Extermination (Daniel Black Book 3) (25 page)

“There, that will hold her for a few minutes. Get her to Elin, and she can keep her going until I have time to finish healing her.”

Daria stared at me. “She’s breathing? Good gods. You can raise the dead, milord?”

“No, it just takes longer than you’d think for people to finish dying,” I told her. “Do you know where Cerise went?”

She shook her head. “I can’t see a thing with all this snow. I think I heard her over that way.” She pointed towards the rear of the ship.

“I completely lost my head there, didn’t I?” She went on. “I’m sorry, my lord. I’ll do better.”

Well, I couldn’t really blame her. She was just a city girl with some magical upgrades, and no military training to speak of. But life doesn’t care how justified your mistakes are, and things were looking bad enough without Daria getting herself killed in a fit of berserker rage.

“You’ll have to, because Embla needs you,” I told her. “Stay behind me, carry her back to the ship, and make sure nothing else happens to her until Elin or I can get her healed properly. I’ve got a golem to kill.”

Easier said than done. If these guys had armor that was protected from my magic, the golems probably were too. They were too big to melt with Grinder, and they were too close to the ship for explosives. That left my earth talisman.

I formed it into a heavy iron spike four feet long, growing out of a ball of stone that probably weighed three or four tons. Enough mass that the enchantment strained to lift it all, but that was fine. I pulled deep on the mana from my amulet, grabbed the implement in a fist of force magic, and strode towards the ship.

I’m not sure what I expected to find, but this wasn’t it. Instead of fighting someone, the golem at the front of the ship was busy ripping up the bridge. Several sections of hull plate and support beams were stuffed into a giant sack slung over one of the construct’s shoulders, and it was working another length of aluminum free.

Aluminum. Mithril. It stopped to loot? Golems weren’t smart enough for that, but… was that a hatch on the construct’s back?

I raised the spike I’d made, and slammed it into the golem’s back with all the force magic I could muster. Iron struck stone with a deafening crash, and penetrated. The golem’s back caved in, shattering around the point of impact to reveal a hollow space inside.

The point lodged in the golem’s breastplate, and I immediately made it sprout a forest of spikes growing out in all directions. There was a muffled cry from somewhere inside the war machine. Then it stopped moving, and slowly toppled over.

I shrunk the talisman back to normal size, and sent a jet of plasma into the opening just to make sure. But there was no sign of Elin. There was a ragged hole where the hatch to the loft should have been, and another where the door to the hold had been ripped off. A swirling mass of that noxious gas filled the hold.

“Stay here for a minute,” I told Daria, and made my shield airtight again. She nodded, and I stepped into the cloud.

I figured no one would expect a threat to come through the cloud at this point, so I turned off Grinder and tried to move quietly. The fumes were opaque enough that it was hard to see, but the hold definitely wasn’t full of people anymore. They must have bailed out the back to get away from the gas. Hopefully my little improvised fort had held up better than the airship.

No such luck.

I emerged from the gas cloud to find that the whole structure had collapsed into mud. Obviously the work of an enemy earth mage. Some asshole had done a pretty good job of ripping the aft end of my ship apart, and the cargo ramp was missing. There were bodies on the ground, a few elves and a whole bunch of the short guys. A golem, too, that looked like it had been cut to pieces. But what caught my attention was the standoff at the far end of the mud patch.

A pair of golems stood to either side of a guy in especially heavy armor, who was holding Sefwin prisoner. She was on her knees, her wrists in shackles behind her back, and he had the blade of a massive war axe at her throat. There were another dozen or so short guys in armor nearby, forming a loose half-circle around their opponents.

Tavrin stood in the middle of the frozen mud patch with a bloody sword in his hand, bleeding from a dozen shallow wounds and looking absolutely murderous. Irithil and half a dozen other elves were with him, which made me wonder where the rest had gone. There weren’t nearly that many bodies on the ground.

Elin was standing next to him, surrounded by a furiously swirling vortex of water. She was bruised and battered, and seeing her made me want to murder every one of these little bastards. But she was on her feet, and apparently making good use of the power source I’d given her.

“-sudden moves, faerie lady,” the guy with the axe was saying. “We wouldn’t want anything to happen to the cute elf girl, would we? The Sons of Ivaldi hold the field today. You can surrender with the elves, or you can walk away, but the mithril skyship is ours.”

Sons of Ivaldi? Those were the guys who’d made half the magical artifacts in Norse mythology. So they really were dwarves, then.

A couple of them had already noticed me, so there was no point trying to hide. I stepped forward with Grinder in my left hand, and my revolver in the right.

“You have until the count of three to let the girl go and back off, or I’m going to kill every one of you little bastards,” I growled.

“Daniel!” Elin gasped.

“No!” Tavrin said. “Daniel, I won’t risk her life.”

“There’s nothing he can do to her with an axe that I can’t heal,” I said coldly. “One.”

My eyes raked over the enemy formation, looking for openings. I couldn’t give these dwarves a hint that I was concerned about Sefwin, but considering the attitude the dark elves had about kids I doubt Tavrin would forgive me if anything happened to her. Two golems and a dozen dwarves was a lot of enemies to deal with, too. I needed help to pull this off.

Aha. A familiar magic was bleeding into the dwarf leader’s shadow. That’s my girl.

“One wizard against an entire clan of dwarves?” Axe guy scoffed. “Ego won’t bring you victory today. Your vassals have already fallen to our might, and my brothers are carrying them off in chains. Hurry off to Kadur Osh, and maybe you can buy them back on the slave market. Or you can stay here and die beneath the axes of the clan, and we’ll take your mithril ship anyway. Isn’t that right, boys?”

There were grim nods all around, and some of them started chanting. “Kill the wizard, kill the elves, take the mithril for ourselves.”

It was all the distraction Cerise needed.

She seemed to form from the shadows behind axe guy, with her hand already on the haft of his weapon. She wrenched it away from Sefwin’s throat with a grunt of effort.

Sefwin reacted instantly, ducking and twisting out of her captor’s grip like a greased eel. In the blink of an eye she was tumbling away from him, rolling to her feet and dashing for safety. I’d been hoping for something like this, and threw myself forward with a burst of force magic. I managed to get between her and the dwarves just as one of them threw a hand axe at her unprotected back.

The weapon passed through my force field like it wasn’t even there, and the edge sliced through even my coat to cut a nasty gash into my chest. Damn it, was everything the dwarves used immune to magic? At least it had taken most of its momentum to penetrate my barrier coat, but if one of those things hit me in the head this fight was over.

I thumbed Grinder back to life as a distraction, and opened fire on the dwarves with explosive rounds. That disorganized them nicely, and then I wasn’t the only one fighting. A wall of water rushed past me to engulf several dwarves, and a barrage of colorful spells lashed out to strike one of the golems.

The other one opened its maw and vomited out another cloud of that noxious gas they used. I stepped back, and blew the gas cloud away with a burst of force magic. I caught a glimpse of Cerise splitting the head dwarf’s skull with his own axe, but then there were three more dwarves trying to close with me behind raised shields.

An explosive round knocked them on their asses, and I played Grinder’s plasma jet over them. They screamed, and tried to scramble away for a few seconds before the heat overcame them. Then they were down, and I had a moment to see where I was needed.

Apparently I wasn’t.

Elin was floating in the middle of a ball of water twenty feet across, which had completely engulfed one of the golems and was somehow tearing it apart. Tavrin was perched on the other golem’s back with his sword buried in its head, sucking out the magic that animated the war machine. Cerise was merrily carving a bloody swath through the dwarves with their leader’s axe, putting her superhuman strength and blinding speed to good use. The rest of the elves were engaging the dwarves around the periphery of the fight, and while that was a more equal contest they were holding their own.

For a moment I thought the fight was over. Then a feathered shaft sprouted from my chest.

Agony blossomed an instant later, muted by my amulet’s automatic pain block but still as bad as anything I’d ever felt. Acid flooded my veins, a death spell attacked my tissues, and a cacophony of uncontrolled mana tried to scramble my magic.

Fortunately the jamming effect wasn’t strong enough to shut down my amulet. It flooded my body with a tidal wave of indiscriminate healing, fighting the spells that were trying to kill me. Good thing, too, because another wave of dwarves was charging in out of the darkness.

I ignored my injury for a few precious seconds, hosing down the middle of the enemy formation with explosive rounds. Once again their magical defenses proved inadequate against purely physical force, and while their armor was heavy enough to provide some protection it didn’t stop the fiery blasts from knocking them around. A half-dozen shots reduced their dense wedge formation to a disorganized mob, with most of the dwarves blown off their feet while a few others staggered forward unsupported.

The fire in my chest was spreading. I found myself on my knees, with the world starting to spin. I had to get this thing out. I groped at my chest with fingers that were starting to shake.

Sefwin knelt next to me. “The head of the bolt is sticking out of your back,” she said. “I think I can push it all the way through, and get it out.”

“Do it,” I gasped.

She set herself, and abruptly threw her slight weight behind the shaft.

“Kyaaa!”

Martial arts crossbow bolt removal? I could swear she’d actually practiced that exact move. It didn’t hurt much with the pain block on, but feeling the shaft sliding through my chest was a damned unpleasant sensation.

Sefwin ducked behind me, set her foot on my back and pulled in one fluid motion.

“Hyaaa!”

The bolt came free, and its destructive spells lost their hold on me. I focused my own healing on the wound for a moment, to stop the bleeding.

A shaped loomed above me. A dwarf with his axe raised to strike. I reached for force magic, realized it wouldn’t do any good, and fumbled for a split second.

Sefwin lunged at him, thrusting towards the eye slits in the dwarf’s helmet with a slender blade that I hadn’t even seen her pick up. He turned his attack into a block, but the move distracted him long enough for me to gather my wits. I grew my earth talisman into a basketball-sized chunk of iron, and slammed it into him.

That worked pretty well. A hundred pounds of iron was too much weight to block, and the dwarves weren’t much good at dodging. Good thing, too, because my attacker had been the first of a whole squad of them. I found myself fighting side by side with Sefwin, frantically smashing away with the talisman in an effort to keep them from closing with me.

We made a pretty good team. My talisman swerved and spun unpredictably, striking one dwarf after another with crushing force. Sefwin ducked and wove around our enemies like some kind of elven Bruce Lee, seemingly unhindered by the shackles binding her wrists together. While their armor was proof against her sword my efforts gave her plenty of openings for fancy moves. Twice, she managed to dart out and stab an enemy through his helm’s eye slits before retreating behind the cover of my talisman. Neither of those dwarves got up again.

But there were too many of them, and I had exactly zero training in any kind of melee combat. A thrown axe bit into my shoulder, and the distraction let one of them get close enough to land a blow on my side with his axe. My coat only partially blunted the force of the blow before the edge cut through, and gave me another deep cut.

A second later I slammed my talisman into him, breaking his arm and sending him sprawling. Sefwin went to finish him and almost got gutted by one of his buddies, spinning away at the last second with a shallow cut along her arm. There were too many of them for this. I needed a better tactic.

A dark blur wove through the press, and a dwarf who was about to take another swing at me lost his head in a fountain of blood. Then Cerise was standing in front of me with a bloody battle axe in each hand.

“Don’t hog all the fun, now, love,” she said lightly, and turned to attack another dwarf.

“You’re welcome to this kind of ‘fun’,” I said. “I’ll take standing at the back casting spells any day.”

“Cast away, milord,” Sefwin said, springing past me to launch a furious series of attacks on another dwarf.

Cerise laughed. “Hey, I think I like this girl.”

I ignored the byplay. Cerise could do this all night, but I’d already seen that Sefwin was a lot more fragile. One false move here and she was dead. I had to make this reprieve count.

I risked a quick glance around. The giant blob of water off to the right told me that Elin was still fighting, and to my left Tavrin was making a stand with the other elves. It didn’t look good, though. There had to be thirty or forty dwarves on the field, and one of the golems was still up and breathing gas attacks at the elves. If the wind didn’t keep blowing the stuff away they probably would have fallen already.

I needed to clear these guys out somehow, but most of my usual tricks weren’t working. Time to improvise. I called Grinder to my hand, and brought my earth talisman back to hover in front of me. It only took a few seconds to shape it into a heavy iron barrier, four feet wide and seven feet tall, with a vision slit at eye level and a small hole in the middle.

“Both of you, get behind me!” I called, and shoved Grinder through the hole. I activated the weapon again, and triggered the plasma jet as soon as both girls were out of the line of fire.

That worked like a charm. The cone of violet flame caught three of the dwarves, who immediately fell back and started screaming. I turned the shield left and right, playing the beam over the ranks of the nearer enemies to disperse them.

“Awesome!” Cerise shouted, peering around the shield. “It’s working, Daniel. Fry the little fuckers!”

“Marvelous,” Sefwin panted. “I believe… I’ll stay… right here… behind this shield.”

A crossbow bolt thunked into the barrier and stuck. Yeah, they had some kind of armor-piercing enchantment on those things. Not enough of one to punch through a plate of nickel-iron an inch thick, though.

I stepped forward, still holding the beam on. I caught several more dwarves, before a party tried to rush our flanks. I turned to drive them off our left flank with the plasma beam, while Cerise made short work of the ones on her side. I handed Cerise my revolver, and advanced again.

When Cerise started firing explosive rounds into the main group of dwarves Elin’s water ball abruptly shifted in our direction. She took up a position behind us, which left Cerise and I with a clear field of fire and no more worries about getting flanked. I pushed forward again, levitating the shield so we could move quickly, and caught another group.

The last golem went down, and the enemy’s morale finally broke. They retreated into the snow, leaving a trail of bodies behind them. Cerise kept firing until the last of them vanished in the darkness, and I turned Grinder off.

The howl of the wind seemed quiet after the din of battle.

Cerise clapped Sefwin on the back. “Good job there, girl. I didn’t think you were that badass.”

The elf girl fell to her knees. “I’m not. Sorry, I was burning life force there at the end. Ran out of mana ages ago. I think I’m going to pass out now.”

“Just rest for a minute,” Cerise told her. “Daniel will get you fixed right up.”

Elin’s water ball evaporated, and she staggered out of it to fall into my arms. She was covered in blood, and my body sense pointed out three deep stab wounds that she was struggling to heal. I immediately added my magic to hers.

“Fuck, Elin. What happened to you?” Cerise asked.

“Some crazy dwarf swam right up to me while I was distracted with the second golem, and started stabbing me. I’d be dead if not for my healing amulet.”

“Most of my people are dead,” Tavrin said grimly. “Or captured by the dwarves, which is scant improvement. This is a disaster. What will you do now, Daniel? Journey to Kadur Osh, and try to buy them back?”

“You think I’m going to give these assholes money for kidnapping our people? Fuck that. They haven’t had time to get far. First we’re going to get our people back, and then we’re going to make them pay for this.”

He shook his head. “I appreciate the sentiment, but the Sons of Ivaldi are a major clan. They must have an outpost under the hill, but I don’t see how we can assault it with such a small force. All of us are injured, we’ve exhausted our magic and I doubt we’ve faced more than a third of their garrison.”

“How long will they hold them here?” I asked.

“An hour or two, I’d guess. In theory the earth gates they use allow for instant travel between their citadels, but they can’t keep them open all the time. There must be an outpost nearby, but they would have attacked in much greater force if their gate was open.”

“The local commander got greedy?” Sefwin asked.

“Yes,” Tavrin agreed. “That’s the most likely explanation. He tried to take this ship with his own forces, so they could keep the mithril for themselves. After this battle I expect they’ll seal their doors, and have their geomancers call for help. It will take them some time to get the gate open, but once they do the clan will march an army through to claim the airship. They’ll send the prisoners through as soon as the vanguard has cleared the gate, to make sure they can’t be rescued somehow.”