“We must move quietly,” Shayieigh pointedly instructed her dwarven companions, what seemed to her an obvious precaution. Still, Shayieigh soon came to understand that her definition of “moving quietly” was apparently very different from Ivan and Pikel’s. The clomp of Ivan’s boots echoed loudly off the stone walls, and Pikel’s sandals double-slapped—once against the floor and once against his foot—with every pumping stride.
They rambled along several long, dark corridors, the only light coming from widely spaced torches hanging in iron sconces. Around a bend and through an archway, the three companions found the walls lined by fonts, filled with a clear, watery substance.
Ivan, needing a refreshing drink, paused and moved to scoop up some, but Pikel quickly slapped his hand away, waggling a finger in his startled brother’s face.
“Uh-uhhh,” the green-bearded dwarf implored, and he hopped up high and pulled a torch from its sconce. Still waggling the finger tucked under his arm, Pikel touched the fire to the liquid. The stuff hissed and sputtered, and a noxious gray cloud arose, making Ivan pinch his nose. Pikel hung his tongue out of his mouth and muttered, “Tuck”
“How did he know?” Shayleigh asked Ivan when they had cleared the stinky area.
Ivan shrugged. “Must be something to this druid stuff.”
“Doo-dad!” Pikel agreed.
“Yeah, doo-dad,” muttered Ivan. “Or ye just knowed that this place is for Talona, and Talona’s the goddess of poison.”
Sly Pikel wasn’t letting on. He just followed the other two, every so often chuckling, “Hee hee nee.”
Around a sharp bend in the corridor, the friends found a group of enemies waiting for them.
Shayleigh fired her bow between the bobbing dwarven heads, catching the leading ore in the chest and dropping it dead.
“Frog!” Ivan called, a reference to a game he and his brother used to play. Pikel rushed in front and braced himself, squared to the next leading ore, and Ivan leaped up from behind and straddled Pikel’s shoulders. Pikel fell forward, hooking Ivan’s feet and his propelling his forward-flying brother into a downward arc.
The ore froze with surprise, stood there with no practical defenses, and Ivan’s axe cleaved its skull, drove right down through the stupid creature’s head so that it seemed as if it would literally be split in half.
The move left both dwarves sprawled on the floor, with several enemies still standing, unharmed (though after witnessing a comrade practically split down the middle, none of them seemed overly anxious to rush in). With the line of fire clear between them and Shayleigh, their hesitation was not a wise thing.
The elf maiden set her bow to furious work, hardly aiming, just firing for the mass of enemy bodies.
A few seconds, and a few arrows, later, what was left of the enemy band was in full flight.
“Now move quietly,” Shayleigh instructed through gritted teeth.
“Quietly!” Ivan balked incredulously. “Bring the whole damned bunch of them on, I say!”
“Oo oi!” Pikel cried. The agreeing brothers turned together toward Shayleigh, to find the elf maiden back against the inner wall of the last corner, her bow up as she looked behind them.
“You may get your wish,” she explained. “Goblins, led by an ogre.”
Ivan and Pikel rushed up to the corner beside her and nodded to each other, as if they already had come to a silent agreement on how to approach this next fight. Ivan stooped, and this time Pikel went up on his shoulders, leaning against the wall and putting one hand up high, fingers conspicuously wrapped around the edge of the wall, in plain sight of the approaching force.
Ivan nodded for Shayleigh to fall back a few steps.
The ogre came around the corner expecting, from Pikel’s high-placed hand, to find a tall foe. Pikel fell away as the monster spun around the bend, its flying club smacking harmlessly off the empty stone wall.
Ivan’s axe chop gashed into the thigh of its lead leg, severing muscles and tendons.
Unable to stop its momentum, the wounded ogre continued its turn, squaring its back to Shayleigh. Still backpedaling, it jerked twice in rapid succession as arrows drove through its shoulder blades, and then it tripped altogether, falling backward. One arrow shattered under the tremendous weight, but the other, angled perfectly so that it hit the ground straight up, plunged through the massive beast, through its heart, with the arrow tip bursting out the front of the ogre’s chest.
By the time the goblins, just two steps behind the ogre, came around the corner, they found their leader dead.
Not that the lead goblins even had time to register the scene. Pikel, crouched back in the corner, swiped his club across, smacking shins and sending two of the monsters sprawling—right at Ivan’s feet. The yellow-bearded dwarf, his axe chopping viciously, made quick work of them.
The rest of the force, with typical goblin loyalty, turned and fled.
“They will be returning from the front,” Shayleigh said grimly.
“Yeah, and the stupid goblins will hear the fighting and come back the other way, probably with a hunnerd kin!” Ivan agreed.
“You may indeed get your wish, Ivan,” the elf answered grimly. “The whole force of Castle Trinity might soon squeeze us between them.” Shayleigh moved to the corner and looked back, then ran up ahead and peered as far along as she could, hoping for a side tunnel, for something that could get them free of this tight area.
Pikel, already understanding their dire predicament, tuned out of the conversation. Down on his knees, he crawled along the worked wall, butting his forehead against any promising stones.
“What is he doing?” Shayleigh demanded, obviously dismayed by the dwarfs apparently ridiculous actions.
Even as she spoke, Pikel pressed his forehead back against one of the rocks. He turned to Ivan, smiling from ear to ear, and squeaked.
“There’s the way!” Ivan bellowed, falling to his knees beside his brother, both of them digging with their fingers at the edges of the cut stone.
“They always put secret tunnels beside the corridor,” Ivan explained to Shayleigh’s doubting expression. “Drains the water in case of a flood.”
Shayleigh’s keen ears caught the sounds of footsteps approaching from both directions. “Hurry,” she implored the dwarves, and she ran to the wall and grabbed a torch. Shayleigh rushed back around the corner, as far down as she could go, then reversed direction and ran back, dipping the torch in every font she passed, and pulling out all the other torches. All the corridor behind her was soon filled with a noxious gray cloud, leaving the passage in smoky darkness. Through it, Shayleigh could see the red dots of goblin eyes, using their heat-sensing infravision.
“Stubborn,” she muttered, and she ran around the corner, down the hallway the other way, repeating the procedure. By the time she got back to the dwarves, enemies were closing from both directions. A goblin peeked around the corner, then fell back with an arrow in its eye.
“Hurry!” Shayleigh whispered harshly, coughing as the evil smoke descended over her.
“Hurry, yerself,” Ivan growled back. He pulled the elf maiden down to the floor and practically stuffed her through the opening, dropping her down a muddy, descending chute. Pikel came in behind, chuckling and placing both his club and Ivan’s axe in the slope behind him.
“What is he doing?” Shayleigh asked, but Pikel only put a stubby finger over his lips and whispered, “Ssssh!”
Ivan rushed across and put his back to the corner, closing his eyes so that the red glow of infravision would not give him away. Goblins shuffled around behind him.
The enemy host came moving down from the other direction.
“More than we thinks!” Ivan roared in the goblin language, a squeaking and croaking tongue. Those goblins beside the dwarf, peering ahead through the confusing veil, took up their weapons.
“Charges them! Killses them!” Ivan bellowed, and the call was repeated by many goblins as the horde rushed the approaching force. In a confusing instant, the two groups were together, hacking away, each thinking the other to be the intruders that had come to Castle Trinity.
Ivan calmly walked over to stand in front of the secret tunnel. Pikel reached out to him, but Ivan hesitated, thoroughly enjoying the battle. Finally, Pikel’s patience evaporated, and he reached out with both hands, grabbed Ivan by the ankles, and jerked him from his feet, dragging him into the tunnel.
Pikel clambered over his facedown brother, out of the tunnel far enough to retrieve the block and tug it somewhat back in place. Now it was the green-bearded dwarf who hesitated, enthralled by the raging action, chuckling as one severed goblin head came bouncing by. Never one to miss an opportunity for payback, Ivan grabbed Pikel by the ankles and yanked him through the mud.
Soon after, the three friends found a way out of that crawl tunnel, into another stone-worked corridor some distance from the fighting. Ivan and Pikel led the way, their muddy faces set in a determined grimace.
Shayleigh shook her head in disbelief many times over the next few minutes as the dwarves rambled through the complex, overturning everything in their path, including a few startled goblins. Shayleigh didn’t tell them to be quiet, though. She knew that their escape had been a temporary reprieve, that no matter how stealthily they might now travel, sooner or later they would meet an organized defense.
The elf smiled then, glad that she was beside the rugged Bouldershoulders. She had seen the brothers like this before, in the battles of Shilmista. Let the enemy come on, she decided. Let them face the battle-lust of the hearty dwarves’.
Ivan and Pikel did slow down and become somewhat quieter when they neared a staircase, rising up out of sight just beyond a four-way intersection of wide corridors. A perfect place for an ambush. They heard singing coming from the stairs, a booming, giant voice. The corridor behind them and the two to the sides seemed empty, so they crept across.
The stairs went up, which was the way they all figured they had to go, but they could see the boots of a giant not so far up the stairs. The huge monster continued its off-ltey singing, apparently unaware of the intruders that had come to Castle Trinity,
“Get ye up fast” was the only explanation Ivan offered to Shayleigh, and with a wink to his brother, the two dwarves set off, using the giant’s booming voice to cover their heavy steps on the wooden stairs.
Shayleigh glanced all about nervously, thinking this a bad situation. She heard the dwarves roar out in glee, though, heard the smacks as Ivan’s axe and Pikel’s club connected on the giant’s legs. Then the whole ground shook as the behemoth tumbled down the stairs.
Shayleigh considered putting an arrow into the tumbling thing, but heard the three corridors behind her fast filling with enemy soldiers. Instead, she turned about and launched the arrow into the thickening mass behind her, not waiting to see if she had scored a hit.
The giant, though very much alive and very much enraged, lay on its back, its head toward Shayleigh and its feet still far up the staircase. It struggled to right itsetf, but its bulk filled the not-too-wide stairs, and in that awkward position, with both legs injured, it floundered miserably.
Shayleigh drew out her short sword and leaped ahead, skipping off the monster’s face, nearly tripping on its huge nose. The giant grabbed at her with its hands, but she dodged them and stuck one when it got too near. The giant lifted a huge leg and curled it in at the knee, forming a barrier of flesh, but Shayleigh drove her sword deeply into the thick thigh and the barrier flew away. As she cleared the huge torso, the elf saw Pikel coming the other way, rushing under the one upraised leg.
Shayleigh called out, thinking that Pikel would surely be crushed, but the dwarf was already wedged tightly between the stairs and the giant’s huge buttocks.
A swarm of enemies came to the bottom of the stairs, some clambering to get atop the giant, others drawing out bows and taking a head on Shayleigh and on Ivan as the yellow-bearded dwarf rushed down to grab the elf maiden.
Pikel’s pet snake bit the giant on the fleshy backside, and the monster’s predictable hop gave the dwarf all the momentum he needed. Bracing his shoulder, the powerful little dwarf heaved and groaned, turning the behemoth up onto its shoulders, lifting a wall of flesh between his friends and the enemies. The giant grunted several times as it intercepted arrows, and then, with Pikel’s stubby legs driving relentlessly, it went right over, wedging tightly into the low, narrow stairway entrance.
Pikel gave his snake a pat on the head and tucked it back into his sleeve, then rushed to join his friends, taking his club back from Ivan as he hopped past.
Shayleigh stood shaking her head once more.
“Stronger than ye thought, ain’t he?” Ivan asked, tugging her along.
They met no foes at the top of the stairs, and Ivan and Pikel immediately lined up side by side and resumed their battle charge, Shayleigh heard no sounds about them other than the echoes of dwarven sandals and boots, and while that fact gave her some comfort, she realized that this blind rush through the complex would likely get them nowhere.
Finally Shayleigh was able to stop the brothers’ wild run, reminding them that they had to sort out the maze of tunnels and try to find Cadderly and Danica.
When the dwarves had quieted, they did hear some noise, a general murmur, down a corridor to the left Shayleigh was about to whisper that she should go ahead and stealthily check out the place, but her words were buried under Pikel’s hearty “Oo oi!” and the resounding clamor of the renewed charge.
“There,” the prisoner said to Cadderly and Danica, pointing across a last intersection to an unremarkable door. “That is the entrance to the wizard’s chambers.”
Cadderly.
The call came again in the young priest’s mind, from somewhere not so far away. Cadderly closed his eyes and concentrated, coming to understand that the call came from somewhere beyond the unremarkable door. When he opened his eyes once more, he found Danica eyeing him curiously.
“The man does not lie,” Cadderly said to her. The prisoner seemed to relax at that “Then why are there no guards?” Danica asked, more to the prisoner than to Cadderly. The man had no answer for her. “This is a wizard,” Cadderly reminded them both. “A powerful wizard by all that we have heard. There may indeed be a guardian or some protective magic.”
Danica roughly pushed the prisoner forward. “You shall lead,” she said coldly.
Cadderly immediately moved up beside the man, catching his arm to hold him back, and looked across him to regard Danica,
“We go together?” he asked as much as stated.
Danica looked to the door, to Cadderiy and the other man. She understood her love’s sympathy and protective-ness toward the helpless prisoner, understood that Cadderly, convinced that this was not an evil man, would not use the prisoner as fodder.
“He and I lead,” Danica decided, pulling the man from Cadderly’s light grasp. “You follow.”
The monk soft-stepped up to the intersection, bent low and peered both ways. She turned back to Cadderly and offered a shrug, then motioned for the prisoner to keep pace and skittered across to the door—almost.
The creature seemed to unfold from the air itself, becoming first a black line, then expanding left and right, two dimensional, then three dimensional. Five serpentine heads waved in front of the startled companions.
A hydra.
Danica skidded to a stop and hurled herself to the left, rolling from the lunging reach of three great heads. The prisoner, not as quick as the monk, managed only a single step before a monstrous maw clamped down across his waist.
He screamed and batted futilely at the scaly head as the needle-sharp teeth ripped him. A second maw descended over the man’s unprotected head, stifling his scream fully. Both heads working in unison, the hydra tore the man in half.
Cadderly nearly swooned at the sight. He got his loaded crossbow up in front of him, shifting it this way and that, trying to follow the almost hypnotic motion of the wearing heads.
Where to fire?
He shot for the center of the great body, and the hydra roared in rage as the dart hit and exploded. Two heads still snapped at the dodging Danica, two continued their feast on the slaughtered man, and the fifth shot forward, far short of Cadderly, but compelling the hydra’s bulky body into a short rush at the young priest.
Danica started for Cadderly, but reversed direction abruptly as the hydra shuffled by, and chose instead to work her way behind the beast. She cried out for Cadderly to run, though she could not see him around the bulk of the monster.
The lead maw came, straight as an arrow, for the young priest, testing his nerve as he struggled to get his weapon readied a second time. The serpentine maw was barely two feet away when Cadderly’s arm at last came up, and he fired, the quarrel skipping off six-inch fangs, driving in the mobster’s mouth and blasting in a muffled explosion.
The head and neck dropped in a line on the floor, slowing the charge.
The two heads that had been after Danica, and the one finished with the dead prisoner, came swooping in, though, and the young priest wisely fell back, desperately bringing up his walking stick to fend off the nearest attack.
He knew that he had to get far enough away to reload the crossbow, had to fall into the song of Deneir and pull something, anything, from the notes. But with the maze of darting heads, the creature pacing his every retreat, Cadderly couldn’t begin to hear the song, had to concentrate simply on whipping his walking stick back and forth in front of him. He did connect once, luckily, the enchanted ram’s head knocking a tooth from the closest maw. That head went up to issue a roar, and Cadderly, purely on instinct, rushed under it, used the serpentine neck as a shield against the other two pursuing heads.
The fourth head, the other one to the right, spit aside the dead man’s torso and would have had the young priest then, except that Danica came around from behind and snapped a kick under its jaw.
The monster’s maw smacked shut; its flickering tongue fell severed to the floor.
Cadderly continued toward the door, concentrating on readying the crossbow. Danica came, too, by his side, looking back as the hydra lumbered about, dragging its one dead head along the floor as it turned.
“Get in!” she called, but Cadderly, for all his desperation, kept his wits enough to keep clear of the door. It was warded, he knew, sensing the magics upon it. Shoulder to shoulder with Danica, he brought his crossbow up again as if to shoot at the hydra. But then he turned, firing instead at the lock on the door, blowing a wide hole in the wood.
Danica hit Cadderly on the shoulder, throwing him aside. He came up against the wall, dazed, to see his love engulfed by four eagerly snapping hydra heads.
She rushed straight for the beast, ran inside its initial bites, twisting and turning, swatting blindly at anything that came near. A head turned enough to get at her, and she grabbed it by the horn, twisting with a jerk that angled the maw so that it could not wrap around her, so that the snout butted her in the ribs. Danica’s other hand shot out the other way, her stiffened fingers driving through the eye of still another snapping head.
All the hydra’s heads were turned completely about, facing its bulky torso. Danica grabbed the half-blinded head, threw her back against the thick serpentine neck, then dodged away as another head rushed in, its wide-opened maw biting hard into its own companion’s neck. Before the hydra even realized its error, the other head fell dead.
Danica was still pinned in that hellish spot, but a quarrel skipped off the side of one turned neck—off the side of one to solidly strike a second. The first head that had been struck wheeled about to view the newest attacker, while the force of the ensuing explosion drove the second head aside, opening a hole for Danica to rush out.
“The door is warded!” Cadderly cried at Danica as she darted straight for the loose-hanging portal.
It was a moot point, for Danica had no intentions of going through. She stopped and, sensing a maw rushing at her back, leaped up high, catching the top of the jamb and pulling herself straight up. The hydra’s head burst through the door.
Lightning flashed several times; fire roared out from every side of the magically trapped doorjamb.
Only two heads remaining, the blasted hydra backed away. Serpentine necks crossed; reptilian eyes regarded the two companions with sudden respect.
Cadderly tried to line one up for a shot, but he hesitated, not wanting to risk a miss.
“Damn,” he hissed, frustrated, after a long and unproductive moment had slipped past. He fired the bolt into the hydra’s bulk, apparently doing no real damage, but driving it back another step. The hydra’s living heads roared in unison. It hopped to the side, three dead necks bouncing along.
“Shoot for my back,” Danica instructed and before Cadderly could ask her what she was talking about, she rushed forward, charged right between the swaying heads, drawing them in to her. “Now!” Danica ordered.
Cadderly had to trust in her. His crossbow clicked, and Danica dropped suddenly to her back, the quarrel crossing above her and splattering a very surprised serpentine face.
That wounded head did not die, though, and Danica, on her back, now had two snapping maws above her.
“No!” Cadderly cried out, and he charged ahead boldly, both hands tight on his ram’s-head walking stick.
Danica kicked up, one foot and then the other, keeping the heads at bay. Cadderly saw that the head he had shot appeared fully blind, and he leaped right across Danica’s prone form, smashing the head with a two-handed overhead chop. The head recoiled, and Cadderly pursued, smacking it repeatedly.
The second head rushed in at Cadderly’s back, but Danica threw her legs up and then down, snapping her back in a quick arch and hurling herself to her feet. A single stride brought her alongside the chasing head and she dipped low, drawing a dagger from her boot, then shot back up, driving the knife up to its silver dragon-sculpted hilt into the bottom jaw.
Cadderly’s arms pumped relentlessly, beating the already disfigured head into a bloody pulp.
The remaining head soared up high, but Danica locked her arm over the neck and went along for the ride, holding fast to her stuck dagger. She curled up around the neck, bringing her boot to her free hand and managing to extract her second dagger.
Then she held on, stubbornly, as the monster bucked and whipped. When its frenzy finally abated, Danica plunged her second knife into its eye, pulled it back, and drove it home a second time.
Again came the monstrous frenzy. Cadderly, trying to get to Danica, got clipped on one rushing pass and was hurled ten feet down the corridor.
But Danica held on, kept both her daggers buried, working them back and forth, turning their handles around in her palms. She fell hard to her back, smacking against the stone, the monstrous neck dropping over her.
Stunned, the monk could not find her breath, could not focus her gaze, and was hardly conscious of her grip on her knives. Her instincts screamed out at her to react, to wriggle away. Her instincts screamed out at her that she was vulnerable, that the hydra head could easily shake free and snap her in half.
But the hydra was no longer moving, and a moment later, Cadderly was standing above Danica, pulling her arms free, shifting the bulky serpentine neck off her.
Shayleigh heard a murmuring up ahead, the drone of many muffled voices. She started to call out a warning to the Bouldershoulder brothers, but the dwarves had apparently heard the sound as well, for they lowered their heads and picked up the pace, Pikel’s sandals slapping and Ivan’s boots thumping.
Shayleigh slipped along silently right behind them, her bow ready. Around a bend in the corridor they saw a straight run past two intersections and ending at a set of double doors.
“Too many!” the elf maiden whispered harshly, slowing her pace. “Too many!”
Double doors blocked their way, then double doors hung awkwardly on broken hinges. Ivan and Pikel burst in, weapons high.
“Uh-oh,” muttered the green-bearded dwarf, echoing his brother’s sentiments exactly, for they had come into a huge hall, a dining area, now apparently doubling as a command post, lined with dozens of tables and more than a few enemies. Shayleigh sighed helplessly and rushed to catch up with the furious dwarves, who, in their momentum, had already charged past the first empty tables.
A group of ores sitting closest to the door barely had the time to look up from their bowls before the dwarves fell over them, hacking and kicking, Ivan butting with his deer-antlered helmet, and Pikel a flurry of flying knees and elbows, butting forehead, and tree-trunk club.
Only one of the six ores even managed to get out of its chair, but before the startled creature took two steps away, an arrow sliced through the side of its head, dropping it dead to the floor.
On ran the dwarves and on chased Shayleigh. Their only hope was in movement, the elf maiden knew, in rushing through too quickly for the multitude of enemies in this hall to organize against them. In full flight, she put an arrow to the side, catching a man in the shoulder as he tried to raise a bow of his own.
Tables overturned, chairs skidded aside, as the men and monsters scrambled to get out of harm’s way. One unfortunate goblin got tangled up in its companion’s chair. When the dwarves had passed, both the goblin and that chair lay flattened on the floor. One ogre did not run, but crossed its huge arms over its chest and stood with legs firmly planted, thinking itself an imposing barrier.
It got wounded in more than its pride when Ivan rushed right through those widespread legs, the dwarf’s axe up high over his head. The ogre lurched, grabbing at its torn loins, and Pikel ran beside it, caving in the side of its knee. The ogre hadn’t even hit the floor yet when Shayleigh sprang up, planting one foot on the cheek of its turned face, another on its ribs as she ran right down the falling creature’s side.
There seemed to be no method to the dwarven rush, no aim above the general chaos. Then Pikel spotted the serving area, a long counter running along the back wall.
“Oooo!” the green-bearded dwarf squeaked, his stubby finger pointing the way.
One of the three servers lifted a crossbow, but Shayleigh’s arrow took him down. A second lifted a wooden tray before him like a shield, but Ivan’s axe cleaved it in two and cleaved the man’s face in two as well. The third man’s shield, an iron pot, seemed more formidable, but Pikel’s club hit it head on, and the pot snapped back to hit the man head-on.
The three friends were over the counter in a flash, Shayleigh spinning about and setting her bow into frantic motion, for many enemies were now in pursuit. She scored hit after hit, but there seemed no way that she could possibly stop the closing horde.
Ivan and Pikel leaped atop the counter to either side of her, armed with stacks of metal plates. The dwarves opened up a barrage of flying metal. Dishes whizzed through the air, spinning and swerving, battering the approaching enemies.
Battering them and holding them up long enough for Shayleigh to methodically cut them down.
“Hee hee nee,” chuckled Pikel, and he hopped down from the counter and grabbed up a pot of thick green soup. Over it went, splashing and spilling, setting up the obstacle of a slippery floor for those enemies that came too near.
The dwarf also scooped up a huge ladle of boiling water before he climbed back atop the counter.
An arrow skipped right past Ivan’s ear, knocking into the wall behind the dwarf. Shayleigh, intent on the largest approaching monster, another ogre, noted the archer to the side, crouched beside an overturned table.
“Yerself takes the bowmen!” Ivan cried. “Me and me brother!! take on them fools that come close!”
The reasoning seemed sound, and the elf maiden forced herself to hold her nerve, forced herself to ignore the closest threats and trust in her companions. She swerved her bow to the side, saw the bowman’s hip foolishly hanging out from the barrier while he reloaded, and promptly stuck an arrow into him.
The approaching ogre carried four arrows in its chest but still stubbornly came on, right for Pikel and the helpless Shayleigh.
The dwarf’s eyes widened in feigned fear, and Pikel seemed to cower, causing Shayleigh to cry out. Pikel came up straight at the last moment, though, whipping out the ladle, splashing the surprised ogre’s eyes and face with boiling water.
Predictably, the ogre lurched, throwing its arms up over its burned eyes. The shift cost the beast its already tentative balance in the green soup, and it skidded in to slam its knees against the sturdy stone counter. Down low, trying to recover its balance and its sight, the ogre felt a burning flash, a club-inspired explosion that caved in the top of its head.
Pikel laid his brain-stained club aside and took up more plates, sent them spinning off at enemies who were suddenly more interested in getting out of harm’s way than in getting to the intruders.
“None better at kitchen fighting than a Bouldershoulder,” Ivan remarked, and, looking at the chaos and carnage, Shayieigh wasn’t about to disagree.
But the elf knew that more than the initial fury would be needed to win this battle. Dozens of enemies remained, for more had come into the room, overturning tables before them, getting down under cover. She saw another archer peek up over the top rim of a table to the side, saw his bow come up.
Shayleigh was the quicker on the draw, and the better shot. While the man’s arrow flew harmlessly high and wide, Shayleigh’s got him between the eyes. The elf’s satisfaction was short-lived as she realized that she had only five arrows remaining, and exhausted, too, was Ivan and Plkel’s supply of metal plates.
Cadderly kneeled above what was left of his prisoner, the man’s torn head and shoulders. Black shadows of guilt assaulted the young priest*s sensibilities, hovering images judging him, telling him that this helpless man’s death was his fault.
Danica was beside the young priest, urging him to his feet.
Cadderly pulled his arm free and stared hard at the gruesome sight. He thought of going into the realm of spirits, to find the dead man and...
And what? Cadderly realized. Might he bring the spirit back? He looked behind him, to the man’s chewed lower torso. Bring the spirit back to where? Did he possess the magics to mend the torn body?
“It is not your fault,” Danica whispered, his thoughts obvious to her. “You gave the man a chance. That was more than most would have offered in our situation.”
Cadderly swallowed hard, swallowed Danica’s wise words and let them push away his dark thoughts, his guilt.
“It could have been any one of us,” Danica reminded him.
Cadderly nodded and rose from the corpse. The hydra had come at all three of them, could have snapped Danica in half, and would have if she had not been so quick. Even if Cadderly had allowed the prisoner to keep his weapon, he could have offered no defense against the hydra’s brutal initial charge.
“We have to be gone from here,” Danica said, and again Cadderly nodded, turning to face the loose-hanging, scorched, and blasted door. He and Danica walked through it together, side by side, coming into a small anteroom. No living enemies presented themselves immediately, but that fact did little to calm the nervous companions, for leering gargoyles stared down at them from a ledge running around the top of the room, holding needle-sharp daggers, Talona’s favored weapon. Demonic bas reliefs covered the stone of supporting pillars, hordes of ghastly things dancing about the deceptively beautiful Lady of Poison. Tapestries surrounded the room, all depicting gory scenes of battle wherein evil hordes of goblins and ores, their weapons dripping blood and poison, overran hosts of fleeing humans and elves.
A single chair dominated the floor; it sat atop a raised dais and was flanked by tall, iron statues of fierce warriors holding gigantic swords before them—while their other hands inconspicuously clasped tiny daggers. No other doors were apparent, though a curtain covered the section of wall immediately behind the chair.
With Danica hovering protectively about him, Cadderly called up the song of Deneir, searched for clues its notes could give to him about the nature of the many things around him. He stood easier when he detected no magical influences on the gargoyle sculptures, but nearly retreated when he turned to the iron statues. Parts of them—mouth and arms, mostly—tingled with residual magical energy.
“Golems?” Danica whispered, seeing the young priest’s eyes open wide.
Cadderly honestly did not know. Golems were wholly magical creatures, animated bodies of iron, stone, or other inanimate materials. They would have seemed appropriate here, for such monsters were usually created by powerful wizards or priests to serve as guardians. Certainly with everything Cadderly had heard about Aballister, the thought of the wizard possessing iron golems, the most powerful of golemkind, was not out of the question. But Cadderly would have expected to detect more magic upon such a creature.
“Where to go?” Danica asked, her tone revealing that she was growing increasingly uneasy standing vulnerable in a wizard’s anteroom.
Cadderly paused for a long moment. He felt that they should go to the curtain, but if these were iron golems, and he and Danica walked up between them....
Cadderly shook the unpleasant image from his mind. The curtain,” he said resolutely. Danica started forward, but Cadderly caught her by the arm. If she was to trust him, when he could not be sure that he should trust himself, then he would walk beside her, not behind her.
With his walking stick, Cadderly gingerly pushed the curtain aside, revealing a door. He started to turn to Danica, to smile, but suddenly, before either of the companions could react, the iron statues swung about, swords stopping barely an inch from them, one in front and one in back.
“Speak the word,” the iron statues demanded in unison.
Cadderly saw Danica tense, expected her to go in a rush at her metallic adversary. A few flickering notes slipped past his consciousness, and he saw, too, the building magical energy in the iron statues’ arms, particularly in the less obvious arms holding the daggers. Cadderly did not have to use magic to guess that the tips of those sneaky weaopns would likely be poisoned.
“Speak the word,” the statues demanded again. Cadderly focused his senses on the magical energy, saw it rising to a dangerous crescendo.
“Do not move,” he whispered to Danica, sensing that if she struck out, the two daggers would do their work with deadly efficiency. Danica’s hands eased down to her sides, though she hardly seemed to relax. She trusted his judgment, but Cadderly honestly wondered if that was a good thing. The magical energy appeared as if it would soon boil over, and Cadderly still had not figured out how he might begin to counter or dispel it
It seemed to the young priest as if the golems were growing impatient.
“Speak the word!” Their unified chant rang out as a final warning. Cadderly wanted to tell Danica to dive away, hoping that she, at least, might get free before the nasty daggers struck, or those swords chopped in.
“The word is Bonaduce,” came a call from beyond the door, a female voice that the two companions recognized.
“Dorigen,” Danica breathed, her face scrunched with sudden anger.
Cadderly agreed, and knew that trusting in Dorigen would surely be a move wrought of desperation. But something abcut the word, “Bonaduce,” struck a note of truth, a note of familiarity, within the young priest.
“Bonaduce!” Cadderly yelled. “The word is Bonaduce!”
Danica’s incredulous stare turned even more disbelieving as the golems shifted back to their frozen, impassive stances.
Cadderly, too, did not understand any of it. Why would Dorigen aid them, especially when they were in such dire trouble? He started forward for the door and pulled the curtain fully aside.
“It must be trapped,” Danica reasoned softly, taking hold of Cadderly’s arm to prevent him from reaching for the pull ring.
Cadderly shook his head and grabbed the ring. Before Danica could argue, he yanked the door open.
They came into a comfortably furnished room. Soft, padded chairs were generously placed, quiet tapestries of solid color lined every wall, and a bearskin rug carpeted the floor. The only hard-edged furnishing was a wooden desk, angled in a corner opposite the door. There sat Dorigen, tapping a slender wand against the side of her crooked, oft-broken nose.
Danica was down in a defensive crouch in an instant, one hand going down to her boot to draw a dagger.
“Have I mentioned before how much you both amaze me?” the woman calmly asked them.
Cadderly sent a silent, magical message into Danica’s thoughts, bidding her to hold easy and see how this might play out.
“Are we any less amazed?” the young priest replied. “You gave us the password.”
“So she might kill us herself,” Danica added grimly. She flipped the dagger over in her hand, grasping it by the point so that she could flick it out at Dorigen in an instant.
“That is a possibility,” the wizard admitted. “I have many powers”—she tapped the wand against her cheek—“that I might use against you, and perhaps this time, our battle would have ended differently.”
“Would have?” Cadderly noted.
“Would have ended differently if I held any intention of renewing our battle,” Dorigen explained.
Danica was shaking her head, obviously not convinced. Cadderly, too, had trouble believing in the woman’s sudden change of heart. He fell into the notes of his song, sought out the aurora, the aura sight.
Shadows flickered atop Dorigen’s delicate shoulders, reflections of what was in her heart and thoughts. These were not huddled, evil things, as Cadderly expected, but quiet shadows, sitting in wait.
Cadderly came back from his spell, stared at Dorjgen with heightened curiosity. He noticed Danica slide a step to the side and realized that she was trying to put some ground between them, giving the wizard only a single target
“She speaks the truth,” the young priest announced.
“Why?” Danica replied sharply.
Cadderly had no answer.
“Because I grow tired of this war,” Dorigen responded. “And I grow tired of playing Aballister’s lackey.”
“You believe the horrors of Shilmista will be so easily forgotten?” Danica asked.
“I do not wish to repeat those horrors,” Dorigen replied immediately. “I am tired.” She held up her hands, fingers still bent from the beating Cadderty had given them. “And broken.” The words stung Cadderly, but Dorigen’s soft, benign tone did not.
“You could have killed me, young priest,” the wizard went on. “You could now, probably, with my own ring, which you wear, if with nothing else.”
Cadderly unconsciously clenched his hand, and felt the onyx-stoned ring with his thumb.
“And I could have let the golems kill you,” Dorigen went on. “Or I could have assailed you with an assortment of deadly spells as you walked through the door.”
“Is this repayment?” Cadderly asked.
Dorigen shrugged. “Weariness, more than that,” she said, and the woman did indeed sound tired. “I have stood beside Aballister for many years, watched him assemble a mighty force with promises of glory and rulership of the region.” Dorigen laughed at the thought “Look at us now,” she lamented. “A handful of elves, a pair of silly dwarves, and two children”—she indicated Cadderly and Danica with a wave of her hand, her expression incredulous— “have brought us to our knees.”
Danica moved again to the side, and Dorigen snapped the wand down in front of her, her face suddenly twisted with a scowl.
“Do we continue?” she demanded, poking the wand ahead. “Or do we let this play out as the gods always intended?”
Another silent message came into Danica’s thoughts, compelling her to relax.
“What do you mean?” Cadderly asked.
“Is it not obvious?” Dorigen replied, and then she chuckled, remembering that Cadderly still had no idea that Aballister was his father. “You against Aballister, that is what this war is all about”
Cadderly and Danica looked to each other, both wondering if Dorigen had gone insane.
“That was not Aballister’s intent,” Dorigen went on, chuckling still between every word. “He did not even know that you were alive when Barjin began the whole affair.”
The name of the dead priest caused Cadderly to unconsciously flinch.
“And certainly it was not your intent,” Dorigen continued. “You did not, do not, understand the significance, did not even know that Aballister existed.”
“You babble,” Cadderty said.
Dorigen’s laughter heightened. “Perhaps,” she admitted. “And yet I must believe that it was more than coincidence that has brought us all to this point. Aballister himself played a part in it, a part that he will possibly regret.”
“By starting the war,” Cadderly reasoned.
“By saving your life,” Dorigen corrected. Cadderly’s face screwed up even tighter.
“Inadvertently,” the woman quickly added. “His hatred for Barjin, his rival, outweighed his understanding of the poisonous thorn you would become.”
“She lies,” Danica decided, inching a step closer to the desk, apparently preparing to spring out and throttle the cryptic wizard.
“Do you remember your final encounter with Barjin?” Dorigen asked.
Cadderly nodded grimly; he would never forget that fateful day, the day he had first killed a man.
“The dwarf, the one with the yellow beard, was held fast by Barjin’s magic,” Dorigen prompted, and the image came clearly to the young priest. Ivan had stopped his advance toward the evil priest, had simply frozen in place, leaving Cadderly practically helpless. Cadderly was no powerful cleric back then, could barely win against a simple goblin, and the evil priest would surely have finished him. But Ivan came out from the enchantment at the last moment, allowing Cadderly to slip from Barjin’s deadly clutches.
“Aballister countered the priest’s magic,” Dorigen announced. “The wizard is not your friend,” she quickly added. “He holds no love for you at all, young priest, as is evidenced by the assassin band he sent to kill you in Carradoon.”
“Then why did he aid me?” Cadderly asked.
“Because Aballister feared Barjin more than he feared you,” Dorigen answered. “He did not anticipate what the gods had in store for him where young Cadderly was concerned.”
“How, then, does it play out, wise Dorigen?” Cadderly asked sarcastically, tiring of the woman’s private amusement and her cryptic references to the gods.
Dorigen motioned to the far wall, spoke a word of enchantment to reveal a swirling door of misty fog. “I was instructed to strike out at you with all my powers, and then retreat. I was to try to separate you from your friends and lead you through that door,” she explained. “Therein lies Aballister’s private mansion, the place where he planned to finish off the young priest who has become such a problem.”
Cadderly studied Dorigen closely through every word, using his aura sight to determine any traps the woman might have in store, Danica looked to him for answers, and he shrugged, convinced, against his own reason, that Dorigen had again spoken truthfully.
“And so I surrender to you,” Dorigen said, and Cadderly and Danica’s surprise could not have been more absolute.
The woman laid her wand on the desk and sat back comfortably. “Go and play this out to the end, young priest,” she bade Cadderly, again motioning to the swirling door. “Let the destiny of the region be determined by the private battle, as fate intended it all along.”
“I do not believe in fate,” Cadderly replied firmly.
“Do you believe in war?” Dorigen asked.
“Do not do it,” Danica whispered over her shoulder.
Dorigen’s smile was wide once more. “’Bonaduce’ will get you through this portal as well.”
“Do not,” Danica said again, this time loudly.
Cadderly walked away from her, walked toward the wall.
“Cadderly!” Danica called after him.
The young priest wasn’t listening. He had come here to defeat Aballister, to decapitate the force of Castle Trinity, so that thousands needn’t die in a war. This might be a trap, might be a portal that would take him to one of the lower planes and leave him there for eternity. But Cadderly could not ignore the possibilities presented to him by Dorigen’s claims, by that swirling door, and he could not ignore the truths his magic had shown to him.
He heard Danica moving behind him. “Bonaduce!” he cried, and he jumped into the swirl, and was gone.
The four-foot-high counter surrounded the three trapped companions on two sides, with a thick column, floor to ceiling, supporting it on either end of the eight foot front section. The wall blocked their backs, leaving only a small gap to get behind the counter on one side, wide enough for two goblins or one large man. So far, only a single enemy had opted to try that route—and he was summarily blasted away by the elf maiden with her deadly bow.
Ivan and Pikel stood atop the counter as the throng advanced, throwing taunts and throwing fists, though no enemies had yet come close enough to hit. At Ivan’s proclamation that ores were “born only to clean the gooey-greens outa ogre noses,” three of the pig-faced humanoids took up a wild charge. The first skidded in the spilled soup as it was about to leap for Pikel, its back leg flying out from under it and its front leg straight out and up high. It slammed hard against the counter, its ankle and lead foot up above the ledge, and Pikel promptly brought his heel around the ore’s toe and bent it down flat atop the counter, bringing his full weight atop it.
The trailing ores stumbled about, but using their fallen friend as support, managed to hold a tentative balance as they banged against the side of the counter. Ivan’s axe cleaved one in the side of the head, but the other managed to deflect Pikel’s first clubbing attack.
That ore was soon crushed against the side, though, as many of its companions, seeing the intruders suddenly pressed, rushed in.
“We cannot hold!” Shayleigh cried out.
“Just get yerself the archers,” Ivan replied, huffing and puffing with each word as he worked his axe furiously to keep the sudden mob at bay. “Me and me brother!! handle this crew!”
Shayleigh looked helplessly to her nearly empty quiver. Her hand started for her short sword as a soldier came around to the open side, but the elf realized that she did not have the time to spare for melee combat. She lamented the waste of an arrow but shot the man down anyway, hoping that his sudden death might give other enemies pause before they tried a similar route.
The counter bucked suddenly as an ogre slammed against the back of the crowd, and Shayleigh thought it would break apart, thought that she would be crushed against the wall as the irrepressible monsters pushed on.
Her actions purely wrought of terror, she turned to face the counter and put an arrow in the ogre’s face. It fell back and the counter appeared to resettle on its braces. Still unsure of its solidity, the elf maiden scrambled up on a shelf against the back wall, a position that afforded her a better view of the area beyond the immediate battle.
A man braced both his hands and one foot on the counter and started to leap up, thinking the dwarves too engaged to stop him.
Ivan’s axe promptly broke his spine, though the dwarf took a vicious hit on the hip for the distraction. Ivan grimaced in pain, growled the wound away, and chopped furiously at the goblin attacker, the dwarf’s mighty axe smashing through the creature’s upraised spear, and through the creature’s upturned face.
Ivan couldn’t revel in the kill, though, for the press of swords and spears, cruelly tipped pole arms and slashing daggers did not relent. The dwarf skipped and hopped, dodged and parried, and every now and then managed an offensive strike.
An arrow appeared suddenly, stuck halfway through Ivan’s yellow beard, and the waves of pain that assaulted the dwarf told him that it had gashed his chin as well.
“I telled ye to get yerself the archers!” he cried angrily at Shayleigh, but his bluster was lost when he looked in the direction from which the arrow had come, looked to the enemy archer lying dead on the floor, and the elven-crafted arrow sticking from his forehead.
“Never mind,” the humbled dwarf finished. He hopped as a sword sliced low across and came down with one boot trapping the weapon against the counter. Ivan kicked out, shattering the man’s jaw, knocking him back into the mob. Two others took his place, though, and Ivan was sorely pressed once more.
Pikel fared little better. The dwarf scored three quick kills, but was bleeding in several places, with one of the wounds fairly serious. He worked his club back and forth, tried to forget the weariness in his muscled arms, tried to forget the obvious hopelessness of it all.
He swooped left, batting aside one lunging spear, but a sword sliced in behind his club, striking against something under his sleeve and then driving through to nick at Pikel’s forearm.
“Ow!” the green-bearded dwarf squeaked, bringing his arm defensively in tight to his side. Pikel’s pain flew away in a moment, though, replaced by shock when the upper half of his pet snake fell out of his sleeve onto the counter.
“Ooooooo!” Pikel wailed, his little legs pumping suddenly. “Ooooooo!”
The sword wielder came in a straight thrust, but Pikel caught the blade in a free hand and flung it aside, oblivious to the lines of blood growing on his unarmored hand. The dwarf’s other arm pumped straight ahead, the end of his club slamming into the attacker’s face. Pikel grabbed up the club in both hands and chopped three times in rapid succession, driving the man to the floor.
Then the furious dwarf whipped a backhand cut that flung a goblin, trying to use the moment to climb atop the counter, several feet away. Back and forth came the heavy club, swatting weapons, breaking bones. Back and forth with undeniable fury; no defenses withstood the roaring dwarfs assault.
“Ooooooo!”
An ogre threw men and ores aside to charge the counter, leaped up bravely, stupidly.
Pikel smashed its knee out, spun a complete circuit and hit it again as it fell, squarely in the chest, sending it tumbling into the crowd. With the enemies directly before him knocked away by the sprawling ogre, the outraged dwarf hopped sidelong.
“Ooooooo!” A swordsman lunged for Ivan, but Pikel smashed the man’s elbow against the lip of the counter before his sword ever got close.
“Hey, he’s mine!” Ivan started to protest, but Pikel, not even hearing him, continued to wail and to batter. His next swipe snapped the man’s neck, but the dwarf followed through too far on his backhand, cupping Ivan and sending him flying backward from the counter.
Pikel was not even aware that he now stood alone. All that he saw was his dead snake, the serpent that had befriended him. He ran back and forth along the counter, showing no weariness in his furiously pumping limbs, feeling no pain from his many, and mounting, wounds, tasting only sweet vengeance as he continued to beat back, to overwhelm, the suddenly hesitant mob.
“We need more support up in front!” Ivan bellowed angrily as Shayleigh helped him back to his feet.
“Arrows?” Shayleigh explained, indicating her empty quiver and the single arrow she held to her bowstring.
Ivan reached up and yanked the arrow out of his face. “Here’s another one for ye,” the dwarf explained grimly. He jerked suddenly, weirdly, then reached over his shoulder and produced yet another long bolt.
Shayleigh’s eyes widened as she looked past the dwarf, looked to a table the enemy had rolled into position so that some archers might get shots through the opening at the side of the counter. She put up her bow immediately and fired, hitting only the wood of the blocking table, but forcing the enemy bowmen to duck down behind.
“I’ll get ye some arrows!” Ivan bellowed as he turned to regard the scene. Out ran the dwarf, full speed. An archer popped his head up, taking a bead. But he lost his nerve as the roaring dwarf drew near, and his shot flew harmlessly high.
Ivan narrowed his focus straight ahead, ignored the many enemies shouting and pointing his way from the side. He lowered his head and hit the heavy table full force, knocking it back over onto its legs and winding up atop it
The three stunned archers underneath looked up in surprise. They didn’t realize how vulnerable they had suddenly become with their barrier now above them until an arrow whistled in, killing one.
Two sets of eyes looked back to Shayleigh; both men were relieved to see a goblin rush across, inadvertently intercepting the elf s next shot at the cost of its own life.
Ivan came over the back side of the uprighted table, rolled in at the men headfirst, the flat side of his axe smacking one of the remaining archers on the side of the head. The other man scrambled to get a dagger out and readied before the dwarf could right himself and bring his axe to bear again. But Ivan had let go of his weapon, scrambled in and clamped his strong hands against the sides of the remaining enemy’s head.
A dagger cut into the dwarfs shoulder, but with a growl, Ivan heaved straight upward, the man’s head going flat against the bottom of the table. The dwarf continued to press, planted his feet under him and his shoulders against the table and heaved up with all his strength. Ivan ducked low as the table flew up a foot and then started to descend, but he kept his arms, and the enemy’s head, up high.
“Bet that hurt,” the dwarf muttered as the table slammed back down, and the man’s face scrunched up.
The man was sitting awkwardly, his legs twisted beneath him, his eyes still closed tightly. Ivan punched him in the face anyway, to get him out of the way, then the dwarf scooped up his axe and the nearest quivers and charged out from under the table, back for the counter area. A crossbow quarrel drove through his calf, and he pitched headlong, but he was up in a moment, running again, gnawing his thick lips against waves of searing pain.
Shayleigh had to spin about and put her third, and last, shot into the face of an ore that had slipped over the far side of the counter, around Pikel’s continuing frenzy. When the elf maiden turned back Ivan’s way, she found herself faced off against another goblin. Desperate, with no time to go for her sword, Shayleigh whipped her bow across, trying to drive the creature back.
“Yous is dead,” the goblin promised, but Shayleigh shook her head, even smiled, seeing a large, double-bladed axe come up high behind the creature’s head.
Ivan stumbled across the goblin’s back as it fell “Here’re yer arrows!” he cried, tossing Shayleigh three nearly full quivers. He had no time to hear her reply, for he spun about, axe flying wildly before him, to knock aside a thrusting spear.
Shayleigh, too, spun about, fitting an arrow as she turned and firing above the counter opposite Ivan, firing once, and then again as the press became general on all three sides.
“Dead snake!” Ivan cried repeatedly, prodding his frenzied brother on. “Dead snake!”
“Ooooooo!” Pikel wailed, and another enemy was swatted away.
But Shayleigh knew that they would need more than Pikel’s frenzy to hold out, and more than the two-score arrows Ivan had just given to her. Her arms pumped repeatedly, firing to the side and out in front beside Pikel, every shot scoring a direct hit, every shot blasting an opening for yet another enemy to step in.
“Bonaduce!” Danica called, and she headed for the wall, leaping up into the swirling fog. She hit the stone hard, and fell back, dazed, into the room.
She rolled in a defensive somersault, feeling betrayed and vulnerable. Dorigen had gotten rid of Cadderly, and the dangerous woman still held that wand. Danica turned another somersault, coming back to her feet more than halfway across the room from the still-sitting wizard.
“The password was Bonaduce,” Danica accused.
“Only those so designated by Aballister may enter his private chambers, even with the word,” Dorigen explained calmly. “He wanted to see Cadderly. Apparently, you were not included.”
Danica’s arm jerked suddenly, and one of her daggers flew at Dorigen. It sparked as it connected with a magical shield and bounced to the floor beside the woman, who promptly put her wand in line with Danica and held her free hand up, warning the monk to stay back.
“Treachery,” Danica breathed, and Dorigen was shaking her head in denial through every syllable of the word.
“Do you believe that you will kill me with that wand?” Danica asked, beginning to circle, her balance perfect, her legs ready to launch her away, with every measured step.
“I do not wish to try,” Dorigen replied sincerely.
“One spell, Dorigen,” Danica growled. “Or a single try with your wand. That is all you will get”
“I do not wish to try,” the older woman said again, more firmly, and to accentuate her point, Dorigen dropped the wand to the desktop.
Danica stood a bit straighter, her perplexed look genuine.
“I did not lie to you,” Dorigen explained. “Nor did I trick Cadderly into going somewhere he does not truly belong.”
Again, the indication was that Dorigen believed a larger fate to be guiding this encounter. Danica was not so convinced as her counterpart. She believed in the power of the individual, in the choice of the individual, and not in some predestined path.
“Aballister will likely punish me for letting the young priest through,” Dorigen went on, against Danica’s doubting expression. “He hoped I would kill Cadderly, or at least exhaust Cadderly’s magical powers.” She chuckled and looked away and Danica realized that she could spring atop that desk and throttle Dorigen before the wizard ever reacted. But Danica did not move, held by the continued note of sincerity in the wizard’s voice.
“Aballister thought the malignant spirit, the evil personification of the Ghearufu, would end the threat to Castle Trinity,” Dorigen went on.
“The ghost that you sent after us,” Danica accused.
“Not so,” Dorigen replied calmly. “Originally, Aballister did send the Night Masks to Carradoon to kill Cadderly, but the return of the spirit was purely coincidence—purely a fortunate coincidence as far as Aballister was concerned.
“He did not know that Cadderly could defeat that spirit,” Dorigen continued, and again came that curious chuckle. “He thought that his storm would surely destroy you all, and so it would have, except that Aballister did not know that you were far from Nightglow by that point. Fearful would he have been indeed, if he learned that Cadderly could defeat even old Fyren after he was finished manipulating the wyrm.”
Danica nearly fell over backward, her almond-shaped eyes opened wide.
“Yes, I watched that battle,” Dorigen explained, “but I did not tell Aballister about it. I wanted his surprise to be complete when Cadderly arrived so soon at Castle Trinity.”
“Is this penitence?” Danica asked.
Dorigen looked down at her desk and slowly shook her head, running her crooked fingers through her long black-and-silver hair. “More pragmatism, I would guess,” she said, looking back to Danica. “Aballister has made many mistakes. I do not know that he will defeat Cadderty, or you and your other friends. And even if we win this day, how can we hope to conquer the region with our army shattered?”
Danica found that she honestly believed the woman’s words, and that made her more defensive, fearing that Dorigen had cast some charm enchantment over her. “Your reversal now does not excuse your actions over the past months,” she noted grimly.
“No,” Dorigen agreed without hesitation. “Nor would I call it a ‘reversal.’ Let us see who wins in there.” She indicated the swirling mist on the wall. “Let us see where fate guides us.”
Danica shook her head doubtfully.
“You still do not understand, do you?” Dorigen asked sharply, and with the change in tone, the agile monk was down immediately into her threatening crouch.
“What are you talking about?” Danica demanded.
Dorigen’s answering shout stole the strength from Danica’s knees, hit her so unexpectedly that she could not even babble a retort. “They are father and son!”
Ivan fared the best of the three trapped friends as the fighting in the dining hall raged on. In the tight opening along the side of the cubby, the stout dwarf and his mighty axe formed an impenetrable barrier. Men and monsters came against him two at a time, but they couldn’t hope to get by his furious defense. And though Ivan was sorely wounded, he took up a dwarven battle chant, narrowed his focus so greatly that it did not allow him to feel the pain, did not allow his wounded limbs to weaken.
Still, the relentless press of enemies prevented Ivan from going to his brother, or to Shayleigh, both of whom needed support. The best that the yellow-bearded dwarf could do was yell out, “Dead snake!” every now and again to heighten Pikel’s fury.
Shayleigh blew away the first man who tried to come over the counter, hit the next adversary, a bugbear, with four arrows in rapid succession, the hairy creature slumping dead before it ever got atop the narrow area Shayleigh then fired one to her side, between Pikel’s legs, catching an ore in the face, then turned back as another enemy, a goblin, leaped up on the counter.
She shot it in the chest, dropping it to a sitting position, then shot it again, putting out the light in its eyes.
The goblins behind this victim proved smarter than usual, though, for the dead goblin did not fall away. Using its bleeding body as a shield, the next goblin in line came up atop the counter. Shayleigh got it anyway, in the eye as it peeked over its dead comrade’s shoulder, but the rush as both creatures pitched in behind the counter gave the following goblin a clear path to the elf maiden.
With no time to notch another arrow, Shayleigh instinctively grabbed for her sword. She whipped her bow across with one hand, deflecting the straight-ahead spear attack, and just managed to angle her short sword in front of her as the goblin barreled in, its own momentum impaling it.
Shayleigh jerked the dead thing to the side, throwing it down, and tore free her blade, its fine edge glowing fiercely with its elven enchantments. She had no time to take up her bow, though, and knew that she wouldn’t likely get a chance to put it to use in this fight again. She dropped it to the floor and rushed ahead, meeting the next adversary before it fully cleared the counter.
The goblin was off-balance, just beginning its leap to the floor, when Shayleigh got there, her sword snapping one way, knocking the goblin’s defenses aside, and then the other. Quicker than the goblin could recover, Shayleigh poked her sword straight ahead, popping a clean hole in the creature’s throat. She used its shoulders as a springboard as it slumped and got up to the counter at the same time as the next enemy soldier. The man hadn’t expected the rush and was pushed back, sprawling into the pressing throng, leaving Shayleigh free to smash down at the ore that was next in line.
She killed it cleanly, but a spear arced over its shoulder as she bent for the strike.
Shayleigh stood very straight, tried to keep her focus through the sudden jolt and blur of agony. She saw the spear hanging low from her hip, saw a man grab at its other end. If he managed to twist the shaft about...
Shayleigh hit the spear just under its embedded tip with her sword. The fine-edged elven weapon slashed through the wood, but the shocking jolt nearly sent Shayleigh falling into blackness. She held on through sheer stubbornness, forcing her sword through her most familiar attack routines to keep the pressing foes at bay until the waves of dizziness swept by.
“Ooooooo!” Pikel’s club did a rotating-end dance before the stupefied expression of an ogre. The giant monster swiped across with its hand, trying to catch the curious weapon, but by then, the club was gone, brought up high above the dwarf’s head.
“Duh?” the ogre stupidly asked.
The club slammed down on its skull.
The ogre shook its head, its thick lips flapping noisily. It looked up to see what had hit it, looked up and up some more, its gaze continuing for the ceiling until it overbalanced and fell backward, taking down three smaller comrades under it.
Pikel, already down at the other end of the counter, didn’t even see the ogre fall. A man had come up, and the dwarf slid down low, club swiping across to blow the man’s feet out from under him.
A sword gashed Pikel’s hip, but down low, he saw even more clearly his poor dead snake. His club came flashing across, snapping the sword wielder’s head to the side, breaking the man’s neck.
“Ooooooo!” Pikel was up in an instant, fury renewed. He skidded back the other way, defeating a potential breach, then came flying back again, tripping up a climbing goblin. The creature stumbled back, its chin slamming, and hooking, against the counter’s lip.
That was not a good position with Pikel’s club fast descending.
But how long could Pikel last? The dwarf, for all his rage, could not deny that his movements were beginning to slow, could not deny that the press of enemies had not relented, that two soldiers had come into the back of the dining hall for every one that the companions had killed. And the friends were all hurt, all bleeding, and all weary.
Across the hall, near the door, a man flew up into the air suddenly, over the ogre that was standing before him, his arms and legs flailing helplessly. Pikel glanced back curiously that way whenever he got the chance, glanced back just in time to see a huge sword explode through the front of the ogre’s chest. With power beyond anything the dwarf had ever seen, the ogre’s attacker tore the impaling sword straight up, tore it through the ogre’s chest and collarbone to exit at the side of the dead creature’s neck. A giant arm swung around, connecting on the ogre’s shoulder with enough force to send the dead thing flying head over heels away.
And Vander—Vander!—waded ahead, his fierce swipes taking down enemies two at a time.
“Oo oi!” Pikel cried, pointing his stubby finger toward the door. Shayleigh, too, noticed the firbolg, and the sight renewed her hopes and her fury. Tangled with an ore atop the counter, she punched out with her free left hand, slamming the creature’s jaw. She feigned a jerk with her sword, then punched again, and a third time.
The ore swayed, balanced precariously on the counter’s edge. It somehow blocked Shayleigh’s darting sword, but her flying foot got it squarely on the chest, knocking it backward.
“Vander is come!” she cried, so that Ivan, too, might know, and she rushed to the forward edge, crouching low and slicing down to drive back the next would-be attacker.
“That damned ring!” Ivan bellowed into the face of the man standing before him, referring to the magical, regenerative ring that Vander wore, a ring that had once before (and now, apparently again) brought the firbolg back from the dead.
Ivan’s wild laughter gave his opponent pause. The dwarf brought his axe up over one shoulder, and the startled man reacted by throwing his sword up high.
Ivan loosened his grip with his bottom hand and drove his top hand down, the butt end of the axe shooting straight out to pop the man in the face. He fell back, dazed, and Ivan tossed his axe up into the air, and in a single, fluid motion, caught it low in both hands at the bottom of its handle and whipped it diagonally across, slashing the man’s shoulder.
Near the middle of the room, a spearman jabbed at the firbolg’s hip, scoring a minor hit Vander twisted about and kicked, his heavy boot connecting with the man’s belly, driving up under his ribs and launching him fifteen feet into the air.
Vander spun back the other way, all his weight behind an overhead chop that cleaved a goblin in half.
The sight proved too much for the goblin’s closest companions. Howling with terror, they rushed from the room.
Too many other enemies presented themselves for Vander to consider pursuing the goblins. An ogre rushed in at him, its club coming across to score a direct hit on Vander’s breast. Vander didn’t flinch, but smiled wickedly to show his attacker that he was not hurt.
“Dun?”
“Why do they keep saying that?” the firbolg wondered, and his sword took the surprised ogre’s head from its shoulders.
To the companions still at the counter, Vander’s walk resembled a ship rushing through choppy seas, throwing a spray of goblins and ores and men high into the air at his sides as he passed, leaving a wake of blood and broken bodies. Vander was at the counter in a mere minute, cutting the enemy force in half. Pikel came down beside him and together they blasted an opening around to the side so that Ivan, too, might link up.
By the time the three got to Shayleigh, she was sitting atop the counter, leaning heavily on the pillar support, for her remaining enemies had gone screaming away into the halls.
Vander picked up the wounded maiden, cradling her in one arm. “We must flee this place,” he said.
“They’ll be back,” Ivan agreed. They looked to Pikel, who was reverently extracting the bottom half of his sliced snake from his torn sleeve, muttering a quiet, “Oooo,” as each inch slipped free.
Cadderly did not understand where he might be; this plush, carpeted room in no way resembled the harsh stone of the underground Castle Trinity. Gold leaf ornamentation and beautifully woven tapestries hung thick on the walls, all depicting images of Talona or her symbol. The ceiling was sculpted and decorated with some exotic wood that Cadderly did not recognize. Any one of the ten chairs in the huge room, their backs and seats carved to resemble teardrops, seemed worth a dragon’s hoard of treasure, with sparkling gemstones running up their legs and armrests and silk upholstering covering them from top to bottom. The whole of the image reminded Cadderly of some pasha’s palace in far off-Calimport, or the private chambers of one of Waterdeep’s lords.
Until he looked deeper. The song of Deneir came into Cadderly’s thoughts without his conscious bidding, as though his god was reminding him that this was no ordinary room, with no ordinary host. The place was extradimensional, Cadderly realized, created by magic, woven, to the last detail, of magical energy.
Looking more closely at the nearest chair, the song playing strong in his thoughts now, Cadderly recognized the gems as variations of magical energy, saw the smooth silk as a uniform field of magic and nothing more. Cadderly remembered an experience in the tower of the wizard Belisarius, when he had battled an illusory minotaur in an illusory dungeon. On that occasion, the young priest had perverted Belisarius’s handiwork, had reached down the minotaur’s throat and extracted an illusory heart of his own design.
Now, in this unfamiliar and obviously dangerous setting, Cadderly needed a boost to his confidence. He focused again on the chair, grabbed at the backing’s magical field, and transmuted it, elongated it, and turned it flat.
“A table would look better here,” he announced, figuring that his host, Abaltister, could hear his every word. And so the chair became a table of polished wood with thick, curving supports carved with eyes and candles and rolled scrolls, the symbols of Cadderly’s god and the brother god, Oghma.
Cadderly looked to the only apparent exit from the grand room, a wide hallway supported by sculpted arches running directly opposite the wall he had somehow walked through. He shifted the song of Deneir slightly, searching for invisible objects or other extradimensional pockets within this pocket, but saw no sign of Aballister.
The young priest moved to the table he had created, felt its smooth polish beneath its hands. He smiled as an inspiration—a divine inspiration, he mused—swept over him, then called upon his magic and reached out to the nearest tapestry, reweaving its design. He recalled the marvelous tapestry in the great hall of the Edificant Library, pictured its every detail in his mind, and made this one a nearly exact replica.
A chair beside him became a writing desk, complete with an inkwell lined with Deneirian runes. A second tapestry became the scroll of Oghma, the words of the most holy prayer of that god replacing the former image, one of evil Talona and her poisoned dagger.
Cadderly felt his strength swell from the images of his own creations, felt as if his work was moving him closer to his god, his source of power. The more he altered the room, the more this place came to resemble a shrine at the Edificant Library, and the more the young priest’s confidence soared. With every image of Deneirian worship he created, more loudly did the holy song play in Cadderly’s thoughts and in his heart.
Suddenly Aballister—it had to be Aballister—stood at the opening of the ornate hall.
“I have made some . . . improvements,” Cadderly announced to the cross wizard, sweeping his arms out wide. His bravado might have hid his nervousness from his enemy, but Cadderly couldn’t deny the moisture that covered his palms.
In a sudden motion, Aballister smacked his hands together and cried out a word of power that Cadderly did not recognize. Immediately, the new clerical dressings disappeared, leaving the room in its former state.
Something about the wizard’s motion, about the sudden flash of anger from the obviously controlled man, struck a familiar chord in Cadderly, tugged at the edges of his consciousness from a distant place.
“I do not approve of the icons of false gods decorating my private chambers,” the wizard said, his voice steady.
Cadderly nodded and brought an easy smile to his face; there really was no point in arguing.
The wizard walked to the side of the entrance, his dark robes trailing out mysteriously behind him, his hollowed gaze locked fully on the young priest.
Cadderly turned to keep himself squared to the man, studied every move the dangerous wizard made, and kept the song of Deneir flowing through his thoughts. Already several defensive spells were sorted out and in line, ready for Cadderly to release them.
“You have proven a great discomfort to me,” Aballister said, his voice a wheeze, his throat injured from years of compelling forth mighty magics. “But also, a great benefit.”
Cadderly concentrated on the tone of the voice, not on the specific words. Something about it haunted him, again from a distant place; something about it conjured images of Carradoon, of long ago.
“I might have missed all the fun, you see,” Aballister went on. “I might have sat back here in comfort and let my formidable forces bring the peoples of the region under my thumb. I shall enjoy ruling—I do so love intrigue—but the conquest, too, can be... delicious. Do you not agree?”
“I have no taste for food gotten at the expense of others,” Cadderly said.
“But you do!” the wizard declared immediately.
“No!” the young priest was even quicker to retort.
The wizard laughed at him. “You are so proud of your accomplishments to date, of the conquests that have brought you to my door. You have killed, dear Cadderly. Killed men. Can you deny the delicious tingle of that act, the sense of power?”
The claim was absurd. The thought of killing, the act of killing, had brought nothing more than revulsion to Cadderly. Still, if the wizard had spoken to him thus a few weeks before, when the guilt of having killed Barjin hung thick around Cadderly’s shoulders, the words would have been devastating. But not any more. Cadderly had come to accept what fate had placed in his path, had come to accept the role that had been thrust upon him. No longer did his soul mourn for the dead Barjin or for any of the others.
“I did as I was forced to do,” he replied with sincere confidence. “This war should never have started, but if it must be played out, then I play to win.” “Good,” the wizard purred. “With justice on your side?”
“Yes.” Cadderly did not flinch at all with the confident reply.
“Are you proud of yourself?” Aballister asked.
“I will be glad when the region is safe,” Cadderly answered. “This is not a question of pride. It is a question of morality, and, as you said, of justice.”
“So cocksure,” the wizard said with a soft chuckle, more to himself than to Cadderly. Aballister put a skinny finger to his pursed lips and studied the young priest intently, scanning Cadderly, every inch.
It seemed a curious gesture to the young priest, as though this man expected Cadderly, for some reason, to desire his approval, as though the wizard’s estimation of Cadderly’s-measure might be an important thing to the younger man.
“You are a proud young cock in a yard of foxes,” the wizard announced at length. “A flash of confidence and brilliance that is quickly lost in a pool of blood.”
“The issue is bigger than my pride,” Cadderly said grimly.
“The issue is your pride!” Aballister snapped back. “And my own. What is there in this misery that we call life beyond our accomplishments, beyond the legacy we shall leave behind?”
Cadderly winced at the words, at the thought that any man, particularly one intelligent enough to practice the art of wizardry, could be so singularly driven and self-absorbed.
“Can you ignore the suffering you have caused?” the young priest asked incredulously. “Do you not hear the cries of the dying and of those the dead have left behind?”
“They do not matter!” Aballister growled, but the intensity of the denial led Cadderly to believe that he had struck a sensitive chord, that perhaps there was some flicker of conscience under this man’s selfish hide. “I am all that matters!” Aballister fumed. “My life, my goals.”
Cadderly nearly swooned. He had heard those exact words before, spoken in exactly the same way. Again he pictured Carradoon, but the image was a foggy one, lost in the swirl of... of what? Cadderfy wondered. Of distance?
He looked up again to see the wizard chanting and waggling the fingers of one hand in the air before him, his other hand extended and holding a small metallic rod.
Cadderly silently berated himself for being so foolish as to let down his guard. He sang out the song with all his voice, frantic to get up his defenses before the wizard fried him.
The words stuck in Cadderly’s throat as a lightning bolt thundered in, blinding him.
“Excellent!” the wizard applauded, seeing his blast absorbed into blue hues around the young priest.
Cadderly, his vision returned, took measure of his protective shield, saw that the single attack had thinned it dangerously.
A second blast roared in, grounding out at Cadderly’s feet, scorching the rug about him.
“How many can you stop?” the wizard cried, suddenly enraged. He took up his chant for a third time, and Cadderly knew that his protection spell would not deflect the full force of this one.
Cadderly reached into his pouch and pulled forth a handful of enchanted seeds. He had to strike fast, to interrupt the wizard’s spell. He cried out a rune of enchantment and hurled the seeds across the room, triggering a series of popping, fiery explosions.
All images were stolen in the burst of swirling flames, but Cadderly was wise enough to doubt that his simple spell had defeated his foe. As soon as the seeds left his hand, he took up a new chant.
Aballister stood trembling with rage. All the room about the wizard smoldered, several small fires sizzled and sparked along the folds of a magical tapestry behind him. He seemed uninjured, though, and the area immediately around him was unscathed.
“How dare you?” the wizard asked. “Do you not know who I am?”
The wild look in the wizard’s eyes, purely incredulous, frightened Cadderly, brought back distant memories and distant images, and made the young priest feel small indeed. Cadderly didn’t understand any of it—what unknown hold might this wizard have over him?
“Your magics fended the lightning,” Aballister cackled. “How do you fare against fire?”
A small glowing globe arced through the air, and Cadderly, distracted, could not dispel its magic in time. The fireball engulfed the room, except for Aballister’s protected area, and Cadderly glowed green, as the same defensive spell he had used against old Fyren’s breath successfully defeated the attack.
But more’insidious were the aftershocks of the wizard’s spell. Smoke poured from the tapestries; sparks flew from all directions at the continuing release of magical energies. Each one ignited a new green or blue spot on Cadderly’s defensive shields, further wearing at them. And the young priest had no defense against the thick smoke stinging his eyes, stealing his breath.
Cadderly could hear that Aballister was casting again. Purely on reflex, the young priest threw up his clenched fist and cried out, “Fete.” A line of fire shot out from his ring at the same time Aballister’s next lightning bolt thundered in.
This one blew away the blue globe, snaked through to slam Cadderly in the chest and hurl him backward into the burning wall. His hair danced wildly, his blue cape and the back rim of his wide hat smoldering from the hot contact.
The air cleared enough for him to see Aballister once more, standing unhurt, his hollowed face contorted in an expression of rage. What magics did he possess to get through the wizard’s seemingly impenetrable globe? the young priest wondered. Cadderly had known all along that wizardry was a more potent offensive force than clerical magics, but he hadn’t expected Aballister’s defenses to be so formidable.
Panic welled in the young priest, but he focused on the sweet harmonies of the song and forced his fears away. He worked fast to create the same reflective field he had used against the manticore; his only chance was to turn the wizard’s magic back against him.
Aballister worked faster, waggling his skinny fingers again and uttering some quick runes. Bursts of greenish energy erupted from his fingertips and hurtled across the room. The first burned painfully into Cadderly’s shoulder. The young priest stubbornly held his concentration, though, enacting the shimmering field, and the second missile, and the three flying behind that, seemed to disappear for an instant and then appear again, heading back the way they had come.
Aballister’s eyes widened with surprise, and he instinctively started to dodge aside. As it had with Cadderly’s spells, though, the wizard’s globe absorbed the energy.
“Damn you!” the frustrated Aballister cried. Out shot the metallic rod, in thundered another lightning bolt, and Cadderly, still dazed and pained from the previous hits, still trying to find his breath in the thick smoke, ducked away.
The lightning blasted into the reflective field and shot back out the other way, smashing against Aballister’s globe, throwing multicolored sparks in every direction.
“Damn you!” Aballister growled again.
Cadderly noted the frustration, wondered if the wizard might be running out of attack spells or if his globe neared the end of its duration. The battered young priest tried to hold on to that hope, to use Aballister’s obvious distress as a litany against the pain and the hopelessness. He tried to tell himself that Deneir was with him, that he was not overmatched.
Another lightning bolt sizzled in, this one low, cutting a wake in the carpet and slipping under Cadderly’s shield. The young priest felt the burst under his feet, felt himself flying suddenly, spinning in the air.
“Not so large a shield!” Aballister cried out, his tone brimming with confidence once more. “And pray tell, how does it handle angles?”
Lying on the floor, trying to shake away the stunning effects, Cadderly realized that he was about to die. He focused his thoughts on the wizard’s last question, saw the wizard chanting again, holding that metal rod, but looking to the side, to the wall.
Desperation grabbed hold of the young priest, an instinctual urge to survive that momentarily numbed him from the pain. He heard the song of Deneir, remembered the bridge he had dropped in Carradoon and the walls he had caused to bite in the mountain valley. Frantically, he searched out the elemental makeup of the bare wall behind him.
Aballister’s, lightning bolt hit the wall to the side and deflected at a right angle. Cadderly, reaching for the wall behind him, grabbed its stone with his magical energy and pulled a section of the slab out, reshaping it.
The lightning bolt hit the back wall, would have deflected again at the perfect angle to destroy Cadderly, except that the wall’s surface had changed, was now angled differently. The bouncing blast shot out straight across the room, again slamming the wizard’s globe to shower harmlessly in multicolored sparks.
Still on the floor, Cadderly closed his eyes and fell more deeply into the song. More magical missiles came in, leaping around the reflective field, diving in to scorch and slam at the young priest. The divine song compelled Cadderly to fall into its sweetest notes, the notes of healing magic, but Cadderly understood that the delay created by attending to his wounds would only invite more attacks from the wizard.
He pushed the song in a different direction, heard the croak of his pained voice, and thought he would surely suffocate from the acrid smoke. Another missile slammed his face, scorching his cheek, feeling as if it had burned right to the bone.
Cadderly sang out with all his strength, followed the song into the elemental plane of fire, and pulled from there a hovering ball of flame that shot a line of fire down on the wizard.
Cadderly couldn’t see any of it, but he heard Aballister’s agonized cry, heard retreating footsteps clicking on the stone of the hallway beyond the room. The smoke continued to thicken, to choke him.
He had to get out!
Cadderly tried to hold his breath, but found no breath to hold. He tried to grab at the song, but his mind was too numb, too filled with confused images of his own impending death. He kicked and crawled, grabbing at torn carpet edges and pulling himself along blindly, hoping that he could remember the exact course out of the room.
Danica spent a long while staring blankly at Dorigen. Unsure of her feelings and stunned by the news that Dorigen had just given her, the monk had no idea of where to turn or where to go. And what was Danica to do with this dangerous adversary, this woman she had battled before, this woman she had told Cadderly to kill when he had Dorigen down and helpless in Shilmista Forest?
“I have no intention of interfering with this,” Dorigen said, trying to answer some of the questions etched plainly on Danica’s delicate features. “Against Cadderly or against you and your other friends.”
Other friends! In all the craziness of the last few minutes—the fight with the hydra, the desperate attempt to get at the wizard Aballister—Danica had almost forgotten them.
“Where are they?” the monk demanded. Dorigen held her hands out, her expression curious.
“We were separated in a corridor,” Danica explained, realizing that Dorigen probably did not know the course that had gotten her to this room. “A corridor lined with many traps. Darkness engulfed us, and the end of the corridor tilted as one tried to pass through.”
“The clerical halls area,” Dorigen interrupted. “They are quite adept at defending their territory.”
The woman’s obviously derisive tone as she mentioned the clerics gave Danica hope that the apparent rivalries within Castle Trinity might reveal a weakness.
“The dwarves and the elf fell through trapdoors,” Danica went on, though she wondered if she might be giving her enemy information that could be used to the detriment of her lost friends. Danica sensed that she could trust Dorigen, had to trust Dorigen, and that realization put her doubly on her guard, again bringing fears that the wizard had used some enchantment on her. Danica reached within herself, sought out her discipline and her strong will. Few charms could affect one of her rigid mental training, especially if she was aware that one might be in place.
When she focused again on Dorigen, the wizard was slowly shaking her head, her expression grim.
“The giant went through a side chute,” Danica went on, wanting to finish her thought before the woman cast some evil tidings over her.
“Then the giant has probably fared better than the others,” Dorigen said. “The chute would place him in a lower passage, but the trapdoors...” She let the thought hang ominously, slowly shaking her head.
“If they are dead...” Danica warned, similarly letting the words hang unfinished. She dropped into a defensive position as Dorigen stood up behind the desk.
“Let us discover their fete,” the wizard replied, taking no apparent heed of the threat “Then we might better decide our next actions.”
Danica had just begun to stand straight when the room’s door flew open and a contingent of several armed guardsmen, a mix of men and ores, rushed in. Danica leaped straight for Dorigen, but the wizard uttered a quick spell and vanished, leaving the monk to grab at empty air.
Danica spun about to face the approaching soldiers, six of them, fanning out with weapons drawn.
“Hold!” came a cry as Dorigen reappeared, standing along the wall behind the soldiers. The soldiers skidded to a stop and glanced back incredulously at Dorigen.
“I have declared a truce,” Dorigen explained. She looked directly at Danica as she continued, “The fighting is ended, at least until greater issues can be resolved.”
None of the fighters put up their swords. They glanced from the monk to the wizard, then looked to each other for some explanation, as though they feared that they were being deceived.
“What is you about?” one burly ore demanded of the wizard. “I gots fifty dead in the dinner hall.”
Danica’s eyes sparkled at the news; perhaps her friends were indeed still alive.
“Fifty dead, and where are the enemies?” Danica had to ask.
“Shut up!” the ore roared at her, and Danica smiled at its unbridled anger. An ore rarely cared for the deaths of companions as long as the threat to its own worthless hide had been eradicated.
“The truce stands,” Dorigen declared.
The burly ore looked to the soldier standing beside it, another ore, its filthy hands wringing its sword hilt anxiously. Danica knew that they were silently deciding whether or not to attack, and it seemed as if the wizard believed the same thing, for Dorigen was chanting softly.
Dorigen blinked out of sight once more; the ores turned to Danica, roared, and came on.
Dorigen reappeared right in front of the burly ore, her hands out before her, thumbs touching and fingers wide spread. The ore threw its arms up defensively, but the sheets of flame that suddenly erupted from the wizard’s fingertips rolled around the meager fleshy barriers, licked at the creature’s face and chest.
The other ore came in hard at Danica. She started for the desk, hopping as though she meant to go over it. The ore swerved, heading for the side, but Danica dropped back to her feet, and kicked its sword out wide. It tried to bring the weapon back in to bear, but Danica caught its wrist, then caught its chin with her free hand. She whipped the monster’s head back and forth fiercely, then snapped a quick punch to its throat that dropped it in a gasping heap.
Danica’s foot was upon the side of the ore’s face in an instant, ready to snap its neck if any of its companions were advancing.
They were not, and all but one of them had replaced their weapons on their belts. The single enemy still holding his sword looked at Dorigen and the smoking corpse before her, looked at the fierce Danica, and quickly decided that his remaining friends were wise in putting up their weapons.
“I declare a truce,” Dorigen growled at the soldiers, and none of them made any moves to indicate that they did not agree. Dorigen turned to Danica and nodded. “To the dining hall”
Cadderly lay on the stone floor, sucking air into his parched throat as the fires in the room behind him died away, having consumed the magical manifestations of curtains, tapestries, carpet, and wood.
Cadderly understood that this grand hallway was purely the image of stone, magical fields too dense to be sparked apart by mere flames. The young priest felt safe from any advancing flames, and he thought it a curious thing that the properties of such extradimensional pockets followed the same physical laws that governed true materials. What might be the potential, then, if he could create something in an extradimension, through the use of magic, and bring it back to his own plane? he wondered.
Cadderly filed the notion far away in his mind, reminding himself that his present business was more pressing than any hypothetical possibilities flashing around in his always questioning thoughts. He forced himself to his knees and noted the wizard’s sooty footsteps on the floor, noted by their long stride and small imprint that Aballister had left the room in full flight.
A dozen yards down, with several doors lining either side of the corridor, the wizard had apparently realized his obvious tracks, for they simply disappeared, leaving Cadderly to figure out which way Aballister had gone.
Still kneeling, Cadderly took out his crossbow and loaded an explosive dart. He laid the weapon on the floor beside him and realized, with a quiet nod of his head, that he held one advantage over Aballister, the greatest advantage of a cleric over a wizard. By Cadderly’s estimation, Aballister had not been wise to break off the combat, no matter how badly Cadderly’s pillar of flame had hurt him, for now the young priest fell back into the song of Deneir, let it take him where it had compelled him previously, into the sphere of healing.
He brushed a hand over his scorched cheek, closing the wound and perfectly mending the skin. He placed his hand firmly against the mark on his chest, where the lightning bolt had thundered home. When he took up his crossbow and stood, just a few minutes later, his wounds did not seem so serious.
But where to go? the young priest wondered. And what traps and wards had the clever Aballister set for him?
He moved to the nearest door, a simple, unremarkable one to his left. He scanned for any obvious traps, then called upon his magic to scrutinize it more fully. Unremarkable, it seemed, and from what Cadderly could tell, unlocked.
He took a deep breath to steady himself, held his crossbow out in front of him, grabbed the knob in one hand, and slowly turned it. He heard a distinctive click, a hissing sound as the door’s edge slipped past the jamb.
The door flew from his hand, snapped open in the blink of an eye. A fierce, sucking wind grabbed at Cadderly, pulling him to the open portal. His eyes widened in fear as he came to realize that this was a gate to yet another plane—one of the lower, evil planes judging from the growling shadows and acrid smoke filling the unbordered region in front of him. He grabbed at the doorjamb and held on with all his strength, and held on, too, to his precious crossbow.
He was stretched out fully into the new plane, feet leading the way. Fearful tingles caressed his body, a sensation that evil things were near him, touching him! The pull was too great; Cadderly knew that he could not hold on for long.
Cadderly locked his hands in place and forced himself into a state of calmness. As he had done in the previous room, he used his magic to study the magic of this area, of the door and the threshold.
All of the portal area was magical, of course, but a single spot stood out to Cadderly, its emanations of magic different and more intense than the fields about it. The young priest let go with one hand, straightened his crossbow, and drew a bead.
He couldn’t be sure if this was the place of the actual gate, the specific key to the interplanar barrier, but his actions were wrought of desperation. He put the crossbow in line and let fly. His shot did not hit the mark, but struck close enough so that the resulting explosion encompassed the target spot.
The wind stopped. Cadderly’s instincts and mounting knowledge of magic screamed at him to roll for the threshold, to tuck his legs in and get his hands clear of the door-jamb. He was wise enough not to question those instincts, and he dove headlong for the threshold, just aheadof the suddenly swinging door.
The door snapped shut, slamming Cadderly and pushing him on his way. He stopped rolling when he hit the corridor’s opposite wall, his legs and lower back bruised and sore. He glanced back and was amazed as the door swelled and shifted shape, twisting tightly into place, seeming to meld with the surrounding jamb.
Aballister’s extradimensional mansion apparently protected itself from such torn planar rifts. Cadderly managed a smile, glad that Aballister’s work had been so complete and so farsighted, glad that he was not hanging in some non-space, some formless region between the known planes.
Ten steps down the stone corridor two more doors loomed. One was unremarkable, like the one Cadderly had just encountered, but the other was ironbound with heavy straps and showed a keyhole below the handle. Cadderly searched for traps, checked around the edges for any areas that might reveal this, too, to be a portal to another plane. Nothing dangerous became apparent, so he reached down and slowly turned the handle.
The door was locked.
It crossed Cadderly’s mind more than once in the next few seconds that Aballister might be harboring yet another of his pet monsters behind this door, that blowing it open might put him into a fight with another hydra, or perhaps even something worse.
The flip side to that argument, of course, was that Aballister might be behind this door, recuperating, preparing some devilish magics.
Cadderly leveled the crossbow at the lock and fired, shielding his eyes from the expected flash. He used the moment to put another dart in place, and when he looked back, he found a scorch mark where both the lock and the handle had been, and the door hanging loose on its hinges.
Cadderly ducked to the side and pushed the door in, crossbow ready. His bow slipped down, his smile widened once more when he realized the contents of this room—an alchemy shop.
“What might bring you out of hiding, wizard?” the young priest muttered under his breath. He pushed the door closed behind him and crossed to the beaker-covered tables. Cadderly had read many texts on potions and magical ingredients, and though he was no alchemist, he knew which ingredients he could safely mix.
And, more importantly for what the young priest now had in mind, which ingredients he could not.
Ivan and Pikel led the charge down one corridor, cut through a room to the side, and headed out a back door into another corridor. Vander came roaring right behind them, still cradling Shayleigh, though the elf maiden was conscious and demanding to be put down. No enemies stood against the friends for this first scrambling rush. The enemy soldiers they encountered, even two ogres, fell all over themselves trying to run away. Ivan, more wounded than he cared to admit, let them go. The dwarf wanted only to find Cadderly and Danica, or to find some place where he and his three companions might hide and recover.
Through the back door of another room, the two dwarves surprised a man trying to come through the other way. He had just grabbed the door’s handle when Pikel’s club hit the thing, launching him across the corridor to slam against the wall. Both dwarves swarmed across the corridor and fell over him, Ivan connecting with a left hook, Pikel with a right, at the same time, on opposite sides of the unfortunate man’s face.
Ivan considered finishing the unconscious soldier as his friends ambled past, but he put up his axe and ran after them. “Damned young colt,” he muttered, referring to Cadderly, whose constant demands for compassion had apparently worn at the tough-skinned dwarf.
“To the side!” Shayleigh cried as Vander and the dwarfs dashed across the entrance to a side passage.
“Oo!” Pikel squeaked, and he and the firbolg sprinted on, a group of enemy soldiers wheeling around the corner behind them.
Ivan barreled into the midst of the force, his great axe chopping wildly.
Twenty feet ahead, Vander put down Shayleigh, who went right to work stringing an arrow. The firbolg spun about beside Pikel, determined to crash through to Ivan’s rescue. The two had only taken a step or two when Shayleigh cried out, “The other way!”
Sure enough, enemies poured into the corridor from another side passage farther down, a large force led by a contingent of ogres. Shayleigh put three arrows into immediate flight, felling one of the leading ogres, but another took its place, running right over the monster’s back as it fell.
Shayleigh fired again, scored another hit, and put her next arrow to her bowstring. She couldn’t hold them back, though. Even if every shot were perfect, if every shot killed an enemy, she would surely be buried where she stood.
She fired again, and then the ogre was upon her, its club up high, a victorious scream erupting from its huge head.
Vander’s forearm slammed it in the chin and knocked it flying into its comrades. The firbolg’s great sword swiped across, disemboweling the next ogre, driving the enemies farther back.
Ivan chopped and spun, every swipe connecting. He saw an arm go flying free of one orcan torso and smiled grimly, but that smile was smacked away as he continued to turn and a goblin’s club slammed him squarely in the face, taking out a tooth.
Dazed, but still swinging, the dwarf backpedaled and sidestepped, trying to keep his balance, knowing that to fell was to be overwhelmed. He heard his brother calling from not far away, heard an enemy grunt and groan as Pikel’s club smacked hard against bare skin. Something slashed Ivan’s forehead. Blinded by his own blood, he chopped out, connecting solidly. He heard Pikel again, to the side, and took a stumbling step in that direction.
An ogre’s club caught the yellow-bearded dwarf in the lower back, launched him tumbling through the air. He crashed through several bodies, the last being Pikel’s, and went down atop his brother.
Pikel heaved Ivan over behind him and hopped back to his feet, clubbing wildly at the tangled mass in front. He squeaked frantically for his brother to join him, and Ivan tried, but found that his legs would not move to his mind’s call
Ivan struggled to stand, to get beside his brother. He realized only then that he had somehow lost his axe, realized that he could not see and could not stand. Darkness engulfed his thoughts as it had his eyes, and the last thing he felt was slender but strong hands grabbing his shoulders and hauling him backward along the floor.
They were greeted at the dining room entrance by the groans and shrieks of the wounded. Danica started forward, her first instincts telling her to run through the carnage and seek out her friends. She stopped immediately, though, and spun about, hands crossing before her.
The sight of their dead comrades had put the soldiers who had accompanied Danica and Dorigen into a rage, and two of them stood right before the monk, their spears leveled, their faces firmly set for battle.
“The truce holds,” Dorigen said calmly, acting not at all surprised by the piles of dead and mutilated Trinity soldiers.
One of the spearmen backed away, but the other stood unblinking, unmoving, trying to decide if the consequences of disobedience would outweigh the satisfaction of impaling this intruder.
Danica read his thoughts perfectly, saw the boiling hatred in his eyes. “Do it,” she prodded, as eager to strike at him as he was to hit her.
Dorigen put her hand on the man’s back. Flickers of electricity arced up the wizard’s body, slipped down her arm and through her fingers, blowing the man to the floor several feet away. He rolled to a sitting position, the shoulder of his leather tunic smoking, metal speartip split in half, and hair dancing on end.
“The next time, you will die,” Dorigen promised grimly, to him and to the other soldiers milling nervously nearby. “The truce holds.”
The wizard nodded to Danica, who sped off around the room. She quickly discerned that her friends had made their valiant stand behind the small counter at the back of the hall. Finding their trail as they left the place was not difficult, since it was dotted with blood.
“M’lady Dorigen!” cried a man, rushing in behind the wizard and her soldiers. “We have them!”
Danica’s almond eyes flickered at the painful news, and she ran back across the hall.
“Where?” Dorigen demanded.
“Two passages over,” the man was happy to report, though his smile lessened when he noticed Danica running free. He gripped his weapon tightly, but, thoroughly confused, made no immediate moves to threaten the dangerous monk.
“Are they dead?” Danica asked, demanded.
The man looked to Dorigen plaintively, and she nodded that he should answer.
“They were alive by last reports,” he replied, “but fully surrounded and sorely pressed.”
Danica was again surprised by the sincerity in Dorigen’s alarmed expression.
“Quickly,” the wizard said to her, and Dorigen took Danica’s hand and ran off, the shrugging, confused soldiers of Castle Trinity falling into ranks behind them.
* * * * *
Pikel dodged back and forth along the corridor, his club holding back the enemy line while Shayleigh picked her deadly shots around him. Pikel’s club rarely came close to hitting anything other than an enemy weapon, but the corridor was fast filling with dead and wounded.
Shayleigh emptied one quiver, began working furiously on another.
“Ogre!” she heard Vander yell, and she had to spin about. An ogre had slipped past the furious firbotg and was bearing down on the elf. She put her bow up quickly and fired point-blank, her arrow disappearing into the fleshy bulk. But the ogre was not stopped, and the clubbing it gave Shayleigh sent her flying back against the wall, tumbling over Ivan. On the very edge of consciousness, she tried again to load her bow as the monster advanced.
Pikel glanced back over his shoulder—and a sword slipped over his lowered club to slash his upper arm.
“Ow,” he groaned, and he turned back just in time to see another sword slip in the other way, gashing his other arm.
“Ow.”
The dwarf darted forward in a feigned charge, and his enemies fell back, then he swung around, transferring the momentum of his spin into his wide-flying chib. The ogre roared as its hip bone cracked loudly, and it lurched to the side.
Shayleigh’s next arrow dove into its chest; Vander’s heavy sword gashed into its side.
It fell headlong over Pikel as he muttered, “Uh-oh,” and dove forward, trying desperately to get away. A man behind Pikel, fully intent on the dwarf, did not react quickly enough and was squashed under six hundred pounds of ogre flesh.
Pikel, laid out straight, scrambled and clawed his way from under the prostrate torso, past the ogre’s hips and right out between its legs.
Other enemies had run over the creature’s back and were waiting for, and stabbing at, the dwarf as he reappeared. He squeaked, “Ow! Ow!” repeatedly, taking stinging hit after stinging hit, trying to get his balance and turn about, that he might fend off the wave of weapons.
An arrow cut the air above him, and he used the distraction and the shield of a falling body to roll all the way out from under the fallen ogre. Three scrambling steps put him beside Shayleigh, the elf now holding her sword low before her, standing unsteadily.
“Together,” she mumbled to Pikel, but as she spoke, a club twirled through the air and smashed her in the face, and she fell heavily to the stone.
More clubs and daggers came flying the dwarf’s way. Pikel’s waving club blocked a few; he looked down curiously to regard a dagger’s hilt quivering from his shoulder, looked curiously to his arm that had suddenly fallen limp to his side.
Pikel tried to backtrack, stumbled and fell over Shayleigh, and had not the strength to get back up.
The side of her face against the stone, only one eye opened, Shayleigh noted the measured approach of the enemy horde, though her fleeting consciousness could not comprehend the grim consequences. The elf saw only blackness as a heavy boot slammed to the stone right before her face, its heel only an inch away from her bleeding nose.
Cadderly ran from the alchemy shop, pulling the ruined door closed behind him. A moment later the young priest was sprawled out on the floor, and that ironbound door was no more than a pile of burning kindling against the corridor’s opposite wall. Cadderly hadn’t expected the mixture to react so quickly! He put his feet under him and started running, managing to hold his balance as a second blast rocked the area, this one blowing apart the door opposite the alchemy shop and cracking the walls along the corridor.
Cadderly rounded a corner, glancing back as a fireball engulfed the area. He could only hope that the second door he had ruined was not another portal to the lower planes, could only hope that some evil, horrid denizens would not come leaping through into the corridor behind him.
He ran past another door, then skidded as he crossed by yet another, this one made of iron, not wood, and hanging open.
“What have you done?” came an angry cry from inside.
I have forced you to face me, Cadderly answered silently, a satisfied look stealing the trepidation from his face. He moved slowly to the iron door, pushing it all the way open.
Cages and glass cases of various sizes lined the huge room’s walls, and a tumult of growls and squawks greeted the young priest. The wizard stood across the way, in front of another door and between the four largest cages. Three of these were empty—for the manticore, the chimera, and the hydra? Cadderly wondered—but the fourth held a creature that would grow into a fearsome beast indeed. A young dragon, its scales glossy black, narrowed its reptilian eyes evilly as it regarded Cadderly.
Cadderly noted the slight trembling of the wizard’s shoulders, could tell that the exhausted man’s magical energies had been greatly taxed. And the young priest’s pillar of flame had hurt Aballister, for the side of the wizard’s neck was red and blistered, and his fine blue robe hung in tatters.
Another explosion rocked the extradimensional complex.
Aballister gnashed his teeth and shook his head. He tried to speak, but his words came out as a singular growl.
Cadderly did not know how to respond. Should he demand the man’s surrender? He, too, was weary, perhaps as weary as the older wizard. Perhaps this fight was far from over.
“Your war against Shitmista Forest was unjustified,” the young priest said, as calmly as he could manage. “As was Barjin’s attack on the Edificant Library.”
The wizard chuckled. “And what of the attack in Carradoon?” he brazenly asked. “When I sent the Night Masks to kill you.”
Cadderly believed that the man was daring him to act, was baiting him to make the first move. He looked again to that young black dragon, staring at him hungrily.
“There is still the option of surrender,” Cadderly remarked, trying to equal the wizard’s confidence.
“I might accept your surrender,” Abailister replied sarcastically, “or I might not!” The wizard’s dark eyes flashed suddenly, and his hands began a circling motion.
Cadderly had his readied crossbow up in an instant and launched the dart at Abailister without the slightest hesitation. His shot was true, but the dart skipped off the wizard’s newest magical shield and struck up high on the back wall, blowing a clean hole. Sparks flared at the scorched edges, the force of the explosion threatening to unravel the binding magical energies—magical energies that were already being assaulted from the continuing bursts from the alchemy shop.
As soon as the dart skipped wide, Cadderly knew that he was vulnerable. His choice of a conventional attack prevented him from throwing up a defensive shield. Fortunately, the wizard’s attack came in the form of fire, with Abailister hurling a small ball of flame across the room. The fire hit Cadderly squarely, would have burned his face and hair except that enough of his protective globe remained so that the flames were dispersed into a green glow.
The young priest recovered from the shock quickly, reaching into his pouch for some seeds to hurl back. Cadderly dropped them right back into the pouch, though, and nearly swooned, for it was neither his turn to attack, nor the wizard’s.
The black dragon spit a line of acid from between the bars of its cage.
Cadderly cried out and spun, falling away to the side. He did not throw his arms up in front of him (and if he had, they surely would have been charred) as his instincts demanded. He used the training Danica had given to him, threw as much of his body as he could out of harm’s way.
The acid slashed across his chest, burning and biting at his skin. Rolling on the floor, Cadderly saw that his tunic was burning, that his bandolier was burning.
His bandolier was burning!
Screaming in terror and in pain, the young priest twirled up to his knees and pulled the bandolier over his head. Apparently thinking that the battle had turned his way, Abailister paid Cadderly’s frantic movements no heed, was deep in the throes of casting another spell.
Cadderly put the flaming bandolier into a few quick spins over his head like a lasso and hurled it across the room, diving for cover as he threw, curling up in a fetal position with his hands tucked behind his head.
Abailister screamed in shock and fear, and the dragon roared as the first of the magical darts exploded.
One after another, the tiny bombs went off, each blast seeming louder than the one before. Metal tips and ends of the darts whipped about the room, pinging off metal bars, ricocheting off stone walls, and smashing glass.
Cadderly could not count the explosions, but he knew that he still had well over thirty darts in his bandolier. He tightened his arms instinctively about his head, continued to scream if for no better reason than to block out the terrible tumult in the room.
And then it was over, and Cadderly dared to look out. Residual sparking fires had been lit all about the huge room. The dragon lay dead, its torso shredded by many flying darts, but the wizard was nowhere to be seen.
Cadderly had started to stand when out of the corner of his eye he noticed a giant snake slipping out of the broken side of a glass container. He put his walking stick in the constrictor’s face, held it back until he could quick-step past.
A metal pole to the other side disintegrated in a flash of light. Another followed suit, and Cadderly began to understand that he had inadvertently unlocked the bindings of this entire magical pocket.
The young priest rushed across the room, through the far door, and into another, narrower corridor. The wizard stood forty feet away, one arm limp at his side, blood oozing from his shoulder, and his face blackened with soot.
“Fool!” Aballister yelled at him. “You have broken my house, but have damned yourself in its collapse!”
It was true, Cadderly realized. The magical bindings were unraveling. He started to reply, but Aballister wasn’t listening. The wizard scurried through a nearby door and was gone.
Cadderly ran up and tried to follow, but the heavy wooden door would not budge. There came another explosion, and the floor bucked violently, knocking him to one knee. He glanced frantically up and down the corridor, looking for some escape; he grabbed up his crossbow, only to remember that he had no more explosive darts.
Glaring light flickered through the open door he had left behind—the light of disintegrating material, Cadderly knew. He tried to fall into his magic, to search the song for a way out.
A flash ran along the ceiling above him, leaving a wide crack in its wake, and Cadderly realized that he did not have time.
He took up his adamantite spindle-disks and looped the cord over his finger. He sent them into a few fast movements, running them down to the end of the cord, then snapping them back into his palm, to tighten the cord.
“I hope you made these good,” he mumbled, speaking as if Ivan Bouldershoulder were standing next to him. With a determined grunt, the young priest hurled the spindle-disks at the door, and they cracked off the wood, knocking a deep dent in its surface. A flick of Cadderly’s wrist sent them spinning back to his hand, and he hurled them again, at the same spot.
The third throw popped a hole in the wood and a fierce wind filled with red stinging dust assaulted Cadderly. He kept his balance and his composure and whacked the door again, his spindle-disks widening the hole.
The flickering light to his side became continuous, and Cadderly glanced that way to see the very corridor dissolving, arcing fingers of electricity leading the way toward him, breaking apart the magically created stone so that it might be consumed.
Barely twenty feet away loomed nothingness.
Cadderly’s weapon hit the door with all his strength behind it. He couldn’t even see through the stinging dust, just flailed away desperately.
Ten feet away, the corridor was gone.
Cadderly sensed it, hurled the disks one final time, and threw all his weight against the weakened door.
Danica and Dorigen worked their way past scores of swarming Trinity soldiers, men and monsters alike. Many stopped to regard the fierce monk curiously, but seeing Dorigen beside Danica, they only shrugged and went on their way.
Danica knew that Dorigen could have had her overwhelmed with a single word at any time, and she spent more time looking at the wizard than at the scrambling soldiers, trying to figure out exactly what was motivating Dorigen.
They heard the firbolg’s roar from beyond as they came up on one corner, heard the wind-cutting sweep of Vander’s great sword and the frantic cries of dodging enemies. A goblin rushed around the bend, skidding to a stop right before Dorigen.
“Three of ‘ems is down!” it shrieked, holding four crooked fingers up before it. Three of ‘ems is down!” A sickly feeling washed over Danica. Three of ‘ems is down!”
The goblin’s smile disappeared under the weight of Danica’s fast-flying fist
“We have a truce,” Dorigen calmly reminded the volatile monk, but it seemed to Danica that Dorigen was not overly concerned, was even amused, by the wounded goblin squirming about on the floor.
Danica was up to the corner in an instant, peering around at the sight she feared to view. Ivan, Pikel, and Shayleigh lay helpless on the floor, with Vander, showing a dozen grievous wounds, straddling them, the firbolg’s huge sword working back and forth furiously to keep the multitude of pressing enemies back.
An ore cried out something Danica did not understand, and the enemy troops broke ranks, rushing away from the firbolg, rushing past Danica and turning, diving, into the corridor behind her. She understood the retreat when the scene cleared, revealing a battery of crossbowmen down the hall beyond the firbolg, weapons leveled and ready.
Vander cried out in protest, apparently realizing his doom. Then a glowing apparition of a hand appeared behind him, touched him, and he swung about, his sword cutting nothing but the empty air.
Danica’s first reaction was to spin and clobber the wizard, guessing that Dorigen must have been the one who had brought forth the spectral hand, and fearing what the wizard might have done to Vander. Before the monk moved, though, the crossbow battery opened up, launching a score of heavy bolts Vander’s way.
They skipped and deflected harmlessly off the firbolg. Some stopped in midair, quivering before Vander, then fell, their momentum expended, to the ground.
“I am true to my word,” Dorigen said dryly, walking past Danica and into the open corridor. She called for Vander to be at ease, called for her own troops to cease the fighting. Some soldiers, ores mostly, near Danica eyed the monk dangerously, clutching their weapons as though they did not understand and did not trust the strange events.
The soldiers who had accompanied the monk and Dorigen from the wizard’s area, who had witnessed Dorigen’s fury against the ore that had gone against her commands, sent a line of whispers spreading throughout the ranks, and Danica soon relaxed, the threat apparently ended. She rushed around the corner, found Vander, too, slumping against the wall, thoroughly exhausted and gravely
wounded.
“It is over?” the firbolg asked breathlessly.
“No more fighting,” Danica answered. Vander closed his eyes and slid slowly down to the floor, and it seemed to Danica that he would die.
Danica found the dwarves and Shayleigh alive, at least, and Shayleigh actually managed to sit up and raise one hand in greeting. Ivan was by far the worst off of the three. He had lost a lot of blood and was losing more even as Danica tried futilely to stem the flow. Even worse, his legs had gone perfectly limp and were without feeling.
“Have you any healers?” Danica asked of Dorigen, who was standing over her.
“The clerics are all dead,” a nearby soldier answered for the wizard, his words sharp-edged as he, too, tended to a wounded man, a Trinity soldier fast slipping into the realm of death.
Danica winced, remembering Cadderly’s brutal work against that group, thinking it terribly ironic that his necessary actions against Trinity’s priests might now cost his friends their lives.
Cadderly! The word assaulted Danica as surely as would an enemy spear. Where was he? she wondered. The potentially disastrous consequences of his showdown against Aballister, his father, rang clearer to the monk now, with Ivan cradled helplessly in her arms. Shayleigh seemed stronger with every passing moment; Vander’s cuts had already clotted and were somehow mysteriously on the mend; and Pikel groaned and grumbled, finally rolling over with a curious, “Huh?”
But Ivan... Danica knew that only his dwarven toughness was keeping him alive, doubted that even that considerable strength would support him for much longer. Ivan needed a priest who could access powerful spells of healing—Ivan needed Cadderly.
Dorigen ordered several men to assist Danica in her efforts, sent several others to the priests’ private quarters to search for bandages and healing potions and salves. None of the men, standing in the blood of their own allies, seemed overly eager to aid the brutal intruders, but none dared to disobey the wizard.
Danica, pressing hard against a pumping wound in Ivan’s chest, her armed soaked with blood, could only wait and pray.
The small sun shone red. The air was hazy with swirling dust, and the rocky, barren landscape ranged from orange hues to deep crimson. All was quiet, save for the endless, mournful call of the gusting, stinging wind.
Cadderly saw no men about him, no plants or animals, no sign even of water, and he couldn’t imagine anything surviving in this desolate place. He wondered where he was and knew only that this barren region was nowhere on the surface of Toril.
“No place that has any name,” Aballister answered the young priest’s unspoken question. The wizard walked out from a nearby tumble of boulders and stood facing Cadderly. “At least none that I have ever heard.”
Cadderly took some comfort in the feet that he could still hear Deneir’s song playing in his mind. He began to sing along, quietly, his hand with the magical ring clenched at his side.
“I would be very careful before attempting any spells,” Aballister warned, guessing his intent. “The properties of magic are not the same here as they are on our own world. A simple line of fire”—the wizard looked to the ring as he spoke—“might well engulf this entire planet in a ball of flame.
“It is the dust, you see,” the wizard continued, holding his hand up into the wind, then folding his long, skinny fingers to rub against the red powder in his palm. “So volatile.”
Aballister’s sincere calm bothered the young priest.
“Your extradimensional home is no more,” Cadderly said, trying to steal the wizard’s bluster.
Aballister frowned. “Yes, dear Cadderly, you have become such a bother. It will take me many months to reconstruct that magnificent work. It was magnificent, don’t you agree?”
“We are stranded.” It was spoken as a statement, but Cadderly, fearful that his words might be true, privately intended it as a question.
Aballister’s face screwed up incredulously, as though he thought the claim absurd. Cadderly took comfort in that, for if the wizard possessed some magic that would get them home, the young priest believed that Deneir would show him the way, as well.
“You are not a traveler,” Aballister remarked, and he shook his head, seeming almost disappointed. “I never would have guessed that you would become so paralyzed by the comforts of that miserable library.”
Now it was Cadderly who screwed up his face. What was the man saving? He never would have guessed? What revelations lay in the wizard’s choice of words, his choice of tense?
“Who are you?” Cadderly asked suddenly, without thinking, without even meaning to speak the thought aloud.
Aballister’s burst of laughter mocked him. “I am one who has lived many more years than you, who knows more about you than you believe, and who has defeated men and monsters much greater than you,” the wizard boasted, and again his tone reflected sincere serenity.
“You may have done me a favor with your stubborn determination and your surprising resourcefulness,” Aballister went on. “Both Barjin and Ragnor, my principle rivals, are dead because of you, and Dorigen as well, I would guess, since you came into my home alone.”
“Dorigen showed me the way in,” Cadderly corrected, more interested in deflating Aballister than in protecting the woman. “She is very much alive.”
For the first time, Aballister seemed truly bothered, or at least perplexed. “She would not appreciate your telling me of her treachery,” he reasoned. He started to elaborate, but stopped suddenly, feeling an intrusion in his thoughts, a presence that did not belong.
Cadderly pressed the domination spell, the same one he had used to “convince” Dean Thobicus to allow him to head out for Castle Trinity. He focused on the area of blackness he knew to be Aballister’s identity, sent forth a glowing ball of energy to assault the wizard’s mind.
Aballister stopped the glowing ball and pushed it back toward the young priest. How easily you work around the limitations of our physical surroundings, the wizard congratulated telepathically. Though you prove yourself a fool to challenge me so!
Cadderly ignored the message, pressed on with all his mental strength. The glowing ball of mental energy seemed to distort and flatten, moving not at all, as Aballister stubbornly pushed back.
You are strong, the wizard remarked.
Cadderly held similar feelings for his adversary. He knew his focus on the ball was absolute, and yet Aballister held him at bay. The young priest understood the synaptic movements of Aballister’s thoughts, the clear flow of reasoning, the desperation of curiosity, and it seemed to Cadderly almost as if he was looking into some sort of mental mirror. They were so similar, the two opponents, and yet so different!
Cadderly’s mind began to wander, began to wonder how many people of Faerun might possess similar mental powers, a similar synaptic flow. Very few, he believed, and that led him to begin calculating the probabilities of this meeting....
The glowing ball, the mental manifestation of pure pain, leaped his way, and Cadderly dismissed the tangent thoughts, quickly regaining his focus. The struggle continued for many moments, with neither man gaint again any advantage, neither man willing to relinquish an inch to the other.
It is of no avail, came Aballister’s thoughts.
Only one will leave this place, Cadderly replied.
He pressed on, again making no headway. But then Cadderly began to hear the melody of the song of Deneir, flowing along beside him, falling into place near him and then within him. These were the notes of perfect harmony, sharpening Cadderly’s focus to a point where the unbelieving wizard could not follow. Aballister’s mind might have been Cadderly’s equal, but the wizard tacked the harmony of spirit, lacked the company of a god figure. Aballister had no answers for the greatest questions of human existence, and therein lay his weakness, his self-doubts.
The glowing ball began to move toward the wizard, slowly, but inevitably.
Cadderly felt Aballister’s welling panic, and that only scattered the wizard’s focus even more.
Do you not know who I am? the wizard telepathically asked. The desperation in his thoughts made Cadderly believe the words to be another pointless boast, a fervent denial that anyone could hope to defeat him in mental combat. The young priest was not distracted, maintained his focus and the pressure—until Aballister played his trump.
“I am your father!” the wizard screamed.
The words slammed into Cadderly more profoundly than any lightning bolt. The glowing ball was no more, the mental contact shattered by the overwhelming surprise. It all made sense to the young priest. Awful, undeniable sense, and after viewing the wizard’s thought processes, so similar, even identical, to his own, Cadderly could not find the strength to doubt the claim.
I am your father! The words rang out in Cadderly’s mind, a damning cry, a pang of loneliness and regret for those things that might have been.
“Do you not remember?” the wizard asked, and his voice sounded so very sweet to the stunned young priest.
Cadderly blinked his eyes open, regarded the man and his unthreatening, resigned pose.
Aballister crooked his arms as though he were cradling a baby. “I remember holding you close,” he cooed. “I would sing to you—how much more precious you were to me since your mother had died in childbirth!”
Cadderly felt the strength draining from his legs.
“Do you remember that?” the wizard asked gently. “Of course you do. There are some things ingrained deeply within our thoughts, within our hearts. You cannot forget those moments we had together, you and I, father and son.”
Aballister’s words wove a myriad of images in Cadderly’s mind, images of his earliest days, the serenity and security he had felt in his father’s arms. How wonderful things had been for him then! How filled with love and perfect harmony!
“I remember the day I was forced to give you up,” Aballister purred on. His voice cracked; a tear streamed down his weary old face. “So vividly, I remember. Time has not dulled the edge of that pain.”
“Why?” Cadderly managed to stammer.
Aballister shook his head. “I was afraid,” he replied. “Afraid that I alone could not give you the life you deserved.”
Cadderly felt only compassion for the man, had forgiven Aballister before the wizard had even asked for forgiveness.
“All of them were against me,” Aballister went on, his voice taking on an unmistakable edge—and to Cadderly, the sharpness of the wizard’s rising anger only seemed to validate all that Aballister had claimed. “The priests, the officials of Carradoon. ‘It will be better for the boy’ they all said, and now I understand their reasoning.”
Cadderly looked up and shrugged, not following the logic.
“I would have become the mayor of Carradoon,” Aballister explained. “It was inevitable. And you, my legacy, my heart and soul, would have followed suit. My political rivals could not bear to see that come to pass, could not bear to see the family of Bonaduce attain such dominance. Jealousy drove them, drove them all!”
It all made perfect sense to the stunned young priest. He found himself hating the Edificant Library, hating Dean Thobicus, the old liar, and hating even Headmaster Avery Schell, the man who had served as his surrogate father for so many years. Pertelope, too! What a phony she had been! What a hypocrite!
“And so I have risen against them,” Aballister proclaimed. “And I have searched you out. We are together again, my son.”
Cadderly closed his eyes, put his head down, and absorbed those precious words, words he had wanted to hear from his earliest recollections. Aballister continued talking, but Cadderly’s mind remained locked on those six sweet words. We are together again, my son.
His mother had not died in childbirth.
Cadderly did not really remember her, just in images, flashes of her smiling face. But those images certainly did not come from Cadderly’s moment of childbirth.
And I have searched you out.
But what of the Night Masks? Cadderly’s reasoning screamed at him. Aballister had indeed searched him out, had sent killers to search him out, to murder him and to murder Danica.
It was only then that Cadderly suspected that the wizard had placed an enchantment over him, had sweetened his words with subtle magical energies. The young priest’s heart fought back against the reasoning, against the logical protests, for he did not want to believe that he was being deceived, wanted desperately to believe in his father’s sincerity.
But his mother had not died in childbirth!
Aballister’s charming tapestry began to unwind. Cadderly focused on the wizard’s continuing words once more—and found that the man was no longer coaxing sweet images, but was chanting.
Cadderly had let his guard down, had no practical defense against the impending spell. He looked up to see Aballister loose a sheet of sizzling blue lightning that wobbled and zigzagged through the popping red dust. The wizard apparently understood the properties of this landscape, for the blast deflected unerringly toward Cadderly. The young priest threw his arms up, felt the jolting, burning explosion jerk his muscles every which way, felt it grab at his heart and squeeze viciously.
He sensed that he was flying, but felt nothing. He sensed that he had slammed hard against some rock, but was beyond the sensation of pain.
“Now you are dead,” he heard Aballister say, distantly, as though he and the wizard were no longer facing each other, were no longer on the same plane of existence.
Cadderly understood the truth of that claim, felt his life-force slipping from his mortal coil, slipping into the world of the spirit, the realm of the dead. Looking down, he saw himself lying on the red ground, broken and smoldering. Then his spirit was bathed in the divine light, the same washing sensation he had felt weeks ago at the Dragon’s Codpiece when he had gone in search of Headmaster Averts spirit.
One, two, played the notes of Deneir’s song.
He knew only peace and serenity, felt more at home than he had ever felt, and knew that he had come to a place where he might find some rest.
One, two.
All thoughts of the material world began to fade. Even images of Danica, his dearest love, were not tainted with regret, for Cadderly held faith that he and she would one day be rejoined. His heart lifted; he felt his spirit soar.
One, two, came the song. Like a heartbeat.
Cadderly saw his body again, far below him, saw one finger twitch slightly.
No! he protested.
One, two, compelled the song. Cadderly was not being asked, he was being told. He looked to Aballister, spell-casting once more, creating a shimmering doorway in the red air. Aballister would return to Castle Trinity, the young priest suddenly realized, and all the region would be plunged into darkness.
Cadderly understood the plea of Deneir, and no longer did his spirit protest One, two, beat his heart.
When he opened his material eyes and looked upon Aballister, he was again flooded with the warm sensation of the images of childhood the wizard had conjured. Rationally, Cadderly understood that he had been under an enchantment, understood that simple logic proved Aballister’s lies. But the lure of what Aballister had shown him could not be easily overcome.
Then another image came to the young priest, a memory he had blocked out, packed away in a remote corner of his mind long, long ago. He stood before the doors of the Edificant Library, a young and not so fat Headmaster Avery facing his father before him. Avery’s face was blotched red from rage. He screamed at Aballister, even cursed the man, and reiterated that Aballister had been banned from ever again entering the Edificant Library.
Aballister showed no sign of remorse, even laughed at the burly priest. “Then take the brat,” he cackled, and he roughly shoved Cadderly forward, tearing a handful of hair from Cadderly’s head as he pulled his hand away.
The pain was intense, physically and emotionally, but Cadderly did not cry out, not then and not now. In looking back on that awful moment, Cadderly realized that he did not cry out because he was so accustomed to Aballister’s commonplace abuse. He had been the outlet for the wizard’s frustrations. He was the outlet as his mother had been the outlet.
His mother!
Cadderly was somehow standing, growling, and Aballister turned about, his eyes popping wide with surprise when he saw that his son still lived. Behind the wizard, the portal glowed and shimmered, sometimes showing an image of the anteroom to the wizard’s mansion within its magical borders. Aballister would abandon him now, as he had abandoned him then, would go about his business and leave his son, “the brat,” to fate.
More memories assaulted the young priest, as though he had opened a box that he could not close. He saw Aballister’s face, twisted demonically with rage, heard his mother’s pitiful cries and his own quiet sobs.
The manifestation of a huge sword appeared in the red air before him, waving menacingly. “Lie down and die,” he heard the wizard say.
That sword! Aballister had used it against Cadderly’s mother, had used this very same spell to kill Cadderly’s mother!
“Oh, my dear Deneir,” the lost young priest heard himself whimper. The song thrummed in his head of its own accord; Cadderly did not compel it to play and hardly heard the harmony of its sweet notes. He thought he heard Headmaster Averts voice at that moment, but the notion was lost when he saw the magical sword arcing his way, slicing for his unprotected neck, too close for him to dodge.
The sword struck him and then dissolved with a sharp sizzle.
“Damn you!” the wizard, his father, cried.
Cadderly saw nothing but his mother’s face, felt nothing but a primal rage focused on this murderer, this imposter. He heard a sound escaping his lips, a burst of anger and magical energy too great for him to contain. It came forth as the most discordant note of the Deneirian song Cadderly had ever heard, a purely destructive twist of the precious notes.
The very ground heaved before him, and he continued to scream. Like an ocean wave, the red soil rolled toward Aballister, a crack widening in its mighty wake.
“What are you doing?” the wizard protested, and so weak and minuscule did his voice sound beneath the roar of Cadderly’s primal scream!
Aballister lurched into the air, thrown by the wave. He flailed his arms as he descended, flapping futilely, and fell into the torn crack. The wave diminished as it rolled on, the ground becoming quiet once more.
“I am your father!” came Aballister’s pleading, pained cry from somewhere not too far below the rim of the crack.
Another cry erupted from Cadderly’s aching lungs, and he threw his hands up before him and clapped them together.
And following his lead, the crack in the ground, too, snapped shut Aballister’s cries were no more.
An exhausted Cadderly stepped through the door Aballister had conveniently created, stepped through the wall, which was no longer covered with a swirling mist, and into the room where he had left Danica. A dozen enemy soldiers were there, milling about and grumbling to each other, but, oh, how they scrambled when the young priest suddenly appeared in their midst! They screamed and punched each other, fighting to get away from the dangerous man. In but a few moments, only she remained in the room, and these kept their wits enough to draw their weapons and face the young priest squarely.
“Go to Dorigen!” one of them barked at another, and the man ran off.
“Stay back, I warn you!” another man growled at Cadderly, prodding forward threateningly with his spear.
Cadderly’s head throbbed; he wanted no fight with this crew, or with anyone for that matter, but he could hardly ignore his precarious situation. He accessed the song of Deneir, though the effort pained him, and the next time the man prodded ahead, he found that he was holding not a spear, but a writhing, obviously unhappy serpent. The man shrieked and dropped the thing to the floor, scrambling back away from it, though it made no move to attack.
“We have your friends!” another man, the soldier who had ordered a companion to go for Dorigen, cried. “If you kill us, they, too, will be killed!”
Cadderly didn’t even hear the second sentence. The proclamation that his friends were prisoners, and not dead, sent his hopes soaring. He rested back against the wall and tried hard not to think of the fact that he had just destroyed his own father.
Danica raced into the room a moment later, slammed hard into Cadderly, and threw her arms around him, crushing him in a hug.
“Aballister is dead,” the young priest said to Dorigen over Danica’s shoulder.
Dorigen gave him an inquisitive look, and Danica, too, backed away to arm’s length and stared hard at her love.
“I know,” Cadderly said quietly.
“He was your father?” Danica asked, her expression as pained as that of Cadderly.
Cadderly nodded, and his lips went thin as he tried to firm up his jaw.
“Ivan needs you,” Danica said to him. She regarded the young priest carefully, then shook her head doubtfully, seeing his obvious exhaustion.
Dorigen led Cadderly and Danica back to the room they had set up for the care of the wounded. Cadderly’s four friends were there—though Vander hardly seemed wounded anymore—along with a handful of Castle Trinity’s human soldiers. The ores and other goblinoid creatures had followed their own custom of slaughtering their seriously wounded companions.
Pikel and Shayleigh were both sitting up, though neither looked very steady. Their expressions brightened at Cadderly’s approach, and they motioned for him to go to Ivan, lying, pale as death, on a nearby cot.
Cadderiy knelt beside the yellow-bearded dwarf, amazed that Ivan still drew breath, given the sheer number of garish wounds he had suffered. The young priest realized that Ivan, for all his toughness, didn’t have much time, and knew that he had to somehow find the strength to follow the song to the sphere of healing and bring forth powerful magics.
Quietly, Cadderiy began to chant, and he heard the music, but it was distant, so distant. Cadderiy mentally reached for it, felt the pressure in his temples, and closed his eyes as he fell into its flow, guiding it along. He swam past the notes of the minor spells of healing, knowing they would be of little use in tending the dwarf’s most serious wounds. The song built to a thrumming crescendo in his thoughts, moved at Cadderly’s demand into the realm of the greatest spells of healing.
The next thing the young priest knew, he was lying on the floor, looking up into Danica’s concerned expression. She helped him back to a sitting position and he looked upon Ivan hopelessly.
“Cadderiy?” Danica asked, and the young priest could think of several questions reflected in that one word.
“He is too tired,” Dorigen answered, coming to kneel beside them both. The wizard looked into Cadderly’s hollowed gray eyes and nodded, and understood.
“I must access the magic,” the young priest said determinedly, and he fell right back into the song, fought hard, for now it seemed to him even more distant.
Twenty minutes passed before he woke up the next time, and Cadderiy knew then that he would need several more hours of rest before he could even attempt to get into the greatest levels of healing magic again. He knew, too, in looking at the dwarf, that Ivan would not live that long.
“Why do you do this to me?” Cadderiy asked aloud, asked his god, and all those about him regarded him curiously.
“Deneir,” he explained privately to Danica. “He has abandoned me in my time of desperation. I cannot believe that he will let Ivan die.”
“Your god does not control the minor fetes of minor players,” Dorigen said, again moving close to the two.
Cadderiy shot her a derisive glance that plainly asked what the wizard might know of it.
“I understand the properties of magic,” Dorigen replied squarely against that arrogant expression. “The magic remains to be accessed, but you have not the strength. The failing is not Deneir’s.”
Danica moved as if to strike out at the woman, but Cadderiy grabbed the monk immediately and held her back, nodding his head in agreement with Dorigen.
“And so your magic is held,” Dorigen remarked. “Is that all that you have to offer the dying dwarf?”
At first, Cadderiy took her unexpected words to mean that he should bid Ivan farewell, as a friend would do, but after a moment’s thinking, the young priest came to interpret the words in a different way. He motioned Danica away, spent a long minute in contemplation, searching for some possible answers.
“Your ring,” he remarked to Vander suddenly.
The firbolg glanced quickly at his hand, but the initial excitement of the group died away immediately. “It will not work,” Vander explained. “The ring must be worn while the wounds are received.”
“Give it to me, I beg,” Cadderiy said, not letting down a bit in light of the grim explanation. He took the ring from the willing firbolg and slipped it over his own finger.
“There are two types of healing magic,” Cadderiy explained to Vander and the others. “Two types, though I have called only upon the method that begs the blessing of the gods to mend torn skin and broken bones.”
Danica started to inquire further, but Cadderiy had closed his eyes and was already beginning to sing once more. It took him some time to catch up to the flow of the song. Again he felt the pressure in his temples as he followed its tiring current, but he kept heart, knowing that this time, he would not have to go so far.
The four friends and Dorigen gathered around the cot, and gasped in unison as Ivan’s severe throat wound simply disappeared, then gasped again as it reappeared on Cadderly’s neck!
Blood bubbled from the young priest’s opened throat as he continued to force the words from his mouth. Another of Ivan’s wounds was erased from the dwarf’s body, to appear in a similar position on Cadderly.
Danica cried out for her love and started forward, but Dorigen and Shayleigh held her back, reasoning with her to trust in the young priest.
Soon Ivan was resting peacefully, and Cadderly, showing every brutal wound the dwarf had suffered, fell to the floor.
“Oooo,” groaned an unhappy Pikel.
“Cadderly!” Danica cried again, and she tore free of Shayleigh and Dorigen and ran to him. She put her head to his chest to hear his heartbeat, brushed his curly brown locks from his face, and put her face close to his, whispering for him to live.
Vander’s laughter turned her angrily about
“He wears the ring!” the firbolg roared. “Oh, clever young priest!”
“Oo oi!” Pikel squealed with glee.
When Danica turned back, Cadderly, his head uplifted, gave her a peck of a kiss. “This really hurts,” he groaned, but he managed to smile as he spoke the words, his head drifting slowly back to the floor, his eyes slowly closing.
“What’s wrong with him?” Ivan grumbled, sitting up and looking about the room with a confused expression.
By the time his friends had pushed Ivan aside and lifted Cadderly into place on the cot, the young priest was breathing much easier, and many of his wounds were unmistakably on the mend.
Later that night, the still weary priest rose from his bed and moved about the makeshift infirmary, singing softly once more, tending the wounds of his other friends, and those of Castle Trinity’s soldiers.
“He was my father,” Cadderly said bluntly. The young priest rubbed a hand across his wet eyes, trying to come to terms with the sudden explosion of memories that assaulted him, memories he had buried away many years before.
Danica shifted closer to him, locking his arm with her own. “Dorigen told me,” she explained.
They sat together in the quiet darkness for many minutes.
“He killed my mother,” Cadderly said suddenly.
Danica looked up at him, a horrified expression on her fair face.
“It was an accident,” Cadderly continued, looking straight ahead. “But not without blame. My fath ... Aballister was always experimenting with new magics, always pressing the energies to their very limits, and to his very limits of control. He conjured a sword one day, a magnificent glowing sword that sliced back and forth through the air, floating of its own accord.”
Cadderly could not help a slight, ironic chuckle. “He was so proud,” the young priest said, shaking his head, his unkempt sandy-brown locks flopping from side to side. “So proud. But he could not control the dweomer. He had overstepped his magical discipline, and before he could dispel the sword, my mother was dead.”
Danica mumbled her love’s name under her breath, pulled him tighter, and put her head on his shoulder. The young priest moved away, though, so that he could look Danica in the eye.
“I do not even remember her name,” he said, voice trembling. “Her face is clear to me again, the first face I ever saw in this world, but I do not even remember her name!”
They sat quietly again, Danica thinking of her own dead parents, and Cadderly playing with the multitude of rushing images, trying to find some logical recollection of his earliest years. He remembered, too, one of Headmaster Avery’s scoldings, when the portly man had called Cadderly a “Gondsman,” referring to a particular sect of priests known for creating ingenious, and often destructive, tools and weapons without regard for the consequences of their creations. Now, knowing Aballister, remembering what had happened to his own mother, Cadderly could better understand dear Avery’s fears.
But he was not like his father, he silently reminded himself. He had found Deneir, found the truth, and found the call of his conscience. And he had brought the war—the war Aballister had precipitated—to the only possible conclusion.
Cadderly sat there assaulted by a tumult of long-buried and confusing memories, assaulted by empty wishes of what might have been and by a host of more recent memories which he could now look at with a new perspective, A profound sadness that he could not deny washed over him, a sense of grief that he had never felt before, for Avery, for Pertelope, for his mother, and for Aballister.
His sadness for his father was not for the man’s death, though, but for the man’s life.
Cadderly repeatedly saw the red ground of that distant world closing over the fallen wizard, ending a sad chapter of wasted, misused potential.
“You had to do it,” Danica said unexpectedly. Cadderly blinked at her in disbelief that soon turned to amusement. How well she knew him!
His reply was a nod and a sincere, if resigned, smile. Cadderly felt no guilt for what he had done; he had found the truth as his father never had, Aballister, not Cadderly, had forced the conclusion.
The small room lit up as Dorigen entered, bearing a candelabra. “Castle Trinity’s soldiers are scattering to the four winds,” she said. “All of their leaders are dead—except for myself, and I have no desire to continue what Aballister has started.”
Danica nodded her approval, but Cadderly scowled.
“What is it?” the surprised monk asked him.
“Are we to let them run free, perhaps to cause more mischief?” he asked.
“There remain nearly three thousand of them,” Dorigen reminded him. “You really have little choice in the matter. But take heart, young priest, for the threat to Carradoon, to the library, to all the region is surely ended. And I will return with you to your library, to face the judgment of your superiors.”
My superiors? Cadderly thought incredulously. Dean Thobicus? The notion reminded him that he had many things yet to accomplish if he was to follow the course Deneir had laid out before him. One battle was ended, but another was yet to be fought.
“Their judgment will be harsh,” Danica replied, and from her tone it was obvious that she did not wish any serious harm to come to the repentant wizard. “They may execute ...” Danica’s grim voice trailed off as Dorigen nodded her acceptance of that fact.
“No, they will not,” Cadderly said quietly. “You will come back, Dorigen, and you will serve a penance. But with your powers and sincere desire, you have much that you can contribute. You, Dorigen, will help heal the scars of this war, and help better the region. That is the proper course, and the course the library will follow.”
Danica turned a doubting look Cadderly’s way, but it fell away as she considered the determination etched on the young priesf s face. She knew what Cadderly had done to Dean Thobicus to get them out here in the first place; she suspected then what Cadderly meant to do to the man once they got back to the Edificant Library.
Again, Dorigen nodded, and she smiled warmly at Cadderly, the man who had spared her in Shilmista Forest, the man who apparently meant to spare her once more.
“Tell me of mercy, wise Cadderly,” Dorigen remarked. “Is it strength, or weakness?”
“Strength,” the young priest answered without hesitation.
Cadderly stood on the rocky slope above Castle Trinity, flanked by his five friends. “You have ordered them to abandon this place?” he asked Dorigen, coming up the rise to join them.
“I have told the men that they will be welcomed in Carradoon,” the wizard replied. “Though I doubt that many will head that way. I have told the ogres, the ores, and the goblins to go and find holes in the mountains, to run away and cause no more mischief.”
“But many remain within the fortress?” Cadderly stated as much as asked.
Dorigen looked back to Trinity’s uncompleted walls and shrugged. “Ogres, ores, and goblins are stubborn beasts.”
Cadderly eyed the fortress contemptuously. He remembered the other plane, the earthquake he had brought about to bury Aballister, and thought of doing the same thing now, of destroying Castle Trinity and cleansing the mountainside. Grinning wickedly, the young priest fell into the song of Denier, searching for the powerful magic.
He found nothing to replicate the earthquake. Confused, Cadderly pressed the notes, mentally called for guidance.
Then he understood. His release of power on the other plane had been a reaction to primal emotions, not consciously conjured, but forced by events around him.
Cadderly laughed aloud, and opened his eyes to see all six of his companions standing around him, eyeing him curiously.
“What is it?” Danica asked.
“You were thinking of destroying the fortress,” Dorigen reasoned.
“Aw, do it!” bellowed Ivan. “Split the ground and drop it in!”
“Oo oil”
Cadderly glanced around at his companions, those friends who believed him invincible, godlike. When his gaze fell over Shayleigh, though, he found the elf maiden slowly shaking her head. She understood.
As did Danica. “Split the ground and drop it in?” the monk asked Ivan incredulously. “If Cadderly can do such a feat, then why did we run about inside that cursed place?”
“We have come to expect too much,” Shayleigh added.
“Oo.” Pikel said it, but it aptly reflected Ivan’s thoughts.
“Well, come on, then,” Ivan remarked after a long pause. He put his hand on Cadderly’s back and pushed the young priest along with him. “We’ve got a month’s hiking ahead, but don’t ye worry, me and me brother!! get ye all through!”
It was a good start, Cadderly decided. Ivan was taking the lead, was assuming some of the responsibility.
A good start on a long road.
Waves of agony rolled over Druzil when Aballister died, pains that only a familiar who had lost his wizard master could ever know. Unlike many familiars, Druzil managed to survive the assault, and when the agony had at last subsided, the imp limped his way down the trails of the eastern Snowflakes.
“Bene tellemara, Aballister,” he grumbled under his breath, his litany against his mounting fears. It was easy enough for the intelligent imp to figure out who had brought Aballister down, and easy enough for him to figure that without the wizard, even if Castle Trinity had survived, his role in the plans of conquest had come to a sudden end. He thought briefly of going to the castle, to see if Dorigen had survived. He quickly dismissed the thought, reminding himself that Dorigen wasn’t overly fond of him.
But where to go? Druzil wondered. Wizard masters were not so easy for renegade imps to find, nor were planar gates that might return Druzil to the smoky and dark lands where he truly belonged. Also, Druzil figured that his business on this plane was not quite finished, not with the precious chaos curse he’d concocted bottled up in the catacombs of the Edificant Library. Druzil wanted the bottle back, had to figure out a way to get it before that wretched Cadderly, if Cadderly was still alive, returned.
For now, though, the imp’s needs were more immediate. He wanted to get out of the Snowflakes, wanted to get indoors and out of winter’s chilly bite, and so he continued his course down from the high ground, down toward the town of Carradoon.
After several days, and several close calls with the wary farmers living on the edges of the wild mountains, Druzil, perched in the rafters of a barn, overheard what sounded like a promising situation. A hermit had taken up habitation in a remote shack not too far from the outer farmhouses, a solitary recluse with no friends and no family.
“No witnesses,” the imp rasped, his poison-tipped tail flicking eagerly. As soon as the sun went down, Druzil flapped off for the shack, figuring to kill the hermit and take his home, and spend the cold winter feasting off the dead man’s flesh.
How his plans changed when he looked upon the hermit, looked at the mark branded clearly on his forehead! Suddenly Druzil was more concerned with the possibilities of keeping this man alive. He thought again of the Edificant Library, and the powerful bottle of the chaos curse locked away in its catacombs. He thought again that he must possess it, and now, by some chance of fate, it seemed to Druzil as if his wish might come true.
Bent low under the burden of an armful of firewood, Kierkan Rufo plodded slowly, dejectedly, back to his ramshackle hut.