Dawnbringer Read online

  Chapter 24

  “Let’s move! Push on through to the city gate and don’t stop!” Captain Barristal bellowed to the contingent of fifty Watchmen at his heels. “They’re overrun, and I won’t let our lads be taken by these whoresons who think they can take over our city!”

  Traven felt cold sweat running down his back as the formation broke into a double-time march. Confusing reports had been coming in all night from all over Nexus. He’d filed the first one, then others had quickly followed, of different fiends being spotted around the city. They would attack and disappear, only to reappear later at another location. The Watch had been unable to determine any method to their chaotic attacks.

  Until now.

  The demons had apparently converged on the city gates, which had been shut and barred on the Pale Lord’s orders ever since the destruction of the foundry.

  Traven could only guess at their objective. He did wonder what had happened to the fearsome Warders, the Pale Lord’s enforcers of the peace. The creatures usually appeared when powerful adversaries were involved, often too much for the Watch or Magehunters to handle. Unfortunately, he hadn’t seen or heard of any sightings of them since the disturbance at the fortress a couple weeks past.

  Something was definitely very wrong if the appearance of a hundred fiends rampaging through the city didn’t draw out the Warders.

  Adelard’s face was pale beside him. His friend adjusted his helm from slipping down and glanced nervously at Traven. Garrick and the rest of his squad grimly jogged along down the rank.

  Much sooner than Traven would have liked, Barristal waved them to a halt. The sounds of pitched battle came from up ahead—the ring of steel, cries of terror, and wails of the dying—all punctuated by the animalistic snarls and grunts of their adversaries.

  A scout ran up to Barristal, and they had a hurried conversation. The captain turned to face the rest of them. “They are just ahead—our lads are on the verge of falling. We’ll strike from the rear and crush them against the wall, men! I want a volley of crossbows then the charge. Make me proud—make your city proud! Attack!”

  The first two ranks raised their loaded crossbows and advanced around the curve of the street, the rest marching close behind. Barristal dropped his upraised arm, and the twang of a score of released crossbows filled Traven’s ears. Squeals and snarls of pain reached their ears.

  “Charge!”

  The crossbowmen dodged to the sides, and then Traven and the rest of the Watchmen were charging the gate from inside Nexus, a scenario he never imagined would happen.

  From the third rank back, Traven could see glimpses of fighting over the heads and shoulders of the men before him. Hard-pressed Watchmen fought atop the wall against uvkra—massive warriors in black armor. The lizard-like fiends, laksaar, swarmed around the stairs, forcing some of the soldiers back as they gained ground.

  Then they were attacking the enemy from behind. Traven suddenly found himself front and center as the first two ranks split apart. Fear chilled his veins at the horrible sight before him.

  Huge spiderlike creatures stood before him, milling behind the other fiends. The nearest drolnac spun at their charge, its four arms weaving a curtain of slashing death. The sergeant in the rank before Traven was chopped apart, his head swept off his torso. His hot blood spurted, and Traven felt it running down his neck under his armor.

  He hacked wildly, opening a gash in the drolnac’s shiny black abdomen. One of its forelegs shot out, and its foot, sharp as a spear tip, slammed into his hurriedly raised shield.

  Garrick gurgled and fell to his right, his throat torn out.

  Screams and cries of panic spread through the Watchmen. Out of the corner of his eye, Traven saw a dozen or so men in the rear turn tail and flee.

  “Damn cowards!” he screamed. He raised his sword and slashed at the drolnac again.

  Adelard drove his sword into the lower belly of its ghastly humanoid torso, where it joined the bulbous spider abdomen. Ichor stained his blade. The drolnac slashed at him, knocking his helm off. Adelard drew his sword free and backpedaled, tripping over a fallen soldier.

  Traven drove his sword deep into the beast’s abdomen as it reared up to impale Adelard on its sharp forelegs. It squealed and skittered sideways, uncannily swift.

  Then Barristal was there like a stout wall amidst the chaos. He calmly drove his sword through the drolnac’s chest. It wobbled and staggered backward toward Traven, who hacked at its neck. Ichor spewed, and the fiend finally fell, its face blank save for a maw of razor-sharp teeth and rows of red eyes.

  Traven shuddered, knowing if he survived the battle, the creature’s fearsome visage would haunt his dreams for years to come.

  “Back at ’em!” Barristal barked. “Don’t let these whoresons take the gates!” Several men followed the captain as he moved toward the stairs on the right.

  Traven helped Adelard up, noticing his friend’s hand shaking as he raised his sword again. He quickly surveyed the carnage. Half the Watchmen had fallen or fled in just those few moments. A handful of drolnac had been slain though the price had been high, judging from the corpses of Watchmen surrounding them. A dozen or so of the lizardlike laksaar were down, which left the forces about evenly matched, numberwise.

  “Watch out!” Adelard shoved Traven back.

  A huge axe slammed into the ground, splitting cobblestone with a loud crack. A massive armored uvkra wrenched its axe free. It towered over Traven, and heat poured from it like a furnace.

  Adelard stabbed his sword at it, but it glanced off the thick armor. The uvkra spun and hacked with the greataxe. It cleaved through Adelard’s shield, splintering it, and his arm folded over, the bone shattered. He cried out, staggering back as the fiend readied its next blow.

  With a cry of impotent fury, Traven drove his sword into the back of the uvkra’s gorget. The black metal buckled, and his sword drove into the flesh beneath. Smoke curled out around the tip of his sword.

  The creature lurched and spun. Traven raised his shield, but the monster’s thick arm backhanded him, the force slamming the shield into Traven’s jaw. He staggered and fell as if he’d taken a roundhouse punch. Colors flared at the edges of his vision, and he struggled to retain consciousness.

  The uvkra raised the greataxe overhead in both hands, and Traven knew it would split him apart like a length of blood sausage on the butcher’s block. He raised his sword defensively in an unsteady hand although he knew it would be no use.

  The greataxe descended, glinting wickedly in the torchlight as it came to end his life.

  But the blow never struck.

  A blur of gray and crimson slammed the beast in the flank, launching it to the side with surprising force. The blur resolved itself into a man of indeterminate age, with a bald head save for a patch of hair on the top. He wore rough-spun gray clothes with a crimson sash around his waist.

  A dozen or so more similarly dressed men rushed in and lit into the fiends. Some carried stout staves while others fought barehanded, but the result was the same. Their fists, feet, and staves struck like stones, and fiends fell around them. A ragged cheer went up from the dwindling number of men on the wall.

  The man with the crimson sash reached down and helped Traven to his feet. His grip was strong.

  Traven thanked him. He was about to ask who they were when he saw the uvkra had gotten to its hands and knees. “It’s still alive.”

  The man turned, unconcerned, and strode over beside the demon. He raised his foot straight up, near his face, and dropped it just as suddenly onto the fiend’s back. The blow landed with a crunch of dented armor, and the uvkra fell back to the ground. The man knelt and wrenched its helmet off. He sent a flurry of punches into the beast’s head, bouncing its face off the cobblestones. Traven could hear bone crunch from the blows, and when the man smoothly stood back up, the fiend lay still. Smoke curled from its skin, which was blackened and scarred as if from some horrific fire.

  “Who are you
?” Adelard asked, coming up to stand beside Traven. His friend looked as shaken as he felt, cradling his broken arm.

  “I’m Brother Cerador of the Order of the Illuminated Path,” the man replied.

  Brother Cerador was unremarkable in appearance, his features weathered, yet he was still in his prime. His calm presence instilled confidence in Traven.

  These are monks, he realized in surprise. He opened his mouth to ask what brought them to their aid, but the man preempted him.

  “The Weave bade us lend aid,” he said with a smile. “For the time is nigh—she will arrive soon, and we stand ready to lend our assistance.”

  “She?” Traven asked, puzzled.

  “The Lady of Twilight, of course. She will come to liberate the city in its darkest hour and claim the seat of power as the Weave foretold.”

  Traven stood speechless, not knowing if the man was mad or not.

  “Your men could still use assistance,” Cerador reminded him, a twinkle in his eye.

  The monks, along with the remnants of the Watch, had swiftly cleared the square around the gate. Traven’s jaw dropped when he witnessed a slim female monk, less than a quarter the weight of an uvkra, dodge the beast’s powerful strike, get inside its guard, and somehow manage to flip it with relative ease down onto its back. A pair of her fellows battered and crushed it with staff, fists, and feet until it remained unmoving.

  Battles still were being fought on the stairs and atop the wall. Barristal and a handful of men had nearly cut down all the fiends on the right-hand staircase. Several uvkra skirmished with Watchmen on the barbican above the gates. The left-hand staircase was nearly lost to a swarm of laksaar. A dozen or so drolnac swarmed up the gates themselves as well as the rough wall as easily as any of their spider kin would. The defenders would soon be overrun despite their gains on the ground. The gatehouse with the mechanism to open the gates was above the left-hand staircase and would soon be lost to enemy control.

  Traven cranked his crossbow and nocked a bolt. He loosed it into the back of one of the drolnac nearing the gatehouse. It hissed and slipped but still managed to cling to the stone wall.

  Brother Cerador ran over to the left-hand staircase, and a pair of monks joined him. He raced up them two at a time, barely breaking stride as he came up behind the laksaar. Fists and elbows flew in a blur, and monsters flew off the staircase to land hard on the cobblestone street below. Traven and Adelard finished off the ones that survived with thrusts of their swords.

  A lightning bolt suddenly crackled past Traven and slammed into one of the drolnac. It forked and struck two more fiends, sending them falling from the wall.

  He blinked away his spotty vision from the blinding bolt and was heartened to see a squad of Magehunters had arrived to reinforce them. The wizard cast another spell, and three glowing darts streaked up to drop another drolnac. Warriors loosed a volley of crossbow bolts into the fiends before marching up and efficiently cutting down the wounded drolnac.

  Then it was over. Traven sheathed his sword and tried to catch his breath. They had saved the gates. He didn’t know why the fiends wanted the city gates opened, but the fact they had failed was a blessing.

  Adelard grabbed his arm and pointed atop the barbican. Brother Cerador was waving for them to join him. They made the quick climb and walked over to the monk. Barristal was at the other end, clasping hands with the handful of remaining Watchmen, praising them for holding the gates.

  “It begins,” Cerador said simply.

  Traven followed his gaze. The Ashen Plains stretched to the horizon, where the edge of Nexus ended in the void. The plains were empty of both commerce and travelers. The portals had all been shut and the gates with them.

  Except the portals weren’t all shut. In the distance, crackling blue energy was limning a large portal.

  “That’s not supposed to be happening,” he said, and a shiver ran down his spine.

  He understood then why the fiends had attacked the gate when the first monstrous figures came streaming through the portal. Then more portals began to appear, along with even more ominous shapes.

  Chapter 25

  The landscape changed and shifted, and the companions were no longer in Achronia. The air was a sickly yellow color, the ground brittle and cracked like the baked mud of a dry lake bed. The atmosphere was heavy—leaden, as if the weight of all the other layers of the Abyss were pressing down and making it difficult to draw breath from the thick air.

  A great sense of unease filled Nera, and from the white knuckles on hilts and nervous glances about, she could tell her companions felt the same.

  “I will go no farther,” Sirath said. “Our truce ends here, Engineer’s daughter. I go to rally my kin to answer the summons if this war you speak of is true. Know this—the next time our paths cross, we shall be foes once more.”

  “I could ask no more, Sirath. I thank you for upholding your end of the bargain.”

  Sirath nodded, gold-flecked eyes gleaming. She murmured words in the fell speech, shimmered, and disappeared.

  Nera noticed Yosrick and Malek exchange a glance from the corner of her eye. When she faced them, they looked worried.

  “What is it, you two?”

  Yosrick was the first to speak up. “This is Aolduhrn!” he hissed, as if that should mean something to her.

  “Aye, Sirath brought us where she said she would. The portal is located here. What of it?”

  “Something terrible lies in wait here—banished to Aolduhrn, the deepest pit of the Abyss, by the Dark One himself. The fearsome turmahr!”

  “‘For therein lies in torpor the one imprisoned by our lord himself, its power unspeakable,’” Nera said, quoting Sirath’s earlier warning. “That is what you speak of?”

  Yosrick and Malek nodded in unison.

  “I know not this turmahr. What is it?” Nera asked.

  “It is said the beast is a creature of pure chaos—that it lives for nothing but to indiscriminately destroy everything around it, to eradicate every living thing,” Yosrick said.

  “And it somehow exudes an aura of death magic,” Malek added, “which unmakes all life. The death magic in some way adds to the creature’s power. The tome mentioned the beast would destroy and feed on whole worlds then return to lie in torpor for centuries.”

  “Our legends tell that this beast you name turmahr is truly primeval, existing prior to the rise of the gods themselves,” Idrimel said. “It existed in the chaos between the time of the old gods and those gods we worship today. The Dark One himself battled the turmahr to an impasse, unable to destroy it, and was only able to imprison it in a state of torpor in the deepest pit of the Abyss, that which you name Aolduhrn. It is strongest here in the chaos and evil of the Abyss.”

  Nera couldn’t begin to imagine such a powerful creature. “And this beast actually exists?”

  “It would be wise to assume it does,” Malek replied. “If not, then all the better for us.”

  “We’d best not awaken it, then, if it lairs here,” Nera said, glancing around nervously. The others had overheard the conversation and looked pale and frightened. “Can you sense the portal or this turmahr, if it is here?” she asked Malek.

  The mage closed his eyes and was quiet for a long time. She was about to ask him what he saw when he opened his eyes, puzzlement plain on his face.

  “What is it, Malek?” Endira asked.

  “My second sight is blocked, distorted somehow. This Aolduhrn is a paradox… The most sense I can make of it is to imagine as if we are standing on the inside of a sphere. I sense it stretches out and folds back upon itself somehow. It shouldn’t matter which direction we choose, for we shall end up at our destination in due course.”

  “You sense the portal, then?” Nera asked anxiously. “And the beast?”

  Malek grimaced. “I cannot pinpoint anything with any degree of confidence. The entire realm here is filled with an overwhelming sense of corrupted earth magic that nearly sickens me, simply feeli
ng it.” His shoulders sagged. “I apologize I can’t be of more use.”

  “Don’t be too hard on yourself, mate,” Arron spoke up. “That’s more than we knew a few minutes ago.”

  “Right, so weapons ready. Danger could come in any form at any time,” Nera said. They set off, picking a random direction.

  So inflated were her fears and wild her imagination, that she was almost disappointed when they reached the portal after but a couple hours of anxious walking. She had expected the core of the Abyss to be filled with all manner of horrific sights and fiends, yet they encountered nothing, not even seeing any sign of the notorious turmahr.

  A high, steep ridge of stony ground rose up from the barren earth, sharp rocks protruding from the crest. Taking the lead, Nera climbed the steep ridge and, gaining the summit, was relieved to see the portal ahead. She leaned on one of the tall rocks, studying their surroundings. The ridge was circular in form, and within was the depression where the prime portal stood, looking much the same as she had seen in the vision.

  The heavy air made it hard to breathe, and her lungs burned from the simple exertion of climbing the ridge. The others joined her at the crest, their weariness momentarily forgotten, with their destination in sight.

  The arched portal was enormous, high enough for five men to pass through standing upon each other’s shoulders, and nearly as wide. It was fashioned from Abyssal iron, matte black in color with runes carved all along its surface.

  She thought briefly of legions of demons marching through as they had in the Planar War. As they undoubtedly are elsewhere, making war on Nexus even now.

  “Let us open the portal and leave this cursed place.” Nera flexed her metal hand reflexively, as if it pained her.

  “Hold,” Malek cautioned. He closed his eyes and studied the portal with his second sight, as she knew from experience. After a long moment, he opened his eyes and glanced around at the party.

  “Well?” Nera asked impatiently.