Frostborn: The First Quest (6 page)

“Then it is safe for me to assume,” said Ridmark, lifting Heartwarden, “that you are not in fact Sir Joram Agramore?”

Joram laughed at him.

“And you,” said Ridmark, “are not Aelia Licinius?”

Aelia grinned, her green eyes flashing with something like lust. “Did you just now realize that, human fool? We have been watching you. A human wielding a blade forged of high elven magic? It has long since we have seen such a sight.” She swung back and forth in the shackles, grinning like a madwoman. “And you slew our pet urvaalgs. Pity. The master shall be ever so disappointed.”

“The master cares not,” said Joram. “New urvaalgs are easy to create.”

“True enough,” said Aelia.

“What do you want?” said Ridmark. “All this mummery has a purpose. What is it?”

Joram laughed. “Why, to enjoy ourselves.”

“Yes,” said Aelia. “The master commands us to guard his dungeons from intruders. But he does not care how we do it. And fun is ever so hard to find.” She laughed. “You should have come to me, human fool. I would have shown you pleasure beyond the ability of your puny mind to comprehend ere I devoured your heart.”

She made an intricate gesture with her bound right hand, and the chains holding her vanished in smoke. She landed with a flex of her emaciated legs, that manic grin still on her face.  

“Do you know what we are, human?” said Joram. “Do you know how you are about to die?”

“You’re urshanes, both of you,” said Ridmark. “Another of the dark elves’ creatures. They made the urvaalgs and the ursaars to act as war beasts, the urvuuls as living siege engines. But the urshanes were scouts. Spies. Infiltrators. They could read the minds of their victims and take the form of someone he trusted. Just as you took the forms of Joram and Aelia to fool me.”

Aelia and Joram laughed at him, and their bodies blurred and rippled.

When the rippling faded, they had both changed. Now they looked like some bizarre combination of human, serpent, and hairless cat. Gleaming black scales covered their lean bodies like armor, and hooked black claws tipped their fingers and toes. Their faces were feline, with long fangs and yellow eyes split with a vertical black pupil. A segmented tail rose over each of their shoulders, swaying back and forth like a serpent, tipped with a barbed and poisoned stinger.

“And do you know how we have decided that you shall die?” hissed the urshane that at masqueraded as Joram.

“No,” said Ridmark, “but I know how you will.”

He charged, Heartwarden’s magic filling him with speed. The urshanes reacted as he suspected they would, jumping back and squatting, their long tails darting over their shoulders to stab at him. 

Ridmark hit the floor and rolled, sweeping Heartwarden over him in a blur of white light. The blade sheared through the urshanes’ tails, their poisoned stingers dropping to the ground on either side of him. Both creatures reared back with screams of agony, their claws raking at the air. Ridmark rolled to his feet, hoping to strike before the urshanes recovered, but the creatures circled him, hissing and snapping. Ridmark turned, trying to keep both of them in sight at once.

“You will suffer for that,” spat one of the urshanes. Ridmark could not tell if it was the creature that had been impersonating Joram or Aelia. “We shall cut off your fingers one by one and make…”

Ridmark feinted towards the creature, bringing Heartwarden around in a quick slash. As he expected, the urshane jumped back, giving Ridmark the opening he needed to strike. He pulled out of the feint, swinging the sword with both hands, and brought the blade down upon the second urshane’s right elbow. The sword sheared through the arm, the clawed fingers falling to floor. The urshane screamed, rearing back in shock as black slime dribbled from the stump of its arm, and Ridmark struck again.

Heartwarden tore open half the urshane’s neck, and the creature fell, its remaining hand clutching at the ghastly wound.

Ridmark spun just in time to avoid the attack of the second urshane, ducking under the claws. He thrust Heartwarden, opening a gash on the urshane’s hip, and the creature hissed in fury. He drew back his sword to stab again, but the creature spun, cracking its wounded tail like a whip. The tail coiled around Ridmark’s left foot, and he lost his balance and fell upon his back. The urshane pounced, and Ridmark thrust up with all his strength.

Heartwarden punched through the urshane’s chest and erupted from its back. The urshane screamed and raked at Ridmark, but its strength drained away, and the creature went limp.

Then it blurred and changed.

Aelia stared down at Ridmark, suspended upon his blade. She no longer looked gaunt or tortured, but instead had the full ripeness of her beauty. Her green eyes widened, and she gazed down at him with shock and pain.

“Why, Ridmark?” she whispered. “Why…why…”

He knew it was an illusion, but Ridmark could not look away. 

Aelia closed her eyes, the life draining from her face. Then her body rippled and changed again, reverting to the form of the urshane. 

Ridmark grunted and pushed the urshane off him, Heartwarden sliding from its corpse with a wet sucking sound. He cleaned the slime from his blade, and then drew on Heartwarden’s magic until he had healed himself. 

Then he slumped against the wall for a moment to rest. The fighting had taken more out of him than he would have liked, and drawing on Heartwarden’s magic always came with a cost to his stamina.

And seeing Aelia die like that, looking into her eyes as the life faded from them…that had disturbed him. It had only been an illusion, he knew, a trick of the urshane’s power. 

But it had seemed so real, so horribly real.  

He pulled some food and water from his pack and ate and drank. Then he rested for a while, drifting off to sleep. When awoke, he was alone, save for the corpses of the urshane. Perhaps they were the only guardians the Warden had left to defend the secret entrance into his fortress. 

Or, more likely, other creatures awaited.

Ridmark got to his feet and walked back to the hall with the balconies, intending to take the stairs leading higher up.

Chapter 6 - The Swordbearer

Ridmark moved through a silent corridor, Heartwarden ready in his fist. 

Stone statues stood in niches lining the corridor, showing dark elven warriors in elaborate armor or wizards in ornate robes, their alien expressions so lifelike that Ridmark almost felt the arrogance and contempt pouring off them. After everything else he had seen in this evil place, he half-expected the statues to come to life and attack him. Who knew what terrors the black sorcery of the dark elves could unleash?

Certainly it would explain the bones and broken armor that littered the floor of the corridor. Ridmark saw more orcish bones, the fanged skulls of beastmen, the delicate skulls of dark elves, and bones he did not even recognize. There had been a great deal of violence in the dungeons of Urd Morlemoch.

But the statues remained motionless as he passed them. 

Ridmark kept walking.

He had twice fought and defeated urvaalgs after leaving the urshanes’ lair. So far he had seen none of the mutated blue orcs in the tunnels. Perhaps they only lurked on the surface, and never entered the dungeons. 

Which made sense, given that the urvaalgs and the urshanes would likely kill them.

The corridor opened into another hall, and Ridmark paused. Both times he had fought the urvaalgs, they had been lurking in halls like this, no doubt to use their superior speed and agility in the larger space.

But this hall looked different from the others. 

It bore no decorations, no reliefs, no statues. No balconies, even, and the ceiling was not vaulted. The walls were two slabs of unadorned white stone, rough and unpolished. Ridmark saw another archway in the far wall, more stairs climbing up. Two plates of blue dark elven steel stood affixed to the wall on either side of the archway. 

Bones littered the floor, along with crushed pieces of armor and twisted weapons.

The bones bore no sign of claw or tooth marks. Instead they looked as if they had been crushed, as if some hulking giant had squeezed his foes to a pulp with his bare hands. 

That was a disturbing thought. Some of the dark elves’ creations had the kind of strength.

Ridmark took another step forward, and the stone tile beneath his foot sank a few inches into the ground.

He heard a loud, metallic click, followed by the grinding sound of stone upon stone. 

And before he could react, a slab of white stone slid across the far archway, sealing it off. He spun, hoping to retreat through the archway he had used to enter the hall, but another slab fell over it.

He had walked right into a mechanical trap. The dark elves had filled their strongholds with such things. Given their love of cruelty, the dark elves had delighted in a particularly well-constructed trap, watching as their victims died a slow death in the grasp of unfeeling machinery. 

Ridmark turned again, Heartwarden raised in guard. Would the trap keep him sealed in here until he died of thirst? That seemed like the sort of torment the dark elves would enjoy. But that did not explain how those broken bones had ended up on the floor. Had the trap sealed him in here with a deadly creature, one that had the ability to turn invisible? Ridmark's eyes scanned the room. He saw nothing, no trace of the telltale rippling that indicated the presence of an urvaalg. He looked at the flat ceiling, wondering if something lurked up there, but saw only empty stone.

Then he heard another metallic click. 

A shudder went through the floor, and the walls on either side of Ridmark began to slide towards him.

He looked at the bones, at the walls, and then back at the bones, and suddenly knew exactly how those skulls had been crushed.

A surge of sheer panic went through him. Heartwarden’s magic gave him superhuman strength to match the power of an urvaalg, but not even a soulblade could give him strength enough to rip open those stone doors. And it certainly could not give him the strength to stop those massive blocks.

He looked back and forth, his heart racing. The walls were not moving quickly, but the room was already two or three feet smaller. In another few minutes, he would not have enough room to move, and then he was going to die quite painfully. 

It might have been better to let the urshanes or the urvaalgs kill him.

Ridmark looked for something, anything, that would let him find a way to escape. He did not know much about machines, about gears and levers and screws. The Dux’s engineers and blacksmiths attended to that, men with faces dark from soot and grease as they labored to repair and maintain the catapults and ballistae upon the walls of Castra Marcaine. 

Maintenance…

His eyes fixed on the plates of blue dark elven steel on either side of the far archway. 

The rest of the room was built of white stone. Why hang those plates on the wall there, without any artwork upon them?

Unless the dark elves had needed a way to maintain the guts of the machine powering the trap.

Ridmark raced across the chamber, drew on Heartwarden’s power, and wrenched at the blue plate. The metal groaned, and then pulled away from the wall with a shriek. Behind it Ridmark saw a set of whirling gears of black metal, clicking and clanking. Each of the gears looked as if they weighed as much as Ridmark. If he stuck his hand in there, it would be torn to pulp. If he tried to stab the gears with Heartwarden, they would rip the sword from his grasp.

He struck his fist against his side in frustration, and felt the weight of the dwarven axe in his belt. It had hung forgotten during his fight with the urvaalgs and the urshanes. But dwarven steel was the finest metal in the world, harder and lighter and stronger than anything else.

Ridmark rammed Heartwarden back into its scabbard and drew the dwarven axe, taking the haft in both hands. The walls shuddered closer, the grinding growing louder.

He had to act now.

Ridmark swung the axe with all his strength into the gears.

The blade sank into one of the gears and got stuck. The turning motion of the gear wrenched the weapon from his hand. The gear continued to rotate against its neighbor, and the axe got pulled into the teeth. The gears stopped with a horrible metallic screech, shivering like a rope under too much tension. 

And ropes under tension broke. 

Ridmark ducked into the meager shelter of the archway. 

An instant later the gears exploded out of the open panel. One bounced off the floor with a tremendous clang and stopped against the base of the moving wall. Another shattered into a dozen jagged pieces. The walls stopped, shuddered a few times, and then stopped again.

The slab of stone next to Ridmark slid back into the ceiling with a low rasp. Ridmark grunted, got to his feet, and looked into the opened panel. The smashed gears quivered, the axe trembling in their midst. The machinery looked like it was still under stress. 

And if the axe gave out, Ridmark suspected bad things would happen.

He hastened away from the panel and up the stairs, leaving the chamber of the trap behind. 

###

Ridmark stopped, sniffing at the air.

“Saltwater,” he muttered. 

He must be getting close to the surface. 

He stood in a long gallery, pillars supporting its vaulted ceiling. More statues lined the walls, waiting in niches. Here and there bones dotted the floor, but not as many as in the lower levels of the dungeons. 

Perhaps fewer intruders ever made it this far. 

He kept walking, and then stopped as a new smell flooded the air. A rank odor touched his nostrils, one more familiar than he would have liked.

The corrupt blood of an urvaalg. 

And it smelled as if it had been spilled recently. 

Ridmark kept walking, Heartwarden ready in his fist.

The gallery ended in a flight of stairs that spiraled upwards. Ridmark started climbing, his eyes scanning the red-lit gloom for any foes, his ears straining for any sound of battle. 

He turned the first circuit of the stairs and stopped.

An urvaalg crouched there, ready to spring.

Ridmark braced himself, Heartwarden raised in guard.

But the urvaalg remained motionless, and after a moment Ridmark realized the creature was dead. Someone had carved deep wounds in its chest and back, black slime dripping upon the white stairs. A sword wound, then, one delivered with enough force to pierce hide and muscle and bone.

And a magical sword, if it had killed an urvaalg.

Had Rhyannis killed it? Ardrhythain had not mentioned if the bladeweavers carried magical swords, but it seemed likely. Or did more dark elves than the Warden dwell in Urd Morlemoch? Perhaps the urvaalg had gone berserk and attacked its masters.

He climbed the stairs, and found three more dead urvaalgs upon the steps. Two had been killed with a single powerful sword thrust through the heart, and one had been beheaded entirely, black slime spattered across the walls. 

Someone had fought three urvaalgs at once and prevailed. Rhyannis? Or someone else? If it was Rhyannis, if she was free within Urd Morlemoch, Ridmark could rescue her, and they could retreat through the dungeons before the Warden even noticed them.

He took another step and heard sounds echoing down the stairwell.

Growls and snarls…and a man’s voice raised in challenge.

A man’s voice speaking Latin.

Ridmark raced up the stairs.

If another man of Andomhaim was in this horrid place, Ridmark would not leave him to fight alone. He remembered what the urshanes had said about the Dux sending a rescue mission. Had there been an element of truth of to their lies?

Ridmark felt the cold, salt-scented wind upon his face, and the stairs opened into a wide courtyard lined with columns. The strange, unnatural black sky stretched overhead, the ribbons of blue fire dancing across it. A half-dozen dead urvaalgs lay scattered across the courtyard, and a half-dozen more moved in a wide circle, growling and snarling.

A knight stood in the center of the circle, clad in chain mail and plate, a soulblade shining in his right fist.

Ridmark had never seen him before. The Swordbearer was middle-aged, with gray-streaked black hair and a close-cropped gray beard. Blood marked the left side of his face, his lips drawn back from his teeth in a snarl. He looked like a man who had been fighting for days without rest, his blue eyes wide and bloodshot with fury and exhaustion.

“Come on, then!” he roared, lifting his soulblade, its soulstone flashing with white light. “Come on, dogs, come and face me!”

One of the urvaalgs lunged at him, and the Swordbearer reacted with lightning speed. The white-glowing blade licked out and opened a gash on the urvaalg’s shoulder, and the creature slunk back with an angry growl. Another urvaalg lunged, and the knight just managed to dodge the strike. He struck another urvaalg, forcing the creature to reel back, but the others closed around him.

They would rush him and kill him.

Ridmark charged forward. 

“For God and the High King!” he bellowed at the top of his lungs, hoping to draw the attention of the urvaalgs. “For God and the Dux!” 

The Swordbearer saw him, his eyes growing wide, and some of the urvaalgs spun to face Ridmark. The older knight took the opportunity to strike, and his soulblade plunged into the back of an urvaalg. The beast roared, went rigid, and collapsed to the ground. The other urvaalgs hesitated, trying to decide if Ridmark or the other Swordbearer was the greater threat.

Ridmark crashed into them, calling upon Heartwarden to lend him strength and speed. Before the nearest urvaalg could get its balance, he slashed his sword in a two-handed blow, taking off the creature’s head in a fountain of black slime. The other knight took advantage of the confusion, his soulblade blurring and taking off an urvaalg’s arm. The creature screamed in pain and fury, and the Swordbearer opened its throat with a quick thrust. 

Another urvaalg lunged at Ridmark, but with Heartwarden’s speed, he avoided the blow. The urvaalg lost its balance, and Ridmark swung his sword and severed the creature’s hamstrings. The urvaalg toppled backwards, slashing and snarling, and Ridmark stabbed down, driving his sword through the creature’s heart. He whirled and caught his balance as the other Swordbearer slew another urvaalg.

Only two of the creatures were left, and both of them charged at the older Swordbearer, roaring with rage and madness. Ridmark stabbed one of them in the back, and the Swordbearer slew the second with a swift thrust. The dead urvaalgs toppled to the white flagstones of the courtyard, and silence fell over the ruins of Urd Morlemoch.

Ridmark and the Swordbearer stared at each other. 

“What is this?” said the Swordbearer at last. “Another delusion of the Warden’s magic? A phantasm? Or are you another of the damned urshanes, come to fool me?” He shook his head. “No…no, I’ve never seen you before, and the urshanes steal a man’s memories to weave their lies. You are a Knight of the Soulblade?”

Ridmark nodded. “I am.”

“Blast and damnation,” said the Swordbearer. “Then has another fool stumbled into the lies and webs of Ardrhythain?”

“What do you mean?” said Ridmark.

The Swordbearer grunted, cleaned his blade on a dead urvaalg’s fur, and returned it to his scabbard. “What is your name, sir knight?”

“Ridmark of the House of the Arbanii,” said Ridmark. “I am a Knight of the Soulblade, in service in the court of the Dux of the Northerland.” 

“Ridmark Arban?” said the knight with a grunt. “I know your father. Good man, solid man. My name is Lancelus Tyriar, a Knight of the Soulblade in service to the Comes of Coldinium.”

“I have never visited Coldinium,” said Ridmark, “and I fear I have never heard your name before. But it is always an honor to meet another Swordbearer.” He looked around at the bleeding carcasses of the urvaalgs. “Especially one who can survive in such a grim place.” 

“Likewise it is an honor to meet you, sir,” said Lancelus, “and I am grateful for your aid. But I grieve to see you here. I would rather have fallen beneath the claws of the urvaalgs than have seen you in battle.”