Pools of Darkness (3 page)

Moments later, the soldiers that remained on the battlefield also broke ranks and turned to run. Catapult loads and arrows followed them until the soldiers were beyond the perimeter of lighted crossbow bolts. The cheer that arose in Phlan was deafening.

As the shouts subsided, Tarl looked slowly about, surveying the walls for damage. His mouth fell open as he was struck by the reality of what had occurred. The entire city of Phlan, walls and all, was in an impossibly huge cavern.

“Look, Master Tarl! Someone has stolen the skies over Phlan!”

The cleric took a deep breath. “No one has stolen our skies, friend. They’ve stolen us.”

Shal settled out of the air to stand next to her husband, confirming his statement with a nod. Though their situation looked grim, both adventurers knew that the danger had only begun.

One hundred miles to the north of the spot where Phlan had stood, a seasoned ranger camped in a tight grove of pine trees amid the violent gales and lightning. The warrior slept soundly despite the weather, but haunting images of danger played through his mind, causing him to toss and turn.

“Shal! Look out!” The ranger sat up in the darkness, screaming, as lightning struck a nearby pine. “Tarl! There’s something—” He stopped as he realized that he didn’t know what he was about to say next. Rain sprayed through the evergreen branches and rolled off the canvas propped over the ranger’s bedroll.

Three times in the last four weeks, Ren had dreamed the same nightmare. Now his head dropped into his hands, and he rubbed his forehead, as if clearing the images from his mind. His pulse thumped in his temples.

Ren shook his head hard. Water spun off his hair in all directions. Despite the lean-to, he was wet from head to toe. The relentless wind drove the rain under every leaf and into every crevice.

“Why do I keep having that dream?” Ren spoke aloud, even though no one was around to hear. Reaching for his sword, he scanned the trees and listened, alert for any passing orcs that may have heard his scream.

Several tense moments went by, but no creatures approached. Satisfied, Ren arose in the darkness and packed his wet gear. Even the equipment inside his backpack was damp. The rain and storms hadn’t let up for over four weeks. The seasoned ranger wondered if he would ever dry out again.

His mount, a huge war-horse named Stolen, shook its wet mane and flicked its tail. Then Stolen stood stoically as Ren loaded the saddlebags and patted the massive horse. “Stolen, old boy, it’s probably better that we’re awake. The orcs will be out, crawling these woods. Time to get busy hunting them.” As he swung onto the war-horse, he thought to himself, What a time to be having nightmares. Just when I’ve got a job to do.

A little more than four weeks earlier, Ren had petitioned the council of Glister to settle a nearby valley. Like most rangers, Ren didn’t believe in the ownership of land. A person could settle the land, care for it, even drive out unwanted creatures. But the land would outlast anyone who might claim to own it. Ren merely asked for the right to live there undisturbed.

After several long hours of verbal parrying and thrusting with Glister’s council, he had come away with an agreement. If Ren eliminated the bands of marauding orcs that terrorized the region, he would be awarded a charter to live in the valley in peace. The council had offered the ranger the use of Glister’s own troops, but Ren preferred to work alone. Now he trotted through the forest on his war-horse, quite alone and quite wet.

Ren sighed as he thought of the Glister council. He had done his best to make a good impression. The ranger had walked into the chambers that morning in a suit of gleaming chain mail of fine elven craftsmanship. His magical daggers, called Left and Right, were visibly sticking out of his dragonskin boots. A two-handed long sword hung in its sheath across his back, and a shimmering elven cloak of displacing was draped over one arm. His gauntlets, equipment belt, and bracers, also made of dragon hide, were shining and well oiled. Standing six-foot-six, the ranger’s impressive equipment and his gray-peppered beard spoke volumes about his skills and experience. But if Ren was a man of action, he had always been a simple speaker. Looking back, the ranger wondered if his mission might have been easier if he had appeared slightly less capable.

“Like the way I look now,” Ren muttered. His hair and beard were shaggy and plastered to his head by the rain. His elven chain mail was caked with mud, as were his dragonskin boots and gauntlets. Grass and pine needles clung to the mud and stuck to his wet leggings. Even the huge war-horse looked bedraggled. “Well, maybe the enemy will underestimate my fighting abilities,” he said half-heartedly. Stolen trotted through the trees.

Ren had been pushing the war-horse as hard as he dared in the darkness. He had scouted the land carefully earlier that day and knew where the orcs were gathering. Leaving Stolen in a circle of trees, the ranger crawled to a rise high above the encampment.

Slowly the ranger peered over the hillock. A ring of watchfires illuminated the valley. What had been a small brook flowing into the lowland was enlarged by the rain into a wide stream, but the marshy conditions didn’t seem to bother the orcs. They were beginning to arise from soggy tents, gathering about a central bonfire.

“Ren, you sorry thief, what have you gotten yourself into now?” He groaned as he tried to hold his grip in the mud and keep his face out of the water. He tried to console himself by thinking that the mud covering him would serve as a useful camouflage.

As he watched, more and more orcs joined the circle around the fire. As the surveillance wore on, Ren’s mind wandered to his recurrent nightmare. The ranger hadn’t thought about Shal and Tarl for months. The three of them were good friends, but their paths had diverged after they’d killed the evilly charmed bronze dragon controlling an army of orcs and ogres that were menacing Phlan. When Shal and Tarl became lovers, Ren felt out of place. They had parted friends and sent messages back and forth, but ten years had passed in the meantime. Ren hadn’t seen his friends in three years.

The images from the nightmare lingered. He could see Shal and Tarl looking a little older than the last time he’d seen them. The two were in Denlor’s Tower, in their bed. An enormous, gut-wrenching earth tremor and a crash of thunder was shaking the place. Shal leaped out of bed, naked, and ran to a grab a purple cloak filled with pouches. Tarl followed, pulled on his clothes, and reached for his shield and warhammer. The nightmare shifted to reveal Shal casting streams of violet energy at an unseen enemy and Tarl fighting something dark and horrible. Ren’s own screams always awakened him before he could learn what terrors his friends faced.

The first time he had dreamed about Shal and Tarl the ranger was disturbed, but this third nightmare left him truly shaken. Ren wasn’t one to have visions of any kind, so he was terribly afraid for his two friends.

Now he cursed the charter to which he had agreed. Ren was forced to devote all his energy to clearing out the orcs until the job was done. If he hadn’t given his sworn and signed word to terms made clear on the vellum he carried, he would have dumped the responsibility, forsaken his quest to settle the valley, and sought his friends to make sure they were safe.

After the second dream, Ren had begun taking risks he normally wouldn’t have taken. Any skilled ranger could battle five or ten orcs without fear. An average warrior orc stood about five feet tall and was usually armored in anything it could steal from its victims. Orcs liked using arrows and slings rather than getting close to the enemy to battle with swords or axes, so at close range most of them were lousy fighters.

But the ranger knew from experience that orcs liked to travel in packs, and the larger the pack, the bolder the orcs. Because Ren was worried about his friends, he’d started attacking packs of ten to thirty orcs. The ranger’s tactics were particularly reckless, but the size of the orc bands made such attacks especially dangerous. A few orcs always managed to escape and warn other bands, so that eventually the hunter had become the hunted.

In the weeks that followed, Ren had discovered many traps set by the orcs, although his keen eyes and sharp tracking skills helped him avoid the cruder snares. Ren had spent the last two decades in the woods, and only the elves and the native woodland creatures were more skilled at moving stealthily through the forests.

Ren had considered returning to Glister to lead its troops into battle against the orcs, but he would have suffered an unbearable delay. By the time he arrived in Glister, organized the militia, and led them back to the hills, he would have lost more than five days. All his scouting would have been for nothing—the orcs would have moved away and set new traps. Besides, Ren trusted his instincts and disliked worrying about the welfare of companions.

Forcing his mind back to the task at hand, Ren peered over the hill. He caught sight of seven different totems, each representing a different orc warband. Ren was well aware of this custom, because he had captured sixteen such orc totems and hidden them back on the trail. Later on they would be proof to the council that the ranger had done his job.

Squinting through the rain and darkness, the ranger saw captured dwarves in slave pens at one end of the camp. The dwarven warriors had obviously been tortured; their long beards and hair had been hacked off. Something would have to be done to save them, and quickly. He would have to devise a plan to free the dwarves or, as a last resort, put them out of their misery before the orcs subjected them to painful deaths.

Three of the larger orc totems concerned Ren. These were different from the others he had encountered. They were centered in the middle of heavily guarded tents. Half-orcs roamed around them.

“Now there’s a completely different breed,” the ranger muttered to himself. “I hope the next time I want to sign a charter a lightning bolt comes down and—”

Crash! A lightning bolt split the sky, and the rest of Ren’s sentence was lost in the thunder. The rain poured more heavily, drumming on Ren’s armor. He clamped his mouth shut and thought better of saying anything more. He was in no position to push his luck.

Ren sighed. Half-orcs. These crossbreeds were taller, smarter, and fiercer than their cousins. The totems told Ren there were at least three powerful bands of half-orcs in the valley, heavily armed and well organized. The ranger looked around for any nearby guards. Half-orcs were usually smart enough to post perimeter guards.

A lengthy scan revealed one guard crouched under a tree about fifty yards away. Hunkered down under its tarp, it wasn’t paying attention to anything but the rain. Ren didn’t have to worry about that one immediately.

Then the ranger spied a band of hill giants. They were hard to miss, since none stood shorter than twelve feet tall. Hill giants weren’t known to be very bright, but what they lacked in brains, they made up in muscle. They lived by terrorizing communities of humans and other “smaller” people. Primitive in appearance, each sported overly long arms that, combined with their stooped posture, meant their knuckles nearly scraped the ground. Their low foreheads resembled those of apes. Ren had fought a few hill giants in his day. He knew they were slow and not impossible to kill, but taking on this large of a contingent—he counted nearly forty— would be nothing less than suicide.

The ranger groaned. He had no other choice but to turn back to Glister and form a small army of men and dwarves to take to the valley. But if he left now, the captured dwarves would surely suffer unspeakable horrors at the hands of the orcs. On the other hand, if those forty dwarves with their armor and weapons were on Ren’s side, the story might be different. Forty dwarves and a skilled ranger might conquer the monster army.

“Now what do I do? You’d better think of something in a hurry, ranger. Hmmm. Now that’s not a bad idea,” Ren muttered under his breath. “I’ll kill the guard, and meanwhile, I’ll think up a typically brilliant plan to kill an army of orcs, half-orcs, and giants all by myself.” The confidence he heard in his voice was greater than the confidence he felt in his gut.

Crawling through the mud on his belly and then on hands and knees, Ren made his way to the brush near the orc’s tree. He was grateful for the rain and thunder that hid the sound of his movements. Rising to his feet but keeping low, he cautiously approached the guard, planting each foot solidly so as not to slip in the mud.

The orc had chosen his position well. His post overlooked the north end of the valley and was in view of two other trails leading to the camp. Had it not been for the rain, Ren would have been an easy target.

The ranger was within thirty yards of the orc when the mud gave way under his feet and he fell with a loud splash. The orc leaped to its feet with bow in hand. It nocked an arrow before Ren could react.

Too late the orc learned a lesson about soggy bow strings. They behaved a lot like wet noodles; neither hurled killing arrows very far.

The look of surprise on the orc’s ugly face as his arrow hit the ground at his feet was nothing compared to the expression on his face when, a moment later, Ren’s two-handed sword cut him in half. Ren’s blood was pumping at his brush with death.

The ranger grabbed the arrows from the orc’s quiver, ran through the mud to his war-horse, and drew out his longbow. Ren wasn’t as skilled with the longbow as other rangers. In contests, he’d seen skilled bowmen hit discs of wood hurled up in the air one hundred and fifty yards away. Ren could never hit such targets from more than seventy-five yards. The orcish arrows he had stolen had to fly only one hundred yards, but their targets were stationary and much larger than a four-inch circle of wood.

The ranger’s bow strings were coated with beeswax and were safely dry inside a pouch. Ren knew they would be effective for a short time, even in the rain. If his plan failed, the warrior had nothing to lose. He ordered Stolen to follow quietly, then walked to the ridge.

The storm was at its worst. Lightning shattered the sky, thunder rattled the valley, and rain poured down in sheets. The ranger peered down the hill and discovered a clear line of sight to the orcs as they huddled together in clumps. Partially sheltered by a white oak, Ren launched arrow after arrow into the small army below. He hurried the attack to prevent his own bow from becoming useless and to give the impression of multiple archers confronting the army.