“I wanna walk!” Leesil grumbled.
“Well, you’re going to ride,” Magiere shot back. “Now keep that horse moving before Chap gets fed up with you and leaves both of us behind.”
She should not have put such a notion in Chap’s head, though it had occurred to him already. Of course, he would never do so ... never.
Wynn had told him a great deal about this region, including Dhredze Seatt, the stronghold of the dwarves that filled the mountain on the peninsula beyond her homeland. Chap was greatly concerned with keeping the orb away from civilization whenever possible. He had led Magiere and Leesil northwest to bypass the dwarves’ region; he was determined to keep the orb unknown to anyone before they reached the barren northern regions. There he might find someplace to hide it where minions of the Ancient Enemy of many names—or anyone else—would never find it.
A few days past, he had judged it was time to turn more westward, directly toward the coast. Dusk was coming quickly now, and they’d soon need to make camp.
“Cheer up,” Magiere said dryly. “We can’t be far from the coast. We’ll sell the horses and buy passage on a ship.”
Chap groaned out in front. Why would she say that?
Leesil uttered a series of scarcely intelligible foulmouthed retorts over seafaring again.
Chap barely heard this, as something else made him pause. His ears rose as he listened carefully until it came again.
An angry, deep-throated shout ended with a loud thud. Snarling growls followed, carrying through the trees.
“What was that?” Magiere asked, pulling her horse up beside him.
Chap’s instinct was to order her back until he learned the answer. Before he could think of a way to do so with just her memories, she kicked her mount, and it lunged past him.
“Magiere!” Leesil called sharply, all traces of whining gone.
Chap bolted after her as she pressed her horse on. Grunting, thudding, and snarling grew louder ahead beneath the pounding of hooves from Magiere’s horse and the sound of Leesil catching up from behind.
A screeching, grating yowl rolled through the trees and pierced Chap’s ears.
It shook him deep inside, as if he should know its sound.
Magiere reined her horse in behind a stand of trees at a clearing’s edge. She was out of the saddle, standing on the ground, before Chap caught up. The sight awaiting them was almost too much to take in all at once.
In the clearing, a battle was beginning between one and many—and the one held the many at bay for the moment. He could only have been tall enough to reach Magiere’s chin, at best. But he was almost twice as wide as a human. His skin was both rough and slightly flecked, as if his heavy bones and thick sinews were covered by flesh-colored granite.
Steel-streaked ruddy hair whipped around his head as he spun about at the clearing’s center. A curly cropped beard of a slightly darker hue covered his broad jaw. He wore a shirt of linked chain over a quilted leather hauberk, and heavy steel pauldrons and couters protected his shoulders and elbows.
Two war daggers were sheathed at his hips, but in one hand he held a double-bladed war axe with a long, stout haft. He swung it as if it weighed nothing to him, though it made the air hum in its passing. And when he turned in a circle and eyed all of his opponents, Chap saw something more that he recognized.
Around the dwarf’s neck was something like what Magiere wore about hers.
Wynn had once described Magiere’s orb handle or key as a thôrhk—a dwarven word, the only word that the sage knew to describe such a device. Magiere’s had ends with facing knobs for pulling an orb’s central spike.
The dwarf’s thôrhk was fashioned like braids of metal, but in place of the knobs on Magiere’s, his ended in stout, short spikes, akin to the one on the haft’s end of his huge axe.
Wynn had taught Chap as much as she could on the journey to her homeland. And Chap knew what, if not who, he looked upon.
This was a thänæ: one of the dwarves’ “honored ones,” so marked by that neck adornment. But what was he doing out here alone in the wilderness against these ... things?
One of the creatures made a threatening charge and stopped short, halfway to the dwarf. The sight of it pricked an ugly memory in the back of Chap’s mind. It had to be another fragment left behind, after his kin, the Fay, had torn out any memories of his time among them when he had chosen to be born into flesh.
The creature facing the dwarf was only a bit shorter than he was, or perhaps its half-crouched stance made it appear so. Wild spotted fur covered its beastlike torso, peeking between the gaps of scavenged armor crudely lashed over its hulking shoulders and bulging chest. It charged again on all fours—no, threes, for with one arm it gripped an old flanged mace with one flange missing. The creature swerved aside at the last instant, spun out of the dwarf’s striking reach, and raised the mace to slam it threateningly against the clearing’s earth.
The thick fingers of its hand ended in dark claws in place of nails.
Chap counted twelve of the creatures, all snorting, snarling, and screeching. They looked like some twisted cross between an oddly colored ape and a dog. Broad but short muzzles wrinkled below their sickly yellow eyes. Every feral noise displayed oversized canine teeth. Longer bristles sprouted above their heads and in tufts from their peaked ears.
They clambered, leaped, and spun on twos and fours as they feinted at the dwarf, forcing him to twist every which way. More disturbing were the pieces of rusted and rent chain, leather, and felt-pad armor over their muscular torsos. Each creature gripped some form of a thick cudgel made from gnarled tree roots or branches ... except for the one with the damaged mace.
The dwarf shouted a string of guttural words.
Chap did not understand what he heard, but the words seemed like some kind of enraged challenge. And the creature with the mace came at the dwarf.
In the instant it took Chap to take in all of this, Leesil pulled his horse up behind Magiere’s. Barely keeping his feet, he tumbled out of the saddle and took in the sight as well.
“He’s not going to last long in there!” Leesil declared, but before he’d even finished speaking, Magiere charged into the clearing.
“Give room!” she shouted.
The dwarf never even looked at her as the largest one came at him. The beast nearest to Chap swerved at Magiere’s voice. It barely saw her before her falchion struck it.
Magiere’s blade careened off its skull in a spray of blood, skin, and fur. Though it shrieked in pain, it barely flinched and twisted its head. The creature’s short, broad muzzle widened in a howl, exposing thick fangs, top and bottom.
“Ah, seven hells, she’s done it now!”
Chap glanced about at those bitter words, but Leesil was nowhere in sight. When he turned back, that thing threw aside its cudgel, dropping to all fours as it went at Magiere. Chap bolted out as another one turned her way from off to the right.
Magiere sidestepped as the wounded one swiped for her leg with a clawed hand and snapped for her gut with its jaws. She brought the falchion in with both hands amid a twist to the side. The heavy blade bit into the back of the creature’s neck.
The creature’s noise ended instantly under a wet grating of steel on bone.
Sod tore from the earth in the second one’s claws and hit Chap full in the face. He briefly lost sight of everything, and he swerved. When his sight cleared, the second one had gotten by him, with a cudgel raised in its three-limbed scamper toward Magiere’s back.
Chap panicked, for they were badly outnumbered against opponents they knew nothing about. He charged straight into the second creature’s legs and snapped at the back of its knee.