Blood in the Valley Read online

  “When will that be?” the cobbler asked.

  “When the attack hits, probably at sundown—that’s when the goblinoids are at their strongest. Once we are fully engaged, all are to make for the ships. They are to force their boarding, if they have to, but I suspect most of the captains will be all too willing to take them aboard and weigh anchor on the excuse they are trying to save civilians. Have your families tell the captains to make for Andenburgh. It is nearest with the best harbor.”

  That got some agreeable rumblings from men Vohl knew from the Andenburgh contingent of the Expeditionary Force.

  “What of the Palace Guard and Procurator Aigann?” the woman who’d spoken up before asked. “What if they try to stop them?”

  “They’ll be too busy, once the fighting gets desperate,” Vohl replied. “And I suspect many will simply blend into the flow, make good their own escapes or gather up their own families. They’re not going to try to hold everyone back. When they see the way the wind has blown, common sense will take over.”

  “And...” The cobbler’s throat bobbed reflexively. “And what of us?”

  “Fight as hard as you can. Fight until it’s obvious the walls are lost.” Vohl forced a tight grin. “Then run like hell.”

  The rumble of the gathering rose. Heads nodded. Vohl felt the group’s energy going with him and let his smile broaden. For a moment, he let himself believe it might work. “That’s all I’ve got,” he said. “It’s nothing fancy; but...I think it will work.”

  Thin chuckles answered him. Men rose from their chairs and moved towards the door, rapidly, with renewed hope.

  “Only a few at once,” Vohl spoke up. “The tavern may be watched.” Bodies stiffened and some of the energy of before faded. Vohl inwardly cursed his second miscalculation of the meeting and tried to correct, flicking his eyebrows. “Hey, stay and enjoy your drinks. They’re free.”

  More chuckles at that. Most sat down, babbling around their mugs. Muddle waved a few up at a time, after scanning through the door, and then sent them out.

  Vohl got up and headed for the stairs to check on Jayce. He pulled up in surprise to see the wizard coming down, helped by Danelle holding one arm. He moved stiffly, his face clouded with pain and weariness.

  “What are you doing? I thought you were sleeping.”

  Jayce accepted Vohl’s hand and let him lead him to a stool by the bar. “I have slept all I can. I’m needed, am I not? I came to see what part in this grand venture I might play.”

  Vohl glanced about to make certain none were paying too close attention. “As soon as you are able, I want you and Danelle to make your way down to the River Imp. Tev will be expecting you there.”

  Jayce shot him a hard look. “I’ll not leave you behind, Vohl.”

  “No, you’d better not.” Vohl grinned. “I’m counting on you to keep the Imp at the docks. Once things start to unravel, Muddle and I are going to make for the Imperial Palace. We’re going to spring Dodso.”

  Jayce blinked. “You’re crazy. Aigann will have all those Guardsmen still loyal to him barricading them selves in.”

  “Muddle and I have broken into more heavily-guarded places,” Vohl replied. He lingered on memories of simpler times, when their future was measured in what they could forage or steal. His present had taken on a similar uncertainty, he realized.

  “You’ll need me,” Jayce said, grasping his sleeve.

  “You’d slow us down.” Vohl shook his head. “Have you no faith in us?”

  “I have all the faith in the world, but we just pulled ourselves back together. I hate to be breaking us apart so soon.”

  “We’ll all be together again,” Vohl said, taking his friend’s hand. “I promise.”

  LONADIEL WATCHED THE horde reform outside Eredynn. The giants were up now, filling the air with bass taunts thrown towards the city walls. The trolls had come too, bringing with them a wave of sour milk stench that set his nose to wrinkling. Goblin masses crowded into the lines, setting the dusk alive with a thousand torches and the grating jabber of their mindless numbers. Below Lonadiel, at their place of—albeit besmirched—honor, the Blood-drinkers formed their blocks and awaited their chance at redemption.

  “The humans have reinforced the gaps in the wall and repaired their palisades,” Groon Blood-drinker said as he sketched a crude map in the dirt at Lonadiel’s feet with a stick. “They will expect attack there.” He jabbed a spot on his sketch. “We wait for them to send their reserves to the gaps and then hit the gatehouse.”

  Lonadiel nodded absently. Groon’s eagerness to come to grips and wipe away the stain of his clan’s flight the evening before was obvious in his plan—for who else could expect to force the main gate? Lonadiel looked to the fields below, where the carcass of the dragon still smoked, filling the low ground before the walls with a pall of sour, yellowy haze. Goblin corpses piled about the body, bigger piles crowding at the battered stonework of the gate.

  “The goblins go in first,” Lonadiel said.

  Groon tensed and refused to look up at him. One of the warlord’s lieutenants—Vraka, if Lonadiel recalled the brute’s name correctly—hissed something in goblinoid, likely an insult, as it set Brathug Foulstench and the other goblin chieftains to cursing him in response. For a moment, as Groon roared vainly for control, a fight nearly erupted.

  “The newly arrived tribes go first.” Lonadiel raised his voice over the gibbering din, a calming hand lifted. “They will be the most fresh and will wear the defenders down. When they begin to falter against the defenses, as they will, the rest of you will go in and finish the job. The glory of the breakthrough and the richest pickings of the sack will be yours.”

  The words seemed to settle the gathered leaders. Groon met his gaze with his horrid, scarred features crinkling into what Lonadiel guessed must be a smile. The smile slipped as his eyes flicked past Lonadiel and the warlord fell supine with his forehead to the ground, the other goblinoids following his example.

  Lonadiel turned to face his mistress with a ready grin. His expression fell as ice shot through his nerves at the sight of what the demon-goddess brought with her.

  Satayebeb led Illah into the circle of the war council by a chain. “I thought it would be educational for our guest to witness our final triumph here,” she said.

  Illah refused to meet Lonadiel’s stare. Her clothes hung about her in tatters, exposed black and blue splotches across fair skin. Blood from wrists rubbed raw caked about her manacles. But her bruised chin remained high in defiance.

  Satayebeb gave the chain a jerk to draw Illah forward to the crest of the hill. “I don’t think she appreciates yet the lesson she will receive.” The demoness brushed Illah’s disheveled hair with a familiarity that set Lonadiel’s innards to clenching momentarily. “But she will.”

  Groon looked up from his groveling and cackled, the goblins joining him. Lonadiel glared at the brutes then shot Satayebeb a look. “What is this?”

  Satayebeb tugged Illah’s chain again, drew her close then passed a hand over her. The manacles clacked and dropped free. Illah’s eyes widened for an instant before the look of deliberate disdain reasserted control.

  “Stand there, dear,” Satayebeb cooed. She waved towards the walls. “Let everyone have a good look at you.”

  “Is this wise?” Lonadiel asked hoarsely.

  “We both know she has no intent of leaving, don’t we?” Satayebeb favored him with eyes gone hellfire red. “I see no point in restraining her.”

  Lonadiel opened his mouth to resist but clamped it shut, instead, the lining of his throat gone dry. He knew Satayebeb had been in his mind, had assumed it would be so, the demon-goddess sensing the words that had passed between him and Illah, his manipulations, his plans. But she was testing him, even now, even though she could see into the emptiness where his soul had been.

  “You are right, as always, Mistress,” Lonadiel said hollowly.

  “Good.” Satayebeb sauntered to his side and took
his hand, the hot jet of her presence coursing into his body. He noticed her glance back at Illah, the wicked smile that creased her face. “It is only a matter of time before she sees it, too.”

  Chapter Nine

  Dreams Die

  Vohl caressed the frame of the Loving Imp’s front door, fingertips tracing long-memorized imperfections in the wood. He closed his eyes and thought back to the day he’d purchased the tavern, then a run-down hovel, from a hard-luck businessman who went on to seek his fortune in the Thyrrian heartlands. Naming it loosely after his long-abandoned Legion, the Forty-Fifth “War Imps”, Vohl had brought the place from the brink of collapse to what was arguably the most popular inn and watering-hole in Eredynn, perhaps in the whole Valley.

  The kind of place Vohl Rhenn could call home.

  Vohl clenched his hand into a fist and smote the doorframe. With a hiss he put skinned knuckles to his lips and sucked the blood away. All that work...now for nothing.

  Muddle’s massive hand came to rest on Vohl’s shoulder. Vohl turned, hadn’t heard his companion’s approach, and forced a smile. “I was just saying goodbye to the place.”

  “We’ll be back,” Muddle said.

  Vohl shook his head. “Back to what; a pile of wreckage?”

  “It was little better than that when we found it,” he replied. “Starting over might do us some good.”

  “I’m tired of starting over, Muddle.”

  The half-breed shrugged. “Just another journey. That’s life.”

  Vohl started with a bitter response but found the energy wasn’t there. He joined his partner in a smile. “I suppose you’re right.” He glanced over Muddle’s shoulder, into the gloom of the empty tavern. “Jayce and Danelle are gone?”

  “A while ago,” Muddle answered, “and the girls went with them.”

  “Good.” Vohl fished under the collar of his corslet and drew forth the key to the Imp, suspended from a leather thong around his neck. He pulled the heavy, scarred door shut with a groan of rusty hinges and put the key into the lock, twisted, and felt the clack of metal on metal. His hand froze then, clenched about the key. He drew in an agonized breath, had to hold back a scream of frustration.

  Muddle patted his shoulder.

  Vohl let the air leave his lungs in a drawn-out sigh, savoring every last moment at the threshold of all he had held dear. Finally, he yanked key from the hole and dropped it back under his armor. “Well, that’s it, I guess.”

  “Until we return.”

  A Legionnaire’s bugle sounded from the wall and was followed by others, the call sounding not the alarm that Vohl had expected but the summons for the Watch to form up at their posts. Something was happening, not the attack, yet, but soon.

  Vohl glanced around the square and the streets radiating out from it. A few Watchmen scurried from doorways, heading to their stations, while women leading children darted from home to home. Eyes watched from windows and alleys, the tense gaze of families awaiting salvation or doom. Dust hung in the air, sundown bringing no respite from the oppressive, dry heat that had come with late afternoon. The sky above deepened from red to blue-black shot through with stars, but the glow from outside the walls, the glimmer of thousands of campfires, made the twilight anticlimactic.

  Vohl and Muddle jogged side-by-side down the Eredynn Way to the gatehouse. Watchmen and hard knots of Legion survivors clustered at the battlements in silence. Older men, young boys, and a few hard-faced women waited behind the walls with buckets of water, wine, baskets of rocks for repairs to gaps in the perimeter, and bandages. A few looked up as the pair passed through and ascended the stairs to join the defenders.

  Severs of the Watch was there, looked up in surprise to see their approach. “Rhenn...” His eyes pinched and he hurried to say, “I...I was given command of this sector as well as my own after your—in your absence.”

  Vohl smiled at the man to spare his feelings. It wasn’t his fault. “What’s happening?” he asked.

  “They’re forming up,” Severs said. “You can hear them.”

  And Vohl could, the clatter of weapons pummeling shields, thunder of drums, the ululating battle-cries, the shrill taunts and maniac laughter and the hoarse, sputtering chorus of horns. The stench of death, burnt meat, and fecal, goblinoid foulness seeped over the battlements, seemed buffeted on the racket. Watching the defenders bow their heads with lips mouthing prayers or simply shivering in silence, Vohl had to concede the horde’s mastery of fear as a weapon.

  “I understand there is an alternate plan at work,” Severs whispered.

  Vohl ground his teeth. “I don’t know what you’re talking about.” Someone had let the scheme slip, then. It had perhaps been unavoidable, but that Aigann might be warned could leave the whole thing in jeapordy. Vohl tried not to think about it.

  “I...well...” Severs fought visibly for something to say. “Well, I’m with you, whatever happens.”

  “You must do whatever you feel best,” Vohl replied and stepped away from the man, moved to the battlements. A pair of Watchmen—one of them the cobbler—nodded at his approach and gave way for him. He leaned into the merlon to view the horde, Muddle hovering at his back.

  The horde was an ocean, currents of leaping, cavorting goblins churning it, waves cresting and aglitter with torches. Giants strode amongst the tide like trees swaying in a storm. The dead stank in their piles at the base of the wall, the dragon carcass still steaming further out. The leading edge of the horde lingered at the no-man’s land just beyond it and out of bowshot, lapping impatiently ever closer as courage and madness began to overtake what passed as discipline amongst the brutes. On the knolls above, blocks of hobgoblins, the horde’s fighting elite, waited in barely-concealed excitement.

  “Vohl,” Muddle said in a voice like a groan. The half-hobgoblin pointed a shaking finger over Vohl’s shoulder at a tiny group, shining in warlike finery, watching from the highest point. “Do you see?”

  Vohl stretched out further, narrowing his eyes. Amongst the group a lithe figure stood, a flash of auburn hair fluttering in the breeze. He recoiled from the sight as if slapped. “It...it can’t be,” he rasped.

  “I think it is.”

  “Illah...” The name left Vohl’s throat in a wheeze, like air force from lungs by a kick to the solarplexus. “What is she doing?”

  “I don’t know,” Muddle said. “She is not restrained.” His next words came through gritted teeth. “She appears to be with them.”

  “That can’t be!” Vohl shook his head. “Why would she turn against us?”

  “Self-preservation?”

  “I don’t believe that; her cult, the Yntuil, whatever they are, has no fear of dying.” An absurd thought came to him, one he almost didn’t voice. “Maybe it’s part of some plan of hers?”

  The corner of Muddle’s eye twitched. “Maybe she saw which way this was going.”

  “And I’m telling you, that cannot be.”

  Vohl turned from the merlon and sagged against the battlements, letting him self slide down until he sat limply on the stonework. His blood ran icy with currents of confusion and the fear that Muddle was right. Was it a trick? Or worse, was it real, was the thing leading the horde so powerful none could resist it? Vohl swallowed back nausea, began to understand, now, how easy it would be to just give in to the inevitable.

  First losing the Loving Imp, now this...

  “Jayce said they got cut off,” Vohl said to Muddle. “He said that if she were alive, she might wish she were dead.”

  Muddle raised his battle axe in both hands, knuckles popping with the strain of his grip on the handle. His features folded into scarred creases and his eyes blanked into a pale light of murderous fury.

  “If she gets to us,” he growled, “she certainly will wish for death.”

  JAYCE LEANED NEAR THE bow of the River Imp, eyes closed, murmuring a low chant as he felt cosmic energies course into his battered limbs. He faced a frustrating conundrum: he needed his magic to
mend his body to have the strength to wield more, but the strength needed to draw that magic forth drained him nearly to exhaustion. He felt the strange tingle of bruises fading before the otherworldly power, the vague ache of that same energy swirling about the knot of infection in the still-festering arrow wound. His temples throbbed and the tickle of powers beneath his flesh became a growing burn, warned him that the spell-craft was sliding beyond his limits.

  He broke his trance and put a steadying hand to the gunwale, wobbling under the weight of fatigue. Enough for now, he thought. He was more whole than he had been in days. There was no need to push too far.

  “Let me help you, Master,” Danelle said from behind him.

  Jayce waved the girl back. “No. Save yourself for later.”

  “I can do it,” she insisted.

  He fought back the urge to rebuke her, knew it was the pain talking, and instead held out a hand. She took it as he said, “I know you can, girl. I know you can do so much more. But I need you fresh to help me, even shield me, should the time come.”

  She pulled herself around him, hugging close. Since their reunion, she had gone to points of absurdity to redeem herself in his eyes. The poor thing; she still didn’t understand that there was nothing to forgive. He snaked an arm over her narrow shoulders and gave her a squeeze that he hoped would ease her nerves and overbearing concern.

  To port, Jayce noticed a cog weighing anchor and beginning its laborious course to the harbor mouth. Jeers echoed from out on the lake, where torches lingered near the water line; dozens of ramshackle goblin skiffs waiting for prey. The shallow-drafted ship, now catching a fair wind out of the northeast, would probably clear the hodgepodge blockade, as several others already had. But the shore to the southwest, just beyond the harbor, glittered with more lights that began to spread like a jeweled stain across the Eredynn Bay, fortelling a hard fight to freedom for the others still moored at the piers and beach.

  “How many is that now, who have fled?” Jayce asked.