Resurgent Shadows (Successive Harmony Book 1) (3 page)

Loran laughed, a genuine smile of pleasure coming over his thin, bloodless lips.

“Well done, well done indeed, Athore,” Loran said approvingly. “I see that Granil chooses his envoys well.”

Athore inclined his head slightly and bared his yellowed, pointed teeth in a snarl. “If you be done with your little test, Loran, I do be needing to return to me Dragonlord soon and the journey is long. Let’s be getting this done here and now.”

“I agree. The siege at Raleigh is already under way. The assistance of your Dragonlord is no longer required.”

Athore leapt to his feet, his axe seeming to leap into his hands. “This be not the agreement made between Granil and Mortan! The hosts of Granil and the Browns will be joining the battle at Raleigh, with you or against you. You be choosing which.”

Loran made a strange gesture with his right hand and pushed it out toward Athore with an indecipherable shout. Athore was thrown backwards as if struck by the force of a small car, flying at least twenty feet through the air in a jumble of arms and legs before he crashed into one of the abandoned vehicles strewn about the valley. The car buckled and bent under the force of the crash. Broken glass exploded outward from the shattered windows.

Athore toppled, face-forward, onto the ground. Shards of glass stuck up from his back, stained orange with his blood.

“The agreement is annulled,” Loran snapped, pulling the hood of his red cloak back up over his head. “Tell Granil that his services are no longer required and, should he desire to test his might against the power of Mortan-zai, he is more than welcome to meet his death at our hands.”

Without a backward glance, Loran turned on his heels and headed back the way he had come, soon vanishing behind the hills.

Caleb sat motionless behind the blackened tree stump, eyes off the scope, not understanding what he had just seen.

Down in the valley, Athore moved shakily, his arms twitching and jerking uncontrollably as he struggled to rise. He pulled himself halfway up the car, but his legs wouldn’t move. He yanked feebly at the roof, struggling vainly to pull himself up, but his grip slowly gave way and he slid down the side of the car.

Caleb looked down at his rifle and then glanced down to the valley where Loran had disappeared. The gun would create too much noise if he wanted to follow Loran. Shouldering it, he drew a short, wide-bladed knife from his boot and got to his feet.

He picked his way down the hill, careful not to send too much ash and dust into the air. Athore had managed to get himself up into a sitting position. Orange blood pooled around him, making a sickening slurry of ash and debris. Caleb walked up to him, knife held at the ready. Athore glanced up at him and grinned.

“I thought I be smelling more human flesh earlier.” A fit of coughing overcame him and he spat up blood. “This be how I die then? Betrayed by the wizard and killed by a human—a pitiful
human
.”

Caleb ignored him. Athore’s axe lay within easy reach of his fully functional right hand, even if everything else from the waist down was lifeless.

“Listen to me, human,” Athore said suddenly. The intensity of his words made Caleb pause. “Chaos will reign. You will all die. Mortan will start with us—with the Browns—but eventually you will all die. This is just the beginning.”

Caleb shrugged and flipped his knife over in his hand. “I’m already dead.”

His arm pumped and the knife took Athore just below the throat. It was an easy throw, one that didn’t give Caleb even the slightest surge of pride.

Athore gurgled weakly and then slumped forward in death.

Ten minutes later, Caleb was tracking once more, his knife back in its sheath and devoid of the half-troll’s yellow-orange blood. A few hundred yards from where he had witnessed the encounter between Loran and Athore, more tracks merged with the pair that he followed. From the breadth, depth, and number, Caleb judged that at least six more trolls had joined up with the man. If Caleb was lucky, he’d be able to sneak up on a few of the trolls while they were alone and then pick them off one by one. That was way too many for Caleb to take on at once, even without the addition of Loran’s apparent power.

He still didn’t fully understand that, though he’d been mulling it over in his mind ever since the fight. Athore had called Loran a wizard, but he couldn’t accept that answer. Despite all the evidence to the contrary around him, Caleb still needed something rational to which he could cling. Otherwise the hunter within him would take over.

Caleb found the remains of a large fire where they must have camped the night before and what was left of an evening meal, but the smell dissuaded him from investigating any further. An unwanted memory reared up in his mind and threatened to overcome him at the sight, but he pushed it away. He followed the tracks north along the edge of an old highway, the asphalt all but hidden beneath a film of ash and debris. He kept at least half a mile behind them at all times, just close enough to see the small black cloud they kicked into the air. He shadowed their movements for most of the day. They stopped only once, late in the afternoon, but they were up and moving again within only a few short moments.

Caleb dripped with sweat and his throat was parched from the cool, dry air, but he didn’t slow, nor did his grip slacken on his rifle.

Night fell.

As darkness closed in, his other senses heightened to compensate for his decreased vision. The faint sound of gunfire made a staccato note of discord in the night, augmented by the concussive rumble of a distant mortar exploding. The Raleigh city-fortress was really under siege.

Though the darkness hid most of the normal landmarks of the area, he knew he was close. The hilly ground and deserted, decaying buildings of the old city would have hid the battle and the city-fortress walls from view even without the dark, but he knew from experience that the flashes from gunfire and mortar shells carried in the black and he’d soon be able to see them against the cloudy sky. He kept his eyes peeled upwards and was rewarded with a faint, flickering glow in the sky as he crested the top of one of the larger hills.

Memories swirled around in his mind at the sights and sounds, mimicking the shadows that danced around him. For a moment, he wasn’t there walking along the abandoned road any longer. For a moment, he was back within the Charlotte city-fortress, hearing gunfire and feeling the desperate wash of pain and fear slip over him. Then he was back in the moment again.

As he crested another hill, two figures, who had obviously been shadowing him, rushed him from either side. The one on the left raised a cudgel and Caleb spun to face it. His rifle bucked in his hands as he fired off a quick shot. The flash threw the short figure into sudden detail, revealing a shock of auburn hair bursting out around the edges of a conical steel cap and a startled expression on the squat man’s bearded face. The light reflected off more metal on the man’s chest. The shot went wide.

Caleb heard a muffled noise behind him and realized he’d forgotten the other figure. He twisted at the hip, dropping his rifle and reaching for his handgun, but he only made it halfway before something hard connected with the back of his skull and his vision exploded in a flash of white. He toppled forward into the ash in a sprawling heap, a trickle of blood tracing down the side of his face.

Caleb’s eyes snapped open and, in that same moment of awakening, he reached for his gun.

It wasn’t there.

One hand dove under his shirt and felt the reassuring presence of his ring still dangling from its chain. The other hand checked for his concealed knives, one at the nape of his neck and the other in the top of his boot. Both were missing. He grunted away the headache that throbbed at his temples and banished the last remnants of grogginess. He got to his feet.

The room he was in was dark but not lightless. There was a faint trickle of light that streamed into the room from beneath the door that gave him a view of the stark walls around him. There was no sign of his captors. For a fleeting moment the thought crossed his mind that some of the trolls had doubled back on him and that he was now in their mercy. He fought down a wave of panic mixed with fear. Blood pounded through his head, augmenting the headache and making him nauseous.

Thomas’s voice echoed in the recesses of his mind and admonished him to stay calm and assess the situation as best he could. He took a deep, calming breath and allowed his training to take over. The one fleeting glimpse he had gotten of his attackers had shown a short, stocky figure with a beard. Facial hair wasn’t something the goblins or trolls Caleb had seen had been blessed with. That meant his captors were human, probably marauders.

He heaved a sigh and studied his prison. He had been lying on an old mattress, musty and torn, but there were no other furnishings that he could see. The walls were thick slabs of concrete, except for the door, which was a riveted steel contraption with a wheel mechanism like a naval ship. With a sudden start he realized that he was in a survival bunker. They had been built as an escape from a nuclear inevitability that had never come. A strange place to find marauders.

He needed more information. He got to his feet, walked over to the door and rapped it smartly with his knuckles. It would draw the attention of his captors or, at the very least, let him know that he wasn’t guarded. If the latter, he’d have to figure out how to get through the door on his own. If the former, he could play along with his captors until he found the right moment to escape.

The wheel turned with a jarring screech of ill-used metal. The heavy door swung inward, and light flooded into the room, outlining the silhouette of a short figure holding a large shuttered lantern.

Caleb took a few steps back from the door to show that he was not going to try anything, though his eyes darted everywhere in search of escape.

“Awake, are you?” the figure said in heavily accented English. “You’re a tough nut to crack, lad, make no mistake. No’ many of your kind can withstand a blow from one of me kin.”

The silhouette moved forward and stepped to the side. The light from the hallway illuminated him. He was short and squat with burnished reddish-brown hair and beard that hung down in thick frayed braids. His face was stony and hard, as if chiseled from rock, though his blue opal eyes twinkled with suppressed merriment. A thick, long-bladed knife hung off his thick leather belt.

“You’re a dwarf!” Caleb said, taking an involuntary step backward.

The dwarf scowled at him. His eyes flashed, and Caleb felt a momentary flush of unease wash over him.

“I’m a dverger. Dwarf is an insulting name you humans use. I wouldn’t make it a habit to be calling us that. You’ll be coming along now then. Sigvid wants to see you.”

The dverger pulled a length of rope from behind his back and approached cautiously, setting the lantern on the floor. Caleb considered his options in the few seconds it took the dverger to close the distance between them. He could slip past the dverger with ease and take his chances in the passages beyond, or he could allow himself to be bound and taken wherever his captors saw fit to take him. His instincts and his training pulled him toward escape, despite the other guards he knew were lurking just out of sight, but his curiosity had been piqued, and it had been a long time since that had happened.

He shook away the feeling and steeled himself to dart to the left, but something inexplicable stopped him. He allowed his hands to be bound, justifying the move by telling himself that getting a chance to look over the bunker would allow him to formulate a more well-planned escape attempt later. The bonds were tight, but not enough to stop the blood flow, for which he was grateful.

“Come along now.” The dverger seized Caleb’s arm in a vice-like grip.

He led Caleb out into the hall, which was lit by crackling torches. Several more guards met them at the other end of the hall, where a larger passageway intersected with theirs. The dvergers were outfitted in coats of burnished mail, and each carried either a heavy, two-handed axe or a short, thick hammer. They all had the same long-bladed knives hanging horizontally across their waists, though the sheaths were as unique as the individuals wearing them.

“We’ll take ‘im from here,” one of the guards said. “Get a move on, you.” He rammed the butt of his axe into Caleb’s back to get him moving forward.

The other guards formed up in a box around him. They were grim faced and silent and kept a firm grip on their weapons, but Caleb found himself studying them more than he studied the bunker around them. Broad in shoulder and powerfully muscled, they were everything that Caleb had always imagined dwarves would be. Wide, squat faces with bulbous noses. Jewel-like eyes slightly larger and deeper set than human eyes. Thick beards, on most of them at least, and long flowing locks that either hung free or in braids, unhindered or else peeking out from beneath conical steel caps. Some of the dvergers had shorter beards or mustaches that hung low in long, thick braids.

Caleb had expected them to be dark or auburn-haired—that’s what legends said about dwarves at least—but the colors ranged from the darkest black he’d ever seen to a light, strawberry blond. Then again, these weren’t dwarves at all, but dvergers. What else had the fairy tales gotten wrong?

They said nothing, but they studied him as much as he studied them. There was hostility in their gaze, and contempt, Caleb could tell, but there was also a small measure of curiosity, as if he were as new and mysterious to them as they were to him.

The dverger guards led him down the main hall for several long, stoic minutes. Side passages opened up along the route at regular intervals, but the guards didn’t waver from their course. Nor did the speed at which they marched allow Caleb much opportunity to study the route they took whenever he managed to pull himself away from his study of the dvergers themselves. They entered a section of tunnels where the walls were reinforced with shoots of steel and where each side passage was barred by a thick door secured with a wheel lock.

Caleb gave a cursory glance over each door as they passed, but they were identical and didn’t offer any signs to mark the concourse of passages that branched out from the main passage. Even if there had been signs, they would have been the old fashioned neon ones, and there hadn’t been any electricity to power them in several years.

The long passage ended abruptly at a large steel door that spanned the entire hall from one side to the other. A pair of guards stood on either side of it, axes resting comfortably on the ground. They wore ornate breastplates that made the ones worn by the trolls earlier look like they’d been made of aluminum foil.

Caleb wondered at the need for guards so deep within the bunker.

“We did bring the prisoner to see Sigvid, son of Siglan,” the dverger behind Caleb said in a voice of granite. “Open the door an’ let us enter.”

“It be open already, Harek,” the guard on the right said with a funny little bow. “So go in yourself, you old gaffer.”

Harek grumbled something inarticulate as if he’d been insulted, but he ordered one of his guards to open the door. He prodded Caleb in the back again with the butt of his axe to get him moving.

Caleb adjusted his arms and shrugged in irritation but walked through the open door, silently berating himself for letting his curiosity overcome his training and instincts. It would be just his luck to die at the hands of dvergers that he’d let sneak up on him in the night. He almost laughed out loud. But then a cold realization cut him off as surely as a bucket of icy water on a hot summer’s day.

The hunter’s voice whispered in the back of his mind, urging him to find escape, to fight death at every cost. And yet, part of him longed to welcome it. For a moment, he was no longer walking through a door, but was in another place, screams sounding in the darkness around him, flames licking at wood, death pounding on the door. Then he was back.

The hall opened up into a massive room about half the length of a football field and almost as wide. The ceiling stretched upward for several stories, mostly obscured by shadow. A wide metal ladder was fastened to the concrete walls opposite from the door. A large, sealed porthole-shaped opening was recessed in the ceiling at the end of the ladder.

Caleb suppressed a shudder at the thought of all the earth and concrete that had been above his head in the hall.

Pulley mechanisms were anchored to the ceiling underneath the porthole. Ropes trailed down from each of them, the ends affixed to a heavy wooden platform that rested a few feet above the ground, propped up on wooden crates. A large party of dvergers was seated around the platform enjoying a meal. Barrels served as stools. A large fire blazed merrily a few yards from the lift, threating to set ablaze the ropes that secured the platform. The smoke wafted up and was pulled out into the night through the ventilation shafts in the ceiling.

Something crackled on a spit over the flames and Caleb’s stomach rumbled in sudden recognition of its emptiness. But as they drew nearer, he recoiled from the smell it gave off and almost retched.

The guards escorting him chuckled at his reaction, sucking in deep breaths through their noses and sighing heavily as if savoring the foul odor.

“Can’t handle roast golgent, human?” Harek goaded, prodding him again.

“Golgent?”

“Them little green ones.” Harek laughed.

The chuckles from the other dvergers deepened. Caleb glanced toward the fire. Whatever was cooking was much larger than any goblin or golgent—whatever—he’d ever seen, but it could have been a troll. He swallowed hard and looked away.

The guards stopped a few feet from the table and Harek shoved Caleb forward toward one of the dvergers whose back was to him.

Caleb could feel the dvergers at the table studying him. Most of them were obscured from view either by the play of light and shadows or by the backs of those sitting opposite them. But their eyes seemed to glow in the firelight, almost goblin-like. He stared back into the eyes that scrutinized his every detail, ignoring the stolid inflexibility that met his gaze.

Out of the corner of his eye, he noticed the contents of his pack strewn over one end of the table—foodstuffs, water sanitation capsules, and canned goods scattered haphazardly. His handgun, magazines, and some ammunition had been separated from the rest of his gear. His rifle, unfortunately, was nowhere to be seen.

“Who are you, human?” the dverger in front of him asked without turning to face him. This had to be Sigvid, the one they’d brought him here to see. “Have you come to aid the Red Dragonhosts?”

Caleb raised an eyebrow. “No.”

“Lies,” another of the dvergers said. “You killed the mutant from the Browns. You be following Loran as a rear guard and be wounding Hafdane with your boomstick when he and Jamdar approached you. You do be a decoy, meant to flush us out before we could ambush the wizard!”

“That’s a lie.” Caleb stared the dverger in the eyes and saw the rage that sprung up in them at the words. Apparently temper was one thing the stories got right about dwarves.

“No one be calling me a liar and lives!” Spittle flew from the dverger’s lips. He grabbed an axe from behind him and leapt up on to the table.

The others shouted in protest as food and drink was tossed into their laps.

The dverger charged across the table, his axe raised above his head in a wide, open grip. Caleb watched him coming and calculated his next move with care. None of the others would intervene to save him. He could see it in their eyes. This was a test. They wanted to see what he would do. They wanted to watch him die.

They wouldn’t get that satisfaction.

Caleb waited until the axe-wielder was nearly on top of him, the axe already beginning its descent, before he took a quick step forward and ducked his head, throwing his shoulder into the dverger’s knees at the very edge of the table.

The timing was perfect. The axe flew from the dverger’s hands, and he tumbled over Caleb’s shoulder to crash into Harek and the guards behind him.

Caleb didn’t turn, leaving his back exposed to the dverger he had just humiliated, and inclined his head toward the table before him as he righted himself.

“Enough!” Sigvid shouted. At last the dverger turned in his chair and glared down at the jumble of bodies that were struggling to untangle themselves. His auburn hair and beard glinted in the firelight. Harek’s shouting from the bottom of the pile cut off as someone put an elbow in his mouth.

“Human, what are you called?” Sigvid’s hard gray eyes stared back into his without blinking.

Caleb’s eyes flickered around the room, looking for escape, but his gaze was drawn back to the dverger in front of him. Why did he want to know his name?