Dark Warrior Rising (33 page)

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Authors: Ed Greenwood

BOOK: Dark Warrior Rising
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She stood silent for a long time ere adding in a whisper, “Like the hairy beast who just left my life. Olo—no,
Thorar
damn you, Dark Warrior.”
Her sigh trembled almost into another sob. Tossing her head angrily and sweeping her surviving arm through the darkness as if she could hurl Orivon Firefist and Talonnorn and every last Talonar Nifl away from her, she set off back down into the darkness.
It was a very short time before she reached the jutting edge of rock. Beyond it, when she turned the corner, fat Bloodblade would be waiting to greet her with some smart remark about the lovemaking of humans, no doubt.
She went around the rock. Someone else was standing there, with a grin on his face and a drawn sword in his hand.
“Sister,” Jalandral purred, “I've been hunting you for a long time.”
Taerune stared at him, open-mouthed.
Her brother took a slow, smiling step toward her.
Behind him, Old Bloodblade stepped silently out of a dark side cleft, sword and dagger raised.
Coming home is seldom as easy as the tales have it.
—saying of the priests of Thorar
T
wo strides out of the cave, Orivon started to cry.
He'd been so afraid he'd find unfamiliar countryside and villages full of folk he didn't know, who'd see him as some sort of marauder to be slain or driven out.
But there were Old Larthor's fields—all overgrown, mind—and the roofs of Ashenuld below him. He hurried down the slope.
Birds called and flitted, but there were no shouts, no beasts in the fields …
Nothing but silence and empty homes, their stones tumbling into an overgrown street.
Ashenuld was an abandoned ruin.
“A welcome?” Orivon bellowed, loudly enough to set birds shrieking up into the sky to wheel squawking overhead. “Anyone?”
No voice replied.
Orivon drew his sword. Jaw set, he tramped to his home. Its door was open, the inside dark and empty, nothing greeting him but the faint reek of mold. No one had lived there for a long time.
The next house was the same.
And the next.
Silently raging, fresh tears almost blinding him, Orivon sought the holy hut.
It was fallen and gone, trees standing thickly where its door had been. He could see the worn threshold, between some roots, but …
Ashenuld was gone. These were but its bones.
Orivon looked back at the cave, hefting his sword in his hand, and then shook his head.
He looked slowly all around at what had been his home, shook his head again, and then whispered, “Farewell, Mother. I hope you died well, and lived better.”
The same empty words he'd heard the old aunts say so often, at one death or another.
“Thorar be with me now,” he whispered—and set off down what had been Ashenuld's main street, the way that led down out of the hills to the village of Orlkettle, and then on to the market-moot of Blard's Brook, and then a long, long way to the fabled many-kings' city of Orlpur.
Orlkettle was almost a day's walk, and—he looked up at the sky—he had less than a day left, before nightfall.
When the wolves and worse came out.
Orivon smiled mirthlessly, and strode on. That “worse” would now be him.
It did not seem to him that he'd walked all that long before he saw the plumes of smoke climbing the sky. Three or four; the thin ribbons that rise from chimneys. Orlkettle. That largest, darkest plume would be the smithy.
He strode to it, ignoring the cries of fearful children and goodwives running for the fields to fetch their men.
There were shouts, and someone came to the door of the smithy before he reached it. Someone old, and scarred, and bristle-bearded, who fixed him with a hard gaze.
“Who be you, stranger, and what want you here, with drawn sword and all?”
“Orivon am I, of … a far place. What befell in Ashenuld?”
“Nightskin raids, until none were left but old Ralla and her kin, who tarried in hopes that her son would return.”
“And where are Ralla and her kin now?”
“Dead, all of them, in the hard winters and the jaws of the wolves and nightskin raids.”
The smith eyed Orivon's scars as if he recognized them.
“Now I've given answers, and it's your turn. Where'd you come by that sword?”
“Made it,” Orivon said simply.
The smith nodded, looking not surprised in the slightest. “New to these hills?”
“Old and of these hills.”
“So how is it you knew Ashenuld? As small a place in these uplands as any?”
“I was of Ashenuld, once.”
Men were creeping up behind Orivon now, with shovels and pitchforks and rakes in their hands, but he kept his back to them, and his eyes on the smith, who raised his voice a little, so that all could hear it, and asked, “Want work here, and a roof and bed? I'm getting no younger.”
Orivon smiled slowly and said, “Why not? Back to the forge. An anvil was my life for long years; I can rebuild that life at yours. Aye, if you'll have me.”
The smith nodded, and smiled too. “I will.”
“Can you fight nightskins?” a man called, from behind Orivon.
He turned slowly, lifted his sword a little, and said firmly, “No nightskin will ever take me alive again.”
There was a murmur; women were joining the onlookers now, peering at him curiously from between the men.
“And if you dwell here and work our smithy,” a raspy voiced man asked suspiciously, “will you take that sword of yours to us?”
“Only to someone who attacks me. Yet hear this, folk of Orlkettle: I will not be driven from here. This will be my home.”
Orivon took a step closer to the watching villagers, and raised his sword on high. “I am Firefist, the Dark Warrior,” he shouted, and it seemed to them that flames rose in his eyes.
Lore about the Dark Below has always been both scarce and suspect. To this day scholars cannot agree about the true nature of That Which Sleeps Below, the Ghodal so feared by Niflghar, whose awakening presaged the Great Doom.
Yet it is clear that in the winter after the Second Summer of Araum, the greatest Niflghar spellrobe of all, Klarandar, rose to prominence in the city of Ouvahlor. In the Fourth Summer of Araum, Ouvahlor made war once more upon its traditional foe, the city of Talonnorn.
Whereas Talonnorn, greatest of the cities of Olone, had prevailed in previous strife between the two cities, such was not the case this time. The city of Talonnorn was shattered by the attack, and whereas some sages assert that the Talonar hurled back their attackers, most read the more reliable accounts to mean that the armies of Ouvahlor withdrew and let the Talonar fight among themselves, bringing their own city down around them.
What is certain is that the city of Talonnorn fell into turmoil at this time, its temple of Olone riven and the grasp of the Goddess on the city broken. Much murder was done within the houses, most Eldests and ruling Lords perishing, and House Evendoom, long dominant in Talonnorn, fell far from ruling might.
It is from this time that the legend of the Dark Warrior rose, the scourge of Niflghar whose adventures are so vividly told and retold. Most sources agree that he was of, or from, Talonnorn, and name him Orivon, or Firefist or Forgefist. Some say he was a renegade Nifl, others an exiled Lord or heir of a fallen House. Perhaps, as some of the wildest tales claim, he was no Niflghar at all, but an escaped human slave. Some even claim the Dark Warrior was an Evendoom she who turned against her house and brought about its fall. Inevitably, the holy writings of the priestesses of the Ever-Ice claim the Dark Warrior was the Ice itself, thrust into the body of a mortal, to walk the Dark Below and cleanse all.
All that can be said for certain is that the Dark Warrior rose, and the Dark Below was changed forever.
 
—from
Dynasties of Darkness,
penned by Erammon the Elder, published the Sixth Summer of Urraul
Little is known of the Dark Below in the years before the Great Doom, but from the writings and testimonies of the few Niflghar and humans who came up into the light in those times, some truths can be told.
The two most numerous races of the lightless lands were then the Niflghar or dark elves, called “nightskins” by most humans for their obsidian-hued bodies; and the brutish gorkul or “grayhides,” whom some have called “orkhs” and worse.
The tusked, hulking gorkul were of greater physical strength, but spent their lives in rages, fighting among themselves whenever they weren't raiding others, or wandering the Dark Below in nomadic clans.
They were easily enslaved by the agile, swift-minded Niflghar, who mastered fell sorceries, tamed lizards of the lightless lands to be their packbeasts and the deadly darkwings to be their flying steeds, and raised great cities in the largest caverns of the Dark.
Most Niflghar followed one of two faiths: They either worshipped the Ever-Ice at the heart of Niflheim, the all-seeing source of the greatest magic, or they cleaved to the goddess Olone, whose beauty was matchless. To achieve physical perfection was to so ascend in Her holy favor as to join Her, and know true power and fulfilment.
Niflghar saw the Ever-Ice as something greater than Nifl themselves, an everlasting Silence that perceived all, spoke to Nifl in dreams, and granted mastery over, and new knowledge of, sorcery to those who served it best and so made all Niflghar stronger. Many of these wizards, called “spellrobes” by Nifl, were male Niflghar, and they ruled the cities that worshipped the Ever-Ice, such as Ouvahlor, Arnoenar, and Imbrae, taking advice from the priestesses of the Ever-Ice and seeking their interpretations of events and holy signs.
Olone was the mother and future of all Nifl, the ultimate Nifl-she, and her priestesses enacted all justice and kept order in cities that venerated the Goddess, such as Uryrryr, Nrauluskh, Oundrel, and the greatest of all, Talonnorn.
The cities were ruled by councils of the greatest Nifl houses or families, a nobility dominated from within by the elder Nifl-shes, or “crones,” family shes beyond birthing age, who sought power and respect among the Consecrated priestesses of Olone by their furthering of the church's aims and influence–and who in turn ruled their families using the might of the church. The crones of every house were led by the Eldest of that house, but every house had a ruling Lord, a war commander and public face of the house who kept his throne only at the pleasure of the crones. Whereas in the cities of the Ever-Ice male Nifl spellrobes were great lords, they were little more than useful house weapons in the cities of Olone.
Otherwise, the cities were socially much the same: the priestesses on top, a dominant house among noble houses, each having a nobility ruled by a Lord but truly ruled by the crones (the unmarried shes of the house), overseeing many servants and warblades (the warriors). Beneath the houses were Nifl merchant traders, shopkeepers, crafters, and laborers of no house, deemed “the Nameless,” who dwelt outside the fortified compounds of the houses in a central cluster of homes and hovels … and beneath all were the slaves.
Slaves in the Ever-Ice cities were prisoners of war, and tended to be few and well-treated. Slaves in the cities of Olone were constantly expended necessities, for the pursuit of the perfection made necessary non-Nifl hands to do all work that could scar or maim, and the cruelty of crones and others caused the deaths of many slaves. Moreover, one road to greater power among houses was the ability to build more weapons, fortifications, trade goods, and finery, and do so faster than rivals—and one way to accomplish such things was through ever more slaves.
Hence, the Niflghar cities of Olone took to raiding surface lands, coming to the surface through mines and caverns to seize humans first by the score and then by the village, by thousands upon thousands, and drag them down into the Dark to lives of cruel, dangerous work.
In both sorts of cities, the Houses made constant and covert war on each other, striving for supremacy. These struggles were tempered by the churches of the Ever-Ice and Olone, and often twisted into open warfare between rival cities, warfare that never truly ceased.
The churches carefully balanced House against House, moving to let a
House be brought down only when it had truly offended the authority of the church or the power of its city. Their weapons were knowledge, church aid, slayings, and the bestowal of magic items, notably the powerful enchanted swords of many powers, known as “spellblades,” into the hands of those not gifted by the gods with mastery of magic.
Those who offended against the laws of the church and the authority of the houses were slain or exiled—or escaped out into the Wild Dark. Most such perished, but some banded together to dwell in small roving bands, raiding the caravans and fighting the patrols of the cities, the Nifl they called the Haraedra or “Towered Ones.” These outcasts were known as the Ravagers, and in time they became the chief slave-takers raiding the surface, and the slaves the trade goods they exchanged with Nameless Nifl merchant traders operating from city to city.
With others doing their drudge work, the dominant cities of Olone rose to ever-greater power over time—and ever-greater decadence. Riven by constant strife between houses and raids between rival cities, they were societies of vanity above all, where murder was a mere means to an end, and cruelty the way of life—as their non-elven slaves from the surface all too often found out.
 
—from
Dynasties of Darkness,
penned by Erammon the Elder, published the Sixth Summer of Urraul

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