"So my people are to suffer," Galen Firth had said accusingly, "while the folk of the much-lauded Mithral Hall crouch safely in their caves?"
Even Alustriel had wanted to kill him.
It had taken all that Bruenor had not to leap across the table and bury his battleaxe in the man's forehead, to split him from crown to crotch in a violent, happy frenzy.
Now the Rider of Nesme was wishing that the dwarf king had. Anything would have been better than this.
"How long is this going to take?" he said sourly, peering through the rain at the smoldering ruins of Nesme.
"As long as you want it to take," the shadow beside him gave its standard answer.
"Well, it's taking too long," Galen snapped.
"Now that's not a complaint I usually get." The voice was like liquid ice, but with a streak of something hot and sticky in it.
"Shut up."
The shadow laughed.
Across the Trollmoors, the forces of the two-headed troll chieftain were being routed by every conceivable weapon that Galen Firth could have imagined. Greenish lightning flickered across the swollen, black bellies of the clouds above, occasionally leaping earthward to strike some distant target like glittering spears. The rain had long ago frozen solid, becoming a never-ending downpour of icy needles that tore through stone as easily as flesh. The droplets that hadn't mutated into little glass knives instead struck the ground and smoked, like the drool of a black dragon, eating into the sodden mud of the moors.
And Galen didn't like the shape of some of those shadows out there at all.
"I could leave you here," the silhouette next to him purred suggestively. He whirled, furious at the intrusion; the filthy creature must have been reading his mind.
"Stay out of my head!" he hissed. The figure only chuckled, a chilly little feline noise that was nonetheless half a sepulchral echo, half a mechanical chittering.
"How much longer?" the Rider asked after a long silence.
"Until what?"
"Until your…friends finish clearing out the trolls."
There was another, shorter pause. Then, the shadow managed to convey a sort of nebulous confusion, despite the fact that Galen Firth couldn't really make out much body language. "I'm sorry, what?"
"I said, 'how much longer until your friends finish clearing out the trolls?' I'm sure that the Lady Alustriel and her allies would feel much better if you were assisting them back at the dwarves' stronghold. I know I would," he added in a spiteful mutter.
Once more, silence reigned.
"Forgive me; just one more time? Clearing out the trolls, you said?"
"That's right."
"Ah. Er. Um… Oh, my."
"What?"
The figure managed somehow to look shamefaced. "Well, nobody said anything about killing the trolls, did they? Anyway, that isn't what I was told."
"What!" Galen spat.
"Well, you see, it's really kind of a funny story… There I was, just debauching amongst a bevy of immoral young succubi—and incubi, now that I come to think of it, ha, ha—and your Lady Alustriel calls me up and she says, now wait till you hear this, she says, 'Morghen, dear, I know we've never been on the best of terms, but I wonder if you could spare some time from your busy schedule to just pop on over here to Realmspace and take care of some monsters for me in the Trollmoors.' Ha. Monsters, you see. So I thought…" The voice trailed off.
Galen Firth had gone pale. "You thought what?" he said, his voice dead.
"Well, you know how it goes. She told me about this dark elf—what do you call them around here? Drow?—this drow who wandered through about a decade ago, or so. Had some friends, wanted to shelter for the night in Nesme, you turned him out…" The voice had taken on a much more knowing, decidedly more menacing, notably less vacuous edge. "Almost got killed by trolls, I hear. And then, ha, here's the funny bit, you come along and demand from his friends the dwarves that they send an army to rescue this miniscule, insignificant, unbelievably unworthy pack of snooty, swamp-dwelling bastards you call 'Nesmeans.' While they're defending their own home from an army of orcs. Without help from you. Again, unsurprisingly. And so, when she told me to clear out the monsters, I just assumed, you see…"
The last living survivor of what had once been Nesme could only cower in abject fear as the being addressing him emerged from its cocoon of darkness, the shapeless blob of shadow unfurling into the very distinct shape of six tenebrous, feathered wings, a mockery of an angel's done in shimmering, quasi-real blackness. The young-looking man from whose shoulders they sprouted sat in midair with his legs crossed in a relaxed fashion, bobbing slightly up and down as he put one elbow in the other hand and laid a finger alongside his unnaturally beautiful face. Eyes like glowing pools of emerald flame, slit down the middle by catlike pupils full of bottomless night, regarded him the way a very, very large snake might look at a very, very small mongoose.
Viridian sparks danced across long, straight, pale-golden hair untouched by rain as the lightning crackled above, and glinted on canine teeth just long enough to be called fangs.
"Oh, Galen, Galen," Dayhawk smiled slowly, the sensuous curve of his lips mocking against his marble-white skin. "What am I going to do with you?"
"Let me go?" the man managed to squeak hopefully.
The sorcerer burst out laughing. "No! No, I don't think that would do at all, my cowardly little friend. At all, aha."
Galen Firth allowed his eyes to take in the lithe, slim body; the ivory flesh bare far below the waistline, clad only in a fauld of shiny black leather. The silvery armor that went from foot to mid-thigh and from shoulder to fingertip. Dayhawk noticed his gaze, and rapped a knuckle on the forearm of the other limb, producing a sound not unlike the shimmering ring made when fine steel was pulled from a scabbard.
"These?" he said, slender eyebrows raised. "Accident; had to have both arms and legs replaced, don't you know. Funny, it all happened because of bigotry and prejudice, too. If only people could just get along…" He sighed theatrically. "Ah, well. Life is what you make it, I suppose."
There was a slithering click as claws unsheathed themselves from the tips of his mechanical fingers.
"And I'm about to make yours very short," the d'aasimar grinned, his eyes the only light in a suddenly endless darkness.