by K L Reinhart
Grom’s horn’s, too, were not the sleek antlers that Terak had seen on the pages, but were more like a goat’s whorls. Perhaps the First Creatures were every creature, all rolled into one . . . Terak thought, before a sudden shout brought him slamming back into reality.
“ELF!” It was Vorg, who had fallen back to the others, the three elves, Lord Falan and the guardswoman. There was a sea of dead orcish bodies strewn across the clearing, but his friends were safe for the moment.
Between Vorg’s battle-ax and the grim determination of the others, they had overcome what orcs were already there. But everyone could hear the shrill BWAAR of more of the orcish hunting horns echoing through the woods. They had won a momentary lull in the battle.
But that only gave them enough time to flee, just as Grom had done, Terak saw. He had already gotten to his feet to join the others as they ran into the trees.
4
The Black Keep
Melangel of the Second Family of Elves stumbled and crawled down the last slope of ice and rock that led to her destination: the Black Keep of the Enclave.
The so-called monastery rose from the edge of the Cliffs of Mourn with its heavy blocks of midnight-colored stone. Its sheer walls stood five stories high, a complicated nest of towers rammed inside it, rising over the battlements.
The sight didn’t exactly fill the elvish scout with confidence, but there was a certain sense of relief at seeing the Enclave’s windows glowing with yellow light against the rest of the darkness.
The unnatural darkness. Melangel spat into the cold and frozen earth. The miasma of shadows had blanketed and covered everything around the elf during her pained flight from the Ice Path.
That thing . . . She remembered the brief image of the creature that she had seen emerging from the Plague of Darkness, before its blood-cast tentacles had seized her up and flung her aside like a child’s doll. A demon. A demon-prince.
The Gatekeeper.
It was true. Her mind balked. She had been sent out of the Everdell and into the Tartaruk to find out how advanced the calamity that faced them was—only to find that the calamity was total.
“And now I can’t even get back to the meeting point . . .” Melangel hissed at the pain that clutched at one foot. She had landed badly from the Gatekeeper’s throw and had been certain that it was broken. A simple healing prayer had fixed the bones, but it still felt tender.
And she was cold. Stumbling and crawling through the arctic mountains at the North of the world did that to a body, even one imbued with inhuman vitality like an elf.
But still, she was almost there. The slope was finally leveling out. She skittered to where the broad area of snow and ice sat around the walls, just a little further—
FZT! A sudden flash of blue light, and the elvish scout was knocked back.
“Ach!” She thumped into the cold, gasping as her hand burned. The Black Keep was shielded!
“Oh, for Star’s sake!” she hissed with tears of frustration in her eyes. The Black Keep had closed its domain. There was no way in, and there was no way her warning could get out.
“Hoi! Something’s out there!” Lights and voices suddenly rose from the battlements above her.
More raised voices and the sudden blossom of light as the double-doors of the Enclave were thrown open. Crunching running feet approached her.
“You’re too late, you fools! You’re too late!” Melangel cried out in her impotent rage.
The grim-faced Brothers and Sisters of the Enclave found the snarling elf in the snow, her hands burnt, her skin cracked and frozen. The Magister’s shield around the Enclave was temporarily thrown down in order for the human followers of that cruel path to rush forward to retrieve Melangel.
They found the elf scout hissing and spitting, clutching at the wounds in her side where the Gatekeeper’s poisonous tendrils had caught her. The wounds itched and burned on Melangel’s body, and the elvish scout felt sick.
“Demons! Giant demons are coming!” the scout hissed, sounding panicked and delirious from the cold.
“Get her to Hospitality,” one of the senior sisters, a dark-skinned sharp-eyed woman said.
“But she’s an elf! What is she doing out here?” one of the younger, jumpier Brothers said.
In response, the sister just nodded to the unnatural black fog that completely obscured all of the mountains in front of them. The Fourth Baleful Sign, the Plague of Darkness, had crept out of the vale of the Blood Gate just a few days ago, and the Enclave had closed its doors and waited.
“It doesn’t matter what she is,” the sharp-eyed sister said as she looked at the end of the world. “We’re all Midharans now.”
Soothing enchantments were cast and simple prayer-words were called down by the guards, Brothers, and Sisters to ease Melangel’s seeming delirium. Enough to send her into a near slumber so they could carry her struggling form into the Black Keep, with the Magister’s shield snapping into place as soon as the Keep’s gates were closed.
Melangel was carried through wide halls of more of the same austere black stone, up and down wide avenues of steps. Younger shaven-headed novitiates and acolytes scattered out of the way.
“Get Chief Hospitality!” the guards called.
“Someone call the Magister!”
By the time the elf opened her eyes again to a sense of something approaching peace, she found that she was in a well-lit room of dark stone, the airs scented with sage and thyme. It was one of the Healing Halls of Chief Hospitality, occupied by rows of low wooden beds and attended by more of the black-robed Brothers and Sisters.
“I need to speak to . . . your Magister,” Melangel murmured, still groggy from the many potions and enchantments that had been laid upon her. She did not feel so bone-cold or poisoned as she had before, but there was no magic the Enclave could call down that would alleviate the terrible apprehension in her heart.
The Blood Gate is about to open. I saw the Gatekeeper . . .
“Ease thyself, elf, I will take your concerns to the Magister myself,” said the thin pale human who was the Chief Hospitality of this place. The ruler over all of the domestic doings and the general welfare of the Enclave was an ascetic man, Melangel noticed, as he stepped forward from the shadows.
“No need, Hospitality,” said a different voice. Melangel heard gasps from the working Brothers and Sisters.
From a seemingly normal corner of the room swept a small dark-skinned woman with a completely bald head. The elf’s sharp ears heard a schnikt as some hidden door closed behind her and the other human who had accompanied her.
“Father Jacques,” Melangel breathed. She at least recognized this second human—the sixty-something, stout, bearded man with the four fingers on one hand who was known to the elves of the Everdell Forest as an emissary, diplomat, and spy.
Father Jacques—the Chief External of the Enclave—nodded just once as the Magister took her position by the side of the bed and looked down at the elf.
The Magister was a tiny woman in voluminous black robes, with but a simple circlet of black-glass stones in a necklace to reveal her position. The human’s eyes were as bright and as fierce as ice, sunken into a face that was clearly old. But age had not made her skin sag, instead making it tighter and more constrained, it seemed.
Melangel made a nod of acknowledgement to the woman. The scout could feel the waves of magical power radiating from her. It was a little like walking into Mother Istarion’s presence unexpectedly, Melangel considered—although Istarion’s aura felt nurturing and natural somehow, whereas this human sorceress and leader of the Enclave felt like a storm in full force.
“I saw your man die,” Melangel said simply. She didn’t bother with any preamble or petition for aid. Right now, after what she had seen, Melangel didn’t really feel like it mattered.
“Hmm.” The Magister nodded again. “Brother Rendall.” The human Magister said it like it wasn’t a question—as if she had guessed the fact of the human’s death
already.
“I met him on the Ice Path that leads to the vale of the Blood Gate, and we were attacked,” the scout said, her proud tones cracking only slightly when she considered what it was that she had seen. “We were attacked by the Gatekeeper—”
“Impossible!” burst out Chief Hospitality, taking a step back from the news like it was a physical assault.
His Magister shot him a dark look, and the man pursed his lips.
“Are you sure?” said Father Jacques, pulling from the confines of his robes a small, leather-bound grimoire, its cover encrusted with silver runes and sigils that hurt the elf’s eyes. “Did it look like . . .” he fumbled with the pages, until finding the place he was looking for. “This?”
The book was thrust open before Melangel’s face, and she saw once again the creature that had attacked her and the Brother Rendall. There it was, hunched shoulders and legs as wide as tree-trunks, with a squashed sort of face and two vast, backwards-curling ram’s horns.
“Big glowing eyes, horns?” The scout thumped her head back down on the pillows of her medical bed. “Yeah, that about covers it,” she muttered.
The Magister’s eyes stayed on the elvish scout for a fraction of a second longer, before she abruptly turned on her heel, already shouting orders.
“Call the Chief Arcanum to the battlements. We’re going to need a stronger shield charm. A much stronger shield charm. Chief External? Send your people to the Everdell, to Brecha, Tor—any kingdom and people who will listen. Tell them to muster and to send their armies. Now.”
The Magister and Father Jacques had reached the secret door in the rear of the Healing Halls. As the door swung open before them, the elvish scout heard Magister Inedi’s final words of command.
“And Hospitality? You’d better start gathering bandages, water, and every healing potion you can, and pray that it is enough to keep the Black Keep alive until aid gets here!”
5
Mother Viveni & Malvern’s Point
Terak and the others bounded through the night, their feet running past trees with barks like a lizard’s scales. They ran between boulders seemingly flung from some ancient event.
And still they were followed. Although the orcish horns were distant and muted in these strange southern woods that lay around them, every one of their party could still hear them.
They couldn’t move as fast as the elf would have liked. Not that Terak let his own exhaustion slow him down, or that Vorg appeared to tire at all with his long, bounding strides. Falan, too, appeared galvanized by grim determination.
But Sister Denaal skidded to a halt a little ahead of Terak. He saw the feral elf woman turn and snarl in frustration at her two charges.
The older elf woman and her companion weren’t at ease under these trees like everyone else was. Terak had only ever seen the Second Family before meeting Denaal—and they had moved like moonlight through the Everdell Forest.
“The Fourth!” Denaal muttered darkly, already heading back as Terak paused.
The Fourth Family? Denaal’s words struck Terak’s mind a second later. They had been fighting at Araxia . . . Was that where these two refugees had come from?
And their lord was in league with the Hexan, came the assassin’s next thought. Maybe it was the fact that he had been raised to overcome and outwit those around him, but he couldn’t stop the sudden suspicion that blossomed in his dark heart.
“Mother Viveni?” Denaal said, lightly rushing to the older woman’s side to offer an arm.
“Enough of that! I haven’t lived for two hundred years to be taught how to run!” the Mother said tartly, with all the assumed authority of her position. This woman was a “Mother.”
Like Mother Istarion of Everdell, Terak thought—a particular role in elvish society akin to a Seer, Healer, and Counselor.
Denaal, for her part, hung her head, but Terak saw her ball her fists at the rebuke.
Vorg, however, had no such respect for elvish customs.
“Your old legs don’t run so fast. It’ll make you easy meat!” he said with that characteristic orcish sense of pragmatism.
“You’d do well to mind your mouth, orc!” said the second of Denaal’s charges—the auburn-haired elvish companion to Mother Viveni, dressed in deep purple robes. Vorg just grinned, displaying his yellow fangs.
“Pay no heed, Eosce.” The Mother fixed Vorg with a sharp glance, before flicking her eyes upwards. “We’re almost there, anyway.”
Terak followed the old elf’s glance toward a singular rise of rock that stood proud in the umbral purples and lightening hazes of almost-dawn.
“I thought you wanted me to guide you to the Jatta Trader’s Station?” Denaal said, looking alarmed at this apparent change in her task. “I only agreed to leave my Family because—”
“Because I am a Mother, and your Family has none!” the older elf announced. Terak remembered Denaal’s warband saying something like that before, that even though Denaal was only a Sister and not old enough to assume full authority of their group, she was afforded respect due to the untimely death of their previous matriarch.
“You know the old customs, Sister,” Viveni turned her ire to the savage elf, who, although clearly balking at this imposition by one not even of her Family, was forced to hold her silence.
“Really, ma’am, we need to—” Lord Falan interjected, as another of the orcish war horns blared, a lot closer than before.
“And neither do I need a human one-fifth of my age telling me things!” Viveni said. “Just get us to Malvern’s Point by first light, and we’ll be safe.”
How can you be so sure? Terak would have asked. But, as the orcish war horns turned into distant whoops and calls of guttural voices, he realized that he didn’t have the time for doubts.
“Let’s just hope the old pointy is right!” Vorg muttered heavily as he set off again, running toward the sun.
The ground started to rise under Terak’s feet, and the strange trees started to thin ahead of them. A stitch of exhaustion ripped through Terak’s side, where he had been repeatedly thrown, jumped, or leapt on in the recent battles.
Use it! Use the pain! the elf commanded himself, using the techniques of the Enclave to allow his awareness of the pain to sharpen and increase until it felt like a white-hot line of fury.
Something that I own, does not own me! The elf jumped from crag to crag—just as he heard a reptilian screech.
“Riders!” Vorg boomed, and Terak was already turning in place, his short blade seeming to magically spring to his hand.
There they were, a gaggle of the unsteady, swooping, darting, and sweeping orcish wyvern-riders heading their way over the dark and broken canopy of the trees. In the distance, Terak could see the rise of mountains on the edge of the Southern Plains. They were clustered with green at their base and glittering in the muted grays and blues of pre-dawn with the many waterfalls that fell from their sides. A pall of threading smokes hung over the expanse of the plains from the many orcish incursions.
“We can’t stop!” Mother Viveni was gasping, with her companion Sister Eosce helping her up the rocks. “We have to get to the top by dawn!”
Which is only a little time away . . . Terak measured from the rising light in the sky. But the top of Malvern’s Point wasn’t far either, he saw. It stood completely bare over the last stragglers of scale-trees, with what looked like three or four columns of black rock edging it like a crown.
“Skreee! Skreee!” The wyverns and their hollering riders were closer now. Terak could see one of them already flinging a fire-lance ahead of them, straight down.
“Castellum!” Terak heard Lord Falan shout suddenly, turning to fling one hand upward into the air to use his own, simpler store of natural magic.
A flicker of blue light flashed into the air, to expand into a shell of blue above their heads. The orcish fire-lance exploded against it in an expanding plume of fire, hammering Falan’s protective shield lower to just over him, Mother Vive
ni, and Sister Eosce.
“Hai!” Sister Denaal hissed her elvish battle-mantra as she loosed one of her white arrows straight into the oncoming maw of one of the wyverns. Terak saw the creature buckle and shake, slamming into the rocks of Malvern’s Point just feet below where the savage elf had stood.
“SKREEE!” Suddenly, Terak’s ears were filled with the rush of wings and the scream of a wyvern as one darted low and fast toward him, its serpentine head opening in a maw filled with rows of pointed, needle-sharp teeth.
The assassin reacted. He had no long sword, no pike, only a dagger.
Your body knows what to do . . . The words of the Chief Martial flashed through his mind as he took one bounding step to kick off of the nearest boulder, flinging his body up at the approaching wyvern as it flashed toward him.
One of Terak’s out flung hands managed to catch one of the wyvern’s reins. The elf assassin swung across, directly in front of the orcish rider with his other hand holding the dagger, straight across the orc’s face.
“Gurkh!” There was a flash of green ichor, and the orc fell back. But now Terak was swinging around the other side of the wyvern’s long and undulating neck, with the rein that he had been holding wrapped around the creature’s scales, causing it to jerk and cough.
Terak grabbed at the creature’s shoulder and wing pinions with his legs, clutching onto the side of the tumbling thing with all of his might.
“Rakh!” The blinded orc was pulling himself forward, sweeping one great clawed hand in front to seek the attacker, even with their face a mess of green and black.
Terak struggled to hold onto both rein and wings as the wyvern rose in the air, then sliced downwards, half-choking from the rein constricting its neck.