by K L Reinhart
“We can’t let them find out,” the elf whispered when they were close enough to share words. “We should tell the other Emarii to stay away from the aft-deck.”
“Impossible,” Kol said. “There’s almost sixty of us, and only one boat. It’s only a matter of time before they find out—”
“Elf!” called another voice, surprisingly close, as the small and very rotund figure of Doctor Lars Mendip emerged from the ship’s house just a little way away. There must be an access hatch to the lower decks inside there, Terak realized. Had Lars overheard their conversation?
“Your boat is secure, Doctor,” Terak lied. Just so long as none of us nulls get too close to those ochullax stones, he could have added.
“Hmm,” Lars said heavily, sweating from the excitement of the recent fight. “Good fighting, elf. I saw you spinning and slicing. Whomever taught you knew what they were doing.”
“Thank you, Doctor,” Terak nodded. He wondered whether he should tell the human that he was the only elf to ever be taught at the Black Keep of the Enclave, or whether that would raise too much interest in his abilities.
“Well, I can see both you and the Emarii must be brave,” Lars said, half turning and pausing for a moment. “I didn’t see one of you use your magic . . .” Lars said lightly, although his eyes caught at Terak’s own.
“Magic tires the body and mind, sir,” the elf said immediately and without pause. It was a fact, and everyone knew it, after all. “My tutor taught me to trust in blade and fist first, before magic.” Which was kind of true, as Father Jacques had insisted that he had to become better with his blades and fists than any other with their magic. Terak hoped that he had achieved it, and that Doctor Mendip believed him.
“Hmm. Wise person, your tutor,” the Navigator said briefly before turning back to examine the sail.
Phew! Terak was about to sigh, just as Lars turned back once more.
“Oh, and another thing: if my reckoning is right, then we’re just a little way out from the capital of Brecha. Stars alone know what we’re going to find when we get there.”
Stars alone might know what you’re going to find on your very boat! Terak thought, although he just nodded silently.
13
The Battle of the Neve
We arrived too late, Terak thought from the prow of the Kingsdrake. His bright eyes glared at the horizon as if they were the hardened Enclave daggers first pressed into his hands at ten years old.
If he could, the elf would have stabbed at the unnatural darkness that surrounded the human city he had visited only briefly. But it appeared that someone else had already attacked this place, and with more than just glares.
The capital city-state of Brecha, home of the brave northern huntsmen and bear-guards, was already glowing red.
The cobbled city burned in the northern, snow-flecked night.
“Where are the attackers! Who are they!?” shouted Kol, further down the foredeck of the Kingsdrake. He exhorted his fellow Emarii to greater action in pulling taut the remaining sails and pretty much doing anything that the Doctors Yarl or Lars Mendip ordered.
“Get!” The orders of Lars right now were for every Ixchting storyteller or Tor citizen or Elder Being to get out of his way as he huffed to the side rail, extending a copper and wood telescope. “Out of the way! Let me see!”
And, after just the briefest moment, the Master and Chief of the Royal Guild gasped and flinched backward. “What!?”
“What is it, man! Tell us!” Kol was barking, limping to the man’s side. Terak merely tightened the straps on his gloves and flexed his hands.
“It’s an Ixchting dragon!” Lars breathed, aghast.
“Yes!” Terak beamed, his excitement overcoming his usual reserve.
“What!?” Lars looked incredulous at the thin elf. “You think a bleeding dragon is a good thing!? Look—half of Brecha is burning!”
“Are you sure?” Kol was saying, confused. “Dragons are only legends. There haven’t been any in this world since the first times—”
“Skreee! Skreee!” There was a high-pitched shrieking from above. Terak flickered his gaze to see that the bird-like Elder Scout and his brethren were starting to keen toward the mayhem in front of them, as if alarmed or hungry for blood.
“I promise you that is a dragon, storyteller,” the elf said.
The Doctor and Chief of the Royal Guild pointed to what was, unmistakably, a terrible sight. Even despite the unnatural Plague of Darkness that clung to the hills and vales, the crimson fires appeared to be driving the shadows back, revealing blackened neighborhoods and smoking temples, entire streets that had been demolished and trampled.
“SKREYARGH!” There was a sudden mighty bellow in the night. A great head lifted itself up through the dark, in front of one of the nearest fires.
It was Grom, the First Creature of their world.
“There’s the palace! There are still defenders, go!” Terak pointed toward one of the larger, as-yet unburning buildings of austere gray stone that stood head and shoulders above the cityscape. The fortress of Brecha still stood, as sturdy as a bulldog growling to the northern Tartaruk Mountains, had the mountains themselves been visible. Its three-part battlements had wide raised platforms and jetties, designed for Brecha’s own galleon, The Lady of the North.
Not that The Lady of the North will ever be landing here again, Terak knew.
The fortress of the old kings of the North abutted and overlooked the River Gate of the northern city walls themselves. It had a wide, meandering river at its base which would have been home to a nest of narrowboats and trading barges—the lifeline of the northern communities— often stuffed full of Brecha crossbowmen on their hazardous journeys out to the isolated townships and homesteads.
The narrowboats still floated, but they had been reefed and moored tight to the River Gate under the watching battlements. They were still stuffed with rivers of crossbowmen.
Not that the crossbowmen were firing, as the sight ahead of them was clearly overwhelming.
Grom the First Creature stood on the far side of the river, underlit by fires as he snarled and roared at his adversaries. Grom was the almost the height of the fortress itself, with gray-and-brown cracked skin that always reminded Terak either of stone or bark. His forelegs were longer than his dog-like back legs, ending in giant tree-trunk like clawed feet, almost like that of an elephant.
Grom had a long, supine neck hanging with deep folds of cracked and leathered hide. At the end was a long, wedge head with sweeping, bracketed horns and a long snout, opening wide now as his neck and chest quivered.
A belt of pink-and-crimson flame burst from behind his maw. It hit the small hills and their already blasted trees, sending up rocks and boulders in its wake as it struck with the force of many cannon blasts.
“Hurrah!” the crew of the Kingsdrake heard a ragged cheer raise from the watching defenders of the River Gate—but the enemies that faced Grom were not defeated. The air galleon wobbled, fell, and righted itself again as it tried to land. Meanwhile, Terak’s eyes were fixed on the large shapes that were rolling out of the way of the flames, bellowing their fury up at the First Creature, and jumping back to attack.
The shapes were few—but they were big.
Each one stood almost to Grom’s knee or a little higher—making each of the foul creatures the size of a small house. They were humanoid, but with thickened limbs capable of punching through walls and hunched-over forms, thick with muscle.
Dear Stars, Terak thought. “They’ve found a cadre of fighting trolls!”
Terak had only one experience of troll-kin before, but that had been one of the rare and elusive forest trolls. It had been captured and turned into a berserker-servant for an orc war-chief and his goblin aide. The forest trolls alone were enough to send terrors throughout the North, but they were far more content to keep themselves to the deep Everdell Forest. Their distant kinfolk, the fighting trolls, were near extinct—and hadn’t seen
battle for fifty or sixty years at least.
The fighting trolls were cleverer and meaner than their nature-loving cousins. They occasionally turned up as brigands or mercenaries in the history books after their cohorts were hunted down and forced from their lairs over the generations.
These gigantic brutes had giant plates of black armor hammered onto their very forms, looking like they had been made by the melted suits of a dozen knights. The fighting trolls wielded weapons, too—gigantic axes or tridents, which they were using to hack and charge the First Creature’s legs.
“SKRARGH!” Grom roared in agony, raising one ponderous, heavy foot to drop it down onto the banks of the river. But the troll attacker had leapt to one side, bellowing and flinging the ten-foot trident past Grom at the waiting narrowboats.
Terak saw the solid pillar of black iron hit the fore-boat like a thunderbolt, crashing through the line of defenders and the deck behind them.
“Brace!” the elf heard Yarl roar from his Navigator’s seat, as the Kingsdrake suddenly swerved and dropped from the skies to crash into the waiting air galleon jetties.
Ixcht! Terak grabbed at the rails to stop himself from being thrown overboard onto the stone walkways beyond. The Kingsdrake shuddered forward to the stone platform, ripping apart stiffened bags of canvas from the jetties that were meant to catch them.
“What the Star’s damned is wrong with this boat!” the elf heard as he clung on, sharing a trepidatious look with Kol. Both Terak and Kol were thinking the same thing. We can’t let the Emarii crew this anymore. She’d be useless in the battle ahead, stuffed full of magic-killing nulls—that is, if they didn’t crash and die right . . . about . . . now—
CruNCH! Even without the use of the air galleon’s magics, the imposition of canvas sack and twenty feet of wooden rail worked to slow them down, so when the Kingsdrake did hit the uncompromising stone platform beyond, it did so with the sound of cracking hull-woods, not splintering ones.
“Tsss!” Terak heard the angered hiss from the other of the Mendip brothers—Lars this time. The elf thought that he caught a hard-eyed stare from the smaller and rounder Chief and Master of the Royal Guild across the foredeck. But Terak had not time to deal with the Doctor’s suspicions.
“Emarii—prepare yourselves!” Kol was shouting as Terak vaulted the rails. His booted feet hit the stones, and he was already lengthening his stride to race toward the nearest stairs down to the River Gate.
“Skreee! Skreee!” There was the sound of a chorus of gleeful, baleful birdsong as the Elder Beings flung themselves from the rigging of the crashed Kingsdrake. They hopped and charged around the elf as he spun toward the stairs down.
The Elder Beings, however, did not take such a terrestrial route. Instead, the elf saw them out of the corner of his eye flinging themselves off from the battlement walls bodily and stretching out their shoulder wings to glide downwards toward their master and their sovereign—Grom.
“Not sure what good a load of stick-thin birds can do against a cadre of fighting trolls!” Terak heard one of the following Emarii moan behind him. They clattered down the steps and across the small landing, down to the inner courtyard beyond.
To be honest, the elf also wasn’t sure what anyone could do against a fighting troll. Anyone who wasn’t the size of Grom, that was—but the Journeyer of the Enclave pushed that doubt aside and drew one of his blades, hissing like a cat. The crowd ahead of them was thick and nervous.
“To the front! To the front!” Terak saw the metal of the River Gate was already open, and one of the human sergeants was attempting to cajole the next line of panicked, shuffling crossbowmen through it. There was a short stone quay on the other side which met the wooden decks of the boats seamlessly. Each boat looked busy—but there were already shouts, screams, and gouts of water from three or four boats out, as the fighting trolls attacked both Grom and the defenders.
But the crossbowmen were weary. Brecha had been attempting to hold itself out against orcs and goblins and stranger beasts of Ungol for weeks now, as the rest of the world did nothing. The northern kingdom of Brecha had been hit hardest by the Blood Plague, and then the Plague of Darkness, too. The resolve of these usually winter-hardened men and women who were the nearest to the Blood Gate was near breaking point.
“Fight for your Lord, men and women of the North!” The sergeant was trying his best to inspire them. “He’s out there at the front! Get out there!”
Falan? Terak felt his heart thump. The elf had been there when the young Lord Falan had first assumed his throne. The human had been far too inexperienced, but courageous all the same.
But then he learned that I was a null, Terak remembered the look of fear and mistrust that had crossed the young man’s face. It still hurt, even now—even after a lifetime of being picked on for being different from the others at the Enclave.
Terak would have thought that he had gotten used to being different. But apparently the disgusted and appalled look that Lord Falan had sent his way had been worse than almost twenty-odd years of snickering.
I have shared and spilt blood with that human, for all of that, Terak knew. It was another confusing pain that he didn’t understand.
He shoved it down and started forward through the press of people.
“Out of the way!” the elf hissed as he ran. The crossbowmen were only too glad to let the snarling, leaping elf with murder gleaming in his eyes ahead of them, followed by the hard-eyed Emarii storytellers, loosing their sabers and scimitars.
“Wait—who are they!?” Terak heard some soldier or another shout ahead of them at the gate.
“Leave ’em! If they want to fight, let them fight!” Terak heard the approving growl of the sergeant. He stood out of the way to let the forty-odd Emarii and one elf through to the chaos and torment beyond.
“Watch out!” The elf heard the anguished shout from the seniors and captains ahead of them, as there was another sudden, huge explosion of wooden fragments from the fourth front boat. Screams came from the dying, angered roars from Grom, and shouts from the terrorized as another of the great tridents broke through wood.
The boat that the elf was crossing bucked and heaved upwards with the force of the explosion, but it didn’t stop the elf or the Emarii as they jumped between frightened soldiers.
“She’s going down!” Terak reached the rail between first boat and second. He saw that the fourth ahead of them was already breaking apart, rising at prow and keel as the fast-flowing river Neve finished the troll-trident’s work.
“Fall back! Protect the Lord!” Terak heard. There were human bodies being dragged and hauled backward onto the third boat—one with a purple-and-green coat, still snarling and shouting as his captains dragged him back from the waters.
Lord Falan. “Give me a blade!” the young man was demanding. He did not bother to rest or retire behind his men, despite the fact that a bloody gash ran down his face and his clothes looked torn and ruined.
Terak snarled in appreciative battle-glee, running across the deck of the second. Falan had apparently found a blade and was turning back to the railing, raising it high in the air.
“For Brecha! Fire!” the human shouted. A sudden thunder of loosed strings sounded as the first ranks of human guards loosed their bolts across the churned, burning waters.
Tock-tock-tock! To hammer against the black iron armor of a huge shape, charging and splashing through the waters straight toward them, whirling an ax that was taller than any human.
“Grakh!” The bolts hammered against their foe. Terak saw beyond them that the Elder Beings were thumping to the far riverbank around the feet of their master Grom, already flinging themselves with savage abandon at the attacking fighting trolls.
But the troll that had sought to attack the humans instead was not cowed or diminished by the fire. A few bolts had found scaled flesh—and the elf could even see them sticking from shoulder and hand and tearing apart a pointed ear—but the creature kept on coming. He br
ought his axe down in a mighty blow, straight toward Terak’s friend.
Falan! Terak barreled across the deck of the second boat ahead of the Emarii. He vaulted onto the side of the railings and leap toward the third.
The mighty axe crashed down, exploding wooden rails and foredeck both—but one of Falan’s captains had seized a hold of their incensed lord and dragged him backward at the last moment. The entire second narrowboat was rolling downwards from the troll’s strike. Soldiers jumped, flailed, and clung to whatever they could to avoid being sent into the waves. A few failed, sliding down into the river Neve to thrash and flail amidst broken and crushing timbers.
“Get off my boat!” Terak heard Falan shout, not even waiting for their deck to right itself as he tore from the captain’s grip. He darted forward in a fencer’s strike, lancing his blade at the inner forearm of the house-sized troll.
“Urkh!” a gout of black blood splayed. Terak was leaping from the second boat’s railings onto the third and was only a few steps away from the titanic battle in front of them.
The troll was standing waist-to-boat now. With a sudden wild swing of one arm, he batted the human lord to one side, to the cries of dismay from Falan’s soldiers and guards.
“For the King! For Brecha!” They were trying to rally as the fighting troll turned to seize the long handle of his axe for another strike. It had become embedded in the wood with the first blow, its blade hidden somewhere in the smaller hold below. The fighting troll grunted and hauled at the thick shaft of metal.
Terak jumped.
The elf saw the creature’s small, glittering dark eyes alight on him just as his first foot hit the troll’s giant fist. Terak pushed his next step off the elbow.
The troll flinched, a convulsion like the heave of a splintering deck down through his arms, but Terak had always been fast. Very fast.