Temple Hill (33 page)

“No!” Corin yelled back. “I jumped clear. Is there any way to open these things up again?”

For nearly a minute there was no reply—Corin assumed Lhasha and Fendel were examining and discussing the mechanics of the trap, trying to figure out a way to re-open the tunnel.

“Corin?” Fendel called out finally. “There doesn’t seem to be any way to move these rocks. Looks like this trap was a one-shot deal.”

The gnome paused, giving the warrior a chance to reply, but Corin didn’t speak. There wasn’t anything to

say, really. Fendel filled in the silence soon enough, anyway.

“Do you have some light? You’re not stuck back there alone in the dark, are you?”

“No,” Corin yelled back. “I’ve still got your fancy glowing stick here in my hand. I can see all right.”

“Good, good,” the gnome sounded relieved. “Hang on to that pole. There’s things in the dark you don’t even want me to tell you about.” The gnome took a second to think before continuing. “Just stay where you are. Don’t move. The tunnel we’re in branches off just ahead, I think one of them might eventually lead us back to you.”

There was no point in arguing with the gnome’s advice. The granite blocks were impassable, and Corin knew the odds of him finding his own way out were next to nil. Corin suspected that Fendel had an uncanny ability to maintain his sense of direction and perspective, even while trapped in an underground maze.

“It could take us a while to find you,” Lhasha called out. “We don’t want to set off another trap on the way. Just hang tight and we’ll get you in due time. All right, Corin?”

“I’ll be here waiting,” he replied. A second later he added, “You two be careful.”

Either they had already set off and hadn’t heard him, or they didn’t see any point in wasting time answering back. Whatever the case, Corin’s only reply was the echo of his own voice bouncing off the tunnel walls.

He stood Fendel’s staff in the crook formed by the tunnel wall and one of the granite stones now blocking his path. The warm glow of the gnome’s magic gave Corin enough light to make out his immediate surroundings, but little else.

Ever vigilant for the sounds of an unseen enemy

approaching through the gloom, Corin settled himself down, sitting with his back against one of the granite slabs. Sooner or later, Fendel and Lhasha would find him. There was nothing to do but wait.

There were tricks a soldier could use to pass the hours on a long watch, ways to relieve the monotony of duty. Corin’s favorite was counting heartbeats. It had the advantage of helping him keep track of time as it passed. Sixty beats a minute. Ten minutes passed, twenty. Thirty.

Of course, time was always relative, and in these particular circumstances it was essentially meaningless. It might take Lhasha and Fendel an hour to find an alternate route back to where Corin waited. Or four hours. Or anywhere in between. They would get there when they got there, and tracking every minute wouldn’t speed things up.

Still, counting heartbeats gave him something to do, a way to stave off the boredom. At four thousand beats, something happened.

Or rather, something stopped happening. Upon first escaping from the beholder and entering the smugglers’ tunnels, Corin had been struck by the oppressive silence, marked only by

the far-off sounds of the battle in the vault and punctuated by the occasional distant scream of one who fell victim to the perils of the labyrinth.

But eventually, Corin’s ears had begun to pick up faint, half-imagined noises coming from the darkness. The scuttle of beetles scattering before the light, never seen but always there. The scampering of tiny, clawed feet. Rats, subterranean lizards, and other predators were fleeing before the strange intruders in their realm of eternal night.

Once noticed, these ambient sounds were instinctively dismissed, pushed to a subconscious level of awareness within Corin’s mind. Suddenly, the sounds stopped, vanishing completely as the unseen creatures in the shadows froze or scurried away to safety through the narrow cracks and fissures in the stone. Corin finally understood what true silence was.

The malevolent eyes that Corin had felt hounding his every step were gone, too. Gripping his swords tightly, Corin rose silently to his feet, moving out from the granite wall behind him. He was unsure what to expect, but he wanted to have room to maneuver.

The silence was soon broken by the sound of someone approaching. The noise was still far off but unmistakable. Deep rasping breaths. Heavy, methodical footsteps. The sharp chink of metal rings sliding across each other with every stride of the armored individual advancing.

No glimmer of light betrayed the progress of the one approaching. The being could see in the dark, Corin realized. Like a half-elf, or gnome, or orog.

When Graal finally emerged, stepping boldly into the light of Fendel’s glowing staff, Corin wasn’t surprised, and neither was his opponent.

“And so my hunt is over,” Graal growled. “We have unfinished business, White Shield.”

Corin said nothing, but held his ground.

Graal hesitated. “You no longer fear me.” His voice was somewhere between disbelief and mockery.

Corin made no reply. He owed this beast no explanations. The arm gave him a chance—slim though it was— of besting the orog in combat, nothing more, but the mere chance was enough.

The night he lost his hand, Corin’s very soul had been rent asunder, his spirit shattered into a million fragments. Alcohol washed away much of his broken self—the fires of hate and revenge consumed even more. Pieces of what he had once been were lost beneath the earth, buried with the bodies of his dead comrades. The fragile bits that remained had been swept away by the hollow winds of a bleak and pointless existence, until there was nothing left but a shell of a once-proud warrior.

But in the past month Corin had been reborn, rising from the ashes of his own destruction. The alcohol was gone, the hateful fires of revenge were quelled. The void left by the corpses in his past had been filled by his friendship with Lhasha. There was purpose in his existence. His life had meaning and value once again.

Corin knew he might die in the dark tunnel, but he would die with the knowledge that his life had not been wasted or given in vain. Lhasha had been saved, and if the price of her salvation was an end to Corin’s mortal existence, that was a sacrifice the warrior was prepared to accept.

Misinterpreting the silver-limbed warrior’s stoic silence as speechless fear, the orog laughed. “I will enjoy taking your other arm this time, White Shield.”

Corin let his enemy come to him, let the beast come well into the light to negate any possible advantage Graal might have in the shadowy tunnel.

The orog rushed forward, trying to gain a strategic

advantage by using his momentum to drive the smaller man back and pin him against the wall. Corin stepped up into the charge, and they met with a clash of blades that rang throughout the caverns.

Corin dodged to the side, using one blade to intercept and deflect Graal’s attack while the other thrust forward, looking to catch the orog on its point and use the great beast’s own weight and momentum to drive the blade home.

” Graal twisted away and leaped nimbly back, showing amazing agility for a creature of his size and bulk. The sword ricocheted off the dark ringed mail covering Graal’s torso. The orog was unharmed, but his advance had been blunted.

Corin followed up with a series of quick stabs and cuts at his foe’s chest, forcing the orog to sidestep and spin away from the blows, turning Graal so that his back was to the wall Corin had been against only moments before.

Corin’s blades flickered in and out, each swinging on a different trajectory and striking from a different angle. He went after his enemy’s legs now, looking to slice open the few inches of unprotected flesh below the hem of the black, iron kilt and above the orog’s heavy leather boots.

Graal stumbled back, momentarily overwhelmed by the unfamiliar dual-bladed attack. The creature parried desperately with his own heavy weapon, somehow managing to smack down each strike with the flat of the dark blade. He was unable to keep Corin off him, unable to drive the undersized warrior back or slow bis furious assault.

The orog’s retreat stopped only when the beast’s back touched the hard stone of the granite blocks behind him. Graal pushed off from the wall, using it for leverage as he swung his knee up, catching the Corin in the gut and doubling him over. Corin dropped to the ground and rolled away, springing to his feet.

Graal had not pressed his advantage. The orog was hesitant, Corin realized. Uncertain. The knowledge fuelled Corin’s confidence.

The two combatants circled slowly, each trying to work the other into a position of disadvantage against the walls. One would advance, and the other would momentarily retreat. But just as quickly, the tide would then shift, and the aggressor would be forced back, dancing away from the counterthrusts of his foe.

With each round of give and take the warriors inflicted small wounds on each other. Dozens of small nicks and cuts on Corin’s arms and body—an inevitable result of any battle—began to bleed. In and of themselves, none of the wounds was fatal, but they gradually sapped Corin’s strength, slowing him down. Even as Corin became more fatigued he could feel his opponent getting stronger, the dark necromancy of Graal’s foul blade drawing sustenance from Corin’s wounds.

The longer the battle raged, Corin realized, the greater his opponent’s advantage would become. If he couldn’t finish the orog off soon, he would surely die in the darkness of the smugglers’ tunnels. The one-armed warrior launched a reckless, all-out assault against his foe, determined to bring a quick end to the confrontation—one way or another.

The sword in Corin’s left hand arced down, a desperate blow designed to kill, or at least throw his already stumbling opponent off balance. The orog parried, the edge of his enormous black sword catching the flat of Corin’s own blade at an angle more precise than a jeweler cutting a diamond—and Corin’s sword shattered.

The shock of the vibration ran down the length of the weapon, through the blade and into Corin’s hand. His hand tingled, his fingers became numb. The useless hilt slipped from his grasp and clattered on the floor to he

beside the shards and slivers of tempered steel littering the ground.

The orog seized the moment and brought his own blade in hard, aiming for Corin’s unprotected left side. Corin had to reach across his body with the weapon held in his metallic right arm to parry the blow, but he didn’t have the leverage to fully turn the course of Graal’s fierce attack.

Corin partially deflected the orog’s dark blade. It bit into Corin’s hip, buckling the one-armed man’s leg and dropping him to a knee. A second blow came in from overhead, a wicked two-handed chop straight down. Unable to brace for the force of the attack, Corin threw his own blade up in desperation, parallel to the ground and perpendicular to the course of Graal’s weapon.

Graal’s sword was halted in mid-arc but the strength of the orog’s blow slapped Corin’s remaining sword out of his metal hand to clatter on the ground. Without pausing, the orog raised his blade for the killing blow and brought it down again on his weaponless opponent. Corin threw his right arm up over his face in a vain effort to protect himself.

The dark blade sliced down in a mere blur, powered by the fury of the orog’s bloodlust. Yet for Corin, all was still. The black sword hung motionless in the air. The White Shield could see the individual etchings on the surface of the foul weapon, shimmering with an obsidian glow. The deadly arc of Graal’s weapon would lop off his prosthetic arm. The blade would continue unabated, slicing through Corin’s shoulder and diagonally across his torso—a sure kill.

But to Corin’s awareness, time had stopped. Frozen in the moment with the dark blade hovering inches above him, the warrior’s mind flashed back to a night three years ago—the night of Igland’s death, the night the White Shields were betrayed, the night Corin lost his hand.

The surrounding light and shadows of the cavern dissolved into the black of a storm-filled night. The far-off cries of doomed men in distant corridors and the faint scuffling of the unseen denizens of the tunnels became the sounds of his fellow White Shields battling Graal’s companions. The warm blood soaking Corin’s clothes and covering his face became the cold, viscous mud of the Trader Road mixing with the pelting raindrops of the raging tempest above. Corin felt his knees sink into the ground beneath him, as if it were soft earth rather than unyielding stone.

His world had come full circle, back to where he was two years ago. Helpless once again beneath the savagery of Graal’s dismembering blade.

But this time something was different. He could no longer hear the screams of his comrades dying around him. There was only silence, and knowledge came to Corin.

His companions were alive.

Unlike Igland, Lhasha and Fendel would survive this night—even if Corin did not.

The storm vanished, replaced by the surroundings of the smugglers’ tunnels once again. The sinister blade still hung frozen above the gleaming silver of Corin’s prosthetic arm, poised to continue on its lethal path.

This time Corin was unafraid.

The eternal moment was over, and Graal’s blade came down upon Corin’s arm. The forged metal of the enchanted blade struck the metal alloy of the prosthetic— and Graal’s blade erupted! Corin was blinded by an explosion of darkness, disintegrating into a shadowy cloud of dust that covered both men like a venomous mist. Each jet black piece of Graal’s evil sword now oozed swirling magical vapors. The smoky tendrils swam toward each other in a gathering tornado of power that

had been unleashed from the broken blade. The tornado whirled in a frenzy until Corin could no longer follow the motion with his eyes. Then nothing.