Chapter 35: Hargulka’s Fortress¶
Prologue — From the Field Notes of Perry Marlowe¶
Entry logged the 3rd of Desnus (May), 4711 AR. Weather: rain, worsening.
The thing they called a hodag is dead. I catalogued its weaknesses before it catalogued ours, though the margin was thinner than I would have preferred to record. A curious animal — a reptilian frill, a temper like a slow landslide, and no strategy to speak of beyond arriving in the middle of everything and biting. It will not be missed.
An hour later I observed the objective from the tree line. Dwarven work, and old: a fortress cut into a hundred feet of wet cliff, one winding ledge for an approach, and a very long drop for anyone careless enough to earn it. A defender’s dream, which under ordinary circumstances I would file under problem. Today the rain files it under opportunity. It dulls the sound, blurs the scent, closes the sightlines to arm’s length. The evidence suggests we may reach the gate before anyone reasonable expects us to be standing at it.
We are four. That is the datum I keep returning to. Rust holds the lower ground with the wolf, ready to carry back anyone we cannot carry ourselves — a sensible arrangement, and a quiet one, which does not stop me noticing the absence of the man who usually keeps the rest of us breathing. Hypothesis: five founders can take a troll-king’s front door with only four hands on the work, and none of those hands a healer’s. I would prefer a great deal more evidence before committing to that conclusion. I intend to gather it carefully. One bolt at a time.
Elroy proposes to gather his as a wolf.
Of course he does.
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I. The Last Guardian on the Road¶
3rd of Desnus (May), 4711 AR — the southern Narlmarches
The rain had been falling since before the beast reared out of the drowned undergrowth, and it had not slackened, and the beast had not moved. It squatted across the path exactly where it had risen at the close of the last hard march — a low, frilled bulk of scaled muscle, water sheeting off the ridged plates of its back, its small eyes fixed on the four figures fanned across the trail. Between the Stormfire Reclaimers and the cliff they had come so far to climb there stood this one last living thing, and it had no intention whatsoever of standing aside.
Perry did not reach for his crossbow first. He reached, as he always did, for the animal’s seams. His eye went over the frill and the shoulders and the set of the wide jaws the way a mason’s eye goes over a wall, and in the space of a breath he had found every place the thing was weaker than it looked — and put that knowledge, wordless and precise, into the hands of the men beside him. Only then did Infernis come up. The repeating crossbow coughed once, and a bolt slicked with something that hissed and smoked buried itself in the creature’s flank, where it clung and began, unhurriedly, to eat.
Elroy answered with steel. His longsword came down in a clean, unglamorous arc and opened the frilled shoulder to the wet — the sort of honest, workmanlike wound he took a plain craftsman’s satisfaction in — and then he set his shield and put himself, as he always did, precisely where the teeth would want to be.
Dravyn stepped into his own reach and brought the glaive around in a single geometric sweep, and there was nothing workmanlike about it at all. The blade found the seam between two plates and drove through hide and into the bone beneath, and as the beast shuddered the wizard traced a short, cold sigil in the rain. Frost bloomed across the creature’s back in a brittle rime — vengeance rendered as weather.
The hodag went into its frenzy then, the way such animals do when they understand, dimly, that they are dying: a whirl of raking claws and snapping jaws that found Elroy because Elroy was standing where the pain was. One claw hammered his side and drew blood; a second came around low and hard, and his shield swung to meet it, the timber swallowing a blow that would have folded his ribs and taking the splinter of it in his stead. The jaws snapped shut on nothing at all. And all the while the thing on the beast’s flank kept eating, quiet and patient beneath the noise.
It was Grotdor who brought it to the edge. He had come up the trail last, unhurried, and when he loosed his will at the beast it left his hands not as fire but as its opposite — a lance of killing cold that struck the hodag square and staggered it to the very lip of death. For a heartbeat the animal’s own savage vitality held it upright on nothing, a corpse that had not yet been informed of the fact. Perry did not give it the chance to learn. He chambered a fresh bolt, exhaled, and put the shot through. The hodag dropped where it stood, twitched once, and was still.
No one spent any ceremony on the carcass. The rain was already carrying the blood down the slope in thin red threads, and the cliff was waiting, and every breath they did not spend here was a breath the garrison above did not get to use.
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II. A Hollow Beneath the Trees¶
Before four people threw themselves at a fortified gate, they took the sensible precaution of first becoming whole.
They did not do it in the open. Perry found the place — a tucked, shielded hollow beneath the close-grown trees, screened on three sides, the kind of spot a man learns to recognize only after a great many nights spent wishing he had one. It was near-perfect woodcraft, and it bought them what they most needed: quiet hours in which to work, and a good deal less chance of waking to something’s teeth.
The evening was less uniformly successful. Grotdor, prevailed upon to tell a tale at the low, hooded fire, told one badly. Whatever he had meant the story to do, it did the opposite — it left the company vaguely unsettled rather than eased, a splinter of disquiet lodged in the back of everyone’s attention that no one could quite work loose. Fire answered to Grotdor readily enough. Words, it seemed, were a more stubborn element, and he did not attempt a second story. Perry salvaged the night at the cookpot instead, turning rations and gathered stores into something hot and solid that put a floor back under all of them, and after that the hollow was a better place to be.
They slept in shifts and woke mended. Wounds had knit in the dark; Dravyn’s reserves had refilled themselves overnight, his focus and his small stores of magic restored; the deep ache of hard travel had drained out of their legs. And below them, on the lower ground, Rust and the wolf kept the rally point through all of it — a line of retreat held open, a place to carry the wounded if it came to carrying, and a healer’s hands standing ready a hundred feet down that the four of them would have to do without on the ledge itself. It was a sound arrangement. It did nothing to make the fortress smaller.
Gear changed hands at the fire, the party sorting through the spoils of recent fights and arming, deliberately, for what they knew was coming. Steel meant for giant-kin. Fire held in reserve. And when the morning came in, it came in grey and streaming: a steady, deepening rain that would tire them faster than a dry day would, and that would also — as Perry had already noted, and did not need to note again — hang across the cliff like a curtain and hide them almost all the way to the door.
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III. What the Storm Could Not Hide¶
4th of Desnus (May), 4711 AR — the southern Narlmarches
They came upon it at last through the streaming woods: the fortress on its hundred-foot face, dwarven in every line, hewn straight into the living rock by hands dead a very long time. A single narrow ledge switch-backed up the cliff — sheer stone rising on one hand, a long and unforgiving drop falling away on the other — and the rain came down in such sheets that they climbed most of it unremarked, scent and sound and sight all drowned together in the downpour. Ahead, a weathered stone barbican jutted from the rock, its arrow slits gazing blindly out into the weather, seeing nothing.
Seeing nothing, that is, until it saw them. It was Elroy who caught the shape first — a hobgoblin’s silhouette shifting behind one of the slits, a pointed ear just visible in the grey. The choice arrived quickly and was quickly made: steal the last of the distance for a killing surprise, or simply charge and trust to violence. They chose the quiet way.
Perry went forward like a rumour. Grotdor kept low and small against the stone. Even Dravyn, for all his height and his heavy runed plate, moved well enough through the murk to have passed unheard. The plan was good. The plan had exactly one flaw, and the flaw was Elroy, already shrugging out of a man’s shape and into a wolf’s — a mountain of bristling wet fur and heaving muscle rising where the General had been standing, deliberate and grinning and about as capable of silence as a rockslide is capable of tiptoeing. The transformation gave him away entirely. There was simply too much of him, and it made too much noise arriving.
The hobgoblin’s head came up. Somewhere behind the stone a signal passed from one throat to another. And the storm, which had carried them so faithfully and so far, could carry them no further unseen.
But if fortune had turned, it had not turned all the way. The four of them had spent the whole climb readying for exactly this, and they met the moment already braced for it — no scramble, no confusion, only four people who had planned for the alarm and were, each in their own fashion, glad it had finally come.
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IV. The Barbican¶
What followed was a battle fought on three fronts at once, on a wet ledge sixty feet above the forest floor, with a lethal drop at everyone’s back the entire time. There were archers behind stone that no blade could reach. There was a green and hulking thing waiting in the dark of the doorway. And there were harpies — for the cliffs below the fortress held a wheeling knot of them, and they were rising now, drawn upward by the noise, hungry and shrieking.
The Reclaimers had the first move, and they used it.
Perry took the nearer archer first — not with a shot but with a look, reading the hobgoblin down to its bones, stripping away whatever secrets a creature behind a wall might imagine it kept, and handing the rest of them the edge of that knowledge besides. Then he simply stepped sideways into the enormous shadow of the werewolf beside him, letting Elroy’s bulk break the archer’s line to him, and put an acid bolt through the arrow slit. It sank home in the dark and began to eat.
Elroy surged up the last of the ledge to the barbican wall itself — and found, to his considerable inconvenience, that the barbican had no door. The slits were slits, four fingers wide, built by dwarves to let arrows out and nothing at all in. Through one of them he could make out the shape that waited within: a troll, green and grey and vast in the gloom. There was no reaching it and no reaching past it, so he planted himself against the stone like a man bracing a gate and waited for it to come to him. It would have to come out sometime. He intended to be exactly there when it did.
The archers answered from cover. One shaft whistled wide of the werewolf; the second found a gap and drove deep, and Elroy took it with a grunt and did not move. Then each hobgoblin melted back out of sight along a practised, gliding reload, trading their shots for stone — there, and then gone. Grotdor toiled up the long ledge behind Elroy the whole while, closing the distance a careful step at a time; the path was too narrow and too slick to close it any faster, and he did not waste breath pretending otherwise.
And then the troll came out. It came around the corner of the barbican like a wall deciding to walk, a slab of grey muscle that lunged straight for the werewolf with both arms spread to seize him — and its grasping charge fumbled, catastrophically, on the mud-slick stone. Its feet went out from under it. Elroy, who had been braced for precisely this, simply helped it the rest of the way down, and put the whole vast weight of it flat on its back at his feet.
Dravyn had been watching the harpies climb. He read the tightening knot of them the way he read everything — as an arrangement of angles waiting to be resolved — and he resolved it. A word, a sigil, and a bloom of roaring fire dropped squarely into the middle of the flock. One of the birds took it full in the chest and came apart screaming; the rest wheeled up through the smoke scorched and shrieking and thoroughly, permanently interested in the four small figures on the ledge. Wrath, in Dravyn’s hands, had a way of becoming geometry. The geometry had just informed the harpies where they would be dying.
Then their leader began to sing.
It was not a sound that belonged to the world. It rose over the whole cliffside — over the thunder and the rain and the shrieking of the flock — and it reached inside the mind and took hold, a snare of pure suggestion that could, in the space of a breath, have turned the company’s own hands against one another. It was the deadliest thing on the ledge, deadlier than the troll, deadlier than the arrows. And it broke against Dravyn like surf against a headland. His will did not so much resist the song as refuse to concede it had been sung — and in refusing, he threw the refusal over all of them, warding every one of the company against the harpies’ voices for the rest of the day. Whatever else the birds could do to them now, they would not be doing that.
Perry, meanwhile, had turned his attention to the thing on the ground. His read of it was merciless and complete: soft in the guard, no resistance worth the name — and, most usefully of all, badly and instinctively afraid of fire. He chambered a bolt to match the diagnosis and drove it home, and the flame took in the troll’s flesh and stayed there, searing shut the deep, terrible engine of its healing before it could so much as begin. A troll knits itself back together from almost anything. It does not do so while it is burning. And Perry, having arranged for it to burn, folded time itself around a single heartbeat and crossed the ledge in the space of it, set and ready before the creature had finished understanding what had been done to it.
Elroy fell on the grounded troll with open, roaring joy. His longsword rose and fell and rose again, and every stroke bit deeper than it had any right to — the rune worked along the blade woke against giant-flesh and made each blow a giant-killer’s blow — and then he threw back his shaggy head and roared, and the sound of it hauled the brute’s whole furious attention onto himself and away from the smaller, softer folk around him. That was the work he had come up the cliff to do. He had never in his life been happier doing it.
“I love being a werewolf.”
— Elroy Jenkins
Grotdor slid past the troll on the wet stone — a clean, tumbling roll that took him neatly through the reach of it and into the very mouth of the barbican — and wrapped himself, as he came up, in a stance of scalding vapour. Steam curled off his shoulders in jets; a shifting armour of superheated mist wreathed him head to foot. Fire, in Grotdor’s hands, was never a wild thing. It was a tool, and he had just made himself into the haft of it.
The troll heaved back to its feet — its dreadful vitality dragging it upright even through the fire that gnawed at it — and got one great grey hand around Grotdor, hauling him in for a bite that missed, clumsy and off-balance with Elroy’s bellow still ringing in what passed for its mind. Around them the archers’ bolts kept raking the ledge and the harpies kept diving, and blow after blow after blow found Elroy’s shield instead of the people he was standing in front of. He took every one of them with something close to affection.
“Love you, shield.”
— Elroy Jenkins
Then Elroy ended the troll. A single devastating stroke of the longsword — the rune blazing along it — all but folded the creature in half; the werewolf sheared clean through one great arm, took the ruined weight of the thing up in his jaws and his hands, and heaved it off the ledge. It went over the lip and down the long, rocky drop, turning as it fell. Whatever it might have knit back together on the ledge, there is no getting up from the bottom of a hundred-foot cliff. The troll was simply, finally gone.
And that left the archers, who had watched the troll go over and chose that moment to break for a rear door and the garrison beyond it — to run, and to shout, and to bring the whole fortress down on the intruders’ heads. They had perhaps two steps in them.
Grotdor found himself boxed in with both of them as they fled, and he gave them no chance at all to reach the door, let alone what lay past it. A great fanning cone of flame washed off his hands and over the pair of them from behind, catching both squarely as they ran, and there was a moment — brief, grim, and entirely characteristic — in which the shape of a burning man announced himself to the last thing the two hobgoblins would ever see.
“Here’s Grotdor.”
— Grotdor Phlogiston
The archers dropped to crackling ruin before either could draw the breath to warn a soul. The alarm died in their throats, and the fortress beyond the door heard nothing at all.
Elroy, still mid-melee, snatched a diving harpy clean out of the air — jaws closing on it like a dog closing on a sparrow, sudden and total — and worried the shrieking thing apart, and flung the body inside to land atop the growing pile.
By the end of it the strike team stood inside the fortress threshold. The troll was gone off the cliff. Both archers were ash. One harpy lay dead on the pile. And — this above everything — nothing else in all that hollowed rock yet knew they had come.
Three harpies remained, and the company ran them down in the cramped foyer with the unhurried competence of people finishing a job. They set a killing flank and worked it. Dravyn’s glaive and Perry’s bolts brought down the first, and Elroy took it out of the air and tore its throat and added it to the heap. Dravyn lifted a loose stone with nothing but his will and hurled it through the second, which vanished in a plume of feathers and grave-dirt; and when a third came slashing for Elroy, the wizard turned the killing arc of its talons into a glancing scratch and put a hard, unseen counter-blow into the creature for the insult. That left only the singer — their leader, already burning and bleeding and failing by slow degrees to the acid still eating at it. Perry cracked it open with a single perfect bolt, and Grotdor slid into the flank and loosed a lance of fire that caught it whole. It went up in flame and plumage between one snap of his fingers and the next, and the barbican fell silent, and the fight was over.
The fortress, if it had known to say anything, might have called it a glorious little slaughter. Thanks to Grotdor, it did not know to say anything at all.
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V. The Threshold Held¶
The single most important thing about the fight at the barbican was a thing that did not happen: no alarm was raised. Because Grotdor had burned the archers before either could break for help, the company’s presence in the fortress remained, in the most literal sense, a secret the fortress was keeping from itself. As far as the troll-king and the whole of his garrison knew, no one had come up the cliff at all. The gate had simply gone quiet, and quiet is a thing a storm explains.
They set about keeping it that way. The enemy dead were dragged to the ledge and pitched over the edge to join the troll at the bottom of the drop, out of sight and out of memory. Grotdor called up clean water and sluiced the worst of the scorch and the acid off the stone; the rain and the general squalor of a hall kept by trolls saw to the rest. They timed the loudest of the work to the booming of the thunder, so that even the sounds of tidying died inside the storm. When they were finished the threshold looked very much as though nothing had happened there — which was precisely the point.
Only then did they let themselves stop. Rather than press on at once from the exposed mouth of the foyer, they fell back into a more defensible pocket just off the entryway and took a hard, earned rest in the storm-shadow. There was no healer among them to lean on — Rust was still a hundred feet below with the wolf, holding a line they had not yet needed — and so they made do. Dravyn saw to the worst of it himself, laying a spare and exacting warmth into the deepest wounds; in his hands the mending was less a comfort than a correction, an error identified and unwritten. Elroy had stood in front of very nearly everything the barbican could throw, and it showed; by the time Dravyn was finished with him the General had been patched back very nearly to whole, which was fortunate, because there was a great deal of fortress left and Elroy fully intended to stand in front of most of that as well.
A little over a year had passed since five founders had sworn a charter on the Thorn and named a raw scatter of tents and palisades a nation. Far to the north and east, that nation went on being one without them — its markets keeping their hours, its river running high and brown with the spring melt, its affairs in the steady hands of the Chief of Staff and the council’s servants while the founders were away at the far edge of the map. The Pentarchy had ridden out to close a wound in its own borders that no writ and no road crew could close, and four of the five had climbed a cliff in a storm to do it.
They caught their breath in the dark and the wet, and tended their shields, and looked toward the deeper passages ahead — toward the great hewn halls, and the court of monsters, and the troll-king waiting somewhere in the heart of his stolen fort, who did not yet know that Athanor’s founders had just kicked in his front door and were sitting quietly in his entryway, resting, before they came the rest of the way in.
The furnace that was Athanor had been lit a year and more ago, on a riverbank, by five stubborn people with a charter and a motto and very little else. It had not gone out. It had, if anything, only grown hotter — and now it had been carried, deliberately and in silence, all the way to the door of the one man in the Stolen Lands who had made himself its enemy. The heat was rising. The threshold was held. And the rest of the reckoning could wait exactly as long as it took four tired heroes to stand back up.
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