Haven 5 Blood Magic BOOK (13 page)

Brand’s mouth was open, he roared or laughed or both. He leapt among them, slashing nothing but air. He stood over Telyn, and grabbed her up with his free arm. She cried out in pain at his touch, but he lifted her as a man might lift a tiny tot. He threw her over his shoulder and whirled.

Holding his axe aloft, he began to rush amongst the stones, slashing at wisps and shadows. Where was Piskin? He had been here a bare moment ago.

He ran out of the stones and looked at their tops, suspecting the manling might be bouncing along their tops as Tomkin had earlier. But there was no one up there.

He cast about, and finally caught a glimpse of the other. He had not fled away into the Deepwood. He had instead begun to circle the stones. He was retreating into the Twilight Lands.

Brand shouldered Telyn, who moaned in response. He felt her blood in his fingers. He breathed hard, trying to think. She was badly injured. If he carried her into the Twilight Lands, if he ran all night with her, she might die untreated.

“You will die by my axe, manling! This I swear to thee!”

There was nothing for a moment, and then came a tiny, mocking laugh that drifted back to his ears. Brand clenched his teeth so hard his entire face would ache for days later, but he cared not. Piskin ran by him, for three circuits. With each circuit, the Wee One grew fainter of aspect, becoming indistinct, ghostly. Brand slashed at him as he passed, but struck nothing. He knew Piskin was no longer in this world.

When Piskin had vanished entirely, Brand put Telyn down, and slashed the blue stones themselves. Sparks flew, and any normal axe would have been broken or horribly chipped. But Ambros was not made of mere steel. He clove two in half, breaking their power so that their silvery nimbus of light died.

Then Telyn moaned at his feet and he struggled to control himself, his rage. The wisps had long since fled. He stood alone, but for his shivering love, who bled upon the moonlit grasses.

He grabbed her up, as gently as he could with one arm, and carried her away into the Deepwood. He kept the axe out. He would march all night, and all day, and into the next night if need be. He would find her a healer, and he would make certain she was safe, and then he would come back to this spot and hunt down Piskin and slay him.

One way or another.

* * *

Oberon had scooped up the minds of the merlings, they were as easily caught as swamp-frogs at dusk. Brand had helped a great deal by attacking one of their villages out of spite. The fact that Brand was seeking Piskin at the time he attacked the merlings was delightful. What a twist of fate! Oberon himself sponsored Piskin, making the sweet irony of Brand’s futile thrashing about all the more amusing.  The fact that Brand and Piskin’s struggles had incidentally improved his growing army was just happy circumstance, but seemed to Oberon a finely demonstrable instance of
justice
, of
rightness
in the world.

The merlings had been more than happy to join Oberon’s growing alliance. He smiled still, just thinking about it. A simple people at best, they would serve his purposes very well. He would dash them against his enemies, using them and their tiny disgusting lives as the perfect foil, distracting those who might cause trouble were they free to maneuver and think.

The kobolds, with whom he treated with now, were somewhat more wary. Too bad, Oberon lamented, that Brand hadn’t stomped down here and senselessly slaughtered a few of them as well to make matters easier. The kobolds had the power of simple logic on their side, of course. They asked him straightforward questions. Why would they wish to irritate the Kindred when they had freshly chosen a new queen? Was that not the height of folly?

“Seemingly,” admitted Oberon, making a stroking motion in the air, as if he smoothed the fur of an invisible cat. “But things are more complex. The Kindred are coming to slay you in any case. They will root you out of your dark holes even down here, in depths of the Everdark. They will send clicking machines and creatures of living flame into your tunnels to burn out your spratlings. They will sing while they march, and soon there will be no more elders or ancients among the kobold tribes. You will all be broken flesh and bone. I’ve seen it, in my foretellings.”

The kobold chiefs hunkered around the greenish-blue light of one of their strange firepits, in which they burned stones as other peoples burned wood. The chieftains were huge folk, as kobolds grew each year of their lives and their chiefs were always the largest and oldest among them. For kobolds, this meant they were more than a century in age, and had long ago outgrown the cramped, slimy tunnels of their youth. The chieftains, being the largest of their kind, were bent in a permanently hunched position. They lived scuttling and crawling through their warrens on scarred knees.

The kobolds eyed Oberon with vast distrust. “You must help us. Our enemy is your enemy,” said the wisest of them. He had but one eye and one arm, but there was a red gleam of cunning in that sole remaining eye.

“Aye, and we will!” shouted Oberon, leaping to his feet. The sudden movement caused the huge, wary kobolds to grope for their flint knives and heavy stalactite clubs.

Oberon strutted before the hulking figures, having not a care for their firepit of burning stones or their crude weapons. Their knobby knuckles popped and bulged as they gripped their clubs, but they did not lift them.

“It will be this way: We elves are not close at hand, dwelling as we do in another place. When the Kindred bubble and churn and finally boil over, they will seek the creatures that are easiest to reach, the way lava flows down into tunnels beneath it first, before shooting up shafts to the surface.”

The kobold chieftains relaxed somewhat. Oberon spoke now in terms they comprehended.

“Your people will thus take the brunt of the pain early on,” Oberon continued in a most reasonable voice. It was very hard to argue with his words. Every single syllable sounded self-evident and truthful to a mortal listener. “Kobolds will be exterminated first, almost immediately in fact, as you are very near at hand. So your question should not be
when
will the elves help, but
why
would we help you at all? Why should my people move to your aid? Would we ensure that the Kindred will turn their yellow greedy eyes toward us secondly? It would seem in
our
best interests to wait, and to hope you quench their flame for conquest with your collective bloods.”

Kobold throats growled. Bent spines twisted and shoulders rubbed against the tunnel ceiling, which was only a dozen feet high.

“But we elves see more deeply than that,” said Oberon. He had every one of their eyes now. Even the single red orb of the wisest was intent upon his words. “We will strike. We will help. We will die with you. Not to save kobolds, but to save ourselves.”

The others stared at him, and the fire of burning stones shot up a hissing white flare. A pocket of magnesium had no doubt been set alight.

Oberon hopped forward and leaned over the flaring fire, as if the intense light and heat of it meant nothing to him.

“All the folk,
all of us
, must fight the Kindred
at once
. We must stand together. We can’t wait and sit back and huddle while they rebuild their walking machines and forge demonic weaponry. We must strike hard and fast. Each day, they grow stronger, preparing to march. Each day, we grow weaker in comparison, and if they slay the kobolds and then the gnomes firstly, well, that will only put off the day of reckoning for the elves by a month or three. They will come for us, we know that. They have Dragon Magic, and we have lost our Sky Magic. They do not fear us.”

Oberon produced a tiny lyre, and he strummed it idly while he spoke. The chieftains were so intent on his words they did not think to demand he stop, to insist that no enchantments be cast.

But the wisest one, the kobold with the single red eye, spoke up. “Then strike with us. Bring your elves into the caverns through the mounds that exist here. Stand behind each rank of kobolds a line of elf archers. Let us, as you say, work together.”

The lyre stopped strumming. An almost infinitesimal flicker of anger could be seen as it ran across Oberon’s face.

They stared at him, awaiting his response.

Oberon, not for the first time these many days of traveling among the most unwholesome of folk, doubted his strategy. These oafs were so simple and distrustful they could not grasp the perfection of his plan. They suspected him of duplicity, and wriggled upon his baited hooks with tenacity. He heaved a breath, and regretted the action instantly, as his nostrils filled with the rich foulness of kobolds. In truth, he cared not one thin whit if the Kindred exterminated the lot of them. The world would be a better place without these filthy creatures.

But, unfortunately, he needed these lowly beings. That very fact was depressing, and worthy of vengeance all by itself. He vowed, right then and there, to add this ignominy to the list of crimes performed upon his dignity by Brand and the Kindred. There would be an accounting, and soon, of these accumulated insults. He should not be forced to ally with crude creatures such as these. They were not worthy of his spittle.

He forced a smile, and raised his head again, removing all dark thoughts from his face as best he could. “You ask a piercing question, ancient one,” this last statement caused a real smirk of amusement to come unbidden to Oberon’s face. He, who was as old as the stones in their firepit, had called one of these infantile animals an
ancient
. The irony was enough to make any thinking being smile.

“There is the small matter, unfortunately, of trust,” said Oberon, speaking as one might to a half-wit. “You will strike first, and thus commit yourselves to war. We will follow your action. That way, we will be ensured of your cooperation.”

“Why we go first?” grunted another chief. This one was the fattest and had the largest mouth, two factors that were probably complimentary in nature.

Oberon shot his gaze that way. “Because otherwise, my people will do nothing, and you will be rolled over by the maddened Kindred. Like ants swarming over a carcass, they will pick your foul bones clean.”

“Your turn will come if you wait.”

“True enough, but we have many other allies and will simply take the time your demise provides to better ready ourselves.”

The kobolds set up a storm of annoyed grunting in their own crude language. Oberon knew some of their speech, but preferred not to listen. He would feel sullied if he listened to their prattle of grunts and whistles too closely.

Finally, they came to a conclusion. The one with the single red eye spoke for the group. “We will do as you ask. We will set a thousand traps. We will throw a thousand darts. We will slay every Kindred we can find alone, and we will creep forth in their artificial night and set alight their fields of mushrooms and lichen.”

“Excellent,” said Oberon, beaming.

“But, we ask something from you now. Give us weapons if you won’t stand with us. Give us something to better slay the Kindred than our sharpened stones.”

Oberon, for the first time, paused in thought. He placed a finger to his mouth, then he swept up that finger upward into the thick air of the tunnel.

“We will do it. You will throw darts that will not miss. The triggers of your traps will snap with clockwork precision. Your archers will bend bows with a greater spring to them than any they have ever held.”

The deal was struck. Oberon was forced to touch the knuckles of each of the foul beasts in turn, as was their custom. Leaving the stinking tunnels, he reached fresh air an hour later.

Finding a clean blue lake, he spent a long time bathing and scouring the soiled hand that had touched their foul, scabbed flesh.

He steeled himself for his next visit. It would be the last, and the most important of the lot. In foulness, the next meeting would far surpass his experience with the kobolds. In comparison, he would recall their company and liken it to a fresh spring morning.

* * *

Gudrin accepted that the effects upon the Kindred of having a living monarch were undeniable, but inexplicable. The Kindred, when under the sway of a monarch, were a people apart from their normal selves. The phenomenon was well-known, but little studied, even by the Kindred talespinners. She found herself to be the locus of this strange reaction, but that didn’t make it any easier to explain to races that had never experienced a time of group madness.

As a naturalist and a scholar she could find corollaries in the world. Other species behaved vastly differently when an instinctual drive overtook them, such as salmon dashing their brains out on wet stones, trying to reach their home waters to spawn when one would think that any spot would do. As well, many varieties of insect exhibited specialized group behavior when the queen of their nest was ready to mate.

She was aware of these comparable instances, but was unable to apply any of them to her own folk. Firstly, because such a comparison was disgusting, and likened the Kindred to creatures that were nearly mindless. Her people didn’t respond to some chemical signature. They were not thrown into a constructive—or destructive—frenzy by some primitive instinct shared with hive creatures. She rejected such comparisons out of hand as insulting. Her people were instead, she knew in her heart, driven by a sense of loyalty and bravery and self-sacrifice. It was
honor
that drove them to wild acts when they had a monarch. They were capable of surprising things under normal circumstances, but when following a leader they truly believed in, one that inspired the Kindred heart do its utmost, that was when others had cause to eye them fearfully.