The Ancient

  “They will likely wish to speak more with Bransen then,” said Cormack, “as he has seen the passes and the glacial structures.” He was about to add that he would help Milkeila in translating the exchange, but the woman just shook her head.

  “They have seen them,” she explained. “Both the way to Badden and his defenses. If we were to be a part of their execution, they would have summoned us as they debarked their boats.”

  “What’s that to mean?” Mcwigik demanded. “Got all me boys together just to be a part of it.”

  Milkeila calmed him with an upraised hand, and cautiously made her way along the beach to speak with Toniquay.

  “The powries wish to help,” she said to her superior. “They have brought the whole of their force to join in our march.”

  “Our march?” Toniquay quipped, his expression sour. “You have plotted to leave us, and conspired of late to expedite your journey. Because you brought us this information, Shaman Teydru has seen fit to grant you your wish without prejudice or punishment. You have paid your worth to us and are free to go.”

  While those words might have once sounded as welcome to the young woman, in this time and place they hit her as mightily as a bolt of lightning. She had known it was coming, indeed, but still, to hear the declaration spoken so clearly and directly unnerved the poor young woman. The black wings of panic fluttered up all around her, threatening to drown her sensibilities in their confused jumble of flapping. She felt alone, suddenly. Homeless and without family, stranded on the beach of a hostile world, all security stolen.

  She looked over to her tribesmen, trying to sort through the jumble to spot Androosis, or some other friend who had expressed similar desires of leaving Mithranidoon.

  “Your young friends will not be joining you,” said Toniquay, as if he had read her mind (and indeed, that was not beyond his power). “They have offered no compensation for the freedom they desire—not even Androosis, though there was debate about whether or not he, too, should be given free leave.”

  Milkeila stood there for a long while, trying to find her breath.

  “I would have thought this news exciting and welcome to you,” Toniquay teased, for of course he had anticipated exactly this.

  Milkeila regained her composure, albeit with great difficulty. “Of course,” she said, for what choice did she have? A decision so rendered by the shaman council was not an invitation to debate.

  “The powries have come in whole to join in your battle with Ancient Badden,” she restated. “They are fierce allies and ferocious enemies, as you are well aware. They would know their place in this, among a force so many times their size.”

  “How generous of them,” Toniquay remarked, contempt thickening his voice. “Better than the cowardly monks, at least, who debark far to the south and run down the road of the same direction. They stand strong only behind thick walls of stone, it would seem.”

  “Their place?” Milkeila pressed, knowing well that Toniquay could launch into a diatribe of many minutes, and one that left him far from her original question, if he was not quickly reined.

  “They have no place among us,” Toniquay answered bluntly. “If they wish a place in the battle, then it is to the side, and out of our way.”

  Milkeila started to argue, but Toniquay was hearing none of it. “We do not train beside powries, nor are we to expect our warriors to trust any of them. The same is true of the monk and the stranger.”

  “And of Milkeila?”

  “You trained beside us once.”

  “But the trust?”

  Toniquay paused and let the question slide away before reiterating, “Their place is not among us. They, you, all of you, would do well to stay far to the side of our march.”

  Milkeila couldn’t help it as her misty eyes were drawn out to the lake, toward Yossunfier, which had once been her home.

  Once and always and nevermore.

  They were not properly outfitted to survive the climate off of Mithranidoon, even now before the onset of winter, so the Alpinadorans, led by their shamans, who had used the views of eagles and hawks and crows to spy out and map the passes, wasted no time in their march. Long and swift strides carried their formations up the mountain passes beside the glacier; shamans and other leaders shouted encouragement and bolstered the warriors with magic and herb-treated waters to hold their spirit and their strength. There would be no camp, no respite. Their swift pace would end when they met the enemy.

  Behind them came the powries, and among them Bransen and his two now-homeless companions, still trying to figure out where they would fit into this upcoming battle.

  Before they had even reached the glacier, sounds of fighting erupted far ahead, at the front of the Alpinadoran line. The ranks tightened, powries eagerly adjusting their berets. But those ranks quickly loosened up again, and when the trailing group crossed the battlefield they discovered that the army had happened upon, and had summarily overrun, an encampment of no more than a dozen trolls.

  “Here’s for hoping that one or more got away to warn their friends and set them all about us,” Mcwigik grumbled. “Sure to be the only way we’re to find any fightin’ this day!”

  “Aye, the tall ones’ll run all the way through Badden’s door,” Bikelbrin, at Mcwigik’s side, lamented.

  Bransen glanced at Milkeila and Cormack, the three of them understanding that they were the only ones among this group who hoped the prediction would prove true.

  And Bransen, who had been at Badden’s camp, who had seen the hundreds of trolls and the giants there, knew it to be an unrealistic hope, and one that would soon enough be destroyed.

  They ran over another group of trolls soon after. A volley of Alpinadoran spears flew out to the east soon after that, taking down a pair of scouts.

  The barbarian horde didn’t even slow to retrieve the missiles.

  Good fortune gave Bransen and his companions a fine vantage point as the real battle commenced. The path wound down and around a huge outcropping before spilling onto the glacier, and the powrie contingent, Bransen’s trio among them, was up high and still back of the stone when the leading Alpindorans swept onto the ice like a breaking wave, washing over those nearest trolls before smashing into a more coordinated defensive formation. Spears crisscrossed in midair, with the trolls taking the brunt of it, as their spears were too small and light to get through the Alpinadoran wicker and leather shields.

  The Alpinadoran warriors poured over the front troll ranks, their towering line of broad-shouldered men and women, most well over six feet in height, dwarfing the diminutive, light-featured trolls.

  But the trolls did not break and flee, and those in the back scrambled all over each other trying to get to the front ranks and into the fight. Like a horde of rats, they leaped and bit and scratched and kicked, flailing so wildly that they were as likely to strike their own as they were to hit their enemies.

  More barbarians swept onto the glacier, lengthening the line and filling in the holes as some of their kin fell away.

  In the back, watching from on high, Milkeila chewed her bottom lip, her knuckles whitening about the handle of the stone axe she carried.

  “They are winning,” Cormack pointed out to her, and draped an arm across her sturdy shoulder.

  “Yach, but we’re not to even get to the ice afore the fight’s done,” Mcwigik complained.

  “Aye, and all that fine spilled blood’ll seep into the cracks by then,” added Pergwick, he and the young Ruggirs hopping over to join Mcwigik and Bikelbrin and the humans. “Or mixed with the scraped and melted ice to be even thinner!”

  “Come on, ye bleating sheep,” another dwarf called, and as they turned to regard the shouter, he waved them his way. Apparently they weren’t the only ones concerned that the fight would end before their arrival, for before that yelling dwarf, a line of powries was going over the ledge and out of sight, picking their way, the group learned when they got to the spot, down a steep but climbable descent that
would get them out onto the glacier just to the south of the Alpinadoran position.

  Glancing over the ledge and following the line of powries climbing down (with amazing deftness, he thought, given their short limbs), Bransen could pick out the point of demarcation. Few trolls stood in that area of the glacier, focused far more heavily to the north and the barbarians.

  For a brief moment, Bransen’s eyes flashed wickedly, wondering if the enemy had left open a flank they might exploit.

  But as the leading powrie dropped down the last few feet to land upon the ice, Bransen’s excitement turned to dread.

  A rain of heavy, large stones complemented the dwarf’s arrival. The northern, left flank, far from open, had been charged to the giants, half a dozen of the behemoths, standing tall now behind a wall of ice blocks that had obscured their position. With their light, bluish skin, white hair, and wrappings of white fur, they blended well with their shiny and eye-stinging environment, but that camouflage did nothing to diminish their overwhelming aura of strength now that they had been spotted.

  Bransen started to call the dwarves back up, but stopped, stunned, as they seemed more excited and eager to get down than they had before the giants had risen up.

  “Giants!” Bransen pleaded with those dwarves around him, a call seconded by Cormack.

  “Bah, them ain’t giants,” Mcwigik said with a howl.

  “Not like the giants we got on the Julianthes,” Bikelbrin added, using the powrie name for the Weathered Isles, their Mirianic Ocean homeland.

  “Not half,” Mcwigik agreed, “but I’m betting their blood runs thick!”

  That was all the others had to hear, and Pergwick and Ruggirs nearly tumbled from the ledge as they fought and scrambled over each other to get to the descent. After the dwarfish tumble rolled away, the three humans stepped up to the ledge.

  “You do not seem convinced of your course,” Cormack remarked to Bransen, and the Highwayman smiled at his own inability to keep his emotions from his face.

  “I came here to buy freedom for myself and my family,” he replied honestly. “Badden’s head for a journey south.”

  “We’ll make sure that you get the foul one’s head, then,” Milkeila assured him.

  Bransen snickered. “All who came north with me are lost. Either dead or trapped in that castle. Dame Gwydre would not refuse me my reward even should I return now, before the task is complete.”

  “But Badden must be stopped,” Cormack said.

  Bransen looked at him skeptically.

  “Do you deny his evilness?” said Cormack.

  “Not his, not that of your Church. Not of the lairds—not one of them,” said Bransen.

  Cormack stiffened at that poignant reminder of the lack of familiarity between them.

  “Then you agree that he, Badden, is worth killing,” said Milkeila, her voice taking on a distinctively sharper edge.

  Bransen looked at her carefully, his expression measured, and caught somewhere between amusement and condescension. “That is not the question. The question is: Is Badden worth dying over?”

  Below them, the powries encountered a group of trolls and the fight was on. “He is,” said Cormack, and he started over the ledge, moving swiftly down the steep decline. Milkeila shot a disappointed look Bransen’s way and followed.

  Bransen passed them easily, using his Jhesta Tu training and his marvelous control of his body to run down the cliff.

  TWENTY-NINE

  Despoilment, Inevitability, and Questionable Triumph

  By the time Bransen got down to the ice shelf, most of the trolls were either down or scattering and more than half of the powrie contingent was already in a full sprint to the edge of the chasm just south of their position. Both their courage and commitment stunned Bransen, for not only were they charging headlong into the waiting giants, but they were putting themselves into a position where they would be afforded one less avenue of retreat, where, if the battle went badly, they would find no escape.

  It wasn’t stupidity, or ignorance of battle techniques, that launched them to the chasm, Bransen knew. They weren’t going to retreat. They were either taking the fight right to Badden’s castle across the way, or they were going to die trying.

  His surprise and confusion over their level of commitment nearly cost Bransen his life, as a troll spear flew in for his side. At the last moment, and with the prompting of a cry from Milkeila, the Highwayman half turned and snapped a backhand against the spear, just below its stone head. The force of the blow flipped the light spear into a near-right-angled turn, and the nimble Bransen flipped his hand and snatched it from the air, his legs moving perfectly to catch up to his shifting shoulders.

  He sent the missile back out at the nearest troll, though he didn’t know if that was the missile-thrower or not. The creature flailed wildly and tried to fall away, and indeed did fall away, though not as it had intended, embedded as it was on the end of the spear.

  Bransen thought to yank that spear back out of the squirming troll as he ran past. But he shook his head, confident that his hands and feet would prove to be all the weaponry he needed at that time. He skied into a pair of trolls, spinning a circle-kick as he came in. That one foot turned both their spears aside, and as he came around fully, Bransen quick-stepped forward, snapping off quick left and right jabs into the faces of the respective trolls. He pressed forward, staying inside the optimum reach of their weapons. He spun to face the one on his left and drove his elbow back behind him to further smash the face of the other.

  A fast left-right-left combination knocked the troll facing him back and to the ground; then Bransen similarly dropped, turning sidelong and coiling his legs as he did. The troll behind him, now below his prostrated form, had just begun to recover from the elbow to the face when Bransen swept his lower, left leg across, hooking the troll behind the ankle and sliding its foot forward, while Bransen’s right leg straight-kicked for that same knee.

  Legs weren’t supposed to bend like that, as the troll’s howl of agony proved.

  Bransen thrust his left arm down below him, driving his upper torso up from the ice. He tucked his legs again and spun with the momentum, right into a standing, turning position that allowed him to circle-kick the descending troll right in the face.

  Its head snapped over backward with such force that its neck bones shattered.

  A roar from behind turned Bransen around just in time to see a giant topple over, grasping both its knees. The powries wasted no time, swarming over the behemoth with glee, stabbing it and slashing it and wiping their berets across the wounds.

  Bransen’s jaw dropped open in disbelief as he lifted his gaze to view the fight beyond the fallen giant, to where a group of powries was rushing to and fro and back again, in and around the legs of a futilely swatting giant who never got close to hitting any of them.

  Oh, but they were hitting the giant! Great, reverberating smacks, and always about the knee. They looked like wild lumberjacks chasing animated trees. The giant danced and tried to keep ahead of them, but they’d only reverse direction, dart between its legs, and whomp it yet again. They howled with excitement and sheer enjoyment, and that only infuriated the beast more, it seemed, and its swings became more frantic, and more futile. Other powries joined in the dance, chopping, always chopping, at the giant’s legs. Down it went, to be swarmed and finished.

  Bransen remembered his feelings upon first seeing the giants. How puny and helpless he had thought himself. But the powries had long ago found the answer to the imposing, seemingly impregnable behemoths. One after another, the giants fell. And the powries rolled along, berets glowing in the afternoon sun.

  Cormack and Milkeila collected the stunned Bransen as they rushed to catch up. “We’ll be at the ice castle within the hour!” Cormack predicted.

  Accurately, Bransen knew.

  Toniquay sang great songs of rousing tenor, heroic deeds, captured and amplified and now enhanced magically to provide more than a morale
boost, but an actual physical boost to the listener. And the warriors of Alpinador, the brave men and women of the many tribes that inhabited Mithranidoon, lived up to their heroic heritage. With coordination and fury, their line drove deep into troll ranks; whenever one group broke through and spearheaded out in front, those to either flank appropriately stretched behind them, so that instead of having any group get caught out alone and surrounded, the length of the barbarian line surged forward in a series of small wedge formations. One-against-one, there was no contest to be found. The larger, stronger, better-armed Alpinadorans stabbed ahead with impunity, skewering troll after troll.

  And yet, Toniquay and the other leaders observed, their progress proved painfully slow. Waves of trolls came against them. Mobs of the monsters rushed in, leading with a barrage of flying spears that set the barbarians back on their heels and forced them to pause and cover with their wicker and leather shields.

  Toniquay looked to the distant ice castle, their goal, and then to the west, toward the dipping sun. They would not get to the castle in daylight, he surmised to his dismay, and the night would not be kind.

  A cheer in the southern end of the Alpinadoran line turned Toniquay that way, and when he noted the fierce fighting there, he did not at first understand. As he focused, though, he heard the bolstering cry “Another giant is down!”

  He swept his gaze out farther to the south, to the powries, the fallen monk, the stranger, and Milkeila. The shaman’s tight old face crinkled with confusion and consternation; were these to be the saviors of Mithranidoon?

  All he had for weapons were his hands and feet, and Bransen really didn’t see how either would do any damage to the giant battling the powries before him. But he had to try.

  A dwarf rolled right around the behemoth’s treelike leg, ending with a solid, two-handed wallop of his heavy club against the front of the giant’s knee. As the behemoth lurched and howled, Bransen closed the last dozen running strides and leaped high. Good luck was with him, for even as he lifted, the dwarf, having gone around to the back of the giant’s leg, drove in a dagger, then smacked it hard with his club. The giant lurched backward this time, distracted and overbalancing just as Bransen crashed in and began launching a series of heavy punches. Over went the giant, crashing down to its back on the ice, and Bransen hopped up to a crouch, sprang into a forward somersault, and double-stomped his heels into the giant’s eyes.