Rangers magic 2, p.23
Ranger's Magic 2, page 23
Ralnor was ready for him. He steadied his blades and held position until the last moment, then stepped deftly out of the way of the monster’s charge. The goblin flew past him, carried on by the momentum of his own charge. A mighty double sweep of his twin battle axes cut through the air where Ralanor’s head had been only a moment before, but Ralnor was out of the way and circling.
He risked a bit of magic, firing a blast of gleaming white force magic at the back of the creature’s legs. The goblin’s feet were knocked out from under him, and he toppled backward, and Ralnor leaped up, his blades raised, ready for the kill. But the goblin captain was quick, much quicker than his great bulk promised.
The goblin flipped backward, feet over head, and sprang to his feet again. Before Ralnor could turn, the two axes were coming down toward his head.
He raised his swords together, blocking the blow from behind and then shoving them away as he ducked to the side. As he came by, he aimed a slash at the goblin captain’s leg, catching the unguarded spot under the captain’s knee where the armor was weak to allow the knee joint to bend freely.
His green glowing blade, infused with battle magic, cut into the goblin’s leg just above the right knee. Muscle and tendon severed as Ralnor pulled the blade across the captain’s leg and then dived out of the way.
The goblin howled in anger, and at that moment, as Ralnor dropped into a roll and sprang out of the way, two more arrows fired from where Lana and Cowan stood by the terrified villagers.
The first arrow slammed harmlessly into the goblin captain’s thick leather chest plate, but the second thudded through the thinner armor on his arm and straight into his left bicep. He dropped the ax in his left hand and stepped back, roaring in pain and anger.
Three smaller goblins broke away from the fighting and charged toward Ralnor, screaming out battle cries in their own language. The captain, distracted for the moment by the arrow in his arm, kept moving back.
Sudden fury at the mindless attack by these goblins on the peaceful villagers filled Ralnor’s heart. Heat rushed through him, and he found instinct taking over. Magic rushed to his hands and took form, and a sudden, focused jet of flame blasted from his hands.
The heat was so intense that it blasted a hole right through the chest of the nearest goblin. Then, in a combination that made Akhen cry out in amazement, Ralnor whipped round and fired a blast of water at the second goblin, and a blast of rocks at the third.
The water fired from his hands like a missile, knocking the goblin off its feet and flying back over into its fellows. It crashed like a missile into the crowded goblins further back, and they all went down in a heap.
The rock magic began to manifest as a big stone, but at the last moment Ralnor had a flash of inspiration. He pulled the power of fire over from the flame spell and combined it into the rock.
Lava spurted from his hand, spraying the last goblin. The molten rock set the goblin’s leather armor ablaze, and the creature turned and fled back toward the village.
Ralnor, seeing the risk that the burning goblin would set the village on fire again, leaped forward and hacked at the creature’s neck with his sword. The green blade hissed as it passed through the burning goblin, severing head from neck, and the creature fell in a heap.
Ralnor turned, bellowing out his fury at the goblin captain. The captain seemed finally to be reconsidering his position. He glared at Ralnor, angry but with growing fear in his eyes. Then he changed his mind. He hefted his one remaining ax in his good hand and ran forward with the ax raised high in the air, bellowing out a challenge.
Ralnor yelled a battlecry in reply and ran to see the goblin’s charge. They crashed into each other, and Ralnor was aware of the other goblins scattering and of Falro and Sena rushing over to help him.
He parried the goblin captain’s ax blow, knocked the monster’s right leg out from under him, and then shoulder-barged him to knock him off balance. As the goblin toppled backward, Ralnor stabbed him through the throat with the glowing green blade.
Black blood fountained out from the wound as the goblin crashed backward, thundering to the ground like a felled tree.
“Fire!” an unfamiliar voice shouted.
Ralnor’s head whipped round. Where was the voice coming from? His enhanced senses meant they could be coming from anywhere.
His battle fury suddenly subsided, and in its place his instinctive sensing of life rushed in. He was suddenly aware of the newcomers who had arrived on the scene while he was concentrating on the goblins.
They were on the other side of the river, and immediately he recognized them; it was the group of humans that he’d detected earlier in the day, before he and his friends had stopped to save the village from the goblin attack.
And they were shooting fire arrows at the boats.
“No!” Ralnor shouted, but it was too late. A flight of arrows had already hit the canoes, and by some ingenious device they had exploded into flame as soon as they had landed. The boats were engulfed in a billowing cloud of black smoke, and orange flames were roaring from the wood of the boats. It was too far away—nearly a mile—for Ralnor to cast water magic to put out the flames, and by the time he had conjured force magic to transport himself and his friends over there, the boats would be sunk.
He looked around. The last few goblins had fled into the hills behind the village, so at least they had saved the villagers.
Ralnor ground his teeth in anger. He had saved the villagers, but he had lost the boats that he and his companions had been relying on to get them to their destination.
“All our supplies!” Lana said despairingly as she came up beside Ralnor.
The humans, having done their work, were now retreating. In their midst, Ralnor caught sight of the black-robed mage, a twisted figure seeming shrouded in shadow. Even as he watched, the human party—about thirty strong—were engulfed in a cloud of shadow that emanated from the figure of the mage. When the dark cloud cleared, the mage and his warriors were nowhere to be seen.
“Confusion magic,” Sena said, a note of disgust in her voice. “That’s what they’re using to cloak themselves. Shall we go after them?”
Ralnor thought for a moment. He and his friends could go looking for the mage and the soldiers, but the chances were that if he did not want to engage, the mage would be able to cloak himself in invisibility. Ralnor’s magic had come back in force just now, and he was glad of it, but he did not want to rely on it too much. Something told him that immediately entering into a duel with a trained mage and thirty heavily armored soldiers was not the best idea.
“I’ll walk back to the boats, and assess the damage,” Cowan volunteered, “though I don’t have much hope that there will be anything left. Those explosive arrows have done their job too well. The humans must have known we were here, somehow. Otherwise, why would they have come, and why would they have gone to the effort of firing our boats?”
“I don’t like this at all,” Sena said. “They must have been on the road for days and days to have gotten this far, and they can only be going to the Forbidden City, like us. That was a mage of the Naxos, the same one that was pursuing us back at the hideout by Stoneheart’s Shield, I think. If one party is out here, how many more could there be?”
“Easy,” Ralnor said, putting a hand on her arm as he heard the fear in her voice. “I have not detected any other life except this group. Whatever their presence means, I don’t think we need to worry about being waylaid by an army before we reach the city. I agree that it’s worrying to find them out here, so close to our path, but we have to keep our heads and carry on as best we can.”
The group had all gathered a little way from the village looking toward the river and the black smoke that was still rising from their canoes. In the time they had been speaking, the elven villagers had gone back to their houses and were inspecting the damage. Some of them were looking at the damaged houses, and others were dragging the corpses of the goblins away from the homes.
Akhen came over to Ralnor last, and with him came an older male elf, dressed in a garb of richer fabric than the others. Most of the elves in the village were just wearing simple wooden homespun, but this elf seemed older than the others and wore a blue and gold robe of rich, heavy fabric. His hair was brown with streaks of gray, and he had a long pointed beard.
The wearing of beards was unusual among the elves that Ralnor knew. In Suntower City it was unheard of, and Ralnor had been surprised to find that Commander Rayne wore a short-clipped gray beard. But this elf’s beard was long and styled in a way that Rlanor had never seen before.
The effect was impressive. It made the elf look wise and thoughtful, and his dark blue eyes shone out of his weatherworn, deep-lined face.
“How can we thank you?” he said in a halting, heavily accented voice. “You saved our homes and our lives, and you came out of nowhere to do it. My name is Anaxis, and I am the elder of this village—the leader, you might say.”
“How come you are so ill defended?” Ralnor said. “You have not even a ditch around your village? No wall, nothing?”
Anaxis smiled ruefully. “My friend, we have had no need for such things. We are a peaceful people, and but for our elven neighbors in the other villages, there has been nobody in these lands since we settled here two hundred years ago.”
“There are other elven villages out here?” Lana asked with interest.
“Oh, yes,” Anaxis said, “but we keep our own council and do not mingle much. You have to understand that the lands here are vast and utterly empty, but they are fertile. We grow crops in the hills, and run sheep that we get wool, milk, and meat from. We have no need to go anywhere or do anything else. We live here quietly, and the only contact we have with our neighbors is when, twice a year, we meet up to discuss the health of the land, to do a bit of trading, and to give the young people the opportunity to marry.”
“And you’ve been out here for two hundred years?” Ralnor asked, marveling that this little community could have been out in the wilderness for so long, without any input from the outside world. “Where did you come from?”
Anaxis shrugged and glanced to one side, slightly evasively. “Where does anyone come from? Our fathers and mothers settled here, that’s all we know. We’ve lived peacefully here ever since. Come, meet the villagers.”
Anaxis turned on his heel to lead them back to the village, but as he turned, his long hair was swept away from the side of his head by the movement. Ralnor stopped, stunned, as he saw the shape of Anaxis’s ear. It was not pointed. It was as round as his own.
He glanced at Akhen, who was staring wide-eyed at Anaxis. Ralnor met Akhen’s eyes, and in that moment they understood each other. Anaxis was not an elf after all—he was a half-elf, like them!
Akhen held one finger to his lips, and Ralnor nodded. They would not say anything just yet. This community was no threat, that was clear, but they were also a mystery. Ralnor and his companions would not push them on the secret of their origins if they were not willing to reveal it for themselves.
Quickly, it became apparent that this was a whole community of elf-human hybrids. Most were like Anaxis, bearing all the physical hallmarks of elvenkind, with only the rounded ears betraying their origins. But some—and especially the women of the group—looked a lot more human than elven. Interestingly, these women had the facial bone structure of humans, and they were shorter and less willowy than elves normally were, yet they had a distinct upward sweep to their ears and eyebrows in a very elven manner.
Ralnor had never seen a female half-elf, half-human before. Indeed, the only half-elves he’d ever known were himself and Akhen. He looked with fascination at these villagers, and he wondered how they thought of themselves. They were clearly elven to his magical sensing, and he had not detected that they were half-elves until he’d actually seen them.
He looked for some sign that they knew what they were, or that they were trying to conceal it, but saw none. They behaved as if they were the most normal people in the world. Some of them looked askance at the pure-bloods in Ralnor’s group. There was obviously something more familiar to them about Akhen and Ralnor than about the others, but for all that they were not unkind or unwelcoming.
The village had not been too badly damaged, and the people praised Ralnor and his friends and thanked them in their own strange language, which was like nothing Ralnor had ever heard before. Only Anaxis was able to communicate in the common speech, and he helped them to understand the villagers. Only he had ever traveled south out of the village lands.
“Tell me, Anaxis,” Akhen asked, when they were sitting together in one of the less-damaged huts a little later, “what do you call yourselves? What is the name of your people?”
The hut was dirt floored, simple, but comfortable, with one window and one door, a bed pallet in one corner, and a low table. The travelers sat on the floor around the table, and Anaxis served them soup in wooden bowls, which they ate with wooden utensils that Anaxis proudly declared he’d carved with his own hands.
“We call ourselves the Dernwaith,” Anaxis said in answer to Akhen’s question. “And that, also, is the name that we give to this land.”
Dernwaith…It took Ralnor a moment to remember where he’d heard the word before. Then he had it. That was the name of the runes that had been written on their map, the old map they had used in their journey through the Pass of Ghosts. And on the map, that name had been written in an ancient script that only Akhen had recognized. He had called them “the Runes of the Dernwaith.”
Akhen’s eyes went wide. He scrabbled in his robe, then cursed. “My writing utensils were in the boat,” he muttered. He cast around for something to write with and came up with the wooden spoon that he’d been eating with a moment ago.
He reversed the spoon and began to draw in the dirt of the floor a little away from the edge of the rug.
“Do you recognise this script?” he asked excitedly. Ralnor, peering over, recognized similar runes to the ones that had marked the Pass of Ghosts on the old map.
“Of course,” Anaxis said, looking at Akhen with puzzlement in his eyes. “That is the name of my people, the Dernwaith, rendered in the script we use to write our language in. You speak our tongue, then?”
“I don’t speak it,” Akhen said, “but I can write it a bit. Anaxis, you do not seem to know quite who and what you are, my friend.”
Anaxis smiled, looking a little confused, and extended his hands. “Tell me then, good Akhen, who am I?”
“You,” Akhen said, “are none other than the descendants of the Nameless Ones.”
Chapter 15
“I know of no people by that name,” Anaxis said. “I do not know what you are referring to.”
“Very likely not,” Akhen said with a smile, “but a long time ago, a group of powerful magic workers were destroyed by a civil war in a land far to the south and west of here. They are the last people known to have used this script. The runes are called the Runes of the Dernwaith, and there was a theory that the word Dernwaith was what that people called themselves, before they changed their customs and stopped taking any names at all. Around two hundred years ago, they closed themselves off from the outside world, but there was a legend that said that a group of them left and traveled far away. The fact that you keep the name and the script tells me that you, you and your people, must be the descendents of those ancient people.”
Anaxis looked at Akhen for a long time before he spoke. “I will tell you, then,” he said, a little reluctantly. “Very few people know this, even among our own folk, but the story of our origins is passed down among the leading families. It’s true what you say. I was not open with you a moment ago, when I said I had never heard of the Nameless Ones. But we are ashamed of our origins, you see, because the Dernwaith gave in to the desire for power and became a corrupt and shameful people. My ancestors left, it’s true, we left them when they got rid of their names, and we headed east, then north up the river. In those days, there were still many threats in the land, the aftermath of the Sundering. But we were magic workers, like you are. We were able to defend ourselves, and when the ancient city north of here became still and ceased to generate horrors, the lands became quiet and empty, and we were left in peace.”
Ralnor suddenly spoke up. “Anaxis, I have to ask—what do you call yourselves? Are you elves? Humans?”
Now Anaxis looked genuinely confused. “We are neither, my friend,” he raised a hand to his ear and showed it to Ralnor. “I am no elf. I am a Dernwaith, that is all. I thought you would understand that…”
Ralnor nodded slowly and lifted his own hair back to show Anaxis his ear. “I am like you, you see,” he said. “As is Akhen here. We are both the offspring of one elven and one human parent. We are part elf, and part human.”
Anaxis blinked a few times. “The Dernwaith...” he said slowly. “Is that what it means, then? Is that what we are?”
“I think so,” Ralnor said excitedly. “I noticed as soon as I had leisure to look at the villagers. You all have some characteristics of humans, and some characteristics of elves. And you say you were powerful magic workers in the old days. That must be what the Dernwaith are, the descendents of the hybrid community. Back in the old days, before the Sundering, the union of elves and humans was not rare, and plenty of people were born who shared the blood of both races. In the years since, it’s become taboo in both cultures, and the hybrids are scorned and excluded by both peoples. But you, you and your folk, you must be the descendents of the ancient community. That must be what the Nameless Ones were, and it explains also why they felt the need to exclude themselves from both peoples.”
“In a place between the two,” Lana said in amazement. “Those hills, the hills where ghosts of that people still dwell, sit between the borders of the human lands and the elven lands. Just like the people themselves.”
