R. Salvatore - Night of the Hunter

He landed with his feet wide apart, hands on his hips.

“Another slave!” Melkatka’s companion said, then repeated the words in the common language of the surface, which most dwarves would surely understand.

“Nah,” the dwarf replied and began a steady approach. “I thinked yerself might be making for a good slave,” he quipped, throwing the drow’s words back at him. “But I seen what ye did to the girl there, and so now I’m thinking not.”

Melkatka raised his whip, while cleverly pulling out his hand crossbow with his free hand, and firing off his dart just as his companion dropped a globe of darkness upon the newcomer. Lightning quick, the drow torturer dropped his hand crossbow to the length of its tether and drew out his own sword.

His companion moved to the side, both dark elves intent upon the area of magical darkness.

Many heartbeats passed.

“He is down,” Melkatka’s companion said. “Well shot, brother!”

The two glanced at each other, then watched together the hand crossbow bolt that came spinning between them-from behind.

Melkatka started to swing around when the heavy gauntlet of the dwarf, who had somehow slipped out of the darkness and arrived behind them, backhanded him across the side of his ribs and sent him flying. He accepted the blow and turned and leaped with it, touching down lightly and quick-stepping to hold his balance, thinking to rush right back in at the surprising enemy. Indeed, he even managed a step that way.

But he was too focused on the newcomer, unaware that he had landed near the female slave. He did realize his error, but only for the instant until the blinding white flash of a miner’s pick driving through his skull dissipated into the absolute darkness of a sudden and brutal death.

Amber Gristle O’Maul shook the embedded pick all around, not to extract it, but simply to feel its end mashing around inside her torturer’s skull. She watched across the way as she did, to see the remaining drow battling furiously with the strange dwarf battlerager-for of course she recognized this furious fighter as a battlerager-who had come onto the scene.

Drow swords worked brilliantly-of course they did! — cutting in side to side against lifted blocking arms. And fine indeed was that ridged armor, Amber realized, for the dwarf’s arms remained intact against solid hits from those magnificent drow blades!

The dwarf kept advancing, steadily and unbothered. Around went the drow swords, one coming in again from outside in, the other retracting and stabbing straight ahead.

And the dwarf became as insubstantial as fog, the stabbing sword hitting nothing tangible. With a yelp of surprise, the drow wisely turned and fled, but he had only gone a few strides when the dwarf reconstituted, just to the side as the fleeing drow passed, and despite the drow’s quick turn and dodge, swords slashing in a frenzy, the dwarf came on with a barrage of punches. His short legs pumped furiously, driving him against the drow, driving the drow against the far wall.

The drow tried to scamper out to the side one way, then the other, but the dwarf cut him off expertly. No novice, this!

The drow struck out ferociously, one sword blocked by a grabbing hand that slid down the blade to cup the drow’s hand, and with a deft twist of his wrist, the dwarf turned his hand over and slid his gauntlet spike into the drow’s wrist and forearm.

The other sword got through, a solid slash atop the dwarf’s shoulder, but if the battlerager was at all wounded, he didn’t show it.

Nay, he just kept boring in, and when the drow retracted, he grabbed that arm.

The drow tried to hold him back, and tried to get away, but the dwarf methodically lowered his head and slowly pushed in. The helmet spike went against the drow’s fine armor, and how the dark elf squirmed.

“No! No!” he pleaded.

The dwarf offered a soft whisper of “Shhh,” in reply, his powerful legs continuing to drive him forward.

The drow went into a frenzy, dropping his swords and pulling his hands free to pound at the dwarf. But the dwarf bored in, the helmet spike finally pressing through fine drow armor.

The drow gasped and grunted, squirmed and continued to flail, but ever slower as the helmet spike slid into his chest and stabbed at his heart.

The spike was against the wall then, fully through the poor victim, but the dwarf kept methodically driving onward.

The drow fell limp and the dwarf finally came back from the wall, standing straight and with the slain dark elf bobbing weirdly, impaled atop his helm. Blood spewed freely from the impaled corpse, showering the dwarf.

Amber nodded eagerly at him, but her smile disappeared when the dwarf heaved the drow up, pressing him off the spike, and lifted his face to bask in-nay, to drink! — the pouring blood.

A long while later, he dropped the corpse to the ground, grabbed the drow by the hair, and dragged him along as he came toward Amber. She shook her head and tried to speak, which of course just filled her mouth with wretched foam.

“But aren’t ye a lovely sight,” the battlerager said when he stood before her, and he dropped the dead and drained drow fully to the stone and reached a bloody hand up as if to stroke Amber’s face. She recoiled instinctively, only then fully grasping what it was that stood before her: an undead monstrosity, a vampire.

She tried to speak again, to ask him who he was, and simply spat out a line of wretched foam. How she hated these dark elves! And she almost wanted this undead creature to kill her then and there.

“Pleasant little lovely,” the vampire said with a puzzled look and a mocking snort. He looked at her shackles. “I’d break ye free, but them drow’d get ye and blame ye for their dead.” He paused, as if another thought had suddenly come to him, and the look that came over his face chilled Amber to the bone. “Might be another way, eh?”

His hand came up again, tenderly-and so discordant that movement rang to Amber, for the gauntlet was still liberally dripping the blood of his dark elf victim. She shuddered and shrank back, shaking her head and pleading with him with little mewling sounds.

The battlerager paused, his hand hovering near to her, his expression shifting through a myriad of emotions, from eagerness to puzzlement, to consternation and ending with a little, feral growl.

Amber sucked in her breath, swallowed a bunch of the putrid magical foam in the process, and vomited all over the ground between herself and the vampire.

“I’m lookin’ that wretched to ye, eh?” the undead dwarf roared, and he lifted his hand as if to strike.

But he pulled back, shaking his head, muttering to himself.

Fighting his urges and his hunger, Amber realized.

And then something else came over him, and he looked off into the distance, up the tunnel and higher. He muttered something that sounded like, “The graves!” And he stomped his heavy boot. “Ah, ye thieving dogs! Ye let him be! Me king!”

He had gone mad, clearly, and Amber believed her life to be at its end, believed that this vicious creature would then tear her apart.

But he didn’t. He ran off up the tunnel, but skidded to a stop and came running back the other way. Down went one spiked fist, driving hard into a drow corpse, and down hard went the other hand on the second corpse, like a gaffe hook pulling a fish up the side of a boat. A drow corpse tucked under each arm, the dwarf ran away, down the tunnel.

He came back a short while later, and Amber knew it was him, although he was in the form of a flapping bat then, and he went right past her without a notice, back the other way.

He had moved the bodies so that she could not be blamed for the murders, she realized.

The captured dwarf cleric fell back against the wall, overwhelmed and terrified. She slid down to the floor and sat there, crying. Spewing foam with every chortle, cursing the dark elves and cursing life itself.