Pikel, with apparently no understanding their dire predicament, seemed to tune out of the conversation. Down on his knees, he crawled along the worked wall, butting his forehead against any promising stones.
“What is he doing?” Shayleigh demanded, obviously dismayed by the dwarf’s apparently ridiculous actions.
Even as she spoke, Pikel pressed his forehead back against one of the rocks. He turned to Ivan, smiling from ear to ear, and squeaked.
“There’s the way!” Ivan bellowed, falling to his knees beside his brother, both of them digging with their fingers at the edges of the cut stone.
“They always put secret tunnels beside the corridor,” Ivan explained to Shayleigh’s doubting expression. “Drains the water in case of a flood.”
Shayleigh’s keen ears caught the sounds of footsteps approaching from both directions.
“Hurry,” she implored the dwarves.
She ran to the wall and grabbed a torch then rushed back around the corner, as far down as she could go. Then she reversed direction and ran back, dipping the torch in every font she passed, and pulling out all the other torches. The corridor behind her was soon filled with a noxious gray cloud, leaving the passage in smoky darkness. Through it, Shayleigh could see the red dots of goblin eyes.
“Stubborn,” she muttered, and she ran around the corner, down the hallway the other way, repeating the procedure.
By the time she got back to the dwarves, enemies were closing from both directions. A goblin peeked around the corner, but fell back with an arrow in its eye.
“Hurry!” Shayleigh whispered, coughing as the smoke descended over her.
“Hurry, yerself,” Ivan growled back. He pulled the elf maiden down to the floor and practically stuffed her through the opening, dropping her down a muddy, descending chute. Pikel came in behind, chuckling and placing both his club and Ivan’s axe in the slope behind him.
“What is he doing now?” Shayleigh asked.
But Pikel only put a stubby finger over his lips and shushed her.
Ivan rushed across and put his back to the corner, closing his eyes so that the glow of his eyes wouldn’t give him away. Goblins shuffled around behind him, and the enemy host came moving down from the other direction.
“More than we thinks!” Ivan roared in the goblins’ language, a squeaking and croaking tongue. Those goblins beside the dwarf, peering ahead through the confusing veil, took up their weapons.
“Charges them! Killses them!” Ivan bellowed, and the call was repeated by many goblins as the horde rushed the approaching force.
In a confusing instant, the two groups were together, hacking away, each thinking the other to be the intruders that had come to Castle Trinity.
Ivan calmly walked over to stand in front of the secret tunnel. Pikel reached out to him, but Ivan hesitated, thoroughly enjoying the battle. Finally, Pikel’s patience evaporated, and he reached out with both hands, grabbed Ivan by the ankles, and jerked him from his feet, dragging him into the tunnel.
Pikel clambered over his facedown brother, out of the tunnel far enough to retrieve the block and tug it somewhat back in place. Then Pikel hesitated, enthralled by the raging action, chuckling as one severed goblin head came bouncing by. Never one to miss an opportunity for payback, Ivan grabbed Pikel by the ankles and yanked him through the mud.
Soon after, the three friends found a way out of the chute, into another stone-worked corridor some distance from the fighting. Ivan and Pikel led the way, their muddy faces set in a determined grimace.
Shayleigh shook her head in disbelief many times over the next few moments as the dwarves rambled through the complex, overturning everything in their path, including a few startled goblins. Shayleigh didn’t tell them to be quiet, though. She knew that their escape had been a temporary reprieve, that no matter how stealthily they might travel, sooner or later they would meet an organized defense.
The elf smiled then, glad that she fought beside the rugged Bouldershoulders. She’d seen the brothers like that before, in the Battle of Shilmista. Let the enemy come on, she decided. Let them face the battle-lust of the hearty dwarves!
Ivan and Pikel did slow down and become somewhat quieter when they neared a staircase, rising up out of sight just beyond a four-way intersection of wide corridors: a perfect place for an ambush. They heard singing coming from the stairs, a booming, giant’s voice. The corridor behind them and the two to the sides seemed empty, so they crept across.
The stairs went up, which was the way they all figured they had to go, but they could see the boots of a giant not so far up the stairs. The huge monster continued its off-key singing, apparently unaware of the intruders that had come to Castle Trinity.
“Get ye up fast,” was the only explanation Ivan offered to Shayleigh, and with a wink to his brother, the two dwarves set off, using the giant’s booming voice to cover their heavy steps on the wooden stairs.
Shayleigh glanced around nervously, thinking it a bad situation. She heard the dwarves roar out in glee, though, heard the smacks as Ivan’s axe and Pikel’s club connected on the giant’s legs. Then the whole ground shook as the behemoth tumbled down the stairs.
Shayleigh considered putting an arrow into the tumbling thing, but heard the three corridors behind her fast filling with enemy soldiers. Instead, she turned around and launched the arrow into the thickening mass behind her, not waiting to see if she’d scored a hit.
The giant, though very much alive and very much enraged, lay on its back, its head toward Shayleigh and its feet still far up the staircase. It struggled to right itself, but its bulk filled the not-too-wide stairs, and in that awkward position, with both legs injured, it floundered miserably.
Shayleigh drew out her short sword and leaped ahead, skipping off the monster’s face, nearly tripping on its huge nose. The giant grabbed at her with its hands, but she dodged them and stuck one when it got too near. The giant lifted a huge leg and curled it in at the knee, forming a barrier of flesh, but Shayleigh drove her sword deeply into the thick thigh and the barrier flew away. As she cleared the huge torso, the elf saw Pikel coming the other way, rushing under one upraised leg.
Shayleigh called out, certain Pikel would be crushed, but the dwarf was already wedged tightly between the stairs and the giant’s huge buttocks.
A swarm of enemies came to the bottom of the stairs, some clambering to get atop the giant, others drawing out bows and taking a bead on Shayleigh and on Ivan as the yellow-bearded dwarf rushed down to grab the elf maiden.
Pikel’s pet snake bit the giant on the fleshy backside, and the monster’s predictable hop gave the dwarf all the momentum he needed. Bracing his shoulder, the powerful little dwarf heaved and groaned, turning the behemoth up onto its shoulders, lifting a wall of flesh between his friends and his enemies. The giant grunted several times as it intercepted arrows. Then, with Pikel’s stubby legs driving relentlessly, it went right over, wedging tightly into the low, narrow entrance to the stairway.
Pikel gave his snake a pat on the head and tucked it back into his sleeve then rushed to join his friends, taking his club back from Ivan as he hopped past.
Shayleigh stood shaking her head once more.
“Stronger than ye thought, ain’t he?” Ivan asked, tugging her along.
They met no foes at the top of the stairs, and Ivan and Pikel lined up side by side and resumed their battle charge. Shayleigh heard no sounds around them other than the echoes of dwarven sandals and boots, and while that fact gave her some comfort, she realized that their blind rush through the complex would likely get them nowhere.
Finally Shayleigh was able to stop the brothers’ wild run, reminding them that they had to sort out the maze of tunnels and try to find Cadderly and Danica.
When the dwarves had quieted, they did hear some noise, a general murmur, down a corridor to the left. Shayleigh was about to whisper that she should go ahead and stealthily check out the place, but her words were buried under Pikel’s heart
y, “Oo oi!” and the resounding clamor of a renewed charge.
EIGHTEEN
THE FIFTH CORNER
There,” the prisoner said to Cadderly and Danica, pointing across a last intersection to an unremarkable door. “That’s the entrance to the wizard’s chambers.”
Cadderly.
The call came again in the young priest’s mind, from somewhere not so far away. Cadderly closed his eyes and concentrated. He couldn’t help but feel that the call came from somewhere beyond that door. When he opened his eyes once more, he found Danica eyeing him curiously.
“He isn’t lying,” Cadderly said to her.
The prisoner seemed to relax at that.
“Then why aren’t there any guards?” Danica asked, more to the prisoner than to Cadderly. The man had no answer.
“He’s a wizard,” Cadderly reminded them both. “And a powerful wizard by all we’ve heard. There may indeed be a guardian or some protective magic we can’t yet see.”
Danica pushed the prisoner forward. “You shall lead,” she said.
Cadderly moved up beside the man, catching his arm to hold him back, and looked across him to regard Danica. “We go together,” he asked as much as stated.
Danica looked at the door then at Cadderly and the other man. She surely understood her lover’s sympathy and protectiveness for the helpless prisoner, and knew Cadderly would never use the prisoner as fodder.
“He and I lead,” Danica decided, pulling the man from Cadderly’s grasp. “You follow.”
The monk soft-stepped up to the intersection, bent low and peered both ways. She turned back to Cadderly and offered a shrug then motioned for the prisoner to keep pace and skittered across to the door—almost.
A creature seemed to unfold from the air itself, a black line that quickly expanded left and right, first two dimensional, then three. Five serpentine heads waved in front of the startled companions.
A hydra.
Danica skidded to a stop and hurled herself to the left, rolling from the lunging reach of three of the heads.
The prisoner, not as quick as the monk, managed only a single step before monstrous jaws clamped down across his waist. He screamed and batted futilely at the scaly head as the needle-sharp teeth ripped at him. A second maw descended over the man’s unprotected head, stifling his scream. Both heads working in unison, the hydra tore the man in half.
Cadderly nearly swooned at the sight. He got his loaded crossbow up in front of him, shifting it this way and that, trying to follow the almost hypnotic motion of the weaving heads.
Where to fire?
He shot for the center of the great body, and the hydra roared in rage as the dart hit and exploded. Two heads still snapped at the dodging Danica, two continued their feast on the slaughtered man, and the fifth shot forward, far short of Cadderly, but compelling the hydra’s bulky body into a short rush at the young priest.
Danica started for Cadderly, but reversed direction abruptly as the hydra shuffled by, and chose instead to work her way behind the beast. She cried out for Cadderly to run, though she couldn’t see him around the bulk of the monster.
The lead head came for the young priest, straight as an arrow, testing his nerve as he struggled to get his weapon readied a second time. The jaws were barely two feet away when Cadderly’s arm at last came up, and he fired. The quarrel skipped off six-inch fangs, diving into the monster’s mouth and blasting in a muffled explosion.
The head and neck dropped in a line on the floor, slowing the creature’s charge.
The two heads that had been after Danica, and the one finally finished with the dead prisoner, came swooping in, though, and the young priest wisely fell back, desperately bringing up his walking stick to fend off the nearest attack.
He knew he had to get far enough away to reload the hand crossbow and fall into the song of Deneir and pull something, anything, from the divine text. But with the maze of darting heads, the creature pacing his every retreat, Cadderly couldn’t begin to hear the song, had to concentrate simply on whipping his walking stick back and forth in front of him. He did connect once, luckily, the enchanted ram’s head knocking a tooth from the closest set of jaws. That head went up to issue a roar, and Cadderly, purely on instinct, rushed under it, using the serpentine neck as a shield against the other two pursuing heads.
The fourth head, the other one to the right, spit aside the dead man’s torso and would have had the young priest then, except that Danica came around from behind and snapped a kick under its jaw.
The monster’s mouth smacked shut, and its forked tongue fell twitching to the floor.
Cadderly continued toward the door, concentrating on readying his hand crossbow. Danica came, too, by his side, looking back as the hydra lumbered around, dragging its one dead head along the floor as it turned.
“Get in!” she called, but Cadderly, for all his desperation, kept his wits enough to keep clear of the door. It was warded, he knew, sensing the magic upon it. Shoulder to shoulder with Danica, he brought his crossbow up again as if to shoot at the hydra. But then he turned, firing instead at the lock on the door, blowing a wide hole in the wood.
Danica hit Cadderly on the shoulder, throwing him aside. He came up against the wall, dazed, to see his love engulfed by four eagerly snapping hydra heads.
She rushed straight for the beast, ran inside its initial bites, twisting and turning, swatting blindly at anything that came near. A head turned enough to get at her, and she grabbed it by the horn, twisting with a jerk that angled the jaws so they couldn’t wrap around her, so that the snout butted her in the ribs. Danica’s other hand shot out the other way, her stiffened fingers driving through the eye of still another snapping head.
All the hydra’s heads were turned completely around, facing its bulky torso. Danica grabbed the half-blinded head, threw her back against the thick neck, then dodged away as another head rushed in, its wide-opened mouth biting hard into its own companion’s neck Before the hydra even realized its error, the other head was forever stilled.
Danica was still pinned in that hellish spot, but a quarrel skipped off the side of one turned neck—off the side of one to solidly strike a second. The first head that had been struck wheeled around to view the newest attacker, while the force of the ensuing explosion drove the second head aside, opening a hole for Danica to rush out.
“The door is warded!” Cadderly cried at Danica as she darted straight for the loose-hanging portal.
It was a moot point—Danica had no intention of going through. She stopped, and sensing a set of jaws rushing at her back, leaped up high, catching the top of the jamb and pulling herself straight up. The hydra’s head burst through the door.
Lightning flashed several times, and fire roared out from every side of the magically trapped doorjamb.
Only two heads remaining, the blasted hydra backed away. Serpentine necks crossed, and reptilian eyes regarded the two companions with sudden respect.
Cadderly tried to line one up for a shot, but he hesitated, not wanting to risk a miss.
“Damn,” he hissed, frustrated, after a long and unproductive moment had slipped past.
He fired the bolt into the hydra’s bulk, apparently doing no real damage, but driving it back another step. The hydra’s living heads roared in unison. It hopped to the side, three dead necks bouncing along.
“Shoot for my back,” Danica instructed. Before Cadderly could ask her what she was talking about, she rushed forward and charged right between the swaying heads, drawing them in to her. “Now!” she ordered.
Cadderly had to trust her. His crossbow clicked, and Danica dropped suddenly to her back, the quarrel crossing above her and splattering a very surprised serpentine face.
That wounded head did not die, though, and Danica, on her back, had two sets of snapping jaws above her.
“No!” Cadderly cried out. He charged ahead, both hands tight on his ram’s-head walking stick.
Danica kicked up, one foot
then the other, keeping the heads at bay. Cadderly saw that the head he’d shot appeared fully blind, and he leaped right across Danica’s prone form, smashing that head with a two-handed overhead chop.
The blinded head recoiled, and Cadderly pursued, smacking it repeatedly.
The second head rushed in at Cadderly’s back, but Danica threw her legs up then down, snapping her back in a quick arch and hurling herself to her feet. A single stride brought her alongside the chasing head and she dipped low, drawing a dagger from her boot, then shot back up, driving the knife up to its silver dragon-sculpted hilt into the bottom jaw.
Cadderly’s arms pumped relentlessly, beating the already disfigured head into a bloody pulp.
The remaining head soared up high, but Danica locked her arm over the neck and went along for the ride, holding fast to her stuck dagger. She curled up around the neck, bringing her boot to her free hand and managing to extract her second dagger.
Then she held on, stubbornly, as the monster bucked and whipped. When its frenzy finally abated, Danica plunged her second knife into its eye, pulled it back, and drove it home a second time.
Again came the monstrous frenzy. Cadderly, trying to get to Danica, got clipped on one rushing pass and was hurled ten feet down the corridor.
But Danica held on, kept both her daggers buried, working them back and forth, turning their handles around in her palms. She fell hard to her back, smacking against the stone, the monstrous neck dropping over her.
Stunned, the monk couldn’t find her breath, couldn’t focus her gaze, and seemed hardly conscious of her grip on her knives. Her instincts must have screamed out at her to react, to wriggle away, that she was vulnerable, that the hydra head could easily shake free and snap her in half.
But the hydra was no longer moving, and a moment later, Cadderly stood above her, pulling her arms free, shifting the bulky neck off of her.
Shayleigh heard a murmuring up ahead, the drone of many muffled voices. She started to call out a warning to the Bouldershoulder brothers, but the dwarves had apparently heard the sound as well, for they lowered their heads and picked up the pace, Pikel’s sandals slapping and Ivan’s boots thumping.