by K L Reinhart
The assassin and null of the Enclave leapt through the air as the troll released his hands on the axe to attempt to bat him away. The elf somersaulted through the dark airs, tinged with the light of fire and resonant with the cries of battle.
He flung his hand out—both hands clutching the handle and pommel of one dagger as he struck the troll—driving the blade deep into the eye socket. Terak’s body smacked into the rest of the troll’s head and chest.
“RAKH!” A bellowing roar sounded as the troll convulsed, the elf dangling wildly from the embedded dagger, but refusing to let go. He felt the blade bite deeper. The creature was staggering backward, then rocking on its feet as it tried to work out its pain—before toppling forward to the deck.
“Ach!” Terak let go just in time as the troll crashed into the deck of the third boat, finishing the task that it had started as the body smashed through upper and lower decks easily.
The assassin of the Enclave hit wood, but rolled and then slid as the wood gave way underneath him. He was going to fall into the churning waters of the river Neve and surely be crushed between hull-part and charging troll or stamping foot of Grom—
“There you are, pointy!” snarled a voice as a mighty hand caught the elf by the forearm and hauled him bodily out of the wet and onto the relative safety of the second boat.
“Urgh . . .” Terak was dazed and bruised, surrounded by pressing bodies as defenders filled the boat. But as he blinked and looked up, he saw that he was sheltered at the feet of someone very large indeed. It wasn’t one of the Elder Beings or the Emarii. It wasn’t any human soldier or captain either.
No—this figure stood eight feet tall, and was dressed in black iron battle armor similar to the fighting trolls ahead, similar because this hulking monster’s armor was forged in the very same orcish workshops. But where the other’s battle-plate was encrusted with scratched and dried blood, this orc’s armor only had the many, many crossed-off scratches of those that he had killed. There had to be hundreds.
Vorg the Unwanted, the Heretic, the would-have-been-Champion of the Hexan and the singular largest orc that one might ever have the misfortune of meeting. Rumors abounded that he had a little troll blood in him somewhere, too. He stood over his friend, the tiny elf, and grinned.
“Nice bit o’ stab work, even for a pointy,” the orc growled.
“Vorg? What? How did you–? How long have you been here?” Terak spluttered. The last time that he had seen Vorg, they had been running up a distant southern outcrop. The elvish Mother Galda was attempting to open a portal which, even at the best of times, was a very dangerous thing—as the making of any portal between the three worlds was a dangerous piece of sorcery. And right now—when the nightmare realm of Ungol was so close to their world of Midhara—it would have been almost impossible to find a route through that didn’t lead straight to the armies of the Queen of a Thousand Tears.
As it turned out, Vorg merely shrugged. He turned to show the elf where his backplate had been entirely buckled, as if it had been stepped on by a giant or Grom itself. There were radiating lines of melted-and-re-solidified, oddly-iridescent metal running from it.
“It’s a long story. Ixchting Galda threw us right on top of a band of Nexish Void-Sorcerers, but Grom soon sorted them out,” Vorg was saying in his deep, gravelly rock-and-baritone voice. Around them were more shouts of “Fire!” as more crossbow bolts were released to their gigantic targets.
“Wait.” The elf started grinning. “Are you telling me that you ended up in the Ungol!?”
Vorg merely shrugged, as close to wryly as an orc warrior got. “Only for a bit. Galda seemed pretty eager to zap us back out of there again.”
“Not surprised,” Terak wondered, as there was a sudden roar that split the air above them.
It was Grom. He was in pain and injured.
14
For the World and for Pain
Grom the First Creature of their world was kneeling, one of his mighty feet awkward below his bulk. The other three were shaking, rent with great gashes up and down legs, spilling the First Creature’s green lifeblood.
There were bodies of crumpled and rent fighting trolls all about it, but there were still more yet surrounding it, converging toward Grom’s neck with their giant axes.
“NO!” boomed Vorg above Terak. Vorg had immediately found some sort of connection with the ancient beast, owing to an orc’s natural affinity for root magic—the very stuff that Grom personified.
The Elder Beings, too, were enraged by their master’s fall. Even though the elf could see that their numbers were small now, with many feathered bodies littering the riverbank, they leapt to defend their god. They looked tiny in comparison to the giant trolls that they harried.
Vorg was already pounding to the edge of the second boat, heedless of the fact that the fast-flowing Neve would come probably up to his neck or more.
“Wait!” Terak heard a human shout, and turned to see that it was Falan, looking ghoulish by the light of the fires. “Release her!” he shouted as he hacked at the roped that secured the second boat to the first.
Immediately, Terak saw what the human lord was attempting to do. The elf sprang to the side, seizing up a discarded longsword to do the same.
“Vorg—stop!” the elf shouted, as the narrow boat swung out in fast-flowing currents almost to the far side of the Neve.
Bolts of purple curse-light were being flung by those of the Brecha sorcerers and guards gifted enough in battle-magic to summon them. They blistered the air and exploded against black-iron armor, stumbling and stalling the charging fighting trolls, but not halting them completely.
Vorg was shaking with rage as the narrow boat swung to its apex—and caught against the downed body of a distant troll, by the water’s edge.
"For Brecha!" Terak heard Lord Falan shout.
“For Grom!” Vorg the Unwanted gave his own war-cry.
For Pain! the assassin of the black-robed order gave his own silent Enclave-blessing. Then all the defenders that on the second boat charged across the handmade-bridge. Vorg vaulted, hitting the muddied, bloodied, and burnt banks first, with Terak a fraction of a second behind him, and the others following.
It was a strange sally that went out from the River Gate of the fortress of Brecha. There was only a small cadre of hardened Brechan knights, attempting to keep pace with their young king. Most of their number were the Emarii story-singers, each one a null. Because of that curse, they had become almost as skilled with weaving their sabers and scimitars as they were with weaving words.
And the elf. The Last Null and Dagger of this World.
Instinctively, the charging defenders of Midhara knew that they had to save Grom. Perhaps some of the less intuitive human knights might have told themselves that it was sound tactical advice. The First Creature that had arrived to defend them was a monster out of faerie tales and legend—but was also the strongest, largest monster that was on their side.
But if the knights had a chance to reflect on their sudden, burning loyalty, they might have realized that there was a deeper flame burning bright within them. It was the same flame that burned brightest in the hearts of the Elder Beings and Vorg—a recognition that in some sense, Grom was their world of Midhara, and the world was Grom, too.
Grom, and his root-magic was what Midhara had been at the start—what Midhara was meant to be, before the magics of the Aesther and Ungol melded and infected their world.
It was nothing but a fight for the soul of their world.
And as for the Dagger of the World? Whatever he felt in his null heart was a mystery, even to himself. A cold certainty that he was where he had to be. A calm island of inspiration in the eye of such pain that he alone of all of those there had been taught to inhabit.
The Dagger of the World had been brought up to kill, and the Last Null had been born to unravel and destroy. Everything was as it should be for that briefest of heartbeats between running feet and meeting blade.
>
“Hsss!” Terak hissed, savage and cat-like, as the battle exploded into blood-curdling life and death all around them. There was a moment of calm in the storm, but now time itself had been thrown into faster and faster movement, every decision taken in a split-second, and every one of them a matter of life or death.
The elf rolled under the sweep of an axe, bouncing up to return a flickering blow across the inner calf of one of the fighting trolls. The thing’s black blood spurted, and the creature staggered to one side.
Which was enough for the elf, as he dove to one side, rolling across the ground. He kept up his charge toward Grom, where the fighting was the fiercest.
In the elf’s wake, the Emarii swordsmen and women engaged with the wounded fighting troll. They stabbed and struck at it with their blades in whisper-fast strikes as they sought to stop it and any other from joining the battle ahead.
Terak dove to one side as a broken and feathered body was flung through the air straight in front of him, almost like an Elder Being missile. The creature was dead before it hit the river’s edge behind the null. Terak jumped up to see the troll that had done it.
It was one of those nearest the center of the battle, a fighting troll already with three white-wood spears of the Elder Beings stuck into its neck, back, and chest. A trio of the ancient race whirled and screeched around it in avian fury.
But the troll was still fighting, swinging its great metal mace—big enough to hold up a stable roof—in front of it. It tried to crush the faster-moving bird-people.
It was having little direct success. But the troll scored a glancing blow against one flailing hand that caused a bird-like shriek of pain and crushed the bones of the afflicted.
Terak took the creature’s place in an instant, slashing his blade at the back of the fighting troll’s hand on the reversing-swing.
“Grakh!” The troll didn’t even flinch, but threw one tree-trunk clawed foot forward to do to Terak what it had clearly done to the previously flying Elder Being.
But Terak was faster even than one of the ancient race. He jumped sideways, rolling in front of the next Elder Being and leapt to his feet. The fighting troll swiveled around toward him.
Or tried to, because the two remaining Elder Beings had jumped under its guard to ram their spears into the thing’s leg and belly.
“RAKH!” The creature was drooling, spinning with a frenzied rage. It obliterated one of the Elder Beings with a mighty swing of the metal mace, leaving nothing but fragments and feathers.
The last remaining Elder Being appeared to be beside itself with fury. It flung itself forward in a leap, wings cracking like sail cloth as it left its white-wood spear embedded in the thing’s belly and attached itself to the fighting troll’s small head.
Terak heard howls of pain as the Elder Being scratched the troll with clawed hands. It darted its bone beak down and down, again and again into the creature’s head.
With a grunt and a smack of its mighty hand, the fighting troll crushed the tiny body of the Elder Being, and flung it away. But the ruin of the creature’s face, rent with many beak strikes and dripping ichor, made it impossible for the thing to see.
Terak felt time slow down, as he did when instinct and training and passion all coalesced into one diamond-clear moment. The fighting troll was blinded, and Terak jumped forward.
One step . . . two steps—
And he threw himself into a whirling kick that connected with the stuck-out end of the Elder Being’s white-wood spear, driving it deeper into the fighting troll’s gut. The creature to staggered backward from the flinch of pain.
No one else knows how to deal with pain. Even trolls. Terak landed with perfect grace on the muddied floor as the dying troll stumbled, lost its footing, and crashed to earth, right on top of one of the upturned blades of another troll behind it. There was a terrible, fateful sound of metal on bone, and the fighting troll was no more.
That left the way clear ahead of Terak to race toward the injured Grom, now surrounded by a stilled tide of bodies.
And with Vorg, bellowing before the resting, snarling head of Grom, with the Elder Scout and a few other of the feathered beings beside it. Vorg’s own battle-axe was wet with troll blood.
“Holy Stars!” Terak stumbled to the side of the Unwanted. “How many did you kill!?”
There appeared to be a low wall of troll bodies around the First Creature. Vorg was heaving great gasps of breath.
“Two? Three? Who cares?” Vorg gasped. The tone in his voice was anything but victorious.
“We’ve still got a ways to go, pointy,” the Unwanted grunted up to the northern hills. When the elf turned to look, he saw another line of the fighting trolls taking predatory, steady steps toward them. There had to be easily another forty of the brutes, Terak thought.
“Oh, Ixcht,” he swore.
“Dear Stars . . . Ready yourselves!” shouted Lord Falan, limping to the side of the First Creature with the handful of Brecha knights that were left. The Elder Being’s numbers, too, were diminished to only twenty or thirty. And of the Emarii? The tale and sword slingers had fared better than the Brechans, but there could only be forty at most of their number picking themselves up to race to the defense of Grom.
The elf’s Enclave-trained thoughts analyzed their side. While they had greater numbers than their foes, each of the fighting trolls was like a small army on their own.
“Grom?” Terak turned to look at the First Creature, but he appeared almost spent, barely able to lift his head from the dirt. One eye apparently gummed up with blood, and the other drooping, his face was scattered with deep cuts. The elf thought that the First Creature looked almost at its last breath.
“Don’t,” growled Vorg beside the elf. “Don’t say it. We fight for Midhara.” He planted the haft of his battle axe in the mud and growled his orcish defiance at their coming doom.
Is it always going to be like this? the elf thought, matching the orc’s defiance with his own elvish hiss. He could see that there were lines of remaining Brecha guards attempting to get across to them. But the boat-bridge that they had crossed had already swung back to the fortress side of the Neve—it would take too long.
Not that they would do much good, anyway, the elf thought. They would need a much larger army to defeat so many fighting trolls, and the numbers they had remaining were exhausted from the seemingly endless onslaught.
But a good way to go, I guess, the elf had a moment to ponder. As good as any other, anyway—
Thumm!
Thumm!
THUUMM!
The air was split with the hammering of great war drums, and the line of fighting trolls wavered, uncertain.
What? the elf thought.
Thumm!
THUUM!
The war drums continued, before stopping as mysteriously as they had started. As the last echo of their thunder faded from the airs, with complete astonishment, Terak and the final defenders saw the line of fighting trolls start to turn. With barely a grunt, they marched backward into the thickened fogs of the Plague of Darkness.
“What under the Stars was that about!?” Terak hissed angrily at their retreating number. A loud but ragged cheer raised itself from the throats of the defenders. The human defenders, the elf noted. The Elder Beings, the orc, the elf, and the First Creature itself were not foolish enough to believe that this was some kind of victory.
“They’re running! We scared them off!” an over-exuberant human captain of the Brechan knights whooped.
Terak glared at the silent line of darkness ahead, his pale brow creased and deep in thought. “They had enough numbers to slaughter us all, easily,” the elf said. “They could probably even have sacked what’s left of Brecha behind us, too.”
“Hmm.” Vorg the Unwanted agreed. “I know orc-kind and troll-kind, and there’s only one reason they don’t jump into a fight when there’s one ahead of them,” the large orc said. “And that’s if there’s a better fight to be had somew
here else.”
“But where?” Lord Falan murmured beside them. He, too, shared the elf and the orc’s misgivings. “There’s only a few inhabited places above us in the North, only—”
“The Everdell,” Terak said, meaning the gigantic Everdell Forest that stretched at the foot of the Tartaruk mountains. It was home to his family, the Second Family of the Elves.
“Or the Black Keep of the Enclave,” Terak continued. Also his family, in a way, or at least the only family that he had ever known.
“Looks like the battle’s coming home for you, pointy,” Vorg said heavily.
Terak listened to the whooping victory chants of the Brechans. His eyes attempted to pierce the magical wall of night ahead of them to no avail.
The Last Null and Dagger of the World didn’t try to admonish the humans for their apparent stupidity.
Let them have their false belief in victory, if even for a moment, the elf thought.
It seemed to Terak that any hope right now, at the end of their world, was probably a good thing.
THANK YOU
Thank you so much for reading The Ungol Blade, the seventh book in the Dagger of the World epic fantasy series. I hope you enjoyed reading it as much as I did writing it.
The next story in the Dagger of the World is called Queen of a Thousand Tears and will be available soon on Amazon.
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