Douglas Niles: The Crown and the Sword

The Palanthians, on the south flank of the original position, were forced to withdraw into a valley of the Garnets, moving to higher ground, and it was this wing that the elemental king pursued. Jaymes rode past the creature as it swept through a rank of crossbowmen, the cyclonic winds of its lower limbs tossing the armored humans around like chaff in a strong wind. It seemed to be loping along with these troops, crossing over a ridge and crushing a wide path through a forest of pines then settling back to the valley floor.

The lord marshal rode just ahead of the looming horror, sweeping into the valley where the legion had fled. He found General Weaver trying to organize a line of defense.

“Stand, you wretches!” the officer ordered his terrified troops, who retained enough discipline that many of them actually obeyed the order. They fired arrows at the elemental, but those arrows vanished, without effect, against the massive torso. A small band of knights charged with lances, but the elemental’s winds tossed them back.

“General!” shouted Jaymes, riding up to Weaver’s prancing stallion. “You’ll have to fall back; your men can’t fight this thing!”

“Run? By Joli, I cannot, sir!” he protested. “By the Oath and the Measure, we must make our stand here!”

“General!” barked Jaymes. “That’s an order-withdraw! Lead your men up into the mountains. Break them into small groups-see that as many survive as possible!”

His sorrowful eyes showing his frustration, the Rose Knight obeyed his lord marshal, pulling his men back from the elemental and urging them higher into the mountain range. They scrambled over the rocky ground, some of them splashing up the streambed, others sprinting through the woods as fast. As if toying with them, the elemental king hesitated, pausing at the mouth of the valley. The grim, lofty face scanned its helpless targets.

The men kept fleeing, completely abandoning all discipline, but the legion’s flight was thwarted a half mile away. The retreating troops rushed around a bend in the narrow valley and halted in consternation and panic. A sheer cliff rose directly before them, blocking any further progress into the mountains. Then the elemental king, his pursuit at an almost leisurely pace, came into view, striding resolutely forward.

Jaymes turned to General Weaver.

“We’ll stand here, my lord!” declared the general. “Est Sularus oth Mithas!”

“Yes,” agreed the lord marshal bitterly. There was no way out of this place, and it seemed certain many thousands of brave men would pay for that reality with their lives.

“Hey, Jaymes! Sir Lord Marshal! It’s me; I’m back!”

Jaymes whirled in his saddle, his jaw dropping in amazement as Moptop Bristlebrow came scrambling right out of a nearby rock pile to stand on a boulder at the foot of the cliff. The kender waved cheerfully then looked around at the soldiers he had startled with his sudden appearance. “You guys are a little jumpy, aren’t you?” he asked.

It was then that the elemental king uttered a thunderous roar that rolled up the valley, echoing between the cliffs and resounding through the air.

Moptop hopped down off the rock and sauntered toward Jaymes. He waved nonchalantly at the monster looming into the air barely a mile away.

“Oh, him again,” he said. “I guess I got here just in time.”

For several breaths Jaymes Markham was utterly speechless. He simply stared at Moptop, stunned by the kender’s appearance on the battlefield. The pathfinder’s air of utter nonchalance was incongruous against the backdrop of death and mayhem, and it took the lord marshal an act of will to shake his head and convince himself that he was not imagining the bizarre scene as the kender ambled cheerfully down from the rocks toward the army commander.

A glance over his shoulder showed Jaymes that the monster was pressing the advance, as if it sensed the helplessness of the trapped humans. Another bellow exploded from the elemental king, this one a thunderous convulsion that shook the ground and caused a small rockslide in the valley. The noise finally startled his tongue into action.

“Moptop! What in the name of all the gods are you doing here? Where did you come from?” the lord marshal demanded when he finally regained the power of speech.

The kender grinned happily. “Well, I found another path. But it’s not like it looks-I mean, I didn’t just magically walk through the rocks, like we did at the Cleft Spires. I went back underground like you asked me to, and I had to look around for a really long time. But I found my way back out again!” He chucked a thumb over his shoulder, indicating the tumble of large rocks at the base of the cliff. “See, there’s a cave down here, and I came out of the hole.”

“Of course.” The lord marshal thought quickly. He looked up and saw the looming form of the elemental king, its black shape etched against the sky and two fiery eyes fixed upon the milling soldiers of the Palanthian Legion trapped here in this valley. They were hard up against the cliff. There were several thousand men in here, many hundreds of them on horseback. Brave and willing to fight to the last man, they were nevertheless incapable of battling the looming monster. Their only hope of survival was escape.

Looking at the sheer cliff, the rock wall looming a hundred feet in the air, capped by a cruel overhang that would have prevented even a skilled climber from attaining the top, Jaymes could see there would be no further retreat on the ground. Even though the kender claimed to have found a cave at the base of that precipitous barrier somewhere within the great pile of large boulders, Jaymes couldn’t spy any opening.

“You say there’s a cave in there. Is it large enough for these men to escape into it?” Even as he asked the question, he felt the looming presence of the giant elemental and knew it was a futile hope.

Moptop confirmed that knowledge with his first words. “Not really-it’s pretty small and narrow. If they left these horses outside, they could go in there one at a time, I guess, if the cave wasn’t filled with adamites. But they pretty much block the whole thing up.”

“Adamites?” Jaymes felt a flickering of hope. “So you found them? And they came with you?”

“Yes-and you were right! They all followed me right along, the whole army of them, after I told them what you told me to say. They’re lined up down there right now. Here they come!”

The lord marshal saw the proof emerging into view even as the kender spoke. Grayish white, the color of naked rock, the first of the stony warriors came out of the hidden cave to appear between a pair of large, square boulders. The stone-skinned warrior slid nimbly down the shelf to stand at attention on the floor of the valley. Another warrior came behind the first, and still another followed, both of them dropping to the ground to flank the first of the statuelike warriors.

The file of adamites emerged from the cave in eerie silence, their heads capped by the antique, bristling helmets, each bearing a small round shield in its left hand and the stout, sturdy spear in its right. But they came quickly; in no time at all, there were more than a dozen standing there, and this rank took a step forward as still more emerged to fill out a second rank just behind the first. The second group marched to the side to take up a position beside the first, extending the front to some twenty-five warriors-and twenty-five sharp, sturdy spears-while more and more and more of them continued to climb out from the narrow cavern.

“My lord!” cried General Weaver, approaching with his sword in his hand. He glared worriedly at the adamites as the first rank took another few steps away from the cliff wall to make room for yet more of their comrades. “Are we being attacked from behind, as well?”