The Devil's Deuce (The Barrier War) (32 page)

They were close enough to the throne that Hoil could now see
the king’s defender again. What was visible of his face through his torn
balaclava was soaked in his own blood, and his clothing hung loosely on his
frame with numerous gashes in the black material. But his eyes were fierce, and
he fought with grim determination. He had lost whatever weapons he’d held, and
now fought bare-handed against swords and knives.

The black-clad elf pointed at an enemy and a ball of shadowy
light shot forth and struck the man in the chest. The elf collapsed and was
crushed beneath the boots of those pressing behind him. The king’s defender
scooped up a knife from the ground and threw it in the same motion with deadly
accuracy, then felled a second elf with the deadly gray light he’d used before.
And then the press of elves was too close, too many opponents for him to fight
effectively.

He stopped one weapon on the right, gripping the bare blade
with his hand and averting the attack. At the same time, on the left, he
gripped another elf’s wrist, trying to force a knife out of his hand. Then
suddenly another elf leapt in front of him and thrust the straight edge of a
halven
through his chest. The weapon slid between his ribs
and poked out the back before it was withdrawn.

His eyes widened, and a gurgling choke wracked his body, but
still he didn’t fall. He stumbled back from his assailants, placing himself
directly before his king. Two elves approached from either side, and the king
stood and pressed against his invisible defender from behind, seeking whatever
protection could be gained. But the same elf who had stabbed the defender
attacked again, and the mortally wounded Do was unable to defend himself or his
king. The blade took him again in the chest, this time just below his ribcage.
The three-foot blade pierced his body and went cleanly through to impale the
king behind him.

“My life before yours,” the elf grated, the first sound he’d
uttered during the entire battle.

Then both elves fell to the ground as their attacker
wrenched his blade and withdrew the weapon. He turned and received Siran’s own
weapon in his throat as the fierce guard reached the center of the fray. Siran
spun the blade and the elf’s head ripped free even as Siran whirled and
attacked another elf. The large elf on Hoil’s other side had fallen sometime
during their last assault, and it fell to Hoil and Siran to finish off the
remaining assassins.

With Siran’s rage fueling his already murderous assault, the
attacking elves stood no chance against him and soon Siran was the only elf
left alive in the room. He and Hoil were both torn and bloody from their
battle, but their wounds seemed trivial compared to the sight of the elven monarch
laying slain before them.

“Let’s go,” Hoil said, resting one hand on Siran’s shoulder.
“We must now look to the prince.”

Siran nodded bleakly, and they rushed out of the room.

As the leaf falls from the tree and is absorbed into the ground and
taken back by the tree, so too does an elf’s life fade with the sun, only to
reawaken with the dawn of a new birth.

- The “
El’Si’Li’Do’Ren
”
[24]
(unknown)

- 1 -

Maran closed the door to the royal crypt behind them,
shutting them in complete darkness. Ancient death lay thick in the air all
around, and Birch’s skin crawled as he laid his sword down on a sarcophagus.
His fingers itched mercilessly, driving him wild with agony and the suppressed
urge to claw at his skin to reach the burning inside. The pain came faster and
more intensely now than ever before. Maran lit another of his lights, made a
tying-off motion with his hand, and suspended the black orb in the air, giving
the two elves their needed illumination.

Birch felt the sanctity of the crypt like a balm on his
soul. While this place had never been blessed and the
Tricrus
was
nowhere in sight, he nevertheless felt a sense of peace and tranquility
permeate the room, and he allowed it to ease away the burning in his hands and
the trembling in his heart. Without his shield on hand, he’d been wielding his
sword two-handed for better control in the cramped hallways. They’d had to
defend themselves several times against Do assassins, and he was worried they
might have left a trail that could be followed to their current hiding place.
But at least the door was thick stone and not wood, and would be that much more
difficult to breach.

 “This is the part where we wait, my nephew,” Maran
said to the prince.

To their intense disappointment, they didn’t have very long
to wait. Within a quarter hour, they heard voices and movement outside the door
to the crypt. They had already ascertained that Rill knew how to defend himself
and was almost as capable with a weapon as Birch and Maran. Birch wasn’t
worried about the young prince in a fight unless the odds were overwhelming.
Unfortunately, judging by the increasing sounds on the far side of the door,
overwhelming
would only begin to describe the forces arrayed against them.

“If it won’t offend either of you, perhaps we can block the
door and at least stall them,” Birch said. “If we use the covers of these
sarcophaguses, we can barricade the door and give them one more thing to get
past before they reach us.”

Maran shook his head. “It won’t work. The door swings both
in and out, and if they can’t move it in toward us, they’re likely to just
swing it out instead.”

“But we can make it more difficult for them to rush us by
putting a few obstacles in their way,” Birch persisted.

“If we can move them, I wouldn’t mind,” Maran replied. “Your
highness?”

“Our ancestors will forgive us this necessity. Let’s do it,”
Rill said resolutely.

Maran and Rill each took one end of the nearest sarcophagus
lid ─ which turned out to be that of Maran’s brother ─ and Birch
stood facing the door and gripping the long edge of the lid. They pushed and
strained until Birch was afraid blood vessels would burst in his face, but only
managed to shift the lid an inch or so. They left off, red-faced and panting
heavily. Just before Birch ceased, however, he felt a surge of strength and
focused inwardly. A rush of fire swept through his blood in an instant, suffusing
him with power.

“Move aside,” he managed to shout, then abruptly he flung
the lid across the room to crash into the doorway. The stone slab boomed and
cracked, but held together. It lay flat and carved-face-up, almost touching the
door. Maran and Rill stared at Birch in stunned amazement, but he was already
moving to the next sarcophagus. With a better idea what to expect, he was able
to control the sudden, inhuman strength, and he lifted the stone lid like it
weighed nothing at all. Birch walked closer and laid it carefully down atop the
first one, creating a small wall of stone over a foot high.

“One more should do it,” he said as he dusted off his hands
and walked to the next sarcophagus.

“No time!” Maran cried.

The door shifted inward and ran into their barricade, then
pulled back and out to reveal a hallway filled with red-tinged elves wearing
black clothing and bearing a lethal assortment of weapons. Pressed by those
behind them, two leapt forward overzealously and immediately tripped on the
barricade of stone lids and fell with several others pressed atop them. All too
quickly, the next few elves rushed into the room past their fallen comrades.

Birch gripped the stone lid nearest to him and hurled it
across the room, crushing the foremost elves beneath the tremendous weight of
the sarcophagus cover. They collapsed backward, bearing more of the attacking
elves to the ground beneath them. The general chaos caused by this jumble gave
Birch and the others time to react. Maran and Rill darted forward and killed
whatever elves were in reach, adding to the immovable mass that blocked the
door.

Birch slid another sarcophagus lid halfway off so it bridged
the narrow aisle between the rows of tombs, giving him quicker access to
another crushing attack if necessary. Then he stood near a closer sarcophagus
and gripped the stone, preparing to launch it across the room.

Maran and Rill fell back as the chaos subsided and their
attackers regained some semblance of order in their assault. They gathered
behind the wall of stone and dead bodies, then rushed out from the sides. Birch
lifted the stone lid high over his head and yelled, “Duck!” then threw the lid
as hard as he could.

One unlucky elf couldn’t evade as quickly as his comrades,
and he was lifted off his feet by the flying stone and smashed against the
stone obstacle. The elf’s chest was completely flattened by the force of the
impact, but the stone knocked other lids out of the way and cleared more of the
doorway for the attacking elves to enter. Before Birch could turn and use the
other lid as a weapon, the room was filled with red-tinged Do, and he took up
his sword instead. His hand burned even more intensely than before, but he shut
the pain away in the rush of the moment. With a brief thought, and without knowing
quite how he did it, Birch was suddenly clad in full, shining platemail armor
instead of just his breastplate.

Thought disappeared under the necessity of battle, and Birch
lost himself as elf after elf fell under his blade. Maran and Rill fought with
deadly efficiency, and for a while they were able to press their attackers back
to the doorway and hold them there. But their numbers proved too great, and the
trio was forced further and further back into the room. Maran broke away from
the fight long enough to provide a new shadow light to illuminate their battle,
which gave Birch an idea.

“Maran,” he said through clenched teeth as he fought off
another attack. “Can you extinguish not only your light but any they might put
up?”

“We won’t be able to see,” Maran protested.

“You won’t, and they won’t, but I still can,” Birch replied,
breathing heavily as he found himself without an opponent for a few seconds.
“Can you do it? Between you and Rill, can you keep them from making their own
lights?”

“We can try,” Rill replied instead. “At the very least, it
may buy us a little time and thin their numbers that much more.”

“Do it.”

At his next break, Maran stepped back and pointed at the
light he’d created, which was now in front of them. The light disappeared, and
their attackers faltered for a moment. Birch took advantage of their confusion
to cut down two elves, and he wounded another before he could fall back. The
light in the room grew even more dim as Rill cancelled out another light
further away, and then Birch was relying on his fiery night vision alone. He
quickly finished off the nearest elves before they could recover, then moved
forward as quietly as he could to attack the others. His platemail was gone in
an instant so it wouldn’t clank and give away his position, but Birch kept his
thoughts carefully poised to bring back the plate-armor protection.

In the noise and confusion of the sudden blackness, Birch
was able to creep up on several more elves and kill them before they knew he
was there. One or two put up feeble defenses as they sensed his presence, but
by the time black lights started to flicker into being, Birch had already cut
down a dozen more elves. Maran and Rill tried valiantly to cancel out the
lights as soon as they appeared, and for a time the flickering confusion of
lights going on and off helped Birch’s endeavors, but eventually the sheer
number of lights being created outweighed their ability to stop them, and Birch
lost his momentary advantage.

He resumed his platemail and continued fighting as Maran and
Rill rushed forward to help him. They had regained nearly all of the ground
they had lost.

The fighting raged on and off for what seemed like hours,
and Birch was certain they had been within the crypt for days with no hope of a
respite. Bloody elven faces swam in Birch’s vision as a dozen elves died before
them, then a dozen more. It seemed their numbers were never-ending, and Birch
momentarily despaired. Then he noticed a new sound and grinned. Hoil’s bellow
echoed from the hallway outside the crypt, and Birch let out a yell of his own
in answer. The elven assassins made a desperate attempt to finish them off
before Hoil arrived to reinforce Birch and the royal elven pair.

And then Hoil was there with a vengeful Siran at his side.
The elven guard clove through the attacking Do elves with a fierce efficiency,
and within minutes there were none left to stand before him.

The silence was deafening in the wake of the bloody battle,
and the five survivors stared mutely at the carnage around them. Elves lay
hacked to pieces and crushed beneath stone slabs, and the floor was coated with
thick puddles of sticky blood. They left bloody footprints where the stones
were clean as they walked from the room into the hallway. Each of them bore
numerous wounds, and Hoil limped from a deep gash on his right leg.

“Is it over?” Rill asked.

“Yes, your highness,” Hoil answered respectfully in a tired
voice. “Or very nearly so, I imagine.”

“How long have we been here?” Birch asked.

“It’s nearly midday,” his brother answered. “It took us
forever to find you three. The two main contingents of assassins were
concentrated here and in the throne room. You and your grandfather were the
targets,” Hoil said, looking at Rill.

“And my grandfather?” Rill asked, turning to the elven
captain.

Siran’s mute eyes tightened. “Your majesty,” he said
finally, bowing deeply.

“I see.”

 “How did it happen?” Maran asked, his face a stone
mask.

Siran was silent. Barely discernible behind his impassive face,
Birch could see the elf’s eyes were haunted.