Blood in the Valley Read online

  “Rhenn!” Aigann’s beating against the door reached a furious cadence. “Rhenn, by the gods...please...pleeease—aaaiiieeeeee!!!” The door shuddered with a heavy blow. Cruel laughter was punctuated by metal biting flesh.

  “Muddle!”

  A final yank tore the bars free of the window. Muddle cast the frame aside, one of the prisoners yelping as it settled by his foot and torsion-heated iron singed his ankle. The prisoners scurried forth to feed their line out the window. Muddle leaned back, breathing hard, perspiration jeweling his fatigue-wrinkled face.

  Dodso leapt up into the window frame as a prisoner secured the line on the bars of a nearby cell. He looked down, swallowed, and said in an uneven voice, “I’ll—I’ll try it.”

  Vohl raced down the corridor as the gnome disappeared from sight. The prisoners followed him out one by one. The dungeon door, quiet for a few moments, began to shudder under renewed battering. Vohl paused at Muddle’s side, watched the prisoners go out. He offered his partner a hand and pulled the brute to his feet as the last escapee passed out the window.

  “You first,” he said.

  Muddle nodded, scooped up his axe and forced his bulk through the window sill. He paused, swallowed once and shook his head. “Gah. Don’t look down.”

  Watching his partner disappear over the side, Vohl wondered if he had been talking to him or himself. He glanced at the dungeon door, saw it beginning to buckle, and sheathed his sword to make a go at it. He hiked a leg over the window sill, got a grip on the alternating lengths of rope and chain, and slid out onto the side of the Palace.

  He didn’t look down.

  A STORM OF UNEARTHLY lighting cascaded from the River Imp’s crowsnest. Danelle’s sorcery struck goblin skiffs and kicked geysers of steam, shattered wood, and flailing bodies from the surface of the bay. Panic overcame many and goblins slid from their improvised craft to paddle vainly for the shore or drown in water churned by the struggles of their comrades.

  Jayce swooned against the mainmast, sapped of strength by his attempts to bolster his apprentice’s attacks through magic of his own. He gave the wood a frustrated slap, berating himself for his weakness. Even that exertion nearly sent him sagging to the deck.

  The piers of the harbor were largely empty, most of the craft on the water now, sailing onto the open lake or fighting through the blockade. The crowds had disappeared, either having found berths or filtering back into the blazing catastrophe of the city to seek what dubious safety they could find in hiding there. Fires walked down towards the docks, billowing smoke alive with scuttling, bandy-legged marauders. In the bay, those waterborne attackers that had found no luck with the fleeing ships now swarmed for the harbor.

  The Imp waited alone.

  Danelle unleashed a blast of chill from her perch, sent the cone of absolute cold angling in a swath across the southwest side of the harbor mouth. Goblin screams of agony clashed with howls of frustration as a sheet of ice spread across the water’s surface, freezing craft in place. Half-frostbitten goblins boiled out of their dead-locked ships only to find the ice splintering beneath their weight. With a crackle, more goblins sank shrieking to their doom.

  A hand gripped Jayce’s arm savagely and spun him around. A shaken Tev asked, “How much longer?”

  Jayce shrugged free of the man’s grip. “I told you; as long as it takes.”

  “Master Zerron,” Tev said, his voice going desperate, “we may have to consider that he’s not coming!”

  Jayce started to answer when a commotion on the far northern side of the docks drew his attention. A small band raced along the beach, followed by a swelling throng of goblinoids, howling catcalls. The group paused to give a brief fight and throw its pursuers back then resumed its flight towards the only ship left at its mooring. A massive, inhuman figure sprinted in its midst.

  “There!” Jayce jabbed a figure out across the harbor. “They’re coming!”

  Tev took a moment longer to notice but when he did, he was instantly in motion. “Make ready to leave!” He stomped aft along the deck, swearing, kicking any who looked too slow to respond, be they sailor or refugee.

  “Danelle!” Jayce barked up to the crowsnest. A rainbow shower of deadly magic answered him, polychromatic shards scything into the goblin mass following on Vohl’s group’s heels. Blossoms of cheerfully colorful fire split the goblins apart, sent many diving for the ground. The group’s lead increased. But fresh goblinoid bands poured down from the streets above the docks.

  Vohl, obvious now at the head of the group, led the way clamorng up the pier to the Imp’s side. Sailors ran out the boarding ramp and he paused, let the most feeble of his party scramble by to safety. At their rear came a ragged but grinning Dodso who barked a greeting that Jayce didn’t hear.

  Vohl was still on the dock, yelling at Muddle, who had paused halfway up its length and turned to brandish his axe before oncoming goblins. The brutes slowed and approached cautiously, cackling, bouncing in their eagerness to force those to fore closer to the half-breed.

  A shaft of fire screamed down from the crowsnest as Danelle threw out her last effort. The strike shattered a length of pier and engulfed much of the rest in a ball of flame. Wailing and the stink of cooked meat filled the air. Muddle stumbled from the nearness of the impact. Finally heeding Vohl’s cries he sprinted up the dock to leap over the gunwale onto the safety of the Imp.

  Vohl came across last with a maniacal laugh.

  Jayce hobbled to the bow where the last refugees crowded. Vohl, Muddle and Dodso were patting each other on the back and greeted him with a rowdy howl like men welcoming a newcomer to a drinking contest. Smiling weakly, Jayce held out his hands and sagged into their midst.

  With Eredynn burning behind it, the River Imp headed out to open water.

  LONADIEL RODE INTO Eredynn at Satayebeb’s side, the pair mounted atop edgy horses captured from the Legion at Maelvynn’s Down. The gatehouse was a wreck, its massive doors lying askew to either side, bodies from the storming parties dragged out of their way and goblinoids bawling their approval from the soot- and bloodstained battlements. Beyond lay the Eredynn Way, strewn with wreckage and corpses and flanked by towers of flame as the city burned to either side.

  Satayebeb released the reins of her mount to spread her arms and drink in the adulation of the horde. Even caught up in the frenzy of the sack, her followers paused in their depredations to pump fists into the sky or shake spears crowned with the severed heads of fallen defenders. The howls of their celebration drowned out even the roar of fire and continued fighting as isolated pockets of holdouts were crushed.

  Lonadiel held back a grimace of disgust at the reek of air charged with gore, burning meat, and pitch. He fought not to hear the screams and pleas of the dying and doomed, even as they scrawled their harsh notes of memory into his skull from where he knew they’d return in his dreams. He accepted them as part of his wholesale dedication to the dark. He knew he’d have to get used to it.

  He knew, too, that he never would.

  “Look at how easily their Senile Pantheon falls!” Satayebeb crowed, gesturing with both hands to the crest of the hill upon which the heart of Ereydnn sqatted.

  The domes and spires of temples had gone red as blood by the glow of fire both within and without. Silhouettes of marauders danced against shattered walls and smoke bled in spark-flecked black from shattered windows. Above those, the white-washed walls of the Imperial Palace streaked black as the flames seared them.

  “Look at it!” Satayebeb’s voice fell to a feral growl as she glanced at Lonadiel. “Glory, love! Glory!”

  “Yes, my Mistress,” Lonadiel replied, nodding without heart.

  Against his better judgement, Lonadiel let his gaze slide over his shoulder. Behind their procession and the ranks of Blood-drinkers fallen in at their backs, a pair of grinning hobgoblins dragged Illah by chains. She trudged with strides stiff and forced, like a spectre in the dust, speeding her gait only at the persistant yanking of
her minders. Her eyes saw nothing. Her face hung loose and drained of emotion.

  “Must you fret so?” Satayebeb sighed with resignation and a hint of malice. “Even now your mood sours our moment of greatest triumph.”

  “She could have been part of it,” Lonadiel said. “We offered it to her and she would not take it.” He winced, recalling the moment that he lost her, finally. “She would not even seek her own death.”

  “I told you,” Satayebeb said with a cackle. “You sought a partener—” she met his gaze with the ever-present sparks in her eyes “—but you need no more than me.”

  “I know.”

  “Trust me, dearest Consort. Partners are complicated; playthings are more practical.”

  Lonadiel watched the Being to which he’d pledged his lost soul raise her hands again to the smoke-roiled heavens and luxuriate in the worship of her mindless minions. With ice crawling under his flesh, he wondered if his Mistress wasn’t really talking about the two of them.

  Epilogue

  Signs of Life

  The first shafts of dawn’s light caught in the column of smoke, rising like a headstone over the fiery grave of Eredynn. Out on Lake Remordan, the moan of the wind kept away the fiendish echoes of its demise, though the fishy tang of the water did not quite disguise its sooty stink.

  Jayce let himself sag on the port gunwale of the River Imp, despair rather than weariness having driven him there as he listened to Vohl’s tale of the city’s last minutes. “You’re certain it was her?”

  “We both saw her, Jayce,” Vohl replied, Muddle nodding from behind him. “She was unrestrained and clearly with them.”

  “Nothing in this business has been clear, my friend.”

  Vohl’s jawed worked. “I know what I saw.” The hard light in his eyes eased. “I’m sorry, Jayce. But you said that the creature leading the horde might have such sway over folk’s minds.”

  “I know what I said.” Jayce shook his head and looked out across the water, unable to believe. Unwilling. He could feel Danelle hovering at his side, could hear her words of warning about the Yntuil warrior-priestess. Jealousy, he had thought. But now...the pull of her Sa’atel, as she’d called him. Had it been too great?

  “Perhaps she might still be saved from it,” Dodso said.

  “Perhaps...” Jayce had once thought himself wise. Now, with horrors greater than even those that had driven him from Zerrax set loose in the world, he wasn’t so sure. Illah’s jade gaze blazed with terror from the shadows clouding his mind. He should never have let her go. Illah, what are you thinking? What have you done?

  “We have to forget about her.” Vohl’s tone had a forced harshness to it. “We have to think about what to do next.”

  “Andenburgh,” Dodso said with something like determination. He waved to the north, where a string of ships labored towards the horizon. “Everyone who has survived this will be there, as will men still willing to stand against this evil. What’s more, Kobolon will rise in force, if I know my folk. And the Norothar will be directly threatened. The dwarves can’t avoid involvement, now.”

  “You will be the Commander again?” Muddle rumbled, giving the gnome a playful kick to the rump.

  “Well...” The gnome grinned, rubbing his hindquarters in feigned pain. “With Aigann so tragically removed from office, I suppose his illegal actions are erased and my Commision reinstated.”

  Vohl groaned, but his smile betrayed a little humor piercing his gloom.

  Jayce sighed. “More fighting.”

  “What else can we do?” Dodso stepped to Jayce’s side and put his hand on the wizard’s back. “At least we’ll be together.”

  “That’s right!” Vohl stood in front of Jayce and held out a hand. “We’ll fight them together!” He gave the hand an urging shake. “To the last!”

  “To the last,” Muddle growled and reached past Vohl’s shoulder to put his hand over the man’s. Dodso followed the refrain and removed his hand from Jayce’s leg to set in on the others’. Danelle did as well. The four looked at Jayce.

  The wizard smiled, tried to ignore that their circle of friendship normally included one more in it. “All right.” He rose from his perch and put his hand into the circle. “Together!”

  THE END

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  Did you love Blood in the Valley? Then you should read Stand in the Valley by K.J. Coble!

  COMING OCTOBER 2021!!!

  For the free peoples of Remordan, the end is near.

  The Defenders of the Valley are battered, divided, and on the run. The forces of darkness—goblinoid hordes, a demigoddess out of the worst nightmares of the past, and an elven traitor still clinging by one strand to his humanity—are on the offensive. With the district capitol fallen, only a few cities and a few erstwhile allies remain to check them.

  But where friendships endure, there is hope.

  The Legion veteran still has his sword, his wits, and a half-hobgoblin monster to cover his flank. The gnome politician still has his silver-tongue and an audience desperate for leadership. The wizard still gathers his powers and strength for a final confrontation, with a troubled, but determined apprentice at his side.

  And the half-elf warrior-priestess faces her past—and a love gone so wrong it can only end one way.

  Together, against the odds, they will make their Stand in the Valley,

  About the Author

  Born too strange for a normal world, K.J. Coble endures adulthood through long-distance running, rock ’n’ roll guitar, and his writing. A love of history, weird fiction, and explosions fills his world-building. In his stories the righteous may suffer, but the corrupt get their comeuppance, and evil always receives its justly-deserved kick in the teeth.

  Lairing somewhere in the Midwest, he is tolerated by his wife, three kids, and a very opinionated coonhound.