‘Captive,’ she rasped, forcing the words out. She began to feel dizzy again, and struggled to keep her poise. ‘Bringing… to the city. Take us there. Lord… Imladrik…’
That was all she got out. Black spots appeared before her eyes and she felt her head go thick.
The griffon-rider gazed at Drutheira doubtfully, then back to Liandra.
‘I can take you to the city,’ he said, tipping the gourd up for her again. ‘Though Imladrik is not here, nor has been for many years.’ The rider had a young, lean face, one that was both serious and mournful. ‘Would that he were. I fear you have not found much sanctuary here.’
Liandra drank greedily. She barely heard the words; all she knew was that she had cheated death — again. That made her happy, almost deliriously so.
‘There is little time,’ she said painfully. ‘Use it well. Take us both.’
A fire burned in the heart of the forest, as tall and broad as the great oaks that crowded around the edges of the clearing. It roared and crackled, sending sparks trailing high up into the night sky and skirling above the treetops.
During the journey west the dwarfs had lit no fires, mindful then of the need for stealth. Now that need had passed.
Morgrim’s surviving thanes sat around the blaze, their armour limned a deep orange. Grondil had gone, last seen charging into the path of a golden wyrm, swinging his warhammer wildly around his head and yelling obscenities at the top of his voice. Frei had survived but his arms were both broken, rendering him furiously weaponless. Many others were lost.
Those who remained stared moodily into the flames. Morgrim could see the wounds they had all sustained — deep wounds from speartips or dragon-claws. Frei had lost almost all of his incredibly finely crafted armour, ripped from his back by one of the beasts. He’d been lucky to survive, broken arms or no, though Morgrim knew Frei didn’t see things quite like that.
They were consumed with shame. Their cheeks glowed red, their hands rubbed one another, knuckle over knuckle, wearing at their anguish. The dirges had not stopped; even now Morgrim could hear them from the trees, murmured around lesser campfires by the warriors he had brought to the face of ruin.
As for himself, Morgrim felt nothing but resolution. He had felt it ever since leaving the mountains — only Imladrik’s doomed attempts to halt the violence had shaken that certainty. There was a kind of purity in adversity and, now that they had been so comprehensively ravaged, all that remained was to fight on. There was nowhere to go, no further questions to ask, nothing left but unbreakable stubbornness.
Which is, after all, what we are known for.
‘And so what now?’ asked Frei, his voice thick with weariness.
Morek spat on the earth. ‘Back to the holds. Muster again, then we strike. Like a hammer on the metal, they will break eventually.’
‘No, rhunki,’ said Morgrim quietly. He remained staring at the flames, appreciating the heat of them against his exposed skin. ‘We will not go back.’
Morek looked at him with surprise. To contradict a runelord was rare.
‘What do you think will happen when we return?’ Morgrim asked, speaking slowly, almost sonorously. ‘We could assemble a host three times the size and the result would be the same. The drakk are too strong. I should have listened to Imladrik. I took it for boasting, but he was too noble for that. Grimnir’s eyes, he was trying to warn me.’
The other thanes looked at him warily. They didn’t like talk like this.
‘We cannot fight them like this,’ Morgrim said. ‘We must find another way.’
Frei laughed bitterly. ‘And what way would that be? Can you now fly in the air? Can you shoot flame from earth to sky?’
‘Don’t write that off,’ said Morgrim, utterly serious. ‘But for now? We must forswear Tor Alessi. We must, for the moment, forget the oaths we took there.’
The thanes began to mutter amongst themselves. Even Morek looked perturbed. ‘We cannot forget them,’ he warned.
‘We can let them rest. There are other ways to hurt them.’ Morgrim never took his eyes off the flames. They were reassuringly alive to him, like flickering remnants of the ancestor gods he had worshipped his whole life. ‘How many drakk do they have? I saw six. If others exist, they are over the sea. In one place, those six can destroy any army we create.’
As he spoke he lifted his eyes from the fire and studied the reaction of his surviving thanes. ‘That is the key: one place. They cannot be everywhere. They cannot defend Tor Alessi and Athel Toralien, Athel Maraya and Sith Rionnasc, Tor Reven, Kor Peledan or the hundred other fortresses they have built. If we cannot defeat them in one battle then we shall defeat them in a thousand small ones. We must split ourselves, fracture our armies into pieces. Every King shall lead his host, every hold shall work on its own; no grand host will be assembled, not until the very end.’
Morgrim’s jaw clenched. ‘This is our land. Why do we fight like they do, out under the sky, lined up to face their magics? We are tunnellers. We can melt into the stone, sink back into the soil. We need no hosts pulled together in the open for the drakk to fly at.’
His eyes went flat as he envisioned it.
‘We can mount endless attacks, one after the other, directed at every fortress they possess. They will turn most of them back. They will kill many more of us. But some will get through. One by one, the walls will fall. We can make this world a hell for them, one in which the suffering never ceases. They fight well, the elgi. They fight better than any warriors I have ever seen. But do they suffer well? No one suffers like the dawi. We will make this the battleground — they will be broken on the anvil of our suffering.’
He finished. The silence was broken by the low roar of the fire and the murmur of the dirges. The thanes listened. They digested. They reflected.
Morgrim leaned back, clasping his hands together. They would need time. The High King would need time, as would the other warlords and captains who were already marching towards their future battles. Word would spread out, travelling like wildfire along the mud-thick lanes of the deep forest, gradually spreading from mouth to mouth until the whole world was running with it.
Morek shook his head. ‘I don’t know,’ he muttered.
That was good. A runelord would never simply agree; there needed to be deliberation, debate, rumination. As a start, given the circumstances, Morek’s stance was admirably open.
Morgrim determined to say no more that night. He would listen to the others, knowing that in time his counsel would prevail. He had seen the way the war must now be fought. In time the others would too.
A thousand tiny battles, each one grinding into the bedrock of the earth, each one a new wound on the weary face of the elgi empire.
He was already planning his next move. Before dusk the following day he would be marching. His army would splinter, each shard heading in a different direction, and he would make his own way among them, no longer the leader of many holds but the warlord of one.
He could see the spires of his prey in his mind, rising from the dry lands to the south, the fragile citadel created by his enemy.
For revenge, for the deaths of Tor Alessi, that one would be the first to burn.
Sunlight angled into the marble chamber from high glass windows. Low beds ran along the walls, dozens of them, each occupied by a wounded highborn. Incense burned in suspended thuribles, a soft fragrance of lavender and marjoram designed to mask the underlying tang of blood. Attendants came and went, feet shuffling on the stone, pale robes brushing.
Thoriol lay on his back, staring at the ceiling. His whole side throbbed with a dull pain, worse when he moved. His chest and stomach were swathed in bandages, some of them bloody.