Cadderly frowned at the black cover of the closed tome as though it were a demonic thing. But it was not, he reminded himself, and before his fears could argue back, he opened the book once more, from the beginning, and again began his frantic scan.
Melancholy assaulted him, and the doors blocking revelations swung wide, their truths finding a place in the receptacle of young Cadderly’s mind.
Gradually the young scholar’s eyes drooped from sheer exhaustion, but still the song played on, the music of the heavenly spheres, of sunrise and sunset and all the details that played eternally in between.
It played on and on, a song without end, and Cadderly felt himself falling toward it, becoming no more than a passing note among an infinite number of passing notes.
On and on …
“Cadderly?”
The call came from far away, as if from another world. Cadderly felt a hand grasp his shoulder, tangible and chill, and felt himself turned gently around. He opened a sleepy eye and saw young Brennan’s curly black mop and beaming face.
“Are you all right?”
Cadderly managed a weak nod and rubbed his bleary eyes. He sat up in his chair and felt a dozen aches in various parts of his stiff body. How long had he been asleep?
It was not sleep, the young scholar realized then, to his mounting horror. The weariness that had taken him from consciousness was too profound to be cured by simple sleep. What, then?
It was a journey, he sensed. He felt as though he had been on a journey. But to where?
“What were you reading?” Brennan asked, leaning past him to regard the open book.
The question shook Cadderly from his reflections. Terrified, he shoved Brennan aside and slammed the book.
“Do not look at it!” he replied harshly.
Brennan seemed at a loss. “I … I’m sorry,” he apologized, obviously confused, his green eyes downcast. “I didn’t mean—”
“No,” Cadderly interrupted, forcing a disarming smile to his face. He hadn’t intended to wound the young lad who had been so kind to him over the last few tendays. “You did nothing wrong. But promise me that you’ll never look inside this book—not unless I’m here to guide you.”
Brennan took a step away from the desk, eyeing the closed tome with fear.
“It’s magical,” Cadderly acknowledged, “and it could cause harm to one who does not know how to read it properly. I’m not angry with you—truly. You just startled me.”
Brennan nodded weakly, seeming unconvinced.
“I brought your food,” he explained, pointing to a tray he had placed on the night table beside Cadderly’s small bed.
Cadderly smiled at the sight. Dependable Brennan. When he had come to the Dragon’s Codpiece, Cadderly had desired solitude and had arranged with Fredegar Harriman, the innkeeper, to have his meals delivered outside his door. That arrangement had quickly changed, though, as Cadderly had come to know and like Brennan. The young man felt free to enter Cadderly’s room and deliver the plates of food—always more than the price had called for—personally. Cadderly, for all his stubbornness and the icy demeanor he had developed after the horrors of Shilmista’s war, had soon found that he couldn’t resist the youth’s unthreatening companionship.
Cadderly eyed the plate of supper for a long while. He noticed a few specks of crumbs on the floor, some from a biscuit and some darker—the crust of the midday bread, he realized. The curtains over his small window had been drawn and his lamp had been turned down, and turned back up.
“You couldn’t wake me the last three times you came in here?” he asked.
Brennan sputtered, surprised. “Th-three times?”
“To deliver breakfast and my midday meal,” Cadderly reasoned, and he paused, realizing that he shouldn’t know what he knew. “Then once more to check on me, when you turned the lamp back up and drew the curtains.”
Cadderly looked back to Brennan and was surprised again. He almost called out in alarm, but quickly realized that the images he saw dancing on the young man’s shoulders—shadowy forms of scantily clad dancing girls and disembodied breasts—were of his own making, an interpretation from his own mind.
Cadderly turned away and snapped his eyes shut. An interpretation of what?
He heard the song again, distantly. The chant was clearer, the same phrases repeated over and over, though Cadderly still couldn’t make out the exact words, except for one: aura.
“Are you all right?” Brennan asked again.
Cadderly nodded and looked back, not so startled by the dancing shadows. “I am,” he replied sincerely. “And I have kept you here longer than you wished.”
Brennan’s face screwed up with curiosity.
“You be careful at the Moth Closet,” Cadderly warned, referring to the seedy private festhall at the end of Lakeview Street, on the eastern side of Carradoon, near where Impresk Lake spilled into the Shalane River. “How does a boy your age even get into that place?”
“H-how …?” Brennan stuttered, his pimpled face blushing to deep crimson.
Cadderly waved him away, a wide smile on his face. The dancing shadow breasts atop Brennan’s shoulder disappeared in a burst of splotchy black dots. Apparently Cadderly’s guesses had knocked out the teenager’s hormonal urgings.
Temporarily, Cadderly realized as Brennan headed for the door, for the shadows already began to form anew. Cadderly’s laugh turned Brennan back around.
“You will not tell my father?” he pleaded.
Cadderly waved him away, stifling the urge to burst out in laughter. Brennan hesitated, perplexed, but he relaxed almost immediately, surely reminding himself that Cadderly was his friend. A smile found his face, and a dancing girl found a perch on his shoulder. He snapped his fingers and swiftly disappeared from the room.
Cadderly stared long and hard at the closed door, and at the telltale crumbs on the floor beside his night table.
Things had seemed so very obvious to him, both of what had transpired in his room while he was asleep, and of Brennan’s intentions for a night of mischief. So obvious, and yet, Cadderly knew they should not have been.
“ ‘Aura’?” he whispered, searching for significance.
The young priest looked back to the tome. Would he find his answer there?
He had to force himself to eat, to remind himself that he would need all his strength for the time ahead. Soon after, one hunger sated and another tearing at him, Cadderly dived back into The Tome of Universal Harmony.
The pages began to flip, and the song played on and on.
TWO
MOPPING UP
Danica blew a lock of her strawberry-blond hair from in front of her exotic, almond-shaped brown eyes and peered intently down the forest path, searching for some sign of the approaching enemy. She shifted her compact, hundred-pound frame from foot to foot, always keeping perfect balance, her finely toned muscles tense in anticipation of what was to come.
“Are the dwarves in position?” Elbereth, the new king of Shilmista’s elves, asked her. His silver eyes kept more to the trees surrounding the path than to the trail itself.
Two other elves, one a golden-haired maiden, the other with black hair as striking as Elbereth’s, joined them.
“I would expect the dwarves to be ready in time,” Danica assured the elf king. “Ivan and Pikel have never let us down.”
The three elves nodded, and Elbereth couldn’t help but smile. He remembered when he’d first encountered the gruff dwarves. Ivan, the tougher of the pair, had found him bound and helpless, a prisoner of their enemy. Never would the elf have believed he would come to trust the bearded brothers so implicitly.
“The dryad has returned,” the black-haired elf wizard, Tintagel, said to Elbereth. He led the elf king’s gaze to a nearby tree, where Elbereth managed to make out Hammadeen, the elusive dryad. Her tan-skinned, green-haired form peeked from around the tree trunk.
“She brings news that the enemy will soon arrive,” remarked Shayleigh
, the elf maiden. The anxious tone of her voice and the sudden sparkle that came into her violet eyes reminded them all of the fiery maiden’s lust for battle. They had seen Shayleigh “at play” with both sword and bow, and had to agree with Ivan Bouldershoulder’s proclamation that he was glad Shayleigh was on their side.
Tintagel motioned for the others to follow him to where the rest of the gathered elves, some two score of Elbereth’s people, almost half of the remaining elves in Shilmista, waited. The wizard considered the landscape for a moment, then began positioning the elves along both sides of the path, trying to properly distribute those better in hand-to-hand combat and those more skilled with their great longbows. He called Danica to his side and began his spellcasting chant, walking along the elven lines and sprinkling white birch bark chips.
As he neared the end of the spell, Tintagel took up his own position, Danica moving to her customary spot beside him, and sprinkled chips upon himself and his human escort.
Then it was completed, and where Danica and forty elf warriors had been standing, stood only unremarkable birch trees.
Danica looked out from her new disguise to the forest around her, which seemed vague and foggy to her, more like a feeling than mundane vision. She focused on the path, knowing that she and Tintagel must remain aware of their surroundings, must be ready to come out of the shapechanging spell as soon as Ivan and Pikel began the assault.
She wondered what she looked like as a tree, and thought, as she always thought when Tintagel performed that spell, that she might like to spend some quiet time as a tree, viewing the forest around her, feeling its strength in her feet-become-roots.
But that would have to wait. There was killing to do.
“Oo,” moaned Pikel Bouldershoulder, a round-shouldered dwarf with a green-dyed beard braided halfway down his back and open-toed sandals on his gnarly feet. He watched the distant spectacle of Tintagel’s spell. His longing gaze was plain to see, and Pikel almost toppled out of the tree in which he sat.
“No, ye don’t!” his brother whispered from across the way, disdaining Pikel’s druidic tendencies.
Ivan tucked his yellow beard into his wide belt, shifted his mithral-hard buttocks on the tree branch, and adjusted his deer-antlered helmet on his head, trying to find a comfortable position in a very undwarven perch. In one hand he held a club made from the thick trunk of a dead tree. He’d tied a heavy rope around his waist that looped up over a branch halfway across the trail.
Ivan had accepted the high seat, knowing what fun it would bring, but he drew the line at being turned into a tree—above his would-be druid brother’s whining protests. Ivan had offered a compromise, enquiring of Tintagel about a variation of his mighty spell, but the elf wizard had declined, explaining that he had not the power to turn dwarves into rocks.
Across the path, in a perch opposite Ivan, Pikel seemed much more comfortable, both with his tree seat and tree-trunk club. He, too, sported a rope around his waist, the other end of Ivan’s. Pikel’s comfort with the perch couldn’t defeat his frown, though, a frown brought on by his longing to be with the elves, to be a tree in Shilmista’s soil.
Guttural goblin grumbling down the path alerted the dwarves of the enemy’s approach.
“Sneaksters,” Ivan whispered with a wide smile, trying to brighten his brother’s surly mood. Ivan didn’t want Pikel pouting at such a critical moment.
Both dwarves tightened their grip on their clubs.
Soon the enemy band passed directly under them, spindle-armed, ugly goblins mixed in with pig-faced orcs and larger orogs. Ivan had to force himself not to spit on the wretched throng, had to remind himself that more fun would be had if he and his brother could hold their positions just a short while longer.
Then, as the dryad Hammadeen had told them it would, a giant came into view, plodding slowly down the path, seemingly oblivious to its surroundings. By the dryad’s words it was the last giant remaining in Shilmista, and Ivan wasn’t about to let the thing go lumbering back to its mountain home.
“Sneaksters,” Ivan whispered again, the title he had chosen for him and his brother, a title he knew that the giant, above all others, would appreciate in just another moment.
The huge head bobbed steadily closer. One goblin stopped and sniffed the air.
Too late.
Ivan and Pikel leveled their clubs and with a nod to each other, hopped off their high perches, swinging down at the path. Their timing proved perfect and the oblivious giant stepped between them, its gaze straight ahead, its head bobbing at just the right height.
Pikel connected just a heartbeat before Ivan, the heavy dwarves sandwiching the monster’s head in a tremendous slam. Ivan dropped his bloodied club and tore out his favored double-bladed axe.
On the path below, the smaller monsters went into a frenzy, pushing and shoving, diving to the dirt, and running in all directions. They had lost many companions in the last few tendays, and they knew what was to come.
The wizard, Tintagel, cried out the dispelling syllable, and Danica and forty elves behind her reverted to their original forms. The elves drew back their bowstrings, or charged with gleaming swords waving high.
The dazed giant wobbled, but stubbornly, stupidly, held its balance. Ivan and Pikel, dangling nearly twenty feet above the forest path, went to work.
Ivan’s axe took off an ear, and Pikel’s club splattered the monster’s nose all over its cheek. Again and again they smacked at the beast. They knew they were vulnerable up there, knew that if the giant managed to get even a single hit in, it would probably knock one of them halfway back to the Edificant Library. But the brothers didn’t think of that grim fact just then.
They were having too much fun.
Below the hanging dwarves came the sound of elven bows loosing hail after hail of arrows deep into goblin, orc, and orog flesh.
Creatures died by the score, others cried in agony and terror, and the merciless elves came on, swords in hand, hacking at the squirming forms of the vile invaders, the monsters that had so tainted the precious home of the People.
Danica spotted one group of monsters slipping away through the trees to the side. She called to Tintagel and sped off in pursuit, taking up her crystal-bladed daggers, one with a golden pommel carved into the likeness of a tiger, the other, with a hilt of silver, carved into a dragon.
Pikel’s club knocked the giant’s head backward so brutally that the dwarves heard the sharp crack of the huge monster’s neck breaking. The giant somehow held its balance for just a moment longer, dazed, confused, then it died. It rolled up on the balls of its huge feet and toppled forward like a chopped tree.
Ivan surveyed the path ahead of the falling beast.
“Two!” the dwarf yelled, and the giant’s body buried an unfortunate pair of goblins as it landed.
“Ye owe me a gold piece!” Ivan roared, and Pikel nodded happily, more than willing to pay the bet. “Ye ready for more?”
“Oo oi!” Pikel replied with enthusiasm.
Without a word of warning to his brother, the would-be druid grabbed a tree branch and quickly pulled the loop around his waist, freeing his end of the rope.
Ivan managed to open his eyes wide, but the inevitable curses aimed at his brother would have to wait as he took a more direct descent to the ground. To Pikel’s credit, the plummeting Ivan did clobber a goblin beneath him.
The yellow-bearded dwarf hopped back to his feet, spitting dirt and curses. He casually dropped his heavy axe onto the back of the wounded goblin’s head, ending its complaints, and looked back up to his brother, who was making his way down the tree in a more conventional fashion.
Pikel shrugged and smiled meekly. “Oops,” he offered, and Ivan silently mouthed the word at the same instant Pikel spoke it, fully expecting the all-too-common apology.
“When ye get down here …” Ivan began to threaten, but goblins closed in around the vulnerable dwarf.
Ivan howled with glee and forgot any anger harbored a
gainst his brother. After all, how could he possibly stay mad at someone who had dropped him right in the middle of so much fun?
The fleeing band’s lead goblin scrambled through the thick underbrush, desperate to leave the slaughter behind. The monster hooked one ankle on one of many crisscrossing roots in that overgrown space, and stubbornly pulled itself free. Then it got hooked again, and the brush’s renewed grasp was not so easily broken.
The goblin squealed and pulled then looked back to see, not a root, but a woman, smiling wickedly and holding fast to its ankle.
Danica twisted her arm in a sudden jerk and charged up and ahead from her low concealment, tripping the unfortunate creature. She was atop the thing in an instant, her free hand pushing away the frantic beast’s futile slaps while her other hand, holding the golden-hilted dagger, came slashing in for a single, vicious strike.
Danica rarely needed more than one.
The young woman pulled herself up from the slain creature, openly facing its surprised comrades, who weaved in and out of the trees behind and to the sides. The band eyed her curiously and looked around, not really knowing what to make of the seemingly lone human woman. Where had she come from, and why was she alone? Not another leaf or bush in the area moved, though fighting continued back on the trail.
Apparently with that thought in mind, an orog cried for a charge, eager to claim at least one victim to balance the loss of the giant. The monstrous band came crashing in at Danica from three sides, through the bush and brambles, gaining confidence and resolve with every step.
Elbereth dropped from a tree limb above Danica, his gleaming sword and shining armor revealing his prominent stature among the elven clan. Some of the monsters halted, and the others slowed, looking back and forth curiously from the elf and woman to their less brave comrades.
A short distance to the side, Shayleigh appeared from behind a tree and set her bow to work, dropping the creature closest to her companions.