Chapter 37: The House Answers¶
Prologue: Grotdor "The Burninator" Phlogiston, Pentarch of Flame¶
Fire is not a temper. That is the first thing my family never understood, and it is the last thing this house is going to learn.
A troll is a simple problem. It closes faster than you can open it, so you stop opening it and you start burning it, and after that it is only meat with a clock running. Two rooms of them so far. Three, if the kennel counts. None of it took cleverness. It took somebody willing to stand in a doorway and hold the gap while I found the clean angle.
Elroy holds the doorway. He is loud about it. He is also, and I will only say this once, the reason the rest of us are still upright.
It is not the trolls that worry me. It is the stairs. Something went up them shouting, and nothing that goes up a staircase shouting comes back down alone. We are four people in a stone box inside a house full of things that know exactly where we are standing. There is no clever position left to take. There is the doorway, and the heat I can hold, and the question of how long either of those lasts.
So: hold — then burn. Clean and quick, while quick is still on offer.
I. The Doorway¶
Nothing had moved in the interval. The rain still came sideways off the cliff outside; the hall still smelled of scorched hide and old bones; the floor was still scattered with the burning and the burned. Elroy Jenkins was still on his back where a hound had put him, and the hound in question was still standing over him, and the moment resumed exactly where it had been left, with the growling.
He got his feet under him and killed it before it had finished being pleased with itself. The sword came up out of the flagstones in one motion and went through the animal's shoulder and out the far side of its chest, and the creature had rather less body left than it needed. It fell across his boots. He stepped over it into the arch of the doorway and stood there, because that was the shape of the evening and everyone in the room already knew it.
Above them, somewhere off along the upper floor, a troll was burning. It had run up the grand staircase in the last hour with its chest on fire and its blood running, and neither had stopped for it. They could hear it moving up there — the heavy uneven tread of something walking off a wound it could not close — and, distantly, doors.
Perry Marlowe put a bolt into the nearest hound at an angle he had chosen before he raised the crossbow. The head of it was packed with something that did not stay a bolt for long; the fire took in the animal's flank and stayed there, chewing, and the hound spent the rest of its short life discovering that the wound would not knit while it burned.
The remaining troll in the hall got up off the floor where it had fallen the hour before, and took a swipe at Elroy on the way to standing. The claw skidded along the shield and found ribs behind it — not deeply, but enough. Then it went hunting, moving along the wall in great sidling steps, trying to find a square yard of that room in which Grotdor could not see it. There was no such square yard. It ended up more or less where it had started, out of options, enormously visible, and visibly annoyed about it.
The second hound had no such doubts. It came across the hall at a flat run, launched itself with the joyful stupidity of a dog who has seen a man standing up and considers this an oversight, and hit Elroy centre of mass. He went down again. It did not hurt him. It simply put him on the flagstones a second time and stood on him.
Grotdor came in from the corridor because he had to; from where he had been standing he could see nothing at all, and a kineticist who cannot see is a lamp under a bucket. He came in and the air changed with him. Steam rolled off his shoulders and gathered around him in a turning shell, close as armour, and the scars on his forearms lit from beneath. He shaped a lance of the stuff and put it into the burning hound at reach, and the animal's coat went up like dry grass.
It should not have been able to knit that. It tried anyway — the flesh crawling closed even as the fire ate it open — and then it did something none of them had expected. It stopped worrying about the men entirely, bounded across the room at Grotdor, and attempted, with the whole weight of its body, to knock him over. It missed by a distance that was almost insulting, landed on its own chin, and had to spend the rest of its effort getting up again.
Grotdor kicked it while it was down. He did not comment.
Dravyn snapped his fingers at the other one and a point of flame leapt from his knuckles toward it and went wide by a hand's breadth. He weighed, visibly, whether to spend anything on a second attempt, and decided that the night was going to be long.
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II. Steam¶
The second minute of it belonged entirely to Grotdor, and he did not spend an action to buy it.
He had been holding the steam shell since he entered the room, and holding a thing like that costs something. At the top of his turn he simply stopped holding it. The shell blew outward in a scalding ring that filled the near third of the hall — the trolls, the hounds, and, because he did not have the luxury of precision and would not have taken it if offered, his own allies as well.
Dravyn's runes flared and took most of it. Elroy turned his face into his shoulder. Perry, who is a halfling and has the halfling's talent for being somewhere marginally better than where he was a moment ago, came out of it with singed sleeves and nothing worse. Everything else in the ring came out staggering, and every one of them was blown five feet back from where they had been standing — which peeled the hound off Elroy and gave him the floor to stand up on.
"My allies are in the aura too," Grotdor said, when it was over, by way of a full apology. "I was too angry to care."
He was not finished. He put a running line of fire down the hall after the steam, a small bright shape that flew the length of it and passed through both trolls and the burning hound on its way. The hound did not come out the other side. The troll did, with most of its back gone.
Elroy had, by then, gone to work with method. The bane-rune on Jenkins Honor had been sulking all night and he had spent a moment coaxing it back into service; when it lit, the sword began taking hounds apart. He opened the second one from shoulder to sternum, and then turned to the troll in the hall and hammered on his shield until it looked at him, and told it — in the tone of a man extending a genuine courtesy — to come back and join the fight.
Behind him, Perry brewed. He had a case of vials and a working knowledge of what four people with no cleric actually need, and what they needed was for Elroy to keep standing. He mixed something cold and grey in the space of a breath and put it in the General's hand, and after that Elroy walked around all night with a thin numbing rime under his skin that dulled the first cut of every exchange and renewed itself every time he drew breath to shout.
Dravyn stepped once for the angle and put the glaive through the troll's guard so cleanly that the creature's whole side opened. It was the kind of blow that has no answer in it; the troll simply had less of itself afterwards. He followed it with a look — nothing more than a look, cold and level and freighted — and the air around the creature's head shimmered and burned. It shrugged that off. It could not shrug off the wound.
What killed it was Perry, one minute later, at range, with fire.
He had taken its measure first, the way he always does — the long assessing pause that the others have learned not to interrupt — and what he found he gave to the room in three sentences: their legs are no faster than ours, they see in the dark, they will punish anyone who reaches past them, and acid stops the healing but only fire actually hurts them. Then he loaded fire, and shot, and the bolt went in beneath the collarbone at a hand's-breadth of angle he had picked out from thirty feet away, and the creature came apart around it.
"Notes for the files. Trolls are flammable. Reproduce the results." — Perry Marlowe
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III. What Came Down the Stairs¶
They had bought themselves perhaps a minute, and they spent it correctly. Grotdor put a palm on Elroy's breastplate and the sea-cool of his other gate ran through the man — a blessing of living water, of all the things to come out of that pair of hands — and closed the worst of it. Perry brewed again, and this time it was something better, and Elroy came back to full and stayed there for a little while.
Dravyn drew a scroll from his case and did not read it yet.
And the fortress arrived.
It came in the order a garrison comes in when it has been properly warned: the heavy thing first, then the specialists, then the line. And it had been properly warned — because somewhere in the building, in the dark, the great mass Dravyn had been feeling through the stone for two days had finally done something, and what it had done was talk. It had spent every second of its opportunity telling the rest of the house where the intruders were standing. It had not come to fight. That, more than anything else that happened in the next hour, was the thing that should have frightened them.
What came down the grand staircase first was two heads on one body, arguing.
It was troll-kin and it was enormous, taller than the doorway it was aiming for, and its two heads carried on a running disagreement in Jotun the entire way down, looking left and right independently, contradicting one another about where the enemy had got to. Then both of them stopped at once and looked at Elroy, and pointed. Then they backed up a few steps to put stone between themselves and whatever the burning smell was.
Grotdor went up the stairs to see. It was, Perry told him afterwards and repeatedly, a poor decision; he went anyway, forty feet at speed on the jets of his own steam, and got high enough to see over the last riser.
There was a throne up there.
It was cut from stone in the honest square dwarven way, and it was large, and it had been draped over with pelts and furs the way a wolf will drag bedding into a stranger's house. There were skulls set around its feet. There were bowls of food beside it. The food was not old.
He said hello. Then he tried to put fire into the two-headed thing, missed, and turned to leave — and the general took the opportunity that leaving always offers. Something that was very nearly a whole tree came around in a flat arc and caught him across the body and lifted him off the stairs. He landed hard and kept his feet, which was itself a kind of achievement, and came back down into the room with a third of himself gone.
"I did advise otherwise," said Perry.
Dravyn burned the last of his patience into a spell and gave himself speed — the world stepping down a half-pace around him, everything in it slightly slower than his hands — and then read the scroll. It was an old tale about a hero and her axes, and telling it aloud did what such stories do in the hands of a wizard who understands them: it settled his aim, and it promised that anything which hurt him would find him a great deal harder to hurt twice.
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IV. The Hammer and the Sorcerer¶
The specialists came next, and they were not trolls at all.
The first of them was a kobold, black-scaled and small and wearing a breastplate that actually fit him, with a spiked steel shield on one arm and a warhammer in the other hand that had a light living inside its head. He came down the stairs at a scamper and stopped in front of Grotdor and addressed him, in Common, with elaborate courtesy.
"Nice trousers, friend. It'd be the same if your kneecaps were broken."
Then he swung for the knees, and it was a very good swing, and it never landed — because Elroy Jenkins was already there. He did not move to get there; he had never left. He simply put himself in the line of it, took the hammer on his own leg, and let the blow spend itself on the wrong man. Dravyn's aura snapped taut around them both in the same instant — the wizard's answering strike came out of the geometry of it, the glaive opening the kobold's shoulder, the harm bleeding away from Elroy into nothing.
The General absorbed what was left of it and found his kneecaps in working order.
The second specialist did not announce himself. He had been in the room for some time, and nobody had known it, because he had put himself out of the world entirely and stood there watching. When he came back into it, it was to throw a cone of fire out of both hands across the doorway, and only then did they see him: another kobold, red-scaled, and older — an old man of his kind, and a sorcerer.
He caught his own ally in it. He did not appear to mind.
That was the shape the fight took from there, and it did not improve. Elroy stood in the arch. The two-headed general came at him and got the sword in return, giant-bane biting the way that rune was made to bite. Perry took the general's measure across the length of the hall — hard skin, and a horror of fire, and enough weight of body to make both facts a long argument rather than a short one — and then loaded fire and shot him, and left him burning.
The burning general spent the rest of the evening trying and failing to put himself out. He backed off from the fight to do it. He never fully managed.
Grotdor threw the small bright flying shape down the length of the room and it went through the last hound and through the kobold with the hammer, and the hound went up like a sausage in a fire and was very nearly finished; and Elroy finished it a moment later, opening it from the top of the skull down, with a note of genuine regret in his voice.
"This one's been through so much. I just want to put him out of his misery."
Perry did the unglamorous thing. He took two of his three breaths in that minute to work oil into the flutes of his crossbow's bolts — an ugly greenish stuff, made for giants and for nothing else — and spent the third opening the far door to see what was behind it.
What was behind it was a troll, and two hobgoblins with bows already drawn and already aimed.
"Get them. Do not let them leave alive."
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V. The Formation¶
The Reclaimers had fought hobgoblins before, on the ledge and at the barbican, and had learned nothing useful from it, because those had been sentries. These were soldiers.
They came down the grand staircase in a line, and they stayed in it. They took the corners in pairs and covered one another as they moved. When one of them was in front, the one behind steadied him, and the pair of them shot better for it than either would have alone. They did not shout at the Pentarchs; they shouted at each other, in Goblin, short flat words, and they did it whenever anything on the far side of the doorway changed.
Dravyn tested that. He took a bead from the strand at his throat, and the string briefly showed what it truly was — a golden chain, spheres hung on threads of light — and he threw the largest of them into the middle of the formation.
It went off the way those things go off. Fire filled the hallway from wall to wall, and washed over five of them.
Four came out of it untouched. Not lucky — drilled. They had gone flat and sideways behind cornerstones before the bead finished its arc, because the instant it left Dravyn's hand one of them had called it out by name in Goblin and the rest had moved. Only the man on the near end was slow, and he came out of the fire with half of himself cooked and stayed on his feet anyway.
"He has a necklace of fireballs," the call went, and then the formation adjusted, and the archers spread out so that no second bead would find more than two of them.
After that it became arithmetic, and the arithmetic was not good.
They shot at Perry, and the one with the steadiest hand shot through cover as though cover were a rumour. They shot at Dravyn because Dravyn was the one they had decided was weakest, and they said so, and they kept saying it. When Elroy stepped into the path of an arrow meant for someone else — which he did four separate times, twice against shafts that would otherwise have gone straight through a friend — they simply reloaded and shot the next one at whoever had a clear line.
The burned troll came back down the stairs and got both hands on him and would not let go. The kobold with the hammer leapt the wizard's hanging ball of fire rather than walk through it — he had watched it long enough to know better — and got in among them. The red sorcerer moved north to a corner where he could reach three of the four at once and opened his hands, and the cone caught Perry and Dravyn and Elroy together.
They gave as good as they got, for a while. Dravyn's answering strikes came out of that fight like judgements: he took the kobold with the hammer off the board with a drift of his hanging flame, the creature dying from one last point of life to none, and killed one of the archers outright with a whip of lightning arced between two of them. Grotdor kept the fire moving through their formation in flat running lines. Elroy tore free of the troll's grip, and with Perry's shot arriving at exactly the moment he needed it — the little Investigator calling the opening from behind him like a man reading a map aloud — turned a workmanlike blow into a butchering one.
And still the trolls healed. And still the archers reloaded. And there were more of both above them.
"For every one of us you kill, we will kill nine of you. Think about the math." — a hobgoblin of the line
Elroy told him there were only four of them, which was not the reassurance he seemed to think it was.
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VI. No Way Out¶
By the last minutes the Pentarchy was not attacking anything. It was holding a stone box.
Perry had put acid into the burning troll on top of the fire, so that it was being unmade from two directions at once and could not spare a thought for either; it had four breaths of life left and did not know it. The red sorcerer was hurt but not nearly hurt enough. The two-headed general had pulled back entirely and stood somewhere out of sight, sullenly regenerating, burning down and healing up in the same rhythm, waiting for the fire to go out of him so that he could come back and finish the argument. The rock troll — the great weight that had never once come into the room — had still not come into the room.
Grotdor was the only one of the four with anything much left in him, and he was spending it as fast as he could shape it: the flying line of fire through three of them at once, blasts at reach, another and another, moving each time so that the next arrow would have to be aimed fresh.
Elroy had no more reactions to give. He had spent every one of them on somebody else, and when the last archer took a clean run at Dravyn with a short sword and put it through him with terrible precision, the General could only watch it land.
Dravyn had begun the fight as the sharpest weapon in the room. He ended it as a target. They had marked him early and they never stopped — arrow, arrow, blade, arrow — and each one that went in bled him a little further down, and there was no one in the party who could give any of it back.
The last two shafts of the evening came from an archer at the far end of the corridor who had done nothing all night but reload and fire and reload. The first went through Dravyn's side. The second went in above it. He stayed upright, which was the only thing left that he could usefully do.
They stood back to back in the middle of it: a wizard riddled with arrows and barely conscious on his feet; a halfling at half his strength with his ammunition case running light; a General with nothing in reserve and both hands still full; and a kineticist holding the last real heat in the room. Hobgoblins were coming in from the east. Hobgoblins were coming in from the west. Hobgoblins were coming up from the south. A troll was burning in the hallway they had meant to leave by.
Every route out of that room had closed while they were busy in it, one at a time, and none of them had been closed by accident.
Above their heads, one flight of stairs up, a stone throne stood draped in pelts with food set out beside it and no one sitting in it — and Hargulka, who had not yet troubled to come down, had not yet troubled to come down.
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