The Messenger

23

Sire! King Strongwind!”

The voice, from the other side of the bearskin, carried an unmistakable urgency.

“What is it?” demanded Strongwind Whalebone impatiently. He was just now glaring at Moreen, who held one of the oil lamps high over her head, ready to throw it at him. The other had just sailed past his head, and lay in shards on the floor of the cave, the oil still burning on one of the slick rocks. The king was out of breath, having spent several minutes chasing the woman around the small grotto.

“Ogres, Your Majesty! They’re attacking the cave!”

Strongwind blinked, scowled, shook his head, then squinted at the bearkskin-covered doorway. “What?” he demanded.

“Ogres, you numbskull!” Moreen shouted. “Does lust make you deaf?” She put down the lamp and started for the doorway. “Pull down this bearskin!” she demanded. “Let us out of here!”

She gave the king a contemptuous glance. “Or do you want to continue? Flattered as I am by your attentions, I think an attack by ogres is a little more important.”

Her mind was filled with horror. How many ogres were here? How were they pressing their attack? She needed to find out what was happening.

There was a pause, a hesitant cough. “Sire?”

“Do it!” roared the king, who was shrugging into his tunic. He lifted up a boot, which jangled loudly. Impatiently he dumped it over, spilling his gold chains and bracelets across the floor, before sliding his foot in. “I’m not through with you,” he growled to Moreen as he did the same with the second boot.

His henchmen pulled the bearskin away from the entrance to the grotto, and Moreen raced away. She muttered to herself, “Oh, yes you are.”

The ogres roughly pulled Kerrick from the deck and threw him into a snowbank. He avoided looking at Baldruk Dinmaker. Until he understood what was going on here, he didn’t want to dwarf to know his former shipmate’s son had recognized him.

Other ogres scrambled aboard the boat, one even squeezing into the cabin. That one emerged a moment later with a shrug. “No one else here!” he called.

“Look again!” the dwarf snapped. “I heard voices.”

The ogre disappeared, and for a moment the boat shook and thudded from the sounds of cupboards being opened, the bunk pulled apart, and other compartments investigated. Finally the ogre emerged, shaking his head. “Nope. Musta been talking to himself.”

Coraltop? Shaking snow from his face and twisting to sit up, the elf shook his head in disbelief. He was glad his small companion had avoided capture, but he was more certain than ever that some kind of magic was at work. In any event, he had more immediate problems to worry about.

Three big ogres stood over him. Each wore a cloak of white bearskin, stiff jerkins over their torsos and clad in heavy leather boots. Their heads were hooded with sheepskin. Two carried big spears, and one a long-bladed sword slung casually over his shoulder. Nearby, a whole column of the brutes made its way along the shore of the cove, while a band of at least a hundred had gathered just out of bow range of the main cavern entrance. Enough of the dawn light had paled the sky that the rim of the valley, high above, was visible at this hour. Just beyond that crest, he knew, the walls of Brackenrock rose imposingly from the top of the mountain.

Kerrick observed a massive ogre approaching, the creature’s square face with unusually small tusks locked in a scowl. With a shock he saw the straggled hair dangling from her scalp and realized this one was a female. In one hand, the ogress held a long-hafted axe that looked as though the blade was pure gold.

The elf had a feeling of dire apprehension as she looked down on him. With a sharp gesture she reached down, tore his hood away, and seized his blond hair in her sausage-sized fingers.

“It is an elf! The elf!” cried the massive ogress, hoisting him upward with a neck-twisting jerk. “My Lord King! He is here, our prisoner! The messenger of the prophecy!”

She dropped him. Another massive ogre plodded toward them, through the snow. This was a bull, tusks wrapped in gold, wearing a golden breastplate that gleamed across his chest. Around his shoulders was draped a bearskin-the only black pelt among this small army of cloaked ogres. The elf remembered Moreen’s descriptions of Grimwar Bane, who had massacred her tribe and stolen the black bear pelt of her ancestors, and wondered if this could be the same brute-though she had referred to him as a prince, and the ogress had called him “king.”

“You?” growled the monstrous creature, squinting down at Kerrick as if he could barely see him.

Any clever retort he wanted to make died in his throat as he looked upward in awe and dread. “Well, I am an elf,” he admitted.

“What happened to your ear?” demanded the king.

“It was cut … by an elven lord,” Kerrick replied. He seized on a possibly helpful explanation. “I am an outcast, an enemy of my people!”

“Should we kill him now?” the king asked the female. The pale-eyed dwarf, Baldruk Dinmaker had come up behind the king, following in the deep footsteps the ogres had plowed through the snow.

“Not yet,” said the queen, with a pensive look at Kerrick. “There is a mystery to his presence here. Now that he is in our power, I would question him.”

“It will have to wait,” declared the king. “We have the humans trapped in the cave. We found the camp of their dogs and killed most of the mutts and the guards watching over their sleds. From the tracks, though, it’s clear that a great number of them have sought shelter in this barricaded cave.”

“In that little crack?” the queen asked skeptically.

The bull ogre snorted in dry amusement. “That’s a wide cave. They’re tried to block off the entrance with a wall of ice blocks, but we’ll see how that stands up to an ogre charge.”

“Good luck, my husband,” declared the ogress. She looked back at the elf, and Kerrick wondered if she was reconsidering the bother of keeping him alive.

Abruptly she picked up the axe. Kerrick flinched as she twisted her hands in opposing directions on the haft. Abruptly blue flames flickered along the edge of the blade. She lowered the golden head of the weapon, which hissed loudly as it made contact with the snow. Steam rose all around him.

“The Axe of Gonnas,” she said grimly. “With the merest excuse, I will cut off your leg.” She turned to the king. “Go to victory, my husband. I will watch the prisoner myself.”

“Good enough,” grunted the king. He drew a long, snuffling breath and shouted to the great, dark column of his warriors. “Pick up the pace, my ogres! We attack!”

“They’re massing out there,” Lars Redbeard said, as Moreen and Strongwind joined the panicked humans crowded into the great cavern. “There are at least a hundred of them.”

“There’s five hundred or more,” Little Mouse declared loudly. The youth was standing in a dark niche off to the side of the main cavern, six or eight feet above the floor. “A column that goes for a mile, along the far shore of the cove. Some of them went and pulled Kerrick Fallabrine’s boat over to the shore.” He glared at Strongwind Whalebone as he made this last statement.

“What witchcraft is that, lad?” demanded Strongwind. “Do you have a crystal ball?”

“No,” Mouse said. “I have a spyhole up here. The snow has melted in the last few days, and you can see the whole cove, even out to the sea, from up there.”

“He’s telling the truth,” Moreen declared resolutely, though Mouse’s spyhole was news to her. “Mouse is the best scout in our tribe.”

“Five hundred ogres? Or more?” Strongwind Whalebone looked stricken.

“We have two hundred of our men posted in the entry, behind the wall built by the Arktos,” Lars hurriedly explained. “I don’t think it would be wise to move any more in there. We wouldn’t have room to maneuver.”

“No, you’re right,” agreed Strongwind. He pointed. “If they charge the entrance and take the front of the cave, we’ll have to stand against them there, in the bottleneck before the main cavern. We can hold out for a while.…” His words faded. It was clear to everyone that the ogres had them in a nearly perfect trap.

“Is there any other way out of here?” he demanded, turning to Moreen.

She looked at Little Mouse, who had come down from the narrow niche to join the group on the main floor. “Mouse, you know this cave better than any of the rest of us.”

“The spyhole I told you about-one person at a time could squeeze out of it,” Mouse said. “You’d come out on a steep, snowy hillside, maybe two hundred feet above the open water of the cove. Of course, the ogres will spot it sooner or later. Even at night, you can see someone against the snow.”

“What else?” Moreen asked grimly. “Is there any other way out, is there a place we could hide?”

“Not hide,” Mouse said, “but there is one narrow way, a sort of path that climbs up through a chimney way in the back. I didn’t tell you about it before,” he said apologetically, “because it probably leads up to Brackenrock, to the room where all those tuskers sleep. I knew you’d worry about it.”

Moreen didn’t know whether to laugh or cry at that piece of news-a possible escape route, but one that led straight into a barracks full of walrus-men.

“It’s a tough climb, too,” the lad continued sheepishly. “There’s another reason I didn’t tell you. You’d have been really mad, and told me I could have broken my neck. I guess you’d have been right, too, but I didn’t! I’m sorry.”

“No, you did well,” Moreen said, giving him an embrace as her emotions choked off any more words. They had come all this way, and for what? For her tribe to be caught by surprise and held captive, and now trapped between an army of ogres and enemy tuskers.

“Brave lad you are,” King Strongwind acknowledged with obvious sincerity.

“What of the tuskers up there?” asked Dinekki, who had hobbled up to join the conversation. “Do they know about this cave? Or do they just ignore it?”

“Well, see, they’ve bricked up a wall to cover it it up. I could see through some gaps in the bricks, and we-well, Bruni or somebody else really strong, anyway-could knock that wall down with a good push. So no, I think they might not even know there’s a tunnel to a cave right underneath them.”

The chiefwoman turned to Strongwind Whalebone, found his blue eyes meeting hers with a look of respect. That way lay hope, at least a chance. To stand and try to hold the cave indefinitely was a recipe for disaster. Even if they fought with skill and bravery, the ogres would inevitably prevail.

“Give me two dozen of your men!” Moreen declared. “I’ll take them and some of my own warriors, and we’ll head through the cave and come around at the citadel from the back. With a small force, attacking by surprise, we’ll get the tuskers rushing out of there in a hurry! Your men can fight a rearguard action down here, hold the ogres long enough that we can get everyone up to Brackenrock.”

“But …” Strongwind Whalebone’s eyes narrowed.

“But what?” she demanded.

“It’s risky,” Strongwind said in a low voice, changing his tone.

“Can you get a rope up that chimney,” Moreen asked Little Mouse. “so the rest of us can get some help on the climb?”

“Well, sure,” he said. He lowered his voice and leaned close. “It will be tough for some of the grandmothers, though.”

Dinekki’s hand flicked out and slapped the boy on the back of the head. “You let us worry about that.” She turned back to Strongwind Whalebone. “Surely you could assign of a few of these strapping fellows to help us elders get up.”

“Of course,” Strongwind said curtly.

One of the Highlanders was already rummaging through the supply cache. “Here’s a rope,” he said. Moreen recognized him as the man Strongwind had called Mad Randall, the berserker. Mad Randall smiled most pleasantly as he slung the coil over his shoulder and ambled forward to volunteer.

“Bruni, Tildey, all of you Arktos warriors, come with me,” Moreen declared, then turned back to the king. “We’ll need our weapons.”

Strongwind seemed at last to regain his decisiveness. “All right. Good luck to you. Your spears are over there. Arm yourselves.” The king himself reached into the cache of Highlander supplies and brought out a gray-bladed sword. Holding it, hilt first, toward the chief of the Arktos, he asked, “Do you want to take this? It’s one of my old reliables. The edge is keen, and it might be more effective than a spear when you’re fighting inside the fortress.”

“Thank you,” she said, surprised at the feeling in his words. She took the weapon, felt the sharp edge and the weight of the metal blade and was grateful Kerrick had had time during the long Sturmfrost to show her a little about wielding a sword.

Strongwind gestured to Lars Redbeard “Take Randall, and twenty of your best men skilled with shortsword and shield. Let the boy show you how to get to Brackenrock. And-” he looked at Moreen and drew a deep breath “-I bid you follow the commands of Moreen, chief of the Arktos.”

Grimwar led his ogres in a grand charge, his own roars mingling with the battlecries of his warriors as they hurled themselves at the cave mouth, and the crude wall of ice blocks erected by the humans. The monstrous attackers lumbered through the snow, the big ogre boots crushing powdery drifts and trampling the shoreline into flatness.

A stream of arrows arced from the narrow mouth of the cave, but the humans hadn’t allowed space for more than a handful of archers to hold the defense. Several ogres roared in pain, plucking the vexing missiles from their flesh, and one hapless brute went down, stone dead, shot in the eye. Yet for the most part the light barrage had no effect as the charge was repeated.

This was warfare! A great roar of noise, an enemy who would stand and fight-if for no other reason than that he had no retreat-his whole army surging into the attack.

“Charge, my brutes!” Grimwar cried excitedly. “Kill the humans! A fist of gold to the ogre who brings me the enemy captain’s head!”

Already several warriors had boldly hurled themselves at the narrow entrance, and steel rang as unseen human defenders thrust their weapons through holes. One ogre lunged with his spear, then stumbled back and dropped his weapon, bleeding from a gash on his wrist. A second attacker quickly took his place, stabbing with his sword, then jumping halfway through the aperture to hack at the humans within. A moment later, he too fell, and as other ogres pulled his bleeding body out of the way, still others, just behind him, pushed their huge spears at the defenders within the cave.

“Knock down the wall! Use your strength, my warriors!” cried the ogre king. His troops had already set to work, chopping with axes and swords, bashing with hammers, surging against the ice wall with the considerable weight of their hulking bodies. A frenzied melee centered on the narrow doorway.

Satisfied for the moment, Grimwar stepped back and looked around. Across the still water he saw the curious boat and, on the bank, his queen, looming over the elf, who remained seated in the snow. He wondered, vaguely, why Stariz-who had been warning him for a year about the menace of this elf in Icereach-had not wanted to execute the prisoner immediately. Grimwar Bane took some pleasure from the fact that he had informed her, curtly, that interrogation must wait until after the battle.

At a safe distance from the battle stood Urgas Thanoi, watching the action with intense interest. Closer to Grimwar was Baldruk Dinmaker, grinning fiercely through his bushy beard. “A great day, Sire, a great day, indeed!” exclaimed the dwarf.

“Yes. On this day, we shall end the Arktos once and for all. Truly, Gonnas has smiled upon us.”

He glanced again at his wife, standing guard over the elf, and added, “You know of elves from your years on the continent, no doubt.”

Baldruk, spat disdainfully but nodded and agreed that yes, he had some experience with elven scum.

“Go to the queen. Be alert for elven treachery. See if you can discover what brought that wretched fellow to our land. The sooner we have learned what he can tell us, the sooner we can be done with him for good.”

“As you command, Sire.”

As the dwarf started away Grimwar was distracted by a loud boom. He whirled around to see that a sizeable section of the block wall had tumbled inward. Ogres poured through the gap, clawing and slipping, stabbing with swords, hurling spears against the suddenly exposed defenders.

These were no mere women warriors, the king observed. Instead of the small group reported by Urgas Thanoi, this was a full rank of strapping, bearded humans, who fought with skill and determination. “Highlanders!” he cried exultantly. “We’ve trapped a war party of Highlanders!”

The humans fought savagely. In moments the shattered ice blocks were slick with blood, and wounded warriors, human and ogre alike, thrashed and groaned across their irregular surface. More and more of the attackers converged on the breach, and the sheer numbers carried them through the line, burying the Highlanders under a wave of ogres.

Moments later, another huge section of the icy barricade fell away and, for the first time this day, Grimwar drew the Barkon Sword and waded into the fray. A desperate human thrust a spear that the ogre king swept aside with the tip of his blade. With a deft gesture he whipped the weapon around and stabbed the man clean through. Stepping over the corpse, the monarch entered the cave.

Another human advanced on him with a longsword. The king’s tusks flashed in a fierce grin as he met steel with steel, blocking, parrying, pushing the human backward. The man fought with courage, even forcing Grimwar to retreat a few steps. Finally the Highlander overreached, exposed himself, and the king brought the Barkon Sword down in an overhand smash that shattered the human’s sword, skull, and breastbone in a bloody splash.

Dead Highlanders were everywhere, and the survivors gathered into small knots, harried by ogres. A few of the men fell back toward a dark archway leading deeper into the cave, and with a triumphant bellow Grimwar pointed after them.

“They flee the steel of Suderhold!” he cried. “After them, my brutes! Pursue, and carry the day!”

“I’ve got the rope tied off,” Little Mouse called in a hoarse whisper from the overhead darkness.

“Thanks be to Chislev,” Moreen murmured, her knees almost buckling in relief. For the past half hour she had been dreading the sight of her young tribemate plummeting from the heights of the cavern’s natural chimney. The sides were sheer, hand- and footholds barely visible in the dim light of the oil lamp they had brought along. Yet the youth had scrambled up the shaft without hesitation.

Now it was time to move. “I’ll go first,” Moreen said, as Randall held the rope for her.

“Of course, lady chief,” he replied. “Just be careful.”

She started up, climbing hand over hand, bracing herself against the rocky walls. Within moments she had passed beyond the illumination of the oil lamp and was fighting claustrophobic terror. Soon she could see a glow above from the small candle Mouse had climbed with. Shortly afterward she found herself sprawled beside him on a narrow, mercifully flat section of cavern floor.

“Next!” whispered the boy as she caught her breath. Soon Randall, then Tildey, had joined her, while the rest of their battle party-twenty Arktos she-warriors, and twenty of the Highlanders-made their way up, one by one. The newcomers gathered on the landing, crowding the rest back from the edge.

“Let’s go have a look at Brackenrock,” Moreen suggested.

“I’ll show you the way,” Mouse offered, and she was surprised at the relief she felt that he was here to provide guidance.

The youth led Randall and the chiefwoman up a steep corridor and around several bends. Abruptly Moreen caught a whiff of raw fish, and in another moment the smell was overpowering. She remembered that stink from her earlier battle with the tuskers and felt a flush of primal hatred. Unconsciously she tightened her grip around the hilt of her iron-bladed sword.

Soon they reached the walled-up place Mouse had described. From within the shadowy chamber they could see orange light spilling through chinks in the stones. When she pressed her eye to the gap Moreen saw a huge room, lit by several blazing hearthfires, and containing dozens of the big thanoi warriors. Some were sitting around listlessly or sleeping, though a knot of them were gathered around a big table, arguing over some kind of game.

It made no difference what they did, Moreen vowed silently, with a prayer to Chislev Wilder. They were doomed.