Chapter 33: The Empty Space¶
Prologue — In the Fire-Keeper’s Words¶
As told by Grotdor “The Burninator” Phlogiston, Pentarch of Flame
Rain doesn’t put out a fire that’s tended. That’s the whole trick of it. Keep the coals banked, keep your hands steady, and don’t listen to the wind when it starts talking in a voice that isn’t the wind’s.
Those horse-things had voices. Wore ours like borrowed coats — cried out to Dog in Rust’s words, cried out to Perry in mine, trying to walk our own into their teeth. It didn’t work. A fire knows its own heat. Dog knew his master. Perry knew I’d never waste breath on his proper name.
So we burned the pack down. The last of them dropped to its knees and begged, and traded its life for the road to the troll-king. Then the rain stopped — first time in days. We sat close to the coals and said some true things to one another: about fathers, and curses, and the men we each might’ve been. Quiet like that has a use. You learn the weight of the thing before you go and do it.
Come morning it was clear and bright. We walked south into a stink of brimstone and found a drake curled asleep in its own ashes. Dravyn laid a slowing hand on it. It opened one eye and looked at us all.
Clean and quick, I said. We’ll see.
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I. The Voices in the Rain¶
The Kamelands — the last day of Gozran (Apr), 4711 AR
The rain had not let up. It came down in grey ropes across the Kamelands, hammering the churned mud of the clearing to soup, drumming on shield and scale and the swollen flank of the thing that had been a druid. That corpse lay where it had fallen — bloated to giant size in the last moments of the ruse, a wall of dead weight fouling the footing, its reek of rot rising even through the wet. Around it, the pack of horse-bodied beasts gathered themselves for the second exchange. One of their number already lay dead in the muck from the night’s first blows. The rest were wounded, and none of them were finished.
The beast Elroy had baited to the far edge of the field the night before hauled itself up out of the mud, hooves scrabbling, and loped in low. The corpse and the crush of bodies choked its lane to the General, so it wheeled instead on the fire-keeper. A cloven hoof came down like a maul and cracked across Grotdor’s brow, snapping his head back. The beast’s voice followed it, thick and gloating in the common tongue — these were the ones Hargulka had warned of, it sneered, the storm-fires, the ruiners of nature, and it would drag them all back to Hargulka and collect the bounty on their heads.
A second beast pressed in beside it, fresher, and lashed out with hoof and jaw at once. The hoof whistled wide. The bite did not — teeth found the meat of Grotdor’s shoulder and tore, and of a sudden there were two of them on the fire-keeper and his blood was running freely into the rain.
The cruelest of the pack did not close at all. It stood off across the clearing, threw back its head, and spoke — in Grotdor’s own voice, pitched and perfect, hurled the length of the field at Perry where he stood apart from the melee. “Perry, run!” it called in the fire-keeper’s borrowed tones. “Get away — you’re too small, too weak — come no closer!” And beneath the words came the low, plaintive keening the beasts used to bend the will of any creature that heard it, a sound like grief and hunger braided together.
It should have taken him. It broke instead the instant it landed, because the thing in the beast’s mouth had made one mistake: it had called him Perry. Grotdor never called him Perry. It was p-dog, or peanut, or some worse thing dredged up for the occasion — never the name his mother gave him. Perry heard the lie whole in that single wrong word, and did not so much as shift his weight.
Another beast slipped clean through the press — past Rust, past Dog, past Perry, untouched — and lunged for the General’s throat. Its jaws caught him, barely, a scrape across the gorget. And in that half-instant Dravyn moved. The wizard’s glaive had been struck from his hands and lost in the mud when the ambush first broke; now he snatched it up two-handed, black scales streaming rainwater, and threw a shell of hard-edged will around Elroy in the same motion — a protection that met the beast’s teeth and blunted them to nothing. His counter-cut hummed around and missed the neck by a hand’s breadth; the leucrotta’s follow-up hoof pawed stupidly at empty air.
Then the reclaimed glaive found its proper work. Across the field Perry’s hand flicked in a short, sharp feint, and the wounded beast — the one lured off the night before, already half-dead on its feet — turned its guard the wrong way. Dravyn made it pay. The glaive came around and down in one long, terrible arc and all but parted the animal in two, the spine folding, the great body hanging together by a thread of hide. He did not wait to watch it drop. His free hand closed and lightning leapt from his fingers, snuffing the dying thing out where it stood — then jumped on, hungry, and cracked across the fresher beast beside it, scorching a black line the length of its flank.
The last of them tried the mimic’s trick on the wolf — Rust’s voice this time, calling Dog to come, to charge into the teeth of the pack. Dog was not fooled for the space of a heartbeat. He knew his master’s voice the way he knew his master’s hand, and he knew Rust would sooner cut off that hand than send him into that. The wolf held, ears flat to his skull, and did not move.
Elroy shouldered south, out of the corpse’s shadow, and came around clean into the fresher beast — the one that had savaged Grotdor. His blade rang home across its ribs. Then his shield came up with a crash of steel and he bellowed into its face, dragging its fury off the wizard and onto himself. “HARGULKA LIED!” he roared. “HARGULKA WANTS YOU TO DIE!” — and braced behind the wall of his shield, grinning through the rain.
Perry had already found the pattern. He read the beasts in one cold sweep — cruel and vicious, and nothing like so armored as the night’s fighting had made them seem, no tough hide to turn a bolt, no ward to slip a blade — and the false picture that had dogged the fight since the ambush sprang simply dissolved. He thumbed a hissing dose into the breech of Infernis, sighted down the repeating crossbow, and put a bolt into the fresh beast’s flank. It punched deep and stayed, and the wound it opened smoked and ran, eating outward at its edges. He was already sliding to a better angle before the thing finished screaming.
Rust wheeled Dog clear of the crush, swung down out of the saddle, and put both hands on the fire-keeper. Warmth poured out of him and into the ragged shoulder, into the split brow; the torn meat knit, the bleeding stopped, and Grotdor straightened, whole and scowling and glad enough of it. Rust was very good at that, someone said, and meant it.
The fire-keeper answered in kind. Heat rippled at his scarred hands; his kinetic gate opened, and out of it he loosed not fire but a single lance of ice that took the fresh beast full and drove it to the very lip of death. Then he loosed the thing he was known for. A great bird made all of flame tore up out of his hands and streaked low through the trees, wings spread wide, and passed through four of the pack at once. The most broken of them — the fresh beast, already dying — burst apart on the bird’s passing like a struck coal, gone in a gout of steam and cinders. The rest it left seared and smoking and screaming.
Two of the pack were down now, and the burning bird’s light was still guttering out among the branches when the survivors came on again.
The beast that had bayed at Dog went back to the well — Rust’s voice again, the keening cry again — and once more the wolf simply refused, lip curled, telling the thing in its own way exactly what it could do with the invitation.
The throat-lunger surged in and bit the wizard hard, and two things answered in the same instant. Elroy threw himself bodily into the path of the jaws, taking onto his own shield-arm the wound that had been meant for Dravyn; and Dravyn’s shell of will closed again and halved even that, so the teeth that should have opened the General to the bone left only a long red furrow. The shield and the wizard covered each other, blow for blow, and the beast’s trailing hoof rang off Dravyn’s polearm and did nothing at all. “Hargulka said you were the weakest,” it spat at him. “We meant to save you for last. But things are getting dire.”
Dravyn did not answer it in words. He set his stance, traced a sigil that flared once in the wet dark, and sent a lance of white lightning straight down the line of them. It caught three at once. The throat-lunger took it full and staggered. The voice-thief — the beast that had worn his friends’ voices all through the fight — caught it worst of all, the bolt finding it so wholly that when the light died it was only a smoking sliver of what it had been, upright by habit and nothing else. The last of them, at the arc’s far edge, was merely singed.
That last beast snapped at the wizard, a wild, graceless lunge that closed on nothing, and then skulked backward through the mud to put distance between itself and the polearm, flinging one more of Hargulka’s borrowed taunts over its shoulder as it went.
Elroy came around the gutted throat-lunger’s flank. Perry’s steadying hand found the angle for him, and the General brought his blade around in one enormous stroke that took the beast’s head clean from its shoulders and dropped the body in the mud. Hargulka simply didn’t like them very much, he boomed down at it, cheerful as a man at a feast — and the head could stay where it lay.
Perry read the pack one last time — a clean, total reckoning that laid every weakness of them bare for every ally at once — and then put a single bolt into the smoking sliver that had been the voice-thief. It drove clean through the heart. “Right through the heart,” he noted, without heat, as the last of the pack to fall in open combat toppled into the muck.
And with that the sole survivor lost its nerve entirely. The beast that had skulked backward — untouched now but for a singeing, alone in a clearing full of its slaughtered pack — dropped flat to the ground amid the bodies, tail tucked, and began to whine. “Listen, mate,” it begged, in a voice gone small and human and frightened. “I yield. Let me leave, and I’ll tell you anything you want to know.” Weapons lowered, one by one, into the falling rain. The hunt was over.
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II. The Last Voice¶
The same clearing, the rain still falling
The survivor did not stop talking after that.
Its name, it said, was Fig — Fig, short for Figurillo — and it had been in Hargulka’s pay a scant couple of months, long enough to regret the arrangement bitterly now that its whole pack lay steaming in the mud around it. Spare its life, it begged, and it would tell them everything. They let it talk, and it did.
Hargulka, first of all, was a she — the largest and most terrible troll Fig had ever laid eyes on, though not, it was quick to add, the source of the pack’s magic or her own court’s. She kept a grim little council Fig called, with a kind of awed relish, a terrible, triumphant trifecta: Hargulka herself; her general and chief-in-command, a two-headed troll it named Nagrundi; and her mate, a troll mage whose name came out of the beast’s maw so mangled that Elroy, delighted, swore it sounded like a name a man would give to some enormous scaled lizard.
Her fortress, Fig went on, lay to the south, deep in the black tangle of the Narlmarches — carved into the face of a cliff along a rocky ridge, reached only by a single thin, high, treacherous trail. Trolls held it, and brawlhounds, and whatever hired muscle her coin could buy. And she had bought more than the pack now dead in this clearing: two great beasts had been paid to lair in the marches flanking the approach and to savage anything that came up the trail, one nested to the north of the fortress and one to the east. A pair of dragons, Fig called them, with a shudder — though Perry, turning the phrase over, doubted the word on both counts.
That last was worth the whole bloody afternoon. The Pentarchy had been assembling this picture for a season now — ever since the snows broke and the Old Beldame first bent them toward her mushrooms — and here, at last, a frightened animal was drawing in the rest of it for them. For the first time since the trolls began pressing the young realm’s borders, the war against Hargulka had a map.
Fig marked it for them where they told it to, and then asked only to be let go. They debated the point. A guide would be useful going up an unknown trail; but a frightened beast that could throw any voice it pleased might just as easily bolt ahead to warn its masters, or find its nerve again the moment a drake filled the sky. In the end they judged it not worth the risk and turned it loose — with Perry’s flat, unhurried promise ringing after it into the trees.
“We see you again, we will kill you.”
— Perry Marlowe
Fig swore it was bound west, far west, for Pitax, and that it would put itself and the whole breadth of the Stolen Lands between itself and the Stormfire Reclaimers forever. Then it was up and gone, galloping across the swollen river with low growls trailing behind it — and Dog stood point at the water’s edge and stared it down every stride of the way, unblinking, until the last of it was lost in the rain.
Among the wreckage of the pack, Rust knelt by the swollen bulk of the false druid and stripped from it a sacred symbol of the wild and a healer’s roll of tools — the trappings of a life that had been bait all along — and tucked them away against the fights to come.
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III. The Old Beldame’s Hearth¶
Elga Verniex’s cottage, on the Tuskwater
With the road ahead drawn on a map at last, the Reclaimers turned back across the marches toward the one door in all the wilderness that had never yet failed to open for them: the cottage of the Old Beldame, Elga Verniex — witch and alchemist and quartermaster of the woods — perched on the near edge of the Tuskwater. It was she, after all, who had set the whole business in motion, a fistful of black rattlecaps from the Kamelands traded for everything she knew of the troll-king; and the mushroom errand had at last come due.
Perry laid out nine of the black rattlecaps and Grotdor five, fourteen in all. Elroy, everyone was quick to remind him, had spent that particular excursion being slowly digested in the gullet of a giant plant, and Rust had never reached the patch; the harvest was the work of the two of them. Elga looked the lot over with a practiced eye and bought all of it, and the coin she counted out was split around the company with a little extra clinking into the common purse besides.
Then came the matter of the mountain, and Elga — who had a way of seeming to know precisely what her visitors would need before they knew it themselves — had it all in stock. Rust had a keening rune fitted to his weapon to make its edge bite deeper, and took a plate of reinforcement for his armor besides; Dravyn bought reinforcement of his own. There was a small comedy in the accounting, too. Elroy had gone into this stretch of country carrying an enchantment ground keen against the flesh of giants, expecting trolls — and it had done precisely nothing all through the leucrotta fight, for the plain reason Perry’s reckoning had already turned up: the horse-things were beasts, not troll-kin at all. That enchantment, like the single vial of troll’s-bane oil Perry kept sealed away, would keep its edge for Hargulka’s actual kind.
The talk turned, inevitably, to the cliff. A single thin trail up a sheer rock face is a hard thing to storm, and so they stocked for a climb. Elroy bought a pair of draughts that would let a man walk a vertical wall like a spider, purely as insurance. Perry, who could brew a climbing tincture on the spot, promised as much. And Dravyn set himself to learn the trick of it properly — committing to his book the means to grip bare stone as surely as a lizard grips glass, and beside it a stranger working still, one that could raise a stair of conjured timber up the face of a cliff where no stair had ever stood. He planned his openings, too. His staff would carry his fire for the day, folded into the shaft of his glaive; but against a beast that breathed flame he would hold that fire in reserve and answer with colder, sharper things.
Above all, the plan took its final shape around Elga’s hearth. Two beasts guarded the road to the fortress, each in its own march, one north and one east. Strike them first — separately, in their own lairs, before either could lend its strength to the walls — and the way to Hargulka would stand open. It was, everyone agreed, the only sensible order of business. First the guardians. Then the mountain.
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IV. The Quiet Before¶
The witch’s clearing — nightfall, into the 1st of Desnus (May)
They did not go far to make camp. Elga could spare them a corner of her grounds, she allowed, and Elroy — who repaid every kindness in the same currency — cheerfully promised to cook the witch a proper haggis before they left. So they bedded down in a forested clearing at the river’s edge and set about the small rituals of a night in the wild with the ease of people who had done it a hundred times.
It went well on every count. Rust ranged out and came back laden with more than they could use. Grotdor worked the campsite over until it all but vanished into the treeline, banked and shadowed so that no wandering thing would ever stumble across it. And Perry set a pot over the coals and cooked — a thick, dark, venison-rich chili whose warmth, by the time it had gone around, seemed to settle the nerve of the whole company for whatever the morning would ask of them. Nothing came calling out of the dark. And as they ate, the long rain that had drenched the leucrotta fight and every hour before it finally, at last, broke: the clouds pulling apart overhead, the stars coming out cold and clear one by one, the night settling into a still, chill quiet with no bite of insects in it and nothing to hear but the fire and the river.
It was Grotdor’s fire, of course. A fire-mage keeps the flame, and he kept it, feeding it against the cold while the others drew close; and around that small banked heat, with the mountain a day off and the rain finally gone, the Pentarchs spoke of themselves more plainly than they had in a long, long while.
They started with the General. Asked what he made of Elroy, Grotdor gave him a soldier’s highest marks and no flattery to cheapen them: a great-hearted man who had, again and again, thrown his own body between the pack and his friends for no reason but that someone else might land the blow behind him. What could ever break a bond like that? Only two things, Grotdor said, and neither lightly — being led to their deaths, the way Elroy’s own father had once led his men; or the curse in Elroy’s blood taking him at the last and turning him on his own, though by then, they both admitted grimly, the fire-keeper would most likely be dead beside him anyway. But when the talk pressed on the word lead, Grotdor drew the line the whole realm was built on. Elroy led the charge — first through every door, every time — and that was a true thing, and a fine one. But no one at that fire was the leader of the rest.
“We fill in each other’s gaps… it’s not that we have one leader — it’s that we are a cohesive unit.”
— Grotdor
Everyone had their own equal say. Five equals and no throne — the whole architecture of Athanor, spoken aloud over the coals by the man least given to speeches.
Elroy took up the thread with his own history, told quietly for once. He had been born to nobility and lost it young, when his father led his men to ruin and dragged the Jenkins name down with them; cast out, the boy had been taken in and raised by an adopted dwarven father in the hard, tracked ways of the mountain-folk, and had come out of it a soldier rather than a scholar — sharp with a blade, versed in both human and dwarven arts, with just enough of courts and banners in him to keep from making a fool of himself before a lord. Staring into Grotdor’s fire, he reckoned aloud that had his father lived and kept his honor, he himself would very likely have grown into exactly the sort of sneering highborn son who used to remind him of his place. The disgrace, in the end, had made a better man of him. Deeds should count for more than the blood a man was born with; it was the nearest thing he had to a creed. His appetite, he added, had grown considerably since his change — cockatrice now, he insisted, not chicken — and one day, when the realm was finally steady on its feet, he dreamed of keeping a quiet farm.
Dravyn traced his own line, so far as he could follow it, back toward Choral the Conqueror — the old warlord whose blood ran in half the dragon-touched of the north — and it was Elroy who caught the thread and tied it to House Rogarvia, Choral’s vanished heirs, whose disappearance eleven years gone had set the whole long struggle for the Stolen Lands in motion. But Dravyn remembered none of it. He had woken on a desolate battlefield with robes on his back, a glaive in his hand, and a power he could not account for — knowing how to read his own spellbook, and nothing whatever of the man who had learned it. What he carried out of that empty morning was a wrath with no direction to point it, and, of late, a cold and near-cultish devotion to Nethys, whose hunger for power and for knowledge answered something that lived in him. The others teased out the old fork in his road — die horribly, or go mad with the power — and did not pretend he wasn’t walking the second path, however evenly he thought he hid it. Elroy, gentler, reached for a soldier’s old tale to reframe it: the story of a warrior who kept a murderous companion at his side and justified it plainly, that a wrath like that, if it were not aimed at things that deserved it, would only be loosed upon the world instead. That, the company agreed, was the arrangement. Dravyn was a loose cannon; the Pentarchy was the hand that kept him trained on the things that needed burning. That, someone laughed, was also why he sat a little apart from the rest.
And then Perry told them, at last, not only where he was from but when. The golden age of Ustalav, near enough fourteen hundred years gone — that was his country, and his century. He was the son of a small wood-elf druid who kept the faith of Erastil and a tall halfling alchemist who served the university, and he had come out of that pairing with elven grace on a halfling’s frame and a mind that married faith to science and would let neither win. He had earned his letters twice: once in alchemy, in the Ustalav that was, and again as a certified investigator in the Ustalav that came after — for he had been thrown forward through the centuries by no plan of his own, but by a freak and terrible accident. Exploring what he had taken for an ancient Thassilonian ruin — the realm the Runelord Xin had raised after quitting drowned Azlant — he had triggered something in a forgotten chamber and woken fourteen hundred years later in the same country and a world entirely changed, with no road home. He had studied the whirling holes in the air for years, hoping to find his way back, and at last had given it up and decided that Erastil had meant for him to be here. Asked the most questionable thing he had ever done in that vanished first life, Perry did not flinch: shady experiments, he called them — the not-quite-moral tinkering of an ambitious Ustalavic mind, the kind that flirts with raising the dead and with the making of one’s own monster. He had come back from that edge to the balance Erastil taught, and it was the memory of the edge that made him hold nature and knowledge now in such careful, uneasy equilibrium. None of them remarked on it aloud — but the ruin that had unmade Perry’s first life was a work of Emperor Xin’s, and here, across the same fire, sat a Runelord who carried Xin’s own words in his book.
The hardest history of all belonged to the smallest of them. Rust had been orphaned in the Goblinblood Wars, his parents killed near their very start, and scooped up as an infant by a passing Hellknight to be raised a slave among Asmodean devil-worshipers — an order of iron sisters he named, uncertainly, the Golden Erinyes — in a place where a hungry goblin child learned very young that you asked a devil, politely, for your bread. Having clawed free of every part of that, he now found himself not merely tolerated by the big folk but seated among them as a full and equal ruler of a nation, and he confessed, plainly, how strange it still sat on him.
“I’ve been schlepping it on my own for so long… it still confounds me — not to be looked down upon.”
— Rust
Elroy saw the mirror at once. He and the goblin were cut from the same rough cloth, two souls unused to being shown respect — and Rust was the living proof of the whole creed Elroy had just laid out by the fire: that it did not matter in the least what a soul had come from; it mattered only what it was. It was Elroy, they all realized, who so often lifted the quiet healer’s voice at the council table — the booming General making certain that the small, steady goblin was heard.
At the last, they asked Rust — the party’s growing conscience — for a word of counsel before the morning. He gave it plainly. Against beasts that could take to the open sky, they could not afford to be caught in the open themselves; the instant a drake climbed off the ground, the Pentarchs would need cover over their heads. Elroy built on it: better still to fight the things close, in their own dens, and deny them the air altogether. The whole company took the counsel to heart.
They slept hearty and whole that night. And in the morning they woke — for the first time in what felt like a very long while — to sun.
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V. A Clear Morning¶
The Narlmarches — dawn, the 1st of Desnus (May), 4711 AR
They broke their fast and marched due south before the sun had properly cleared the trees, barely past the fifth hour of the morning, the woods still dark and deep and dripping from the long rain. The country changed under their boots as they went, the rolling, copse-dotted hills of the Kamelands giving way to the black, close-grown tangle of the Narlmarches, where the canopy shut out most of what little light there was. Following the map Fig had drawn, they came at length upon a clearing scorched down to ash and cinder: burned trees standing black and bare, soot-dark rubble underfoot, and dug back against a cave-mouth a great hovel of a nest — not stone but a vast heaped construction of bushes and twine and fern and dead leaves, banked all through with embers. The whole place stank of brimstone, of sulfur and rot and something fouler still, thick enough to catch in the throat. It was, unmistakably, the den of a fire drake.
The river-country had whispered for years of a red dragon in the deep Narlmarches, a thing that devoured any soul who crossed its path. The whisper, it turned out, had never been quite true and never been quite false. There was no dragon. There was this.
Heeding Rust’s counsel, they resolved to take the beast inside its own den, in the dark, before it could ever wake and bolt for the open canopy — and they spent their preparations without stint. Dravyn folded his staff’s fire into his glaive for the day, quickened his own movements past the ordinary, and set three illusory doubles of himself shimmering into being at his side, so that a striking beast would have four Dravyns to guess among; a small light he fixed upon himself to cut the gloom. Perry brewed a quick tincture and blurred himself into the scorched scenery until he was little more than a suggestion of a shape, then drank down a draught to sharpen his eyes in the dark. Rust laid a cool protection against fire over Elroy, drew a shell of borrowed vitality over his own small frame, and hung back at the den’s edge with Dog. Grotdor swallowed a draught to turn aside flame. And Elroy shifted — teeth lengthening, shoulders swelling, the curse in his blood answering his call rather than the moon’s — into the half-wolf shape he had learned to wear like armor, raised his shield, and set himself square in the mouth of the den, a wall of muscle and steel between the sleeping thing and the open sky it would want.
Inside, curled in the warm ash of its own making, lay the drake. It was red-scaled and wiry, gamier and leaner than any true dragon, crowned with a great sweep of terrible horns and breathing smoke and brimstone even in its sleep; two heavy hind legs and no forelimbs at all marked it drake and not dragon. It was enormous, and by every sign a mighty specimen of its kind. Perry crept close to study it, but a sleeping beast gives up few of its secrets, and he could read little more than its color and the plain fact of its fire. It was not bound to its sleep by any magic — only dozing — and so any thought of roping or binding it where it lay was set aside; that would only wake it early, and angry.
There was time for a single stroke before the thing began in earnest — one held breath before the plunge. After some debate it fell to Dravyn, and he chose to spend it not on a wound but on a hobble. He laid his scaled hands out over the sleeping drake and dilated the very flow of time around it, thick and slow as cold honey. The beast shrugged off the worst of it — but not all of it; the working caught, and held, and would drag at its limbs when the moment came. And as the magic settled over its horned bulk, the enormous flame drake opened one baleful eye, and yawned, and looked out across the ash at the five Pentarchs of Athanor arrayed before it in the dark.
The hunters had become the hunted in this wet country, and then, this dawn, the hunters again. Somewhere to the south a troll-queen kept her cliff and her terrible trifecta and did not yet know that a frightened animal had drawn her whole secret out on a map. Between the Stormfire Reclaimers and her walls stood one drake, and one hodag, and a fortress full of trolls — and the first of it was waking now, an arm’s length away, in the reeking dark of its own den.
The empty space had held its breath long enough. The assault on Hargulka’s mountain had begun.
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