Orlok shielded himself behind the double blade of his axe. The runics inscribed in the metal deflected the sorcery, only for the tendrils to snake around the dwarf and alight on two of his men. They burst into flame, quickly filling the room with an acrid, choking smoke.
Keldren spoke again and, with a rush of cool wind, the smoke dissipated.
Silus was pushed aside by Greta as she launched herself at the wizard, screaming at the top of her lungs and wielding twin blades. With a gesture, Kelos summoned a wall of flickering green energy between Greta and the elf and she slammed into it with a sickening crunch before falling at Silus’s feet, unconscious.
“This will not end in more bloodshed!” Kelos shouted.
“That man is not your friend, Kelos,” Silus said. “For what he has done, for what the elves have done to us all, they deserve to die!”
“Not this one, Silus.”
“Oh, yeah?” Orlok growled, “and why’s that?”
“He has renounced the empire and has promised to help us return home.”
“Not good enough. Now, you can’t hold up that barrier forever, human, and my men and I can be very patient when we want to be.”
“What if I gave you a map of the palace?” Keldren said. “I can tell you the likely locations of all the senior ministers, and even show you the secret passages to the throne room. Behind me are hundreds of maps, detailing every level of the city, both public and hidden. If you let me go, I can give you all the intelligence you’ll need to take this city down before my people know what hit them.”
“Silus,” Kelos said. “You trust me, don’t you? Keldren is our only hope of getting home. And we must get home, my friend, for something truly terrible is coming to Twilight. And I’m coming to believe that, with the power within you, you may be one of the few people who have a chance of stopping it. The Final Faith is wrong about Kerberos; He isn’t the one true god. There’s one other — Hel’ss — and it means to decimate our world. We have to get back and warn Makennon.”
After studying the mage’s face for a moment, Silus nodded and turned to Orlok.
“I say trust them. Let Keldren go.”
“He is an elf!”
“And you are a thick-headed dwarf. Listen to me, you can kill as many elves as you like, but not this one.”
Greta got groggily to her feet and was about to launch herself once more at Keldren when Orlok gripped her shoulder.
“Change of plan, Greta.”
“Please tell me I’m going to like this.”
“Keldren here is turning rat on his own people. Aren’t you?”
For a moment the arrogance and hatred remained on Keldren’s face and he looked about to speak the words of another spell, but Kelos silenced him with a gesture.
“Remember what I have promised to show you, Keldren? Do you want to toil down here with no recognition from your peers for the rest of your life? Or do you want to know the truth of your legacy?”
Keldren closed his mouth.
“Thank you,” Kelos said. “Gentlemen, I believe we have an accord. Now, how about you shake on it?”
Keldren looked down at the stone manacles that still enclosed his wrists.
“Ah, yes, good point.”
They stood awhile on the headland and watched the city burn. The elves, realising that Da’Rea was lost, had begun to bombard it from the coast, using the cannons of their song ships. The dwarves had all but taken the elven stronghold, but they would not keep it. Those that survived would be rewarded only with the corpse-strewn rubble of a once beautiful metropolis. Silus wondered whether Orlok would think the battle worthwhile once the dust had settled.
He tried to spot Illiun amongst the skirmishers below, but couldn’t see him. The man who had been utterly broken by his experiences had now found a channel for his rage, agreeing to help the dwarves in their assault. Silus was saddened to have said goodbye; he had been determined to save Illiun and his people, but he had failed them, stranding the few survivors of the colony even further from home, now entangled in a war not of their own making.
The only one of his comrades who had seemed at home in this brave new world was Ignacio. He had said a rather formal goodbye to them all before leading his newly-formed church east; the twenty or so men and women that made up the congregation, including Bestion, just about keeping up with the bellowed hymn that led them on their march. That this was the beginnings of the Final Faith, Silus could well believe. He had seen the fanatical fire burning deep in Ignacio’s eyes as he shook hands with him for the final time, all trace of the man he had once been subsumed by his faith and determination. Silus supposed he could have stopped the Final Faith in its tracks there and then, just by slipping a knife between Ignacio’s ribs. But there had been enough killing, and no matter what he had become, Silus still thought of Ignacio as his friend. He only hoped that he would find something like peace in the fellowship of his disciples.
Beside himself and the wizard Keldren, all that remained of their party were Katya, Zac, Kelos, Dunsany and Emuel. Just seven people to venture to the World’s Ridge Mountains and there face a dragon, along with whatever else lurked amongst those forbidding peaks. As a child, Silus had been told many tales of the horrors that lurked at the edge of the world, and he hoped that none of them were true. But no matter the risk, they must try and get back home. Kelos had told him all that Keldren had revealed about Hel’ss and, remembering Illiun’s stories of the entity — the terrible god that had ravaged their world — he knew that they must return to their own time and warn the Final Faith about what was coming. Perhaps, Silus considered, he could use his ability to commune with Kerberos in the fight against this last remnant of the pantheon. Twilight might not be much, just a small peninsula surrounded by impassable seas, but he would fight to his last breath to save it. If that meant communing with Kerberos again, after all that he had learned concerning the true nature of the deity, then so be it.
Keldren took out a large sheet of blank paper from a pocket in his robes and placed it on the ground, weighting it with stones to prevent it from blowing away. Next he extracted a small bottle of ink and a pen, and inscribed all of their names upon the parchment, surrounding the writing in strange, arcane symbols.
“The ink is that of the chasm squid,” Kelos confided in Silus. “It has unique properties that will make the translocation that much smoother. Really, you’ve no idea how fascinating it is for me to see a practitioner such as Keldren at work.”
Silus would have shared in his friend’s enthusiasm, were it not for the memories of the pain the elf wizard had inflicted upon him in the course of his experiments. But Kelos trusted him, and that was what mattered.
Emuel didn’t appear quite so convinced by the wizard’s performance. The eunuch stood slightly apart from the group, his arms wrapped tightly about himself, his face closed. Out of all of them, Silus felt that Emuel had suffered the most. He was still barely in his teens and already he looked like the weight of the world rested on his shoulders.
“Gather close,” said Keldren, “and link hands.”
The last time that Silus had been involved in a ritual circle, most of the participants had been immolated, so it was with some trepidation that he took Katya’s and Dunsany’s hands. Keldren stood in the middle of the circle, the paper in his hands.
“If you close your eyes, you may find this less disorientating.”
Even so, Silus kept his open. And when reality began to fold around him in a fractured and nightmarish origami, he wished he hadn’t.
CHAPTER TWENTY- TWO
Khula had seen it come down several days ago. Its impact shook the mountain and set off a landslide that would have buried their village, had it not been for the intervention of one of their shamans. Early one morning, part of the sky had simply disappeared, with a sound like a great sheet tearing, revealing a ragged black patch of… nothing. Khula had looked into the void, wondering whether the whole of the heavens was going to tear away, when a light had blazed out of the darkness, burning with such intensity that she had to shield her eyes against the glare. Through the gaps between her fingers, Khula made out the suggestion of wings and a horned snout, and she thought she knew what was falling to earth. When the mountain had finished groaning and the dust had settled, Khula sent a party of scouts to report on what had just landed in their territory.