Douglas Niles - Circle at center

These memories were especially vivid and sweet, and he pulled Darann close with a powerful burst of longing. Cupping the fullness of her flesh in his hand, he pressed against her, felt her shift and turn slightly as she slowly came awake. He squeezed, found her nipple with his blunt finger. Kissing the back of her neck through the mane of hair, he pushed his loins against her with strong, suggestive force.

When she reached her hand between them, her fingers grazed his flesh with an electric, rousing touch. Soon they were turning, she rolling to her back while he slid on top of her. She took him in, and in a breathtaking, gasping moment they became one. For long minutes they lay nearly still, murmuring sounds of love, moving hands and lips. Gradually the pace of their motion increased, though still they were nearly silent. They shared the moment of release with a deep kiss, clinging desperately to each other, love coursing as hot as the blood running through their veins.

As his breathing returned to normal, Karkald thought what a grand thing it was to be alive.

They took a long time getting up, and by the time they had ambled back to the main cavern they found Hiyram sitting, belching and sniffing the air. His eyes were luminous in the darkness and when Darann touched off a bit of coolfyre he scowled in irritation.

“Why’s for dat?’ he demanded. “Spose’d be dark round here.”

The dwarfwoman just laughed.

“Where goin?” asked the goblin, quickly shifting conversational tacks. “Way from wyselts, yup?”

“Why-are there more of them around here?” Karkald asked worriedly.

The toothy face bounced up and down in an enthusiastic nod. “More and more comin’, runnin’ from Delvers, yup?”

“Delvers?” Now Karkald felt a real chill of alarm. “They can’t be around here, can they? Remember, we’re in the midrock, miles above the First Circle now!”

“Delvers climb up, too… like you two, too.” Hiyram hooted gleefully at his wordplay. “Lotsa rocks fall down… Delvers find a way up.”

“How many Delvers?” Karkald was remembering the size of the force he had seen below his watch station.

“More than I could count… or you too, either. Fingers and toes on myself, and on you and you… makes not even the start of ’em.”

“An army-climbing up here?” Darann asked, staring wide-eyed at Karkald. “But why?”

“Go to Fourth Circle,” Hiyram exclaimed with a hearty chuckle. “Elves up there-Delvers eat ’em like maggots!”

Karkald looked at his wife, saw the memory of horror in her eyes. He, too, recalled the visage of that steel-jawed monster, Zystyl, and his eyeless horde. Could the scourge of the First Circle be released against a whole new world?

“The elves know nothing of war, of hatred and killing. They’ll be helpless!” Darann whispered, and Karkald knew she was right. Nayve’s innocents would be massacred in droves. He could only nod in mute agreement.

“Then we have no choice but to keep climbing,” she declared, and he had no argument with her decision. “We have to get all the way to Nayve, to carry to the elves the warning of the Delver invasion.”

B elynda awakened to a world that had changed in a profound and unmistakable way. She sensed the alteration in the core of her being, in her ragged memories of the nightmare that had been visited upon her in the darkness. Numbly she groped for her gown, pulled the tattered garment over herself like a blanket. Her body was sore, bruised and scraped where she had been used. But that was not even the worst of it-the violation went deeper, touched at the very heart of her being, and then went further still until it had warped the place that was the Fourth Circle.

The sage-ambassador knew that her life, her world, would never again be the same. She tried to remember who she had been, why she had come to the Greens. But those memories meant nothing, had no relevance to this painful thing that existence had become.

Nistel… surely he was dead, killed by that awful blow to his head. Perhaps it was only yesterday that his life had been taken, but even that seemed, from her current vantage, like a very long time ago. It had happened before she was changed into this person she didn’t know, couldn’t even begin to recognize.

A fire burned within her, a raging conflagration that seemed to destroy her peace, her soul, everything that was good about her. Her hands curled into claws as she remembered the man, remembered what he had done to her. She would have killed him in an instant if he had been standing before her.

But when she tried to move, she realized that vengeance was, for now, an unattainable dream. The injuries to her flesh were real, and crippling. It was only with great difficulty that she could push herself to a sitting position and slip the gown over her shoulders. She ached in her limbs and joints, felt a stinging soreness in her neck. And these hurts were as nothing compared to the ripping fire in her loins, the burning, the sense of pervasive poison that, she feared, must quickly consume her body.

Perhaps it was already too late… she had a sense that she was already doomed, fatally wounded, crippled in a way that could never be made whole. The despair was so powerful that, for a moment, she almost yielded to a darkness that would have dragged her back down onto the straw mattress, never to rise again.

But it was the memory of that mattress, the place where he-the man who was a monster-had worked his evil, that gave her the strength to stand. She moved away from the bed with a shudder of revulsion, and then, once again, her hopelessness began to give way to a stronger emotion.

“I hate him.”

She said the words quietly, and they brought her some small comfort. Until this moment, hate had been an abstract concept to her, a thing that had no place in Nayve. Now she felt it in her guts, in the fury that tightened her jaw and brought a narrow squint to her eyes. She raised her hands and saw that they were fists, small but rocklike, and for an instant she fixed on the idea of striking the man who had attacked her. She swung her arm, awkwardly she knew, but even that flailing gesture brought a sense of satisfaction.

Then the flap of the tent was pulled aside and Belynda whirled. All of her anger turned to panic as she instinctively took a backward step. By the time she had recovered her resolve, she recognized the intruder not as her attacker, but as the massive centaur called Gawain.

“Come with me,” said her captor, stomping his great forehoof for emphasis.

“Why?” she snapped. “Where are you taking me?”

Her objections were ignored as Gawain reached for her with a meaty hand, snatching her arm before she could pull away. She kicked and squirmed but he had no difficulty manhandling her around, clasping her back to his chest and lifting her off the ground. Belynda kicked again, but she couldn’t reach the centaur, and each movement sent a jolt of pain through her bruised body. Such was the power of her hatred that she kicked and thrashed with renewed violence, ignoring the agony in her own flesh.

The great centaur pulled her out of the tent and she saw the encampment of her enemies in daylight for the first time. They were in a wide clearing amid the high trees of the Greens. Hundreds of unkempt people, nearly all male, stared at her. There were a few dozen centaurs, mostly at the perimeter of the camp. Closer by, in casual clumps of like kind, she saw numerous goblins and elves, and smaller groups of looming giants. All of them, even the few women present in the army, looked at her with a peculiar, disturbing sense of hunger. She saw burly giants lick their lips, goblins nod their round heads eagerly as she was carried past. Even the elves, her own people, watched with a kind of bemused fascination, though they displayed little emotion at her predicament.