Troy Denning: The Titan of Twilight

As the high scout moved up the canyon, a steady war din started to build: screaming footmen, bellowing giants, the crackle of flaming swords and snapping pikes, steel clanging against steel. Other smells merged with the sick stench of burning warriors: coppery blood, throat-scorching brimstone, the fetor of spilled entrails. Brianna’s stomach grew hollow and queasy. She forced herself to breathe through her mouth. She climbed out of her sleigh, holding on to Blizzard’s snowy mane while she peered up the canyon.

Two hundred yards away, the road was becoming a river of pain and death as a long line of fire giants waded into a swirling current of knee-high soldiers. The queen could see her footmen swarming around the first three foes, hacking with gleaming battle-axes at huge ankles, or jabbing pikes into the seams between thick plates of ebony armor. The giants were fighting back viciously, clearing broad swaths of road with every swing of their fiery swords. Brianna counted a dozen more brutes coming down the canyon to join the battle, and she could not even see the end of their line.

Tavis was already a hundred yards up the canyon, above a jumble of courtier sleighs lying abandoned along the roadside. He was less than twenty paces from the leading fire giants, easily within bow range; from that distance, he could sink an arrow into each of a giant’s eyes before the dead body hit the ground. Nevertheless, the high scout continued forward, traversing the slope well above the reach of his enemies. The queen saw one giant try to climb after him, but a thicket of pikes instantly drove up beneath the warrior’s loin apron. The brute thundered in pain and collapsed into the battle swarm.

Brianna felt her hand drifting toward her sleigh, where the satchel containing her spell components lay on the bench. She allowed herself to pick up the bag, but restrained the urge to reach inside. Through long experience, the queen had learned the wisdom of saving her magic for critical moments, when a rain of fiery hail or a well-placed lightning bolt could turn the tide of a battle.

Tavis finally stopped and nocked his runearrow. He fired down the hill. The queen waited for the shaft to detonate, but the blue flash and sharp crack never came. Apparently, the arrow had bounced off the target’s thick armor-it was inconceivable that the lord high scout had actually missed. He drew another runearrow and fitted it onto Mountain Crusher’s bowstring.

On the hillside below Tavis appeared two fire giants, crouching behind their bucklers and scrambling up the slope. One brute’s breastplate was striped by a long runnel of blood, bright and red against the ebony steel. From his collarbone protruded a tiny, feathery stub: the high scout’s first runearrow.

Tavis ignored the pair and fired at the road again. Brianna felt a growing tension low in her abdomen and knew another labor pain was coming. The two giants lowered their bucklers and charged up the slope, raising their huge swords to strike.

“What’s that firbolg doing?” Brianna demanded of no one in particular. “Say the command word!”

She would have said it herself, but that was not possible. Three years ago, Tavis had nearly died when a spy learned how to discharge his runearrows and detonated one in his face. Now, the command words had to be spoken backward, and even then, they worked only if spoken by the person who had nocked the shaft.

By the time his foes reached striking range, Tavis had pulled another runearrow from his quiver. Brianna did not see what good it would do him, for he would never have the opportunity to nock it. The fire giants’ huge swords dropped, tracing fiery arches against the hillside. Tavis gathered himself to leap, then the giants’ flaming blades came together in a brilliant flash.

The hillside erupted into a fiery ball, spraying scorched rock and blazing stumps into the air as high as the giants’ heads. The looming warriors raised their swords and struck again, hewing great, smoking furrows deep into the mountainside. They did not stop swinging until they had churned the ground into a blackened mound of stone and earth. Even then they continued to jab the tips of their blades into the heap, like a pair of nervous hunters trying to spear a wolverine before it scurried from its den and chewed their legs off.

The giants were doomed to fail. Brianna saw Tavis more than twenty paces down the slope, rising to a knee, the runearrow in one hand and Mountain Crusher in the other. His cloak was badly tattered from catching on stones and stumps, and he looked rather unsteady on his feet. Despite his condition, he quickly nocked his arrow and fired.

The shaft streaked up the slope and planted itself behind a giant’s knee. If the fellow cried out, his voice was lost in the battle din, but he suddenly hunched over to slap at the wound. He said something to the brute with the runearrow lodged near the collarbone, and they both turned to face Tavis. In the same instant, the enormous, bearded face of a third fire giant appeared behind the scout.

Brianna’s hand slipped into her satchel. Before she could withdraw the spell component, her husband abruptly rushed across the slope toward a nearby crag. Behind him, sapphire lights flashed beneath the armor of his foes, and a trio of loud, sharp booms shook the canyon. All three giants collapsed, one with nothing below his loin apron, one with nothing above his breastplate, and the third with nothing between his chin and his belt. With the impact of their crashing bodies, Brianna’s swollen stomach reverberated like a drum.

The baby noticed the rumble, too. The queen’s belly suddenly began to jump and dance above the child’s kicking feet. A tiny fist pressed against her kidney, sending a fiery pang of anguish through her lower back. Almost instantly, the pain faded to a dull ache, but it also slid forward and encircled her abdomen. The coil slowly tightened, and the crushing agony of a labor pain gripped her.

The queen gritted her teeth and kept her gaze fixed up the canyon. One of the giants had fallen onto the road, but the other two were still tumbling down the slope, descending upon the road in a fiery avalanche of blood, bone, and steel. They came to rest atop the third giant, forming a hillock of black armor and flesh.

The death of the three fire giants caused no eerie silences or temporary lulls in the battle; the fighting continued. The Royal Snow Bears pressed their attack with renewed vigor. One giant fell when he looked over his shoulder at his dead comrades, the next when he slipped and dropped to a knee. Brianna’s pikemen swarmed up the gorge, leaving the road behind them strewn with bodies large and small. The roar of combat faded to a drone, and the rancid battle-smell grew so thick the howling wind could not sweep it from the canyon.

The Snow Bears’ advance came to a rumbling halt thirty paces later, when they crashed into a long line of charging fire giants. As the battle din returned to its former roar, four giants at the rear of the column climbed the hillside into Brianna’s view. Unlike their comrades on the road below, they had no bucklers strapped to their arms. They carried their swords, dark and cold, in their scabbards. The four spread out and cautiously started across the barren slope toward Tavis, bobbing and dodging to make themselves difficult targets.

Doing her best to ignore her growing pain, Brianna reached into her satchel, considering which of her spells would best aid her husband.

As her fingers closed around a small glass rod, Avner cried, “Majesty, look!”

The young scout was standing on his bench, pointing up Wyrm River. Brianna looked over the top of her sleigh and saw several fire giants near the bend in the canyon, belly-crawling down the river’s icy surface. They were not hiding-even the thought was absurd-but trying to distribute their weight across the ice so they did not fall through. They would soon outflank the Royal Snow Bears, for the company no longer had enough men to spread their lines across the frozen river.