The Shield of Hannar (Runehammer Novels Book 2) Read online

  Fist rock spiked outward from the pinnacles at an impossible angle. Its defiant point leaned one hundred feet above the valley floor, and came to a table-like point. Beyond its wondrous mass, due east, stood the greatest monument of the known world: The Wall of Duros.

  Hannar fell to his battered knees on that rocky edifice as tears streamed down his mud-smeared cheeks. All his anger broke for a moment. The beauty of this great work was beyond any story he had heard, or what any tall tale could boast.

  The thing stretched into the curving, fogged distance in both directions. Above the plain it towered like a mountain range. Its blocky towers dared the lowest drifting clouds, and were capped with snow at those impossible heights. So colossal was this cyclopean titan, it dizzied the mind to feel its weight exploding straight up from the plains below. Tiny windows, doors, and stairways dotted the surface like goat trails on a peak, and wide-winged eagles soared in circles on its drafts and breezes.

  But on this wonder no banner flew. No color defied the endless expanse of hewn stone. No wooden gable post or banded door broke the ageless granite infinity. The air was silent and forever between Fist Rock and the wall’s mind-bending scale. It was a place the mortal mind could perceive the profound scale of the universe, and feel the turning, folding, ageless breathing of the cosmos itself.

  So, he cried.

  He cried for his father. He cried for his mother in her timeless stoic smile. He cried for the dead men he killed with his bare hands. He cried for the corpses at Fort Friendship. Most of all, he cried for himself. At this his anger returned, for the last emotion felt like weakness, and the old blood wouldn’t have it.

  Stood he then, tall as a tree on Fist Rock’s promenade. His blonde fop drifted in a gust of wind, and his shield was motionless on his right hand. Through his broad dwarven nostrils he took that clean, massive air. This monument was the work of his folk. This feat of endurance, of patience, of unity-a reminder of all that could be when folk join in purpose-was his. Not lightly would this duty pass from those countless unseen generations of yore into his veins. Not lightly would the honor of his folk rest on his shoulders, so he crouched, his eyes narrowed again, and scoured he that wide plain for any sign of his prey. A wiry plume of black smoke betrayed the vastness of the plain. It spiraled and coiled upward, made tiny by the massive grey backdrop of the wall. It was a garrison at the wall’s foot, part in flames. The distance was too far to see more. No doubt it was the next stop on his quarry’s path of destruction.

  What could their purpose be? What drove them across the landscape with such fury and speed? Hannar didn’t even know who or what they were save Mars’ report that they were an undisciplined rabble of elven traitors. After this chase, Hannar could not have known, but they were something far more sinister.

  In leaps and sliding strides, he found his way down onto the grassland and through the dells that formed that wide valley floor. By dusk he was at the destroyed garrison. Again, he was aged beyond his years at that moment. Bodies. Dwarves and men all tangled and twisted in steel and blood.

  Hardened this time, Hannar did not pause. He scoured for track, and found their way forward. The elves had been forced to take to the wallways, as the bedrock of this mighty edifice was too dense to cut any dungeon or passage. The only way was over.

  To understand what happened next, it is important to know how the Dwarves of Duros managed such a feat of engineering. The Wall was in fact not built, but hewn. Over generations were the roots of the mountain cut back, and a series of cranes and counterweights hoisted the boulders and till above. Here was stacked and fitted a mighty retaining wall, which was in turn backfilled by smaller skree and rubble from the base.

  Over four hundred years this process continued, cutting inward, hoisting and stacking, along forty leagues of solid stone. The upper half was riddled with cavities, chambers, tunnels and gateways, but the root of the wall was a mind-bending single mass of solid rock. The first precarious doorway did not defy the sheer face of it until at least two hundred feet straight up.

  These doorways and signal fire stations were accessed by zig zagging stairways, death-defying hand hold ladders, and foot-stone traversals that gave the wall a brocade appearance from miles off. Up these dizzying paths the elves had gone, and Hannar began to follow.

  But in moments, something felt off. There were no iron boot marks on these steps. The elves had passed here, that was certain, but no dwarf had taken this path. In fact, some of the handholds had crumbed away, and the next were beyond dwarven reach. Hannar stopped, surveyed the dizzy scene, and saw his answer clear as day.

  What he passed by as a service or trash tunnel had new relevance. He returned five strides downward, no easy task at these heights, and looked inside the square opening. It was shallow, and blocky-cut. The rear wall was only a few feet inward, and then a connecting shaft shot straight upward into darkness. One wall was cut with a slotted groove that held a small rectangular step. The opposite wall was grooved as well, but empty. Hannar recognized this dwarven invention.

  On the shelf he stood, and his weight gave a click behind the stone. From above, a grinding, and the tiny stoop slid upward. He braced and rode the stone at speed. Halfway up the counterstone slid downward past him, and light glowed above.

  This manner brought him to a wall-top station in moments, while the elves must have taken hours to make the climb. Hannar popped his knuckles on Wall’s leather grip, and he smelled a fight ahead.

  Now, elves are not known to handle disappointment well, or abide being humbled by the other races of Alfheim. Their pride and lofty self-worth is age-old, and ingrained in their bloodlines like letters etched in marble. So it was that pang of surprise and foolish hubris was known to them that day, and stung it did.

  At the pinnacle of Duros’ mighty wall stood a lone dwarf, barely twelve winters in his boots, disheveled shield in one hand and weaponless, grinning ear to ear like some foolish devil about to breathe hellfire.

  The Red Captain stopped suddenly, having just crested the final stairway. He was winded, and the entire company needed rest despite their unnatural bloodless life force. Before them the dwarven boy stood defiant in the high, cold wind. Snow gathered at the granite corner jambs, and flurries drifted about the boy’s golden braids.

  In his left hand, he held a rusted steel pole bannered with the great thin linen of Duros’ folk: a dark red taper with a single black chevron at the center. The high winds caught this ancient cloth, and it flew and whipped above the youth like a scene from the sagas.

  It was a good day to fight.

  “I am Hannar, Hunnin’s son,” he began, “and this is Wall.” He lifted the shield in front of him, banging on it with the banner pole. “Come take it from me, if you can.”

  The Red Captain was wide-eyed, gasping, and frigidly pale in that snowy air. This was the ground of dwarves, and no place for elvenkind. Their skin was too thin, their blood to close to the cold, their ears nipped with ice.

  Despite all this, he laughed.

  “Fool! What know you of our purpose? Of anything?” He straightened his crimson cloak dismissively, and waved his right hand with a lazy gesture. His company of elves, fifty strong at least, covered in scrapes and dented armor and battle wear, exploded forward.

  The battle was joined. The tale of that day has been told more than even the campaigns of Kellan the Conqueror, or the exploits of the dragon slayers of the First Age. Rightly so, for that day a young boy met the supernatural onslaught of evil head on, and did not flinch.

  17

  It’s a curious thing how time can slow during the moments of greatest intensity in life. The mind digs its heels in, refuses to let the moment slip by, and magnifies time through the lens of white hot attention. It raises the question of what relationship truly exists between time and perception.

  Now the scribners of old Ardenmoor, zealots in scholars’ robes and little else, posited that time heeded only the will of the One God…that the passing of
each moment was evidence of His heartbeat, and the pace of this was not only fixed but a cosmic law. So, men toiled and triumphed in the shadow of a temporal universe so far beyond themselves it practically gloated with titanic distance.

  Opposing this frigid view were the desert priests and hermits of Koab, that strange domed city at the edge of the Ghost Sands. To them, time was a construct of the mortal mind, present only to aid in our instinct to make sense of a formless, pulsating, cyclical dimension called now.

  Few of these book-makers and vision-havers had much evidence either way, for they had not known the odd nature of time in the heat of battle. Whitefeather, the tallest, swiftest, and quietest of Akram’s elite soldier brigade, knew of this. He knew of this with acute clarity in the last seconds of his life.

  Whitefeather’s knuckles turned stark white, and he lost his grip for a split second. The leather-wrapped haft of the longhammer creaked and frayed. There was no way out. Below, a yawning pit crackled and crumbled. It was more like a fissure or chasm in the heart of Englemoor. Above this dangled he from the hammer’s grip. The pit teemed and tangled with blackish rubbery things. They were like a giant squid, but eel-like in shape individually, and their mass sickened the mind with the darkness of that hideous plane from which they must have ebbed.

  At the hammer’s other end was a form of legend. It was The Headsman. She was three hands taller than Whitefeather, broad as a beer wagon at the shoulders, and strung with crushing thews like steel cables. Her muscled form was covered with remnants of armor, cloth scraps, and frog belts in various tangles. A half-dozen weapons were lashed and looped at her waist, and she sported only one boot.

  With one mighty fist she held the hammer fast, saving Whitefeather’s life for a brief second. With the other she held a snaking purple whip at bay. Its barbed suckers smacked and strained to reach her throat. Her chest stretched impossibly between the two efforts, and her hood was peeled back enough to show white, bare teeth in a silent hellscream of sheer will.

  Facing this choice, atop the sagging roof of the Wrong Way Tavern, she again found that unexpected valor of her folk. In one action, she let the tentacle snap ‘round her neck like a cobra. It burned, she choked, and brought the other hand to the hammer. Like a great mythic athlete of Aphos, she swung the hammer, soldier in tow, to one side. Whitefeather took her cue and released at the zenith of the swing, tumbling through mid-air toward solid ground.

  But it was for naught. As he wheeled through the air with a final hope, one massive arm of slime-oiled death snapped out from the pit below, coiled around him with a crushing wet slap, and yanked him brutally into the black. Only the wrenching squeals of crushing armor accompanied his doom.

  “Damnit!” Elisa spat. The eel at her neck she tore away and crushed, then surveyed the scene. The fight had not gone well. Not well at all.

  The guard of Englemoor had fought bravely enough in the first few days, and when the maniacs of the asylum catacombs took up arms and turned their wild howls toward the enemy, the tide had briefly turned. But these abominations spewed from some unseen depth below the city, and only multiplied when defeated.

  Elisa and a company of the living had backed themselves into Seras’ Cathedral at the south edge of town. The stone walls and foundation proved impermeable to the tentacle-things, who picked the city clean by night and mostly absconded to the tunnels by day.

  But the light of Seras could be their shield for only so long. They had no provisions, and a half-dozen of Elisa’s improvised militia were bleeding out. So, they made for the Wrong Way Tavern, stealthy as shadows.

  That was three days past, and in perfect silence they had eluded the creatures for that time… But to what end? Elisa constantly questioned why they were fighting the endless enemy; Why not skulk out of the city by day?

  Some foolish honor pecked at her, though, and at her companions. Half mad with blood and days of fighting, watching townsfolk torn apart, buildings swallowed, or bleary-eyed madness taking the weak-willed into the pit on their own feet, the survivors of Englemoor were weary indeed. Still they had to resist these fell things. They had to.

  So, when Akram’s company came slinking into town that afternoon amid the smoke and ruin, Elisa’s stealth was betrayed, and the things sniffed them out again. They erupted from the earth like a wave in a fumarole, shattering pine and tile alike. Akram’s company braced and gasped, having no idea what in the hells was happening.

  Elisa had saved them, rallied them, and returned to her safe haven at the Wrong Way, but for naught. The eels of death filled every cavity, and had mutilated half the King’s elite before any good fighting ground could be gained.

  That is when Whitefeather, a heroic, slender youth of Kathic blood but raised in Ramthas’ shadow, was lashed by the whips and pulled to his grave. The tavern was crumbling, and Anna and Mars fought the creatures back at the cellar rubble while Akram, Elisa and the others made a stand at the shattered opening that was once the second floor.

  “We must be rid of this place!” Akram bellowed, smashing a purple tangle with an iron boot. “We’ll not last another minute!”

  “Headsman!” a robe-clad militiaman called. He was in random pieces of armor and slung with swords on both hips. “Look!” He pointed straight down.

  Elisa looked as the gaping pit below them was suddenly emptied. The seething beasts withdrew from that fissure impossibly fast, and two more chasms cracked open at either side of the building.

  “It means to crush us!” Anna cried out, taking refuge behind Mars, and bumping into the tangle of elite soldiers and ragtag lunatics.

  Elisa’s gaze met Akram’s. It was an odd moment, for she was four heads taller than he at least. They both had that shine in their eyes, though: the gleam of the mighty. There was silent understanding in that split second. Both heroes breathed in, nodded their heads inexplicably at each other, and braced on the crumbling gable. The only escape lay straight down.

  “If we mean to fight,” Akram laughed, hands on hips, “then let’s pierce the thing in the heart!” He waved the others to follow, looped his hammer at his waist, for the legendary Angrid had not yet been found, and leapt like a frog into mid-air. Down into the opening he flapped and vanished in the dim.

  “Back into the bloody tunnels, lads!” Elisa yelled, and every hope of a quick victory, every intent of walking away from this accursed town and returning to the hills faded. She leapt, and they all followed. Anna went last, hacking a purplish worm-grabber from her boot with a hatchet at the last moment.

  Just as the company vanished, the things gathered their force on both sides of the building, and clasped together in a slimy crash of splinters and shattered stone. The entire structure exploded into dust, and the barb-lined suckers probed at the ruin for signs of prey, but they had gone.

  So, Englemoor fell silent again, and those cobbled paves were not trod by mortal men for three generations after that day.

  18

  Alfheim had not always been a den of formless monsters and evil wizards. In fact, the more it became a wild and unbelievable place, the less its stories meant for generations to come. There is much in the small and commonplace that the wondrous and epic can never capture. Alas, the wondrous came to Alfheim, but as watchers of those ages from the distance of time, we must remember to seek out the minute and mundane things to truly know what our predecessors sacrificed for us.

  In its earliest days, fresh from the baffling crucible of the Primordius, this land was a great sprawling wilderness teeming with bears, wolves, mice and birds. There were no men, or dwarves, or sorcerers or treacherous elves. There were no great works of architecture, or strange vine-choked temples in the damp.

  But like all things, the world was changed by time. The nobler gods, great towering avatars of truth and forever, were envied and despised by the lesser. Behind all this the blasphemous gods coiled and screamed between the stars. Mortals came into the world as the eons yawned, and through them countless powers rose and fell
and rose again.

  The pure forms of nature, and time, and the ineffable echoes of life itself became altered. The races, as they are called, became more diverse. New kinds of beasts and even abominations tasted the crisp air of the old woods. The multiplication of all things obscured to most mortals the very existence of the gods, and so, they grew in their rage and lust unchecked.

  But the rise of evil made mighty the forces of good, as iron sharpens iron, and they achieved much. So poetry, and valor, and perseverance entered the cosmos.

  Millennia later, countless kingdoms had countless stories, and for every wrath unquenched a score more quests met doom or triumph. Dwarves and men endured with their hearts most like those noble beasts of yore, but the more magical souls of elvenkind saw deeper into the dimensions of the universe, and there found darker corruptions and terrible knowledge.

  In time, some of their number seethed with resent and age-old feud. Too long had they played the distant scholars and high-chinned watchers. Too long had they abstained from too many of life’s little things.

  It was these little things that created the Red Captain’s hate.

  He was a boy, long ago, as happy and care free as any. Son was he to Lenn Furia, Duchess of the Kathic state of Iridess. That part of Kath is wooded with palms and wide fern groves. Theirs was a musical, sunlit place.

  He was taught the sword, and the pen. Friends had he on both elbows, and in the open-air courts of Iridess he ran and played war and swam in the crystal waters of the River Isles. But fate had its eye upon him, and death had stayed silent too long.

  It is a matter for scholars exactly how the embalmed dead of the Kathic mages regained their life, but it was common enough that their tombs were barred, locked, and trapped. The dead were revered, even worshipped, but never welcome. For when reanimated they carried a terrible rage and lust for blood that could not be quenched by anything but fiery annihilation.