Troy Denning - The Titan of Twilight

Kaedlaw’s growl became a fierce, echoing howl.

“Is there any way to keep him quiet?” Tavis asked.

“What do you want me to do, smother him?” Brianna snapped. “If the firbolgs hear him, you’ll just have to kill them.”

Tavis clamped his jaw shut and tried to listen past Kaedlaw’s howling.

“I didn’t mean to snap, Tavis,” Brianna apologized. “But he nearly died the last time I tried to keep him quiet.”

Tavis felt her tug on the cloak he had laid over her legs, then she tucked it around Kaedlaw. The child’s howling quickly abated, leaving the tunnel to the relative silence of dripping water.

“That’s better, isn’t it?” Brianna whispered to the infant. “But when we’re outside, you’ll have to give your father’s cloak back to him.”

Tavis was thankful for the darkness, for it prevented the queen from seeing the grimace that creased his face. How could his wife and the front riders think he had sired the hideous infant-or even call the child by a name suggesting it resembled him? Galgadayle’s prophecy was at least partially correct; the brutish child was not Tavis’s offspring, but that of the Twilight Spirit’s imposter prince.

“Maybe we’ll let the front riders carry me,” Brianna said, still talking as though she were speaking to Kaedlaw. “And your father can wrap you inside his cloak so you both stay warm.”

“He’ll be warmer with his mother,” Tavis said. “And you can keep my cloak to be sure. I’ll be fine.”

Brianna stiffened in his arms. She was silent for a long time, then said, “Lord Scout, if I didn’t know better, I’d think you were reluctant to hold your son.”

Tavis’s mouth went dry. “I–I’m holding both you and K-Kaedlaw now.”

“That’s not what I mean. You haven’t actually touched him since you found us,” Brianna said. “In fact, you’ve hardly looked at him. What’s wrong?”

Tavis wanted to turn the question back on his wife-to demand how she could possibly think he had sired the hideous thing, to ask whether she was blind or took him for a fool-but he fought back the urge. Despite the baby’s grotesque appearance, Brianna was convinced he had fathered the child. Now was hardly time to tell her otherwise. Besides, it would take more than a half-reliable prophecy to make him betray the oaths he had sworn to the queen.

“Well, Tavis?” Brianna pressed.

“We-uh-should-uh-”

A pair of anguished wails reverberated out of the opposite drainage tunnel, sparing Tavis the necessity of saying more. The screams did not end, but continued to echo through the darkness, randomly changing pitch and volume, as though the bodies from which they came were being played like living instruments. The gruesome music carried a steady undertone of crackling and splashing, and the basal throb of deep-throated chortling.

“Hiatea have mercy!” Brianna gasped. “What’s happening in there?”

“I don’t know, Majesty,” said Gryffitt. “But we’ll put an end to it soon enough.” He started to splash toward the tunnel, with the other two front riders close behind.

“No!” Tavis ordered. “Stay with the queen.”

“Begging your pardon, Lord Scout,” said Gryffitt. “But if that was me up there, I’d want some help.”

“If we try to help them, we’ll join them.” The two front riders had walked into an ambush, as Tavis had half-expected, but it hadn’t been firbolgs. “You men take the queen and start back up the tunnel. I’ll hold them here.”

“Them?” Brianna demanded.

“Fomorians,” Tavis answered. “Galgadayle told me to watch out for fomorians and verbeegs.”

The wails continued unabated.

“ Galgadayle told you?” Brianna sounded stunned.

“I pulled Avner’s sword out of his back,” Tavis admitted. “He won’t be doing us any more harm.”

“He has done more than enough already,” Brianna growled. “How-”

“If the fomorians catch you, they’ll do more!” Tavis thrust Brianna toward Gryffitt. “Take her and go.”

Several pairs of hands reached up to take the queen. “We’ll wait at the drift where we heard the water draining,” said Gryffitt.

“Don’t wait,” Tavis replied. “And if you must stop to hide, do it well. Fomorians see in the dark better than we see in daylight.”

As the front riders waded away, Tavis started toward the opposite drainage tunnel. He stopped when he heard Brianna uttering a spell. A pale silver light flared behind him. He turned to see his wife lying on the shoulders of her three bearers, a glowing dagger in her upraised hand.

“I thought we should see as well as the fomorians,” she explained. “And Tavis, try to come back. I’d rather Kaedlaw grew up knowing his father.”

“I’ll do what’s in my power, milady.”

The tortured screams of the two front riders finally died. Tavis waded into the darkness ahead and slowly made his way to the wall. He placed himself between a pair of rough-hewn support timbers, chimneyed up the side of the tunnel, and braced himself between the ceiling arches. He freed one hand long enough to draw his sword, then settled in to wait.

As the last sloshing echoes of Brianna’s departure faded away, Tavis saw a familiar blue glow flickering across the turbid waters below. Mountain Crusher. He grasped his sword more tightly and tried not to think of the fatigue burning in his thighs and shoulders. The magical light grew brighter, illuminating bands of blood swirling in the orange river. The weapon itself floated into view atop the water, spinning in the current and sweeping the walls with its cold, shimmering light.

The bow remained in one piece, with Thatcher’s hand still gripping the handle. The wrist was cocked at an impossible angle. The arm jigged and jagged in three different directions, then came to an abrupt end at the mangled elbow.

Two foul-smelling mangles of flesh and bone drifted into view. They had been twisted into grotesque parodies of human bodies, their limbs bent against the joints or torn off entirely. Organs that should have been safely tucked inside the torsos now hung outside. Tavis looked away, fighting the urge to retch.

Mountain Crusher brushed against a timber, then spun into the opposite wall and caught its string on a rock spur. The two bodies slowly bobbed past, lingering beneath Tavis so long that it almost seemed the spirits of the two front riders were torturing him for sending their bodies to such hideous deaths.

The crest of a gentle wave rolled down the tunnel, carrying the corpses away. A sweet, musky scent rose off the water, mixing with the smell of sulfur and musty wood.

A stubby, gray-skinned hand came into view. It had only three gnarled fingers, each ending in a sharp, broken nail that protruded from the tip like a muskrat’s claw. The appendage itself was as large as a human torso, its ashen hide mottled with black warts and crimson boils. The twisted thing advanced at a glacier’s pace, reaching out to dislodge the glowing bow. Tavis heard no sloshing water, no wheezing breath, no sound at all.

At length, a fomorian’s warty, pear-shaped head came into view. Like all of his kind, the hunter was hideously and uniquely deformed. One eye hung in the center of his forehead, and the other rested atop his pate. From one side of his head dangled a pair of drooping ears. His broad nose ended in a single cavernous nostril, and an ivory curtain of crooked teeth jutted over his thick lower lip. Though the brute was squatting on his haunches, he was so large that the wiry hair on his back brushed the ceiling in front of Tavis.

The fomorian’s two eyes worked independently as he advanced, one searching the tunnel ahead, the other scanning the walls and ceiling. One of the dark pupils swept past Tavis’s hiding place, then stopped midway down the wall and started to rise again.