Defenders of the Valley

by K. J. Coble

  “You do not hear!” Akrak shrieked and launched from his crouch.

  Surprise should not have been enough to get the drop on an already-tense Groon, but Akrak shot through the flames of the campfire. He was on top of Groon faster than panic, pinning the hobgoblin warlord’s shoulders to the ground with manic strength contorting his emaciated claws into iron bands. Groon struggled, his heart hammering in his barrel chest as he breathed Akrak’s rotting breath and wondered if his corpse would smell so.

  Steel flashed through Akrak’s neck. Black gore jetted into Groon’s face and he flinched, momentarily blinded. The weight on his chest fell away and he erupted to his feet, drawing his blade reflexively and coming to a battle stance. He risked an instant to wipe his eyes clear.

  Vraka stood to one side, breathing heavily, his sword dripping with Akrak’s blood. Other warriors were rushing to the yurt, shouts of alarm spreading across the camp behind them. On the other side of the fire, Akrak’s body twitched, spumes of gore from a stump of neck painting the dirt. The shaman’s head lay a few feet from Groon’s boot in a tangle of blood-matted hair.

  “Curse you for a fool, Vraka!” Groon bellowed, stepping towards the other hobgoblin and jabbing the point of his blade at his chest. “I ought to gut you for a—”

  “My lord...” Vraka breathed, eyes gone wide like twin, yellowy moons.

  Groon turned slowly, as if in a nightmare, hearing the gasps of the warriors around them.

  Akrak’s body struggled to its feet, its neck-stump still frothing gore that speckled transfixed onlookers. It bent and fumbled about the fire, singing fingertips in the blaze without seeming to notice. Groon could not move, stood with his sword clenched in a joint-creaking grasp, unable to raise the weapon in defense as the corpse-thing’s fingers fluttered across the dirt, briefly brushing his boot before they found the decapitated head and clenched it by the hair to lift it. With a sound like gristle squishing between fingertips, Akrak affixed his head to jagged edges of his neck.

  Dead eyes opened.

  Vraka and the other warriors folded to their knees, some whispering prayers to ancestors or deities none claimed to believe in. Groon found some fragment of courage, despite the teeming worms of terror consuming his guts, and met the dead shaman’s gaze.

  “Now will you hear?” Akrak asked in a gurgling voice. Groon wasn’t sure when it happened, but cleaved meat had already flowed together, knitting without a scar.

  “I...” Groon swallowed away terror. “...that is, you spoke of drums?”

  “Yes,” Akrak said in a tone of relief. “The drums...always in my head. They call us, Groon Blood-Drinker. She calls us, she that was and will be again.”

  “Who calls?” Groon asked, his skin writhing to be so close to the resurrected thing.

  “She whose name was forgotten and is remembered.”

  “Calls us to go where?”

  Akrak pointed a frail, bloody arm north. “The Remordan Valley.”

  Chapter Four

  Shadows Lengthen

  A shape of blackness, like animate shadow defined only by the lesser dark around it, pursued Illah through a corridor she recognized as one of the winding passages of the Watch Tower. Screams of dying comrades rent the air as she retreated slowly before the thing’s attacks, parrying relentless blows. She sensed stairs behind her and slowed to negotiate them in retrograde. Her attacker seemed to pick up on the shift in balance and stepped up the fury of its assaults. Illah continued her grim retreat, barely holding the avalanche of strikes at bay.

  The duel had a familiarity about it and she recalled, as she leapt backwards up three stairs to give herself an instant of respite, drills she’d once endured at the hands of mentors seeking to perfect her fighting style.

  “Yes,” the shadow taunted, “we’ve done this before, you and I.”

  The legs are vulnerable, she thought, keeping her guard low, but watch for the high strike.

  The shadow slashed for her right calf. She deflected the blow into the wall then leaned back as the thing broke the lock and hacked at her face, the blade’s edge whistling hardly an inch from her nose. It reversed the stroke with a chop for her shoulder. She blocked the strike and locked blades with the thing. She sought the face of her assailant, so close, its hot breath puffing over her neck, but choking blackness swelled around her, filling the narrow stairwell.

  “Good,” the darkness said. “You have grown beyond what they taught you. You have found a form all your own.”

  Shadow enveloped Illah, pressing in upon her skin, hot and damp. She struggled to breathe. Her pulse roared in her ears.

  “You need them no longer.” The voice came from the dark, came from all around her. She could almost sink in to it. “You are your own individual. Break free. Be with me.”

  Illah’s lungs labored against the crushing, black weight. Like a trapped animal, she thrashed against the dark. But the crossed swords ground closer, her arms shaking with exertion, her heart hammering, hammering. She felt the steps against her shoulder blades as she was folded back.

  A face coalesced from the darkness.

  “I did it all for you, Illah,” Lonadiel’s voice said. “Find freedom in the dark.”

  Illah awoke with a scream, bolting upright. A candle-lit room met her eyes. She sat twisted in sheets drenched with her sweat, stinking of blood and sickness. Pain wracked her body and fever seared under her flesh. Distantly, the sound she’d thought to be her pulse continued, the sound of drums.

  War drums.

  A small girl in formal-looking robes spun from a table, her brown, doe-like eyes gone wide. “Don’t be afraid!” she said, recovering her composure and rushing to Illah’s side.

  “My sword...my things...”

  “We’ve got them.” The girl put her hands on Illah’s arm, pressuring her to lay back. “Don’t worry. Everything is going to be all right.”

  Illah managed a bitter chuckle as she allowed herself to sag into the bed. As if anything could ever be all right again. “Where am I?”

  “The tower of my master,” the girl replied, “the wizard, Jayce Zerron.”

  Illah frowned through rivulets of sweat. “I’ve never heard of—” she shook her head “—it’s not important. How...?”

  “The Arhem clan brought you,” the girl said, dabbing a rag in a wooden bowl of water.

  “Centaurs...” Images rushed through Illah’s skull. She remembered the fight at the creek, the charging shapes her battered, terrified mind could not comprehend. She remembered...

  I can’t stay here! She wrenched upright again, hands fumbling the sheets aside. She saw she was almost naked; saw the bruises and fresh bandages. Pain returned in lances of roaring agony and with a hiss escaping through clenched teeth, Illah fell back against the pillow.

  I cannot stay here...

  “Please, don’t move.” The girl put the wet rag to Illah’s forehead, a sudden and wonderful cool through the sheen of fever-fire. “My master applied poultices and a spell, but the energies need time to work on your wounds and infection.”

  Illah nodded, marshaling her strength before she spoke again. “What is your name?”

  “Danelle,” the girl answered. “I am Master Zerron’s ward and apprentice.”

  “Wizards, are you?” Illah said. “Then you know of us, the Yntuil?”

  “Of course,” Danelle said in a voice that chided Illah’s assumption of human ignorance. “We see few elves in the Valley.” Her brows furrowed as eyes shining of precocious intellect scanned Illah. “You are different, though. I’ve never seen an elf with brown hair.”

  “I am—” Illah winced to have her mixed parentage, a point of considerable controversy among the fey folk, stated so baldly “—half-elfin. My father, such as he must have been, was Man.”

  “I see,” Danelle said. Any hint that she was embarrassed was hidden well behind a gentle, even sad face. “I didn’t know my father, either,” she added in a soft voice.

  Illah smile
d at the strange girl. The expression dissolved as the drumming she’d felt even through her nightmares returned. “What is happening?”

  Danelle glanced at the ceiling, from which dust trickled at the vibrations. “That’s the barbarians. There are hundreds, just outside the village.” She looked at Illah. “The Arhem said they attacked you.”

  “They did,” Illah began to say. She drew in a breath that froze in her lungs as terror clenched her heart. “How long before I am well?”

  “Days, at least,” Danelle answered, her face pinching in concern.

  “Too dammed long.”

  Illah threw her feet out over the edge of the bed and leveraged herself up. The talons of agony latched on at the effort, bit through her frame, held her rigid and trembling as she fought to overcome. Oh...gods...help me. Tears welled at the corners of pinched eyes. Vaguely, she felt Danelle’s hands on her shoulder, easing her back.

  “Down,” Danelle said, her tone going stern. “Rise again and I will put the sleep upon you.”

  Illah managed a grin through pain as she settled against the hay-stuffed mattress. “Oh, you are that powerful, then?”

  “Powerful enough,” the apprentice replied, straightening the sheets.

  Illah clasped Danelle’s forearm and forced the girl to meet her feverish glare. “Then you must help me get out of here,” she whispered. “I cannot stay. It will be the doom of you all.”

  Danelle smiled, pride warming her face. “We may not be Yntuil warrior-priests,” she said, “but we’re rugged enough. And my Master is no country trickster. You will be safe with us.”

  “Safe...” Illah chuckled, meaning to sound sarcastic but the noise coming out a hopeless sob. “There is no such place. He has followed me here.”

  Danelle frowned. “Who?”

  Illah met the girl’s earnest gaze out of the corner of an eye then looked away, couldn’t face her as she said, “No one.” Her mouth pinched at the bitterness of the lie.

  I did it all for you, Lonadiel whispered from the dark.

  JAYCE ZERRON LOOKED down upon the barbarians from the top of his tower. Rain had hidden their approach until dawn, when they began to boil from the tree line and infest the ridge overlooking Edon Village. They had little of an army’s discipline, clustering about campfires, dancing and chanting to drums with no sign of constructing siege works or even a crude palisade.

  But their numbers were formidable.

  Arlen Fletcher folded his arms so tightly around his chest that the thin man looked like he might squeeze the very breath from his lungs. “Damned centaurs! They gave hardly any warning at all!”

  “Calm down, Speaker,” Jayce said. “Panic benefits no one.”

  “Who’s panicking?” Fletcher snapped. He began to pace the battlements of the tower top.

  Jayce hid a sigh of relief to have the man no longer hovering at his shoulder. He eyed the Faces’ line, such as it was, hundreds in a mass teeming with pent-up excitement. Movement in the forest behind them hinted at more coming. There’d be thousands before long. Jayce glanced down into the village, where folk scampered through the streets, some taking to the rooftops to watch the building juggernaut. He heard commotion down by the river and saw some of the fishing boats taking to the water, loners with no families leaving villagers behind to curse their cowardice—or fortune. Scanning dilapidated piers and the few skiffs left behind, Jayce knew there would never be enough craft to ferry even a fraction of Edon’s population to safety.

  “Bastards,” Fletcher said, seeing the runaways.

  “How many able-bodied men are there in the Village?” Jayce asked.

  Fletcher shrugged. “With the weaklings gone, we have perhaps a hundred—if we count the old men and boys.”

  Jayce nodded. “We need to get them into the tower compound. It’s walled and we can make something of a defense within it.”

  Fletcher snorted. “It’s a two-foot wall you had the lads put up to keep their sheep out.”

  “It’s defensible,” Jayce insisted. Years past, in what seemed another man’s life, he had seen less formidable obstacles stymie the finest army of the Old East. But it’s best not to ponder that too long, he thought, recalling on which side he’d stood during that debacle.

  “They’ll roll over us.” Fletcher shivered, crushing himself tighter in his arms.

  Jayce put a hand on the other man’s arm, resisting the urge to add a calming spell to his words. “If your people stay outside, they will. Inside, we can make a fight of it.”

  “For how long?”

  “For as long as we have to,” Jayce answered, letting his voice go hard. No, that’s a mistake. Can’t scare him; I need him. He offered the Speaker a smile. “And you’ll have me with you.”

  Fletcher nodded, seemed to take some strength from Jayce’s offer.

  The tenor of the barbarian cacophony changed. A fresh body of men emerged from behind the line, bawling a war song. Others took up the tune, roaring, hammering drums, letting the Horns of the Hunt blare.

  Jayce had heard of this from the centaurs and from traumatized survivors of the Skinners’ past rampages. To earn their place in the line, the new arrivals would have to prove their zeal with lusty voices and displays of depraved courage. Clots of men sauntered down from the ridgeline, hammering their chests, slashing their arms, bellowing catcalls and challenges. In the village woman shrilled and children cried. The air, even as high up as the tower, stank of panic.

  “Get the people inside the walls,” Jayce said, touching Fletcher’s arm again. “Please hurry.”

  Fletcher turned to go but paused and met Jayce’s gaze. “Look, wizard, I know it hasn’t always been the friendliest between us...”

  “Just go!”

  Fletcher nodded and strode to the trapdoor leading down from the tower top. The door flipped open as he reached it, Danelle emerging from below. She joined Jayce as the Speaker disappeared. Her gaze flicked over the horde for a moment, calculation in her eyes, but strangely no fear. Jayce wasn’t certain if she was refusing to believe what her senses showed her or if she really wasn’t worried.

  “The Yntuil is conscious, Master,” she told him.

  “Good.”

  Jayce closed his eyes, took in the feel of the planes, the currents of energy beneath the matter that was the mortal realm. Barbarian shamans were creatures of instinct, untrained minds responding to the energies the way an animal quivers at the hint of a thunderstorm. They wielded power with brute force and results that were rarely predictable. Occasionally, though, one emerged with dangerous talent.

  There is something out there...some deeper, guiding current, carrying these beasts along like driftwood. He opened his eyes finally, unable to put a finger on the curious sensation.

  “What are we going to do?” Danelle asked, stepping close to him.

  What, indeed. Jayce sighed. I crossed half a continent to find a land where I could just be, away from these endless blood-cycles of destruction. But it is everywhere. The lands of man are sick with it.

  “We’re going to fight.” Jayce turned to her and put his hands on her narrow shoulders. “Get the brazier and bring it up here. Bring components to build an aura. That will be your job. Do you think you can handle it?”

  “Of course, I can, Master.” She grinned with a child’s eagerness.

  “This will be more than summoning minor entities to torment,” he said, taking on the tutor’s stern demeanor. “And it’ll be more than me testing your wards. There is something at the edge of this, Danelle, something that isn’t here to play. Am I clear?”

  “You are,” she replied, the smile falling away at his tone. “What will you be doing during all of this?”

  Jayce turned her as he gestured over the barbarian line. “Do you hear them, child? They sing of blood, war and hell.” He forced a grin. “Well, I’m going to show them that they’ve come to the right place for hell.”

  THE River Imp reached the mouth of the Talos River a day out from
Eredynn. Hills and deep forest beginning to thicken and green with spring shrouded the river banks. Sandstone outcroppings speckled the heights, resembling age-worn battlements that cast jagged shadows across the water.

  Tev’s barked orders rang out over the ship’s deck and set her young crew to lowering the sails while others ran out oars. Muddle strode to the bow with a long pole the muscled brute carried one-handed. He sank the it into the water as the ship slowed, checking the depth, vigilant for sandbars. Midday sunlight colored the half-hobgoblin’s grinning face bright red as he gnawed on his pipe stem.

  “How long to Zerron’s Tower?” Dodso asked, reclined against a gunwale as he whittled a block of wood.

  Vohl, lounging with head rested on arms crossed at his back, his bare feet up on the gunwale beside Dodso, scowled to have his relaxation disturbed. “We’ll reach it in three days, maybe. But we won’t be stopping there until our return trip from Threshold.”

  “What is it you’re bringing him?”

  Vohl’s eyebrows went up. “I thought you didn’t want to know.”

  “Well, I’m part of this little expedition now, aren’t I?” Dodso said. “I guess I thought I should know what I’m getting in trouble for.”

  Vohl shrugged. “In exchange for some Ozerian silk I procured at no small cost last fall, I have a contact from the Glittran Magocracy who’s secured some Whisper Weed.”

  Dodso shook his head and blew out an exasperated breath. “I knew I shouldn’t have asked. You worry about me riling up Aigann...if he finds out you’re trading in the Wizard-Lords’ toys, he’ll call the Inquisition out on you!” He frowned. “So, what’s Zerron need the stuff for?”

  “I don’t know,” Vohl said, leaning back. “He uses it for divination or something like that. I don’t ask, you know?”

  “Uh-huh.” Dodso looked out over the water and frowned. “What are those?”