“Long live King Bellowgranite! Hail to the true king!”
The cheers resounded through the great cavern, and despite his gloom and worry, Brandon couldn’t help but feel a resurgence of hope. Yet when he reached the royal party and spotted Gretchan’s father, he was reminded of her absence again; and everything else seemed to pale to insignificance when compared to her dire peril.
Tarn Bellowgranite and Otaxx Shortbeard led the Tharkadan Legion to a station in the great central plaza of Norbardin, and it was there that Brandon joined them.
“Congratulations, my lad!” Tarn proclaimed expansively. “Your Kayolin troops did a magnificent job! The city is retaken!”
“And what word of Willim the Black?” asked Otaxx Shortbeard, ever more practical than his liege.
“He’s taken Gretchan!” Brandon said, seizing Otaxx by the shoulder, clenching the old soldier tightly. “Willim the Black has taken Gretchan! He’s magicked her away, and they’ve disappeared.”
The veteran general’s face paled. “By Reorx-do you have any idea where they have gone?”
“There’s no way to tell. We’ve learned that his army, such of it as survives, is fortifying the main road to the Urkhan Sea. We’re making ready an attack there.”
“By all means, make haste,” Tarn said, overhearing the conversation and immediately growing serious. “We’ll find that villain-and get Gretchan back, I trust.”
Brandon nodded and turned back to the war. He hoped the king was right. But that was all he could go on …
Hope.
Chap Bitters proved to be an inventive and hardworking captain. Operating under Blade Darkstone’s orders, he had sent out numerous small parties of his men, ordering them to quietly muster any of Willim’s troops they could find. Hour by hour he gathered a steadily expanding force in the concealment of the warehouse district.
The rest of the company had set to work expanding and fortifying their space. By knocking out the walls connecting the coal storage building to several neighboring structures, they had created a large hideaway in which to gather and wait. All the external doors except their initial entrance were fortified and guarded around the clock.
By the time some forty-eight hours had passed, General Darkstone had assembled more than a thousand loyal Theiwar. For the time being, they kept a low profile, concealed in the bank of warehouses along the darkest streets of Norbardin’s industrial quarter.
Most of the citizens in the area had been frightened away, and those who weren’t and could be found were given a quick choice: either join Darkstone’s force or die.
Most of them, of course, volunteered.
At the same time, the general’s spies brought him steady reports about the enemy’s progress. The fall of the palace was reported to him, though it did not come as a surprise: Darkstone knew that the battered structure was ill suited for defense.
More significant were the reports that Willim’s troops were massing to make a stand on the Urkhan Road. Though they had suffered tremendous casualties thus far, the general knew that his troops, added to the black wizard’s, meant they still had a sizable force at their disposal.
Then he looked up to see that, in a breath of magic, his master had come to him.
“Welcome, sire,” Darkstone said, bowing deeply. He didn’t know whether he would be allowed to live through to the end of his report, but he was not ashamed of his recent activities. And when he explained about all the recruiting he had done, boasting of the nearly twelve hundred loyal soldiers collected there in secret, poised on the enemy’s flank and, as yet, undiscovered by the invaders, Willim the Black was not displeased.
“It is as if you have read my mind,” the wizard said with uncharacteristic praise. “I have been preparing a bit of a surprise for our enemies. First, I will lead them away from here, into a perfect trap. I am certain that, flushed with victory as they are, they will follow me …”
Then, Blade Darkstone would have a great ambush ready-an ambush that would either win the war or leave a scar of blood and despair across the breadth of the new king’s realm.
NINETEEN
Gretchan sat in her cage and watched the two black-robed females talking in low tones, looking frequently in her direction. Sadie, Facet, and the imprisoned cleric were alone in the vast cavern of the wizard’s lair, Willim having teleported away to an unknown location several minutes earlier.
The priestess stared at her staff, resting on the wizard’s worktable, well out of her reach. To her, that sacred artifact seemed almost to thrum with power. The anvil on the head retained a faint glow, which was very unusual when she wasn’t holding onto it. She remembered how the device had seemed to absorb the dissolving essence of the fire dragon, and she couldn’t help but wonder how the presence of so much uncontained power could affect the thing.
The black wizard’s worktable, as usual, was covered by a scattered assortment of vials and jars, dishes and boxes filled with components too vile and mysterious for the cleric to identify. Among them lay scrolls, some rolled into tubes, while others were spread flat for reading. In her rare glimpses, Gretchan had seen that some of the pages contained various arcane symbols, none of which made sense to her. But she knew enough about the ways of wizards to understand that the scrolls contained written versions of his spells, some of them undoubtedly very powerful. Through the medium of a scroll, even a wizard who was not powerful enough to learn a specific casting could obtain the means of using certain elaborate magics, by carefully reading the words aloud.
Among all the detritus on the table, rising higher than anything else, stood the bell jar that had caught the cleric’s eyes long before. A lone blue spark drifted around in that jar like a wistful firefly, seeming to fly without pattern or purpose. Gretchan had noticed the elder apprentice, Sadie, paying a great deal of attention to that jar, frequently glancing at it with a frown of concern or worry on her face. Once, when neither of the other wizards was looking, she had gone over to it and placed a tender hand on the glass, almost stroking it affectionately.
Beyond the table stood a large cabinet closed and locked. But Facet and Willim had opened it several times during Gretchan’s captivity, and she had noticed that it contained rows and rows of bottles in a variety of sizes and shapes and colors. Some were so large, they looked like wine jugs, and they were opaque, as if made of clay. Others were tiny vials of clear, delicate glass, with liquids that were colorless and watery or dark and thick as syrup. She had guessed that it was the wizard’s potion cabinet, and she knew enough about sorcery to know that such dangerous elixirs could offer the one who drank them any of a wide variety of powerful, albeit temporary, powers. She’d heard of potions that allowed the imbiber to fly or to become invisible or to move at a speed far faster than any mortal could attain. Others were known to bewitch the drinker into viewing the one who had offered the drink as a great friend, a person to be trusted and favored in every way possible. There were even more sinister and vile applications, up to and including lethal poison. In fact, it had been the wizard’s intent to test one such potion on Gus, an incident which had led to the gully dwarf’s fortuitous escape from Thorbardin, when he had drunk a potion of teleportation instead of poison.
Gretchan couldn’t offer any comments or start a conversation with the other dwarf maids because, before he had departed, Willim the Black had once again muffled her with a spell of silence. In fact, he had even ordered Facet, the younger apprentice, to bring the priestess food and water. Gretchan had unquestionably been drained and exhausted by the confrontation with the fire dragon, and after quenching her hunger and thirst, she had, for the first time since her capture, fallen into a deep sleep.