Arrows flew outward as well, launched by the defenders lining the walls, but the volley was meager compared with the shower of missiles that flew from the goblins. At the same time, a steady drumming became audible; the ogres were on the march. The sound rattled the very ground Jaymes stood on, swelling in volume with the tempo.
“They’re comin’ at a goodly clip,” one gray-haired veteran declared sagely, to the nods of the men and boys around him. “Be here real soon, that’s my guess.”
But they had even less time than that before a monstrous shape appeared, towering over the piles of rubble that marked the site of the gatehouse. The king of the elementals was as tall as the city walls, Jaymes realized. The creature bore closer with a steady, ominous gait. Its two eyes burned outward from a massive face that resembled nothing so much as a craggy cliff.
Several of the defenders, boys too young to shave probably, began to cry softly as the monster neared. “Reminds me of Mina’s red dragons at Sanction,” the old veteran said conversationally, taking the time to spit on the ground. “Lotsa noise and fuss-they was really something to see, I tell you. But they’re just critters like the rest of us. Critters what can kill, but critters what can be killed too.”
The boys listened, wide eyed, and the man’s words seemed to calm some of their fears. Jaymes didn’t feel any need to dispute the fellow’s claim, though the king of the elementals seemed different than any “critter” he had ever witnessed.
Its torso looked to be solid rock. Its arms lashed about, supple as tentacles, translucent in color-and clearly powerful, as one reached out to smash at a chimney that had somehow survived the ruin of the gatehouse. Smacked by that limb, it crumbled like a toy.
Finally the whole of the monster could be observed as it stepped right into the plaza. Jaymes saw that it was balanced upon twin, whirling cyclones-black tornadoes of swirling, tumultuous air. The sight was terrifying and violent as its mere presence stirred up geysers of wind, spattered dust and rock across the ground, and rattled the heavy boards of the barricade. By all the gods-how was it even possible to stop something like that?
The lord marshal raised his sword and stared along the blade, seeking to make contact with the creature’s hellish eyes. When he did meet them, he staggered backward from the physical impact of the elemental’s raw emotion. Jaymes’s knees buckled and he went down, bracing himself with one hand on the breastwork, veering dizzily.
But he did not lower his eyes. He forced himself to stare into that monstrous visage, holding his sword aimed straight at the creature’s eyes, allowing the magic of the ancient artifact to find and grab the creature.
The elemental king’s gaze seemed like liquid fire being poured directly into Jaymes’s skull.
Fury.
He had never imagined such rage, such a thirst for destruction, vengeance, retribution. The violence of the elemental king’s emotions made him sick to his stomach, but still he would not look away. Jaws clenched, he stared, unaware that his own fingers were curling into fists. Staggering, he pushed himself up to a standing position, still leaning against the barricade, his knees bending as if in preparation for a charge.
Hate.
The elemental directed its anger to the very sky, and the sun that burned so loftily above. It hated the whole city of humankind, the thousands of souls that flickered and survived here, living and dying quickly in a way that this monster could never understand. The elemental king despised all living creatures, and it craved to end life. Deeper, Jaymes probed that hateful consciousness, seeking to penetrate its monstrous core.
Wrath.
Anger was fundamental to this seething creature. The elemental hated not just the humans, but it hated its own army. In particular, Jaymes perceived an image of the half-giant, Ankhar the Truth. There flashed another image of a man in a gray cloak-the Thorn Knight-and the withered, hideous visage of the hobgoblin shaman. Those were the beings, the marshal understood, for which the monster reserved its worst malice.
Fury… Hatred… Wrath.
All these emotions were focused, most forcefully, against those three beings, its own allies.
Why did the creature attack Solanthus, then? The answer seemed obvious: because it could not strike at the ones it hated the most. Jaymes perceived this basic truth amidst the elemental’s many churning emotions. The monster was restrained from attacking its most hated foes, so it inflicted utter annihilation on anyone within reach.
Moptop Bristlebrow poked around another corner and looked to the right then the left. The shadows of these dingy confines were broken here and there by a few shafts of sunlight. He stood ankle deep in water, not even noticing yet another of the many stagnant puddles that littered the city sewer system of Solanthus.
Which was, beyond any doubt, the most fabulous city sewer system the kender had ever seen. A beam of sunlight, grid-patterned because of the iron grate over the manhole above, offered him a chance to consult his map. Moptop made a scratch mark with his charcoal pencil then started along the left-hand tunnel, the passage that, he guessed, led either due west, or on some angling vector toward the north and east.
Altogether these tunnels formed a truly intricate maze, which he was having a splendid time exploring. He had been down here all morning, traipsing around, exploring, adding crucial details and highlights to his maps. And there was still a lot more to see.
This was even better than poking through the ducal palace, which had occupied most of the previous night. He had almost been thwarted in that endeavor, since he had quickly discovered someone had accidentally locked the door to his guest bedroom so he couldn’t get out. Strangely, though he could hear servants walking past, and though he had pounded and yelled for quite a while, no one had noticed the commotion and come to unlock the door. Fortunately, a drainpipe extended near his fourth-floor window, and it had been a simple matter to scamper up to the roof and climb down one of the chimneys.
Of course, the ducal palace was a fascinating place in its own right. He had enjoyed making the rounds during the night, investigating several bedrooms. There were lots of guards patrolling the halls, and though Moptop had frequently been tempted to introduce himself to one or two of them, they always looked so serious that he guessed they were very busy with guard stuff. So he had simply melted into the shadows and let them pass.
He had even found a secret passage! When he went over to Jaymes’s room to see how the lord marshal was sleeping, he had been surprised to find him missing. Then he had discovered a panel of the room’s wall that slid silently out of the way, and when Moptop had been poking around that particular passage Jaymes himself had emerged from another secret door, this one connecting to the room of the duchess. Here, too, Moptop had been tempted to say “hi,” but the lord marshal had looked so preoccupied that the kender had allowed him to walk right past without announcing his presence.
But after six or eight hours, Moptop had seen just about as much of the palace as he wanted to. In the cellar he discovered a drain, which someone had gone to the trouble of securing with a grate, which was practically tailor-made for a kender’s egress. He had slipped through then slid down a bumpy chute of slick, mossy stones-a fun ride, that! — soon finding himself in this far vaster network of places to explore.
He was just starting to skip westward-or north by eastward-when something shook the floor under his feet. Debris fell from the top of the sewer tunnel, bits of gravel and dust spattering onto the kender’s topknot. He saw concentric ripples in the puddles that had, up until now, been lying there perfectly still. A moment later he felt the shake again… then again, at a regular tempo. It reminded him of being in a house where somebody large and heavy was walking around on the roof or in a room right over his head.