Resurgent Shadows (Successive Harmony Book 1) (14 page)

“Hold, boy!” Sigvid called. The dverger had been following behind them for the last hour, obliterating any traces of their passing. Part of the reason it had taken them so long to get back to the enclave was the circuitous route they had taken to avoid patrols and throw off pursuit. He came puffing up to them, his expression pained.

“You cannot take the woman into the tunnels, Caleb,” Sigvid said. “You’ll both be killed the moment you walk through the door. The only reason you’re even still alive is that I spoke for you.”

“Well, just speak for her too,” Caleb said.

“It doesn’t work that way. I swore a blood oath and adopted you as kin. I owed you my life and I repaid my debt. There’s nothing else I can do.”

“Nothing else you
can
do, or nothing else you
will
do?”

Another voice spoke before Sigvid could answer, stifling any retort.

“When the Council be hearing that you abandoned the patrol and did get a dverger killed not even Sigvid will be saving you.”

Bothvar and the other dvergers appeared out of the early morning gloom. Two of the dvergers bore a third on a shield. There was a massive, gaping wound visible through the dverger’s tattered breastplate.

The woman stirred in Caleb’s arms and struggled to stand. Caleb lowered her to the ground and supported her as she got her balance. She straightened and the first few rays of dawn cast the woman’s face into sharp relief. Her face was smooth and perfect, marred only by the bruising on one of her otherwise flawless cheeks. Her eyes were deep blue pools that seemed to melt and grow fathomless the longer Caleb looked into them. Even beneath a layer of dirt and tears the woman was stunningly beautiful. She held his gaze and, for a moment, there was a glimmer of power and strength so strong that Caleb stumbled and looked away.

“Give me my bag, please,” she said.

Caleb pulled the satchel from his shoulder and handed it to her before he’d even thought about it. The tone of voice she used was one used to being obeyed, even if it was colored by exhaustion.

The woman reached into the bag and pulled out a small, round amulet on a chain. Leaving the bag where it was, she walked over to the injured dverger on unsteady feet. Caleb wanted to run forward and help her, but Sigvid had a hand on his arm, restraining him.

“What are you doing, woman?” Bothvar shouted.

The woman ignored him and stepped up to the injured dverger on the shield. A look of profound sorrow crossed her face.

She knelt in the dirt and the dvergers bearing the makeshift litter lowered it onto the ground in front of her, their expressions mirroring hers. Bothvar made sound of protest, but the other dvergers hushed him.

“Might I pray over him?” the woman asked, looking directly over at Sigvid.

The smith seemed taken aback for a moment, then nodded.

The woman clutched the amulet in one hand, chain interlocked in her fingers, while she extended her other hand out over the dverger’s torn and broken chest. Her eyes closed, her mouth moved, and a white light burst forth from both the hand clutching the amulet and the hand hovering in the air over the dverger.

Both Sigvid and Bothvar cried out in surprise and anger, but the light grew brighter and brighter until it was too painful to look at. Caleb stared through the red glow of his eyelids until the light vanished and the relative darkness crashed in. For a long moment, Caleb remained lost in the moment of transition from light to darkness, mind attempting and failing to process what he’d just seen. Was this magic like Loran had done? Had he just saved one of the magicians who served the Dragonlords?

Shouts forced his eyes open. The woman still knelt next to the fallen dverger, but he was no longer prone. He was sitting up, skin unbroken and smooth. The look of awe and wonder on his face was matched only by the fear and anger on Bothvar’s.

“Witchcraft!” Bothvar’s voice shook with anger and more than a trace of fear. He grabbed for his axe.

Two things happened at once. First, the healed dverger struggled to his feet and pulled the woman around behind him, protecting her with his body, and, second, a light throwing axe buried itself in the ground at Bothvar’s feet.

Caleb glanced in the direction the axe had come from. Sigvid, his face a contorted mask of anger and frustration, spun a second throwing axe in his hands.

“She healed me, Bothvar,” the dverger protecting the woman said in a heated growl. “Healing is not a power of witchcraft.”

“Her fate is not yours to decide,” Sigvid said with icy quietness. “The boy has claimed her as plunder from the raid. By dverger law she belongs to him now. We have ways of controlling magic users.” He gave Caleb a look that demanded silence.

The woman’s head spun around, her eyes blazing with an intensity that made Caleb want to hide in a deep, dark hole, but kept her silence.

Bothvar growled, but lowered his axe. “You’d best be telling him to mind what he does with his spoils. I’ll not be having them breeding and infesting us with their mewling spawn.”

Caleb flushed and opened his mouth to shout back, but Sigvid’s bellow silenced him before he could speak. “What he does with her is his business and none of yours.”

“The Council will be hearing of this.”

“Aye, the Council will, but I’ll be the one to tell them!”

Sigvid sheathed his throwing axe and stomped over to the woman, grabbed her by the arm and half dragged, half led her back to Caleb’s side and then shoved her into Caleb’s arms. Caleb tried to catch her, but she fell with a small shout of protest.

She started to say something, crimson spots of color blossoming on her dirty cheeks, but Caleb promptly put a hand over her mouth to silence her. She shot him a look of pure venom, but quieted.

Caleb didn’t understand exactly what was going on, or why Sigvid had claimed something so outrageous as this woman being his “plunder,” but for reasons he couldn’t explain, he trusted the dverger smith and was willing to give him the benefit of the doubt. But if Sigvid actually thought that he’d—that he would desecrate Rachel’s memory by—well, if he thought that, then he’d soon find out the true strength of the hunter first hand.

Sigvid led them inside the hidden cave, ignoring Bothvar’s continued protests, but did concede to having the woman’s eyes covered before he would open the concealed door in the cavern wall. Once inside, he ordered the other dvergers to go on ahead and forced Caleb and the woman into the guardroom where Caleb had spent his first night in the Enclave.

Caleb tried to protest, but Sigvid wouldn’t have any of it.

“Wait here, Caleb,” Sigvid ordered. His voice sagged even as it resonated with authority. “I don’t know why I do these things for you. You’re going to be the death of me one of these days, I swear to you.”

With those resounding words, Sigvid slammed the door shut and locked it behind him.

Sigvid strode down the hall with purposeful steps, booted feet thumping against the stone floor with resounding thuds. He fished in a pocket beneath his armor and pulled out his pipe and a small pouch of smokeweed. Pausing next to one of the greenish lanterns, Sigvid filled the bowl and lit the pipe with his striker. The smokeweed burned an angry red as Sigvid took a few quick puffs, smoke billowing out around him and then resumed his plodding march.

Idiot boy!

Sigvid grumbled and puffed harder on his pipe. How was he going to explain this one away to the Council? It had been hard enough to convince them to let Caleb stay in the first place, and now this? Rothvar, in particular, was going to want retribution on Caleb for the entire experience and, by extension, Sigvid himself. It had always been thus between them. A century was not quite so long a time to hold such a bitter resentment in the life of a dwarf.

“Stupid, naïve, ignorant boy!” Sigvid grumbled to himself as he walked, though he knew he only half meant it. His mind raced, trying to come up with some justification for his actions, but he reached the doors to the council room before he’d formulated any sort of a plan.

Fine then.

In all his life, he’d never turned back from anything. He wasn’t about to start now, especially not in front of Rothvar or Bothvar. No, this was his Enclave as much as any of the elders. His blood, sweat, tears, and passion were etched in every wall, and colored every piece of steel in the place. He was a Ferreiro and had once been the heir to the dverger throne. He would not give them any satisfaction this day.

He shoved the door open with one hand, pipe dangling from a corner of his lips and stem clamped between his teeth. The door swung inward and rang against the back wall, though the half dozen dverger elders seated at a table opposite the door didn’t even blink. They were all scions of the mountain, wrought from the stones themselves. It took more than a wooden door to even begin to rile them up.

Bothvar, on the other hand, started.

Sigvid wasn’t really surprised to see him here, speaking with his father, Rothvar, but it still rankled. The disrespect implicit in the action was such that, in normal times, Sigvid would have challenged the other dvergers to Holmganga, but as it was, he simply had to allow it. Sigvid strode to the center of the room, meeting each gaze in turn.

Bothvar nodded once to his father and then made a stiff exit.

Sigvid waited until the door swung shut behind Bothvar and then pulled the pipe from his mouth with one hand and made a vague gesture.

“So, I assume you’ve already heard what happened?” Sigvid said without any preamble. Bandying words was something for diplomats and aylfin. Dvergers were much more pragmatic than that, usually at least.

“We have,” Rothvar replied. Of course it would be him that responded first.

“What be your justification for bringing the woman into our sacred halls?” Einar, the oldest of the assembled elders, well into his third century of life, frowned beneath his short, white beard. Sigvid had always found it odd that the man spoke in the Tealcenrir dialect, even though he wasn’t from the capital city. Sigvid himself had lost the habit decades before.

Before Sigvid could answer, another of the elders interrupted. “You do not have the authority to allow entrance into our Enclave, Sigvid, son of Siglan,” Keld said. “As we reminded you the last time. We are not in the habit of taking in refugees from among the humans. Have you forgotten your place yet again?”

Sigvid glanced at the speaker, but didn’t take his eyes off Einar for long. He was the true authority here in the Enclave and, for the most part, didn’t carry the baggage of pre-formed opinions with him. It was a rarity among dvergers, but a welcome one.

“If I remember correctly,” Sigvid said blandly, “my place is as a full member of this council, a right granted me as Ferreiro. I am Sigvid, son of Siglan, and once-heir to the throne. I do not need to explain my actions.”

“That authority be not yours, Sigvid.” Einar said, emerald eyes growing cold.

“It is mine if I claim it.” Sigvid replied, not backing down.

In truth, he had renounced the later authority almost fifty years ago, but he wanted to remind them of it now. Abdicating had been seen by some as an act of honor. Others considered it the actions of a coward. Either way, it served as a reminder to them that he was there, a part of the Enclave, and even in front of them to begin with, by his own choice and volition.

“Ludicrous!” Rothvar snapped, to the accompaniment of more than one murmuring voice around him. “You be not the King, nor do you be having any further claim to that title. You do not even be a member of the Deepgarth clan any longer.”

Sigvid stuck his pipe back into his mouth and took a long pull, then blew the smoke out around him. He let the silence stretch, knowing the elders were deep in thought and that his own calm would look better to Einar than Rothvar’s anger. As a nice side-benefit, it allowed Sigvid time to think.

“Why would you be putting your reputation on the line for these humans, Sigvid?” Einar asked quietly after the silence had stretched for several long minutes. “They did nothing for you.”

“The boy saved my life and the lives of the entire Enclave.”

“You did already be speaking for him.” Einar said, holding up a hand to forestall further argument from Rothvar and Keld. “What be this woman to you? She did be leading many of our folk into near destruction. And she do be a magic user, one of Faerin’s ilk, if Bothvar’s accounting be true.” He said the last with a twisting curl on the corner of one lip, almost a scowl, but not quite. Even that, though, on Einar was an enormous show of emotion. Rothvar’s expression, and several of those near him, was much more extreme, though less intense.

“She’s got some healing ability. Perhaps we could use her. We are needing a good healer.”

This time it was Keld who held up his hand to quiet the others. When the murmurs didn’t die down immediately, he barked an order for silence and they stilled.

“You didn’t know about the healing until it no longer mattered,” he growled at Sigvid, nose twitching the long, braided mustaches that hung from his upper lip.

Sigvid shrugged and decided to be honest. “The boy cares for her. I owe him my life and I honor my debts.”

“Your debt to him do be paid,” Einar said. “Again, you did speak for him already and that did spare his life. What be your real reason, Sigvid?”

“I be knowing what’s on his mind,” Rothvar said, his voice shaking. “He do be thinking of his wife again. He be falling to the berserker’s rage. How many will be dying this time before you come around?”

“Don’t you dare defile her memory.” Sigvid spat, anger flaring within him like forge coals under the steady breath of a large bellows. His pipe slipped from the corner of his mouth, but he caught it before it hit the ground. Einar held up a hand, but Sigvid ignored it. “This has nothing to do with her.”

“Doesn’t it?” Keld asked, also ignoring Einar’s upraised hand. “Does this woman not remind you of your wife? A poor, defenseless woman unable to fend for herself against the Dragonhosts?”

“My wife wasn’t defenseless when they took her. She cut them down even as they overwhelmed her. She was as fierce a warrior as any here.”

“So you do still be angered over her death?” Rothvar demanded.

“Of course I am!” Sigvid almost yelled. “She was my wife, by Úndin’s beard. How could I not still be angry about it? Wouldn’t you be angry still, if it had been your wife? Your families are safe, hopefully, back in Tealcenrir. Those filth out there, golgent and trulgo, dragons and Dragonlords, they’re what has done this to us. Humans may have played a part in it, but it wasn’t them that did this. It wasn’t the boy and it certainly wasn’t that woman. Don’t forget yourselves just because you’ve been sitting at that table for far too long to remember what it was like to feel blood rushing through your veins.”

“Enough!” Einar shouted. “Rothvar, you and Sigvid best be leaving your petty squabbles outside this room if you do be wanting to remain a part of this Council.”

Rothvar banged a fist down on the table hard enough to rock it on its legs, but didn’t argue.

“Sigvid,” Einar continued. “Unless you do be telling us some better reason to save her, we will not be letting her live. We cannot be risking the lives of our own for her.”

Anger still seethed within Sigvid, a wrath the likes of which he had not felt in almost half a decade. He took a step forward and raised one thick finger.

“You have my word that the woman will not cause us problems. If I am wrong, you may exile me along with the boy. I claim it as my right. I have spoken for the boy and he has claimed the woman as his spoils. If you have a shred of honor left in you, you’ll grant me that.”

This quieted everyone in the room.

“Do you be serious?” Einar asked, one hand resting on his bearded chin, one finger absently scratching beneath the hair. “Do you really be expecting us to believe you would be leaving her, in her hallowed place among our honored dead?”

Sigvid turned a hot expression on the elder, resolve making his words ring far beyond when the echo of them died. “That is what I’m saying. Do what you must to satisfy yourselves, even the cuffs if need be, but the woman stays, or I go.”

*              *              *              *

Caleb sank down to the ground with a sigh, his chain mail scraping against the wall with a note of protest. He gestured for the woman to sit down on the cot and noticed, as he did so, the blood and wounds that covered his hands. He gasped in pain as he drew a breath and realized that at least one of his ribs really was broken. The woman appeared at his side and helped him pull off his shirt. Bullet fragments clattered onto the floor, dislodged from the mail coat beneath it. The woman reached out with trembling hands and tugged several more free from the interlocking rings. Silently Caleb thanked Sigvid for his foresight in making the mail. He didn’t remember being hit by any of the bullets, but then again, he didn’t remember most of the battle beyond the absolute rage he’d felt when he’d seen the woman bound and trussed like a pig for slaughter.

“You fought like a wild beast out there.” The woman pulled a small tin of yellowish paste and her amulet from her bag and rubbed some of the paste onto his hands.

Caleb sighed at the immediate cool relief, but winced again as his ribs spasmed and shocks of pain moved in waves up his body and clouded his mind.

“I have never seen a man so lost before,” the woman continued in a voice heavy with sadness.

Caleb looked at her and blinked repeatedly, but she wouldn’t meet his gaze.

“Lost?”

“Yes, you are lost. You were more animal than man. I am grateful you saved me, but you have paid a terrible price.”

Caleb didn’t know what to say to that. Honestly he was just glad the pain was being dulled.

“Who are you?” he asked to break the silence the stretched between them.

“I am called CeNira by some. I am a cleric of Faerin. A healer.”

As she spoke, she passed a hand over his mailed chest, her eyes shut in concentration. A faint white light glowed briefly in her palm and the amulet which had gone around her neck and a wave of bitter cold washed over him. The chill faded quickly and pulled the pain away with it.

“How did you do that?” Caleb gasped, looking at his hands and noticing that they too were fully healed and clean as freshly washed.

“A gift from the Goddess.” CeNira smiled softly, wrapping a trembling hand around the amulet and bringing it to her lips. She kissed it and then let it fall.

“That is quite a gift.” Caleb said softly, leaning back against the wall. “How can I get a gift like that?”

CeNira laughed softly, and the laughter was the sound of bells at Christmas-time. “All gifts some with a price. You know, I do not yet even know your name.”

“Caleb.”

Caleb coughed and licked his dry lips, but didn’t get up. He couldn’t muster either the strength or the desire to do so.

“Caleb,” CeNira repeated softly. “A good name. The Goddess bade me come here and seek out a man amongst dvergers, but I did not think to find one so broken as you.”

Caleb cracked one eye and glanced at her.

“There is a great battle being fought, Caleb. It is but one fight in the unending war, but the stakes are high. Great evil is awakening and the Balance has shifted out of alignment. Your world and others have been pushed together by Sayrin and his followers, against whom Atelho fights. In the Cataclysms, the armies of Chaos and the Dragonhosts were pulled into your world and destroyed the life that you knew. You must accept this, Caleb—there is no going back.”

Caleb opened his other eye and gave her a flat look. Others had tried to explain what had happened to the world using religion. God and Satan, Chaos and Order. It was the same song played by different musicians.

“Things will get much worse before they get better, but you must fight for this world, or else all is lost. The Dragonlords are the force that binds the armies of Chaos together. If you are to save this world you must face them, and fight Chaos at every turn. You must not let yourself succumb to ruin, despite the pain you feel. Follow your dreams—they will guide you.”