Dawn couldn’t have come early enough, but, for all that it came sooner each day, it felt like the night had lasted a thousand years. Everyone got up once the sky’s blackness started to soften to blue-grey patches, the novices heading out to the stables in groups to rub down the horses, feed and water them, while the elders took the first turn at breakfast. Durgil just took a chunk of bread with butter and went out into the mist to join the squires and speed the whole process up.
Now he was just glad to be astride his charger, Thistlefoot, his boots back in the shortened stirrups once again. He didn’t get enough chance to be in the saddle, but the aches and pains were old, familiar friends. He rode near the head of the column where they could go three or four abreast on the path, just two rows behind the chapter-masters. The mists coming off the meadows quickly lifted away in the warm morning air. The paladins followed the route as it climbed above wild, gorse-coated fields, and when the hedges fell beneath the high roadway, Durgil could finally see the fruit-growers in their vineyards, the walls of the distant quarry where all the thumping was coming from.
His brothers riding about him were stony-faced, the humans of the company looking a little fatigued by the last night’s mental exertions: the vigour of the Judge should’ve filled them, endowed them with divine strength as they pursued his holy goals, but after the ordeal of the excruciating three-hour vision, they’d stirred from their bed with red eyes, weak knees. Lord Rael and the other elves seemed paler than usual, and their braid-bound hair seemed almost to have dimmed in hue, from gold to copper or silver to grey. Only Durgil’s dwarven fellows maintained their stalwart exteriors. He knew it was a vain thought, and beneath his dignity, but he hoped his eyes were as clear as Sir Vanfrad’s.
Before mid-morning, Lord Ghelliot steered Floodmane abruptly to one side – but he wasn’t halting. He was leading them off the road, walking his steed calmly towards a thicket-choked hillock. As the company’s leader came about, Durgil caught a sight of his face. The reassuring coldness of his facial expression was there, the impassive detachment which was his signature – but he’d never seen the lord look so drawn, so troubled.
Like reverse brickblood, he caught it by looking, feeling the dread permeate his own features, feeling like fear was now something that could be sanctioned –
He was tempted to look aside, check whether he’d caught Vanfrad’s gaze – but no. He kept his face forward, and kept his eyes down on his reins.
I’ll not turn away, he thought. I trust in your Judgement, Father. He raised his eyes, fixing his gaze on Lord Ghelliot’s streaming pennants. I trust, until the end.
It started to get hot, and when they took a break to water the horses Durgil unclipped his cloak, replacing it with the lightweight cape from Thistlefoot’s pack. It was against regulation for him to shed more of his armour than his helm while he was out on an expedition, and, in fact, not one of them had yet donned their ceremonial helmets; he had to wear the cloak or the cape at all times, unless he was within the monastery sanctum. Thankfully the choice as to which was left to him. Glancing around, he noted he wasn’t the only one replacing his rain-cloak with a more-fitting alternative. Fighting a dragon would call for going lightweight where possible, being ready to react quickly to dangers as they appeared. It wasn’t going to call for extra warm clothing.
He gave Thistlefoot a bonus biscuit and a grateful pat on the rump while he stowed the cloak in the pack, tying the straps down tight.
To me, you are as I to them, he told the old courser silently. Better able to bear the burdens.
He was offered an initiate’s assistance in getting back in the saddle, as sometimes happened in situations like this – most of the new boys had never seen him outside the city walls before. He snorted, waving the fine young man aside, and sprang up onto Thistlefoot’s back with the practised ease of an experienced rider, the agility of a dwarf in the prime of his faith.
That earned Durgil an admiring look or two, ridding the haunted expressions from a couple of young faces.
They always underestimated the leg-strength of dwarves, he found.
They’d been picking their way uphill through the treeline for almost an hour, following the banks of a stream clogged with willows and limes, but now the undergrowth was too thick for the mounts to proceed. The sun was high, Kaile the Protector smiling down benevolently, as Lord Ghelliot threw his leg across Floodmane’s back and dismounted on the true edge of the forest. The wind stilled had stilled to a hushed murmur, but when the knights of the company followed suit, slithering from their mounts with all the subtlety of thirty-seven bags of coins spilling to the ground, the voice of Orovon rose up, the leaves and branches crashing and crying in response. Durgil took it as a sign from the gods of light: the chapter was acting on celestial command, watched-over and guided on every step of the journey. Though the Knights worshipped Kultemeren, it was not an exclusive relationship. They revered every Power of Celestium equally. But just as a man might have only one woman in matrimony, a man had to choose to give himself to just one of the gods. No minister permitted in the walls of Mund spoke for more than a single deity, on pain of death. That was as the gods willed it. Those divisions certainly didn’t stop them from all joining together in a single endeavour, to aid their Father’s mortal children now in their quest.
The paladins took down their battle-packs, and wordlessly went on foot through the spiky bushes, Durgil bearing Dwimmerfoe upon his left forearm, the blessed diamond shield which was one of three such defensive relics owned by the chapter. Within seconds the sticky green tendrils started as they meant to go on, snaring their capes, fastening to any exposed scrap of fabric, looping awkwardly about Dwimmerfoe’s points. With swords sheathed to save their edges, the company of knights battered their way through the endless walls of scrub, only pausing to catch their breath as they came briefly into small, weed-tangled clearings.
Durgil no longer felt so certain when they reached the lip of a crevasse, acrid smoke pouring from the open earth like steam from a geyser. He suddenly felt like he was being watched, as though a demon were hanging invisible above his head – but when he cast about his keen senses imparted nothing out of the ordinary.
Taken from Royal Road, this narrative should be reported if found on Amazon.
It was not water boiling down there in the darkness, but something far fouler brewing, the taste of it like bitter berries on his tongue and in his nostrils. The knights were fortunate to bear the blessings of their patron, their bodies inviolate, immune to the vagaries of health which so afflicted other men. Durgil fancied his dwarven constitution would’ve seen him through without it, but the humans and elves might not have been so lucky.
After two passes about the rim the feeling of being observed lessened, and he judged that the northerly edges of the zig-zagging opening in the earth seemed the shallowest, with the easiest slope by which to traverse the yawning, vaporous blackness below. He pointed as Lord Ghelliot regarded him, and started moving back around the crack, watching his footing on the uneven ground. He heard his brethren pooling behind him, following the same exact route.
Just as he came within twenty yards of the riven stone ramp by which he intended to head down into the pit’s depths, two figures emerged, climbing out of the column of mist ahead of him. They were identifiable before they stepped out of the swirling gasses; the man’s shadow alone was enough to force recognition, and the woman cast none, her radiance alone clarifying her fellowship with the knights.
It was her voice we heard, Durgil realised. O, Kultemeren, thank you for delivering us. Thank you…
“The Order of the Whisper’s Predicate?” Kanthyre Vael asked, then, seeming to realise how foolish she was being, smiled warmly. “Welcome, brothers. We’ll be glad of your aid.”
Her husband, Phanar ‘of N’Lem’ (whatever precisely that was supposed to mean), cut an imposing figure in his burnished armour and high helm, his wolf-pelt cloak. He kept his own silence, regarding the paladins critically. But despite the differences in size and frame between the two dragonslayers, the High Healer of Wythyldwyn was no less intimidating than her husband to one who knew of her. The mace at her belt was the same as Durgil had seen before when she’d worn it in public: bands of gold metal and azure stones were interlaced, spiralling up the handle, and the spiked sphere on the head of the shaft was pulsing with a soft amber light bespeaking its potency. The young woman wore her own coat of shining mail, built and belted for its protective properties with no eye to vanity, accentuating rather than hiding her lush, heavy frame. Along with her fiery hair, she was the true visage of a battle-maiden – a battle-bride – and Durgil knew it for a fact that had he lacked the detachment of his station he would have, of all humans, dreamed of this one.
“The fog won’t affect you, I assume?” the Exalted of Wythyldwyn said, gesturing at the noxious vapours billowing up just behind her. Her eyes crossed him, to settle on another target behind him, surely one of his superiors. “I… I hope not, it would blind most men in minutes of even mild exposure, and kill them in…”
Her voice dropped away. Uncertainty twisted her features.
Durgil glanced back and noted Lord Rael in motion.
The lithe elf-knight was moving through the ranks of his fellows with the uncanny grace of his particular kindred, and when he vaulted a mossy boulder to come to the front rank of the paladins he twisted like an acrobat despite his armour, putting to shame any hopes Durgil previously fostered to impress the initiates with his own agility. He somersaulted over the foremost brothers, and in his gauntleted hand –
Phanar stepped in front of Kanthyre only at the last moment, the gladiator’s sword snaking through the air to catch and turn aside the paladin’s, deflecting the blow the elf aimed at the cleric’s throat.
The light-arc of Lord Rael’s sword still burning in his vision, Durgil felt Glaimborn’s grip in the coarse leather lining of his gauntlet, and he smiled grimly, crunching the heel of his boot into the earth and rooting it there. Under the radiance of the chapter-master’s attack, everything was made plain. Lord Rael’s vision was clearer that of the lesser knights.
The moment the sword was turned aside, everything changed.
Kanthyre Vael and Phanar of N’Lem – they were suddenly strange, dimensionless entities to Durgil’s eye. The dragonslayers’ outlines were no longer filled with colour and texture, but with racing black clouds, the images distant, somehow, as if seen from a great remove, and far darker in hue than the vapours coiling up behind them. Indigo lightning danced about inside the borders shaping their false forms, flickering across the remote-seeming storm-clouds and crashing down their extremities, as the illusory creatures reacted to Lord Rael’s wrathful onset.
The Phanar entity had responded more quickly than the knight appeared to have anticipated, and even the parrying-stroke threw the paladin off his balance – Phanar’s dark, empty hand reached up and caught the chapter-master by the front of his helm.
The illusion’s turbulent, flickering fingers sank through the steel and into the elf’s skull.
Silent but for their footfalls, two of the youngest knights at the forefront surged to aid their lord, but Durgil and the others just behind held their ground. The chapter champion kept Dwimmerfoe and Glaimborn readied, and started casting about for other threats.
The Kanthyre entity, now poised behind her protector and assailant with her head-shape turned towards the two onrushing initiates, raised her void-mace and pointed it at them.
The indigo fire crackled down her arm, her weapon, and burst free into the air, stretching and forking out to blast the ignorant pair.
Despite their rashness, they were Knights of Kultemeren. They might never have faced this type of foe before, but they would learn their lessons from this encounter, and their natural instincts compelled them to ignore the nethernal lightning, brute-force through it, which was precisely what would be required to sap at the illusion’s strength.
The fire passed harmlessly through their armour, their bodies, sputtering out behind them.
And Lord Rael never needed any help.
The tall elf reached up with his free hand and took Phanar’s forearm in his gauntleted fist. He overpowered the thing, pulling its fingers free of his face, and simultaneously brought his blade up into the entity’s midriff.
Phanar parried it but, this time, the whole chapter disbelieving, his scintillating weapon was like a stick of butter before the master’s own glittering sword.
The keen edge of the blade ripped Phanar in two, and the elf’s gauntlet closed, shattering the illusion’s wrist. Suddenly, the black creature’s outline was falling apart, drifting about on unseen eddies.
The first of the young knights to reach Kanthyre shoulder-charged right through her, dissolving her where she stood.
The lad went flat on his face, and when he sat up and looked around, one of the first whose eyes he met was Durgil.
The dwarf gave him a thumbs-up, and the boy grinned, wiping off his cloak as he got back to his feet.
Durgil strode past him, looking down into the broiling mist.
Was that trap designed for us?
There was no answer, but he could breathe in the fumes without sensing any untoward effects, any uneasy feelings. In that at least the illusion had told the truth.
No. Unless it were a trap designed more to lull one into a false sense of security… Designed to persuade us that the dragon expects a different interloper. An interloper incapable of seeing through such lies.
If this dragon they sought was smart, perhaps it knew of the Red Harlot’s escapades in their city. Durgil had seen Lovebright up close with his own two eyes and had been none the wiser. Maybe this drake had itself been lulled into a false sense of security, thinking the paladins weak, when in fact their failure with regard to the interloper was only a sign of Tyr Kayn’s extreme puissance.
He was ten steps into the thick vapours, half-blinded and guided only by divine instinct, when he realised:
Yet, if not Kanthyre’s… whose was the voice beckoning us to hurry?
* * *