The War of the Moonstone: an Epic Fantasy (11 page)

Unsmiling, Niara led her two
priestess through the crowds and met up with Raugst and his generals.

“High Mother,” he called, swinging
his steed around to face her. “You have come. Good.”

“I hope we have not kept you
waiting.”

“Not at all. I see you’ve brought
an escort.” He nodded to Hiatha and Lisilli, who met his eyes with stony
glares.

“Does that pose a problem?” Niara
knew that he would not gainsay her before his generals. They would have the
proper respect. Although, looking at them, there were several she did not
recognize. Had he placed his own kind among them, too?

“Of course not,” he said, waving
the question aside. His eyes stared into hers, and she felt a shiver course
through her. His eyes were those of a predator on the hunt, and she was his
prey. But, and there could be no mistaking it now, it was not a meal that he
sought. She would have been more comfortable if it were.

“Very well,” he said. “Since we are
all gathered . . .” He lifted his new horn, a lacquered black affair with a
gold band about it, and blew a long, low note. Instantly the soldiers began to
form ranks. “It’s time we were off. There are Borchstogs that wait to be
blooded, and we shall not keep them.” He lifted his sword over his head. “To
war!”

His generals lifted their swords,
too, and the metal flashed in the light of the sun.
“To war!”

Niara looked to her priestesses. Softly,
grimly, she said, “To war.”

Chapter
8

For weeks, Giorn headed south, skirting the
Borchstog-occupied fortresses, hiding from their roving bands. Often he saw
their glarumri fly overhead, searching for refugees, and he hid amongst the
trees when they came. At last he hit upon a Borchstog band headed south. This
was unusual, as every other Borchstog was intent on conquering the north. He
tracked the band for several days, and at last saw their leader. It was the
woman with the black hair and green eyes. She who had stolen the Moonstone. He
did not know who she was,
what
she
was, but he knew she was taking the Stone to Wegredon.

He remembered the feel of her
kisses, remembered the feel of her body against his, and his mind burned.

As he tracked them, he kept on the
lookout for a chance to slip in and steal the Moonstone before they reached
their destination, but the Borchstogs were careful and he could not find an
opening. What was more, they had somehow sensed his presence, and they had been
hunting him steadily. The main host would continue toward Wegredon, while
smaller bands would be dispatched to track and kill him. The Borchstogs even
recruited vampires and
lurum-cruvalen
from the surrounding countryside to help. Thus he had little time left for
retaking the Stone.

He followed the band of Borchstogs
through the highlands of Feslan, then through the rocky wastes between the
southern reaches of Felgrad and the northern foothills of the Aragst, and at
last trailed the band into the dreaded Aragst Mountains
themselves. It was a black land, unholy ground. These mountains had been raised
by Gilgaroth ages ago to impede the armies of the Alliance, or so it was said, and they bore
his taint. Fell creatures lived here, preying off the weak, following the will
of the One. Legend said that he could look through the eyes of his creatures.

Giorn hoped the legends were wrong,
or that the Dark One was occupied with business of His own, for Giorn spent
most of his time hiding from the roving bands. What little time remained to him
consisted of trying to find food and sleep. Fortunately the mountains provided
an endless number of fissures, caves and sprawling forests for him to hide in.

All the time he wondered what
Vrulug wanted the Moonstone for. The Enemy had some plan, some grand design
they were working toward, and it depended on the Stone. But how? Was it as
simple as destroying it? It couldn’t be; otherwise they would not need to take
the artifact to Wegredon. Surely the Last Gift could be destroyed just as
easily in Feslan.

The question gnawed at him as he
worked his way up into the forbidding Aragst Mountains.
He drew closer ever to Wegredon, the keep of Vrulug. He could sense its taint
on the air, cold and bitter, could feel it in his bones. In his dreams dark
figures loomed over him, and he heard mocking laughter and horrid shrieks. He
saw Niara, weeping, bleeding, being savaged by Borchstogs, and he woke up
gasping.

Waking brought little relief. He
heard screams, far off in the woods, screams of men and others, and he
frequently came upon naked bodies of Borchstog victims. They would be nailed to
trees, their limbs crudely sawn off, their bodies showing signs of terrible
tortures and mutilations.

As he went, the unnatural chill in
the air turned to heat. Boiling hot drafts wafted up from the south, bringing
with them the stench of sulfur, and he wondered if it were true about the
moat-fires of Wegredon.
Surely that’s
just a legend
. On he went. He grew weary and overcome by a sense of
despair. Horrid, inhuman howling echoed throughout the forests, and the clouds
twisted into strange and sinister shapes. The air turned bitter in his mouth,
and his dreams grew worse. Always they were of Niara. He missed her keenly, and
feared for her. What if Meril had been fool enough to continue to trust Raugst?
The idea grew in Giorn’s mind until it became a paranoid certainty.
I must return to Thiersgald
.
I must return soon.

One weary evening, his journey
ended. He heard the crackle of a great flame, and the Borchstogs in the company
he was following let loose howls of glee. Giorn dragged himself up a tall pine
tree on a knoll, not knowing what to expect, and beheld the evil splendor of
Wegredon itself.

“Dear Omkar . . .”

Great, thick towers stabbed high
into the night, jutting from a profusion of ramparts and bulwarks that were
actually set
into
the mountain wall. What
was most impressive about the fortress was its infamous Moat-Fire. Giorn had
thought the tales surely an exaggeration, but no: a moat of high, leaping flame
encircled the half of Wegredon that projected from the rock, and its bright
tongues melted the down-flashing snow, a war of fire and ice. Above the curtain
of flame loomed the high black towers of the keep, silhouetted against the
stars and drifting clouds that slithered and stalked their way across the
heavens with grasping tentacles and spit of flame.

It awed him that the legend he had
heard so much about actually existed and was just as intimidating as he’d
always been told. Could it truly be fused with Illistriv, the Second Hell? Either
way, there was no easy way around it.

Movement drew his eye. He watched
the company of Borchstogs approach the leaping flames of the Moat-Fires. They
paused, and the great iron drawbridge slammed down, scattering sparks high into
the black night. The Borchstogs dismounted and began to enter the fortress,
passing over the drawbridge and between the leaping walls of fire. As soon as
they vanished within, the drawbridge lifted back up and the curtain of fire
sealed up behind them. There was no way through. Giorn cursed.

Then he noticed the handlers that
took the great Serpents and guided them into the woods. Likely the gaurocks
were returning to their dark caverns.

Giorn followed. Borchstogs led the
gaurocks through forests, down steep inclines, then up a dry ravine into a
great fissure in the mountain. As Giorn watched, the massive creatures
disappeared inside.

He did not follow. There would be
too many Borchstogs there, not to mention the gaurocks themselves. But higher
up the frozen, weed-grown face of the cliff were other caves, other fissures. They
must all connect somewhere. He had long heard the tales of Wegredon’s mines, of
how cruelly Vrulug had used his slaves. They had carved deep and labyrinthine
mines below Wegredon and had scoured the mountain of ore. Legend said that
Vrulug had been too cruel, had driven his slaves too hard, forced them to dig
too many tunnels too quickly, and that someday they would give out and Wegredon
would simply collapse into the mountain.

Giorn thought that might be a
little too much to hope for, but these caves proved the existence of the mines.
It took little doing for him to scramble up the side of the cliff, hanging onto
frozen weeds and roots, and slip inside one of them.

He lit his lantern and squeezed
through the opening. Rough walls of rock pressed in on both sides. His small
light lit the way immediately around him, but the illumination did not go far. All
was blackness ahead.
This is a bad idea
.
But the alternative was to let Vrulug possess the Moonstone.

Shivering in the cold, sword in one
hand and lantern in the other, Giorn stepped forward. Bats chittered overhead
and the tight space reeked of their offal. Deeper he went, and the corridor
wound and twisted, branched and was bisected. The walls widened out and he
passed through broad avenues. Occasionally he encountered the skeleton of a
Borchstog or one of their slaves, or a piece of armor or pottery. Stalagmites
reared up like crooked fangs, beaded with frozen saliva. The lantern drove back
the darkness, revealing the tunnels bit by bit. Shadows swallowed the world in
his wake.

Something was wrong. The air grew
hotter, more oily, more bitter. The taint of this place grew thicker, and a
weight seemed to descend on his mind.

A more immediate problem confronted
him. He was lost. Perhaps hopelessly so.
No
,
he told himself.
The Serpents are below. I
need only find the right cross-tunnel.

He pressed forward. The taint in
the air grew stronger, hotter, and suddenly it was as if all the hope and
warmth in him were driven away. Horrors rose in his mind. Dark shapes reared
over him, laughing. He saw Niara, screaming. Her flesh sloughed away from her
face. The world twisted, heaved, and Giorn gasped for air. With difficulty, he
blinked the horrid images away, but the feeling of madness and evil persisted,
and his heart beat rapidly.

Something powerful was near. Greater
than Wegredon. Greater than Vrulug.

Gilgaroth
,
he thought.
It’s the Wolf. It has to be.

That was crazy. Why would Gilgaroth
come here, to the borderlands? Unless . . .

The
Stone,
Giorn realized. Gilgaroth might have come for the Stone. The sound
of drums reached him, low, soft, rhythmic drumming, and Giorn stood
stock-still, not even daring to breathe. He listened, straining his ears.

Boom.
Boom. Boom.
The drumming issued from many drums, but what he could hear was
only the faintest echo of it. He could feel it in his bones, reverberating up
through his feet. He could feel it in the air, shaking and malevolent. It was
everywhere, yet nowhere.

He couldn’t tell what direction it
came from, but he thought it would be best to go the opposite way.

Boom.
Boom. Boom.

He squared his shoulders, stabbed
the lantern forward, and took a step. The volume of the drumming remained the
same. He took another.

The drumming came faster.

The sound filled his ears and heart
as he marched through the darkness. His imagination spun, peopling the
blackness with strange and sinister things, picturing the drummers in a myriad
of different monstrous shapes and sizes. And what of the reason for the
drumming? Were the drummers summoning demons to some awful feast deep in the
dark halls of the forgotten earth?

As it happened, it was worse than
he had imagined.

He was just slipping around a bend
in the hall when the way opened out before them onto a gallery overlooking a vast
chamber. Darkness concealed its exact dimensions. It could have been hundreds
of yards across, or a mile. The ceiling stretched up into lofty and unseen heights,
shadows wreathing it.

Great, twisted columns towered from
the ground high into the air in a rough circle hundreds of yards in diameter,
their tips supporting lurid flame that danced and swayed to otherworldly
currents. On some sat not flame but hunched, winged, alien figures, beady eyes
turned not within the circle but without. Giorn guessed these to be the
guardians of this affair, keeping unwanted visitors out. Not that any would
want in, for inside that vast circle of monolithic pillars stretched a sea of Borchstogs.
On their knees, the thousands of demons bowed toward a raised dais on which
stood a great black altar seeming to throb with horrid energies, and on this
altar was tied a slim young girl, naked and struggling against the ropes that
restrained her.

“Dear Omkar,” whispered Giorn, then
immediately clamped his mouth shut. He crouched down and dimmed the lantern.

His heart went out to the girl. He
knew dire things were in store for her and longed to be of assistance, but the
Borchstogs were too many.

And there were not just Borchstogs.

A tall figure stood before the
altar, facing the sea of supplicants. Grim and nightmarish it was, standing on
two feet like a man but covered in fur, with long, claw-tipped arms hanging at
his side, a demonic, wolf-like head, and great, bat-like wings sprouting from
his back: savage, bestial, evil.

“Vrulug,” Giorn whispered, and
unconsciously clutched a fist.

The wolf-lord’s voice rolled over
the gathering, harsh yet fluid. He spoke Oslogon so that Giorn could only
understand him after some thought and even then not every word.

“ . . . honored by the Presence of
the Great One,” Vrulug was saying. “And we should be honored beyond measure to
be assisting Our Lord and Master in fulfilling His Destiny. Because of our
actions tonight and onward, His Will shall triumph, His Shadow shall stretch
over all and encompass the World, He shall be loosed from beyond the Black Wall
of these mountains and be free to devour His enemies, just as He shall devour
our offering of this elf maiden now . . .”

Giorn squinted, studied the girl
upon the altar, and saw that Vrulug spoke the truth. She was slender and
supple, and at first Giorn had thought this the result of youth. Now he saw
that she was a mite too delicate, too beautiful, too full of the Grace of the
Omkar to be mortal.

“All hail Our Lord, the Great
Gilgaroth!” roared Vrulug.

The Borchstogs thundered their love
and devotion.
“Roschk Gilgaroth!”
they bellowed, and the hall shook to the sound of their passion.

A coldness descended on Giorn’s
mind, and he swayed drunkenly, nearly crying out. Something huge and dark
stirred in the shadows on the far side of the altar, something awesome, full of
might and malice. It surged forward, wreathed in shadows—no,
emanating
them—colossal and primal.

It opened Its eyes. Fire blazed
forth from them like twin red suns. It loomed over the girl on the altar, and she
cried out in fear, then, overcome by awe and terror, fell silent. The Thing’s
fiery gaze lifted from her to Vrulug, then swept the gathering.

“I
have come!”
it roared. The Borchstogs responded vociferously.
“I have come to set the Final Days of this
siege in motion. No longer will the weaker races band together to stem the tide
of My conquest. Felgrad shall fall. My armies harry the other kingdoms of the
Crescent, thus they cannot come to its aid. Felgrad, weakest link in the chain
of the Alliance, shall be no more. The chain shall be broken. The Alliance will crumble. With
it destroyed, with the Crescent fallen, no might of Man or Elf can stand
against me. The northlands are soft. Too long have they relied on the Crescent
to protect them. I will pluck them like overripe fruit, and they will taste as
sweet.”