turned and called to stern, “Tev!”

  A round man with an over-developed upper body that marked him as a former galley oarsman emerged from the blocky cabin on the after deck. He gave a piercing whistle through the gap where his front teeth had been and a dozen boys who’d been lingering on the pier scrambling up the boarding ramp and set to disembarking the ship.

  Vohl recognized some but not others, probably new recruits, fishermen’s sons lured into his service by the promise of pay in gold—and the sights and sins of the notorious trading post, Threshold, at the northern edge of the Valley where it opened up into the Glittran Wastes. Tev barked at one of the new hands and gave the lad a shot to the rump with his boot. He was Vohl’s First Mate in name, but for all rights and purposes the ship’s true captain.

  “We’ll hug the east ban
k of the lake until reaching the mouth of the Talos,” Vohl told Dodso. “Then it’s northward to Threshold, maybe a week’s time, weather permitting.”

  “Great,” Dodso replied without interest. “Since you so unceremoniously dumped my possessions—” he scooped up his knapsack “—where can I billet this?”

  “By our things,” Vohl said, gesturing to the cluster of packs near the aft cabin.

  Dodso dragged his pack to the pile and set it down. He paused there, his eyes lingering on Muddle’s axe gleaming in the sun and Vohl’s sword sheathed nearby, both gone from their place over the mantle at the Loving Imp. The gnome turned to Vohl. “Is there something I should know?”

  Vohl glanced at Muddle, grinning unpleasantly through pipe smoke as he helped one of the boys run out the mainsail. “Just cautious is all, “Vohl said. He flicked his eyebrows deviously at the gnome. “One never knows what the Father of Waters will bring.”

  THE DOORS OF NOROTHAR Holdfast groaned open and Sarcha’s expedition issued forth. Sarcha squinted in the morning sunlight and took a deep breath, reveling at the green, dewy scents of air not caustic with stone dust, ash, and the stale sweat of blocky dwarven bodies. Before her stretched the mist-wreathed openness of the world and an instinctive part of her rejoiced in its boundlessness.

  Sarcha rode atop the cranky roan Vennitius had loaned her. Behind her tromped a hundred-dwarf column, stooped figures laboring under knapsacks that seemed ridiculously over-sized, helmed heads flashing in the sun as they bobbed to the step, for all the weight seeming light, even energetic. These were younger males, beards full and richly chestnut, brown or fiery red. Though they limited their chatter to the gruff monosyllables of their kind, the corners of their eyes crinkled with pleasure. They quested forth, as their ancestors had, in search of riches and glory, leaving behind the dreary decay of the holdfast and its gloom.

  Rasti Ironforger stood beside one of the doors, speaking in low tones to Clegg Greatclub, the younger dwarf clad for the march. They looked up at Sarcha as she brought her mount to a halt. Behind her, a dwarf foreman barked an order and the column planted their feet as one with a crash of iron-shod boots.

  “A day for new beginnings,” Sarcha said to the dwarf elders.

  “It is, indeed,” Ironforger replied with a nod.

  A cacophony rose from the rear of the column. Sarcha turned in the saddle to see dwarf females and a handful—a pitifully small handful, Sarcha noted—of younglings boil up from the shadows of the holdfast to exchange final goodbyes with their kin. Many of the proud, young males maintained their rigid poses, but a few broke ranks enough for last hugs, occasional soft words, a chubby child hefted up in arms, and once and a while the glitter of quickly-hidden tears.

  “A day and a half to Eredynn,” Clegg Greatclub said. “Two, maybe three more days to Candolum. After that, we’ll need river transport. You have the funds?”

  “I have them,” Sarcha replied coolly. “But I’d like to avoid Eredynn, if possible?”

  Clegg shrugged. “The Old Imperial Highway skirts the city. It may add a little time.”

  “I don’t care.”

  “As you wish.” For an instant, Clegg scanned the parting families, his eyes melancholy as they searched for someone who was apparently not there. He sighed. “Heke does not approve.”

  “Dames,” Ironforger snorted. He clapped the younger dwarf’s shoulder. “She’ll approve when you come back laden with gems to make her eyes sparkle.”

  Sarcha hid a wicked smile. “Our drop off will be fifty miles south of Candolum on the Icing River. It’s cross-country, due southwest from there.”

  “Then we’d best be on the road,” Clegg said. He shook hands with Ironforger and turned to bellow a command to the column. The dwarves shooed away their females and babes as foremen repeated Greatclub’s order. Clegg strode to the head of the column and roared another order. A kettle drum thudded once and the dwarves snapped their feet forward into the first stride of the long march.

  Sarcha lingered by Ironforger as the column passed. “No word of this leaves. We are agreed?”

  “Of course.” Ironforger sounded annoyed.

  “I worry over this fanfare,” Sarcha said, nodded at throngs of waving, sniffling dwarf females. “It’s a lot of tongues that could be wagging.”

  “Then you worry over nothing,” Ironforger replied with a puffing out of his chest. “We are Norothar, Lady Sarcha.”

  Sarcha nodded, as satisfied as she could force herself to be. In Thyrria, planning for months, years it had all seemed so simple. But she could feel the fraying edges of the plan. Failure meant a future more horrid than any of these squat fools could comprehend. She tried to shake away a hint of dread and spurred her horse forward along the column.

  To the beat of the kettle drum, the dwarves struck up a tune. Sarcha’s command of the northern dialects, particularly the dwarven twists on Thyrrian Common, was sketchy, but she could glean the general meaning.

  “Raise your voice, lads of Norothar; To gods of new and old; You plant your feet and shoulder your arms; Due for battles and trials bold...”

  Trials bold, Sarcha thought with an upturn of her lip as she settled at the head of the column. Oh, yes...battles and trials...and gods of new and very old...

  “The bards will sing and the dames will cry; To hear your tales told; We’ll grind the world under iron shod heels; To wrest out its glories and gold...Due for battles and trials bold; There are none that can stop us; There are none so bold; Not even ye gods of new or old...”

  THE CHILLWATER MARCH lay southwest of the Remordan Valley, below a spur of the Labyrinthine Mountains, a frigid, barren stretch left fallow as farmers no longer dared an existence under the constant threat of pirates off the Pellesian Sea. A single, crumbling Imperial Highway had once stretched its narrow length, but hard-pressed to keep its borders stable, Thyrria had stripped the garrisons that once patrolled it. Now overgrowth, mudslides, and the elements had left it a faded path trod only by the desperate.

  The mercenary band of hobgoblin warlord Groon Blood-Drinker was desperate, indeed.

  With the civil wars of the Magocracy of Glittra in the far north at an unusually long lull, work had dried up and Groon had sought his fortunes in the south, gambling hard-won capital on a sea journey. Stories of the plunder to be had, nibbling away the fringes of dwindling Thyrria, had lured him. But he’d lost comrades drowned in treacherous winter storms, had lost more clearing the territory of competing bandit princes. And even more trickled away in the night, now, lost to desertion as the promised caravans and booty never showed.

  Groon sat before the campfire outside his reindeer-hide yurt, trimming a claw to sharpness with a notched knife and regarding what remained of his command. Once the terror of the dead Glittran wizard-lord, Yetwea’s legions, the Blood-Drinkers had dwindled to a cluster of huts sheltering from the wind in the crags of the Labyrinthines, little better than a human peasant hamlet. Sullen, yellow eyes rose over the camp to the once-prosperous trade-way and saw...nothing.

  Always nothing.

  Vraka approached Groon’s campfire with mad Akrak trailing behind, the bent shaman babbling and pointing at rocks that set him to maniacal laughter. Groon groaned and wiped spittle from his fanged lips, tried to ignore hunger pangs. It had been a long time since he’d eaten well.

  It had been a long time since he’d done anything well.

  “Most Deadly One,” Vraka said, bowing as he came before his lord. “Akrak has told me something I think you should know of.”

  Akrak seemed not to have heard Vraka, scuttled instead to the edge of the fire. He stretched a gnarled hand into the flames, murmuring nonsense, and retracted it with a hiss, the motion sending him tumbling onto his back, cackling.

  Groon sheathed his knife and folded his arms. “We should have left this filth in Vasbethen—” he eyed Vraka “—and maybe you, too.”

  Vraka spun and kicked Akrak in his bony backside. “Get up, cur! Tell your lord wh
at it was you saw!”

  Akrak, still cackling and muttering righted himself and crouched on his haunches at the fireside. He had none of the hobgoblin bulk any longer, sinewy limbs wasted to spindly twists like an old tree’s branches, the bright red of healthy goblinoid flesh faded to the rusty brown of dried blood. Upon falling on hard times, the shaman had begun fasting, claiming he sought visions. Groon had despaired, figuring the creature’s mind, already bent by his petty sorceries, had finally teetered off the edge. But a strange new light in his bruise-colored eyes caught Groon’s attention.

  “You hear nothing,” Akrak said. He grinned, exposing rotten gums as he gnashed his teeth. A fang broke off as Groon watched, black blood mingling with spittle that dangled from a split lip. “How can you not hear?”

  “Hear what, you fool?”

  “Like drums...always pounding...always in my head...” Akrak clenched the sides of his skull and moaned. He wobbled, seemed about to fall over, but the eerie light flashed back into his gaze and he regained his composure. “They are the drums of war, the drums of our new glory.” He smiled wide, bleeding and drooling down his chin, down his neck to stain the tatters of his tunic. “She will come!”

  Groon’s palm itched for the handle of his sword. He could not have this, a lunatic wandering the campfires, filling his warriors’ minds with prophesies. They’d be at each others’ throats in no time. They’d be at his.

  “Hear me, Groon Blood-Drinker!” Akrak shrilled, causing batwing ears to tremble. Hobgoblins clustered about other fires looked up at the disturbance. “The gods that were once will be again.”

  Groon tried to meet the maniac’s eyes and had to wrench his gaze away. He glared at Vraka. “Kill him.”

  “But what about—”

  “Kill him,” Groon snarled, coming to his feet, “or I kill you!”

  Vraka blinked and glanced back and forth between his lord and the shaman. He was a huge hobgoblin, red bulges of muscle under often-mended flaps of leather scale armor. But Groon had survived where few had, an average-sized goblinoid of unusual intelligence and exceptional cruelty. Vraka blinked again and half-turned towards Akrak, reaching for his sword.