AUTHORS NOTE
For those who are 'following', please disregard any notifications of early chapter changes. All I've adjusted is some ages (some characters are now slightly older than they were originally).
Slyksylva - I'm sooooo sorry! It's scant compensation, but this was part of the plan all along. I've strayed so much from my original ideas, but this one needed to happen :(
Archer1Eye - Sorry! Sharein is going to realise something in this chapter that should explain the situation a little better... Hope is not lost, but it's not going to be such an easy journey as all that. The runes are something that, for the time being, Sharein has completely forgotten about... but she's about to get reminded very soon. Not that she will get answers for quite a while though. Thanks for the review! Hope you enjoy this chapter 3
Chapter 77? Day of High Summer? 768 n.c?
My plan was simple. I knew that I could enchant a piece of parchment to ring a bell, all I had to do was figure out how to make the rune explode. Malkarov had long ago mentioned the possibility and had told me that it was a favourite sort of trap in ancient temples, ruins and the like. A search through Malkarov's books revealed the answer, an enchantment called Explosive Runes (Touched). Curiously there was another rune scheme for Explosive Runes (Read), whereby you wrote words over the top of the rune scheme and when those words were read, the enchantment would activate. I spent an entire evening copying out the enchantment onto pieces of parchment and in the end had almost eighty separate pieces of parchment enchanted. After enchanting so many I could feel the depletion of magic inside me but when each one activated I would get the magic back so I wasn't too worried. With the knowledge that Malkarov was safe, if injured, I worried more about my family and how they were. I relied on the fact that it wasn't Mother's first time fleeing certain death and with this thought a realisation struck me.
Mother fleeing from certain death. Mother's story! That's right!
Prior to coming to Easthaven, my Grandmother had prayed at an altar exactly the same as Shard's in Allarth. Hope swelled up inside me, burst inside me with such explosive force that I felt even a little giddy! Even though Shard's altar here was destroyed perhaps she remained linked to the other one? I needed to find Mother to find out where exactly the other altar was, perhaps Grandmother had told her?
I had a goal!
I had a goal and while I felt the pull to follow that thread, I needed to finish what I was planning in Easthaven first.
A quick check from the roof of the tower revealed that the orcs were much more active during night time, with the vast majority sleeping during the day. Easthaven seemed to be a staging point; for during the night orcs trickled in from the south in small groups and a group of fifty orcs departed to the north. Shortly after the orcs departed to the north, one came running back and ran straight into the Pig and Wheelbarrow. I wondered if this meant that the orc in charge was staying there and straight away became my priority for the morning.
I slept well and awoke when the sun started to shine. I hoped that this meant the orcs were starting to sleep. Nothing had gotten into Malkarov's tower during the night, so I wasn't sure what had come of the discovery of the guards to the north. Looking down from the roof of the tower I could see that the same orc I had killed the day before was still lying down at the door. I wondered at the intelligence of leaving the same orcs guarding the same place for what seemed to be at least an entire day, but I wouldn't look past good fortune.
I readied myself and just before opening the door I cast Invisibility on myself. To begin with I snuck down towards the church, put one of the pieces of parchment on the ground and covered it with dirt. I then did the same near the door of the church. I followed this method across the bridge then up and down the road. Simply putting down these pieces of parchment didn't dismiss my Invisibility, so I could keep it up for a while.
My biggest worry was, of course, that an orc would happen to step on one of the runes before I had finished. Then everything would happen all at once while I was out in the open. Thankfully there didn't seem to be any orcs patrolling, most seemed either asleep or drinking and fighting on the Common's Paddock. This made things so much easier for me as I was able to cover all eighty pieces of parchment. Once I had finished that, I began enchanting doors of houses, crates and barrels of food and equipment. Enchanting the first door did drop my Invisibility spell and I had to be extremely careful as I moved. I knew that orcs could see in darkness but I didn't know how their vision worked during daylight, would they be able to see through shadows? I tried to keep to them nonetheless. There were a number of crossbows left leaning against the front walls of houses and they made perfect targets. My luck remained true and the last thing I did before casting Invisibility again and sneaking back to Malkarov's tower was to ensure the whole thing was set off.
I had placed one piece of parchment on the road in front of the Common's Paddock and so when I reached the bridge I summoned Tenebrae's gift to me and summoned a semi-sphere of darkness on the parchment. I didn't wait and watch for the result, instead I hurried towards Malkarov's tower. Once inside I climbed all of the way up the stairs and quietly opened the trapdoor. I worried that something had gone wrong, did the orcs not notice or did the enchantment not work? I peeked over the edge and peered down towards the paddock. The sphere of darkness was surrounded by orcs, who were not curious or brave enough to venture inside of it. They were poking it with their swords and then one brave orc put its hand into the darkness. They seemed to be arguing about something, perhaps the best course of action? One was pointing over the river towards the church and another was pointing at the Pig and Wheelbarrow. Others were arguing amongst themselves hopefully to see who would be the one to venture inside. Their argument seemed to rouse another orc from one of the tents, slightly smaller than the rest who appeared to question them. The arguments stopped and they gestured for the smaller orc to come closer. I watched the small orc come closer and when it reached the others one of them sprung forward and grabbed hold of the smaller orc! The small orc was picked bodily up and thrown into the darkness! Still there was no explosion and I growled in frustration. Where did I go wrong?
The orcs surrounding the darkness seemed to be eagerly awaiting something and all reacted simultaneously to something, laughing and clapping each other on the back.
Then the explosion happened! The fiery blast looked extremely strange, spreading out from the dome of darkness and it ripped through all of the orcs who had surrounded it! They were all blown backwards about ten feet and the sound of the explosion reverberated through the valley. A ripple of excitement spread through me and I waited eagerly with baited breath. Three other explosions seemed to happen at the same time, one near the Pig and Wheelbarrow and two farther to the south. Then four more one after the other, then they just seemed to happen continuously and it seemed to go on forever! Wood from the houses was being blown out and upwards, with some houses catching on fire. Clouds of dust were being blown up, covering most of the city. Trails of smoke started appearing through the dust cloud and yet still more explosions were occurring!
When the explosions started to die down there would be a pause before another explosion sounded somewhere around the town then a longer pause, then another single explosion. When the quiet began to stretch for longer and longer, the dust started to clear. I looked down upon a wasteland. The houses were mostly destroyed, the road had great black blast marks all over it, smoke was rising out of the rubble all over the town. Aside from the smoke there was not a single sign of movement. Charred orc bodies lay on the ground or mixed into the rubble all over town. I don't know how long I stood there in shock, just looking from body to body to body. Then there was movement. Slowly, tentatively, the two orc guards from the northern valley entrance had made their way along the road. They had caught sight of the destruction, they had obviously heard the explosions and seen the smoke. Yet they did not know the cause. They crept forward and paused, crept forward and paused. I frowned, I was sure that I had planted another piece of parchment where they were standing. When they crept forward again they stepped on it and boom! Both orcs were thrown up into the air by the fiery explosion! I smiled to myself at the job well done, the entire town had been cleansed.
I packed my bag and gathered everything that I might need. Before I left I wrote a note to Malkarov and left it on his bed, describing what I had done and suggesting that before letting anybody come back into the village that they check for enchanted parchment that may not have been set off. Once that was all done, I took a round of cheese from one of the cupboards in the kitchen and two of his books that contained rune schemes and I left his tower.
My plan was to head north out of the valley and then turn left towards Easthaven. Now that the orcs had broken through, they must be aiming for the north; for the Irongap Mountains. But they would have to set up a line to the west to protect them from counter-attack from Carnian forces. Unless they had managed to distract the Carnian armies enough with an attack through the main pass? In any case, I needed to find Mother. She would have answers. The most likely place for them to be, for everyone to be, was Sunhaven. To get there I would have to travel through lands held by orcs and then likely cross over the lines held by each army. I followed the road out of Easthaven, but when I turned left I turned before the main Sunhaven road and instead walked through the fields. When the woods took over from the fields, I walked through the trees while keeping an eye on the road. I stopped when I saw redcap mushrooms growing that Malkarov would have wanted harvested for material components, but forced myself to continue. I did not have the time, or the need. Although once I made it to a city, I would probably need money and I could probably sell them to another wizard… I half turned to head back, but decided that I would stop for the next thing that I saw. It made for slower going, but the components could provide money and the money could provide food in the future. I had started to amass a collection of different things before I realised that I didn't have pockets, pouches or bags to carry each separate thing in and decided to dump most of them in favour of collecting only two things; red cap mushrooms and skeletal ivy leaves. The mushrooms would need to be dried before use, but I thought that someone might want to buy them to dry themselves. Skeletal Ivy Leaves I remembered seeing in the Mages Guild Shop with a price of one silver moon per leaf. These I stored between the pages of one of Malkarov's books. With my careful and slow going, it was late afternoon before I got close to Sunhaven and saw a line of orcs crossing the road and stretching towards the mountains in the north. They had chopped down trees in the woods and built a spiked wall to hide behind. I snuck through the woods to see if the wall continued to the south and was dismayed to find that it did. The orcs had cut down a great swathe of trees a hundred yards wide and built their wall ten yards in from the edge of it. This meant that any attackers would have to run across ninety yards of open ground to get to the wall and the orcs guarding the wall all seemed to be equipped with crossbows. Although the orcs seemed spread out along the line, every hundred yards or so was a small camp holding another group of orcs. I estimated that, in just the small section that I could see, there were around one hundred orcs and I shuddered to think how many were actually guarding this line. Not only this line though; if there were thousands of orcs guarding the line north to south through Carn, how many were attacking the Irongap Mountains? How many had made it through? They were not my problems and I focussed instead on the one at hand. How to get past them.
I could try to sneak past with Invisibility, but there did not seem to be a big enough gap in guards. I would have to be as quiet as possible too and hope that nothing saw my footprints in the mud or grass. I could try to cause a disruption in one part of the wall in the hopes that all of the orcs rushed there? I could try to just destroy one part and try to rush through, but that immediately sounded like a bad idea. I'd been punctured by crossbow bolts enough to last me a lifetime. I was about a hundred yards from the road and right next to one of the small camps that had been set up inside a clearing cut out of the woods. Tents littered the clearing and all while the camp itself was extremely quiet (likely with all of its occupants asleep) the orcs guarding the wall were all paying attention to what was on the other side of the wall. The fact that the clearing was cut out of the forest also meant that it was completely hidden from most of the rest of the wall.
When the idea struck I found myself musing, "I wonder…"
'Only one way to find out,' I answered myself.
Three Elemental Explosion spells were enough to kill everything in the camp and because they made no sound, I was able to cast each one without even being noticed! Next I cast Manipulate Elements and when I did I was able to feel the presence of each of the fifty orc bodies in the camp. I did not think that I would be able to handle all of them, but was pleased to discover that I was able to keep twenty Manipulate Elements spells going at once! Twenty orc bodies crawled out of their tents and twenty orc bodies took up torches that rested next to their tents and lit them in the closest of the many fires burning around the camp. The orcs on the wall still hadn't noticed them. I knew that I had to be very close to them to instruct them, so I cast Invisibility and followed closely behind as they all strode purposefully towards the wall. When the first of the orcs on the wall noticed them, I had them run. Their movements were jerky and awkward, but their pace did quicken. Each of the twenty orcs crashed into either an orc guard or the wall in a line one hundred feet long. Those that crashed into orc guard didn't seem to do much damage in the crashing, but that's when something curious did actually happen. When the orcs crashed, they often dropped their lit torches. Sometimes these fell on the ground and sometimes they fell on the orc guard, but when they fell on the "zombie" orc… Whoosh! The orc lit up on flames in an instant!
My Manipulate Elements spell turned them into husks, literally. They were dried up, containing still the fats and oils but none of the moisture. The orc "zombies" that caught on fire burned the guards they had crashed into. The orc "zombies" that continued running to the wall, began burning the wall. Soon orcs were running around on fire and the wall itself was ablaze for a hundred feet! I backed away slowly as other orcs came rushing from the north and south to see what was going on. I disappeared back into the trees and made my way back towards the road. When I got there it appeared as though most of the orcs guarding the road had left to see what the fuss was to the south and I was able to perfectly repeat exactly what I had just done. There were less orc guards (as most had gone to the south), so the fire spread along a much larger portion of the wall. Very soon two portions of the wall were on fire and orcs were running around everywhere. There was not sufficient water around to put out the fires and in places orcs attempted to push portions of the wall over in order to stop the fire from spreading.
I was hiding among the trees when I first heard it.
A clear resonant call, a tone that cut through all of the bustle and frantic effort at the wall; a clarion call that bespoke solidarity of effort of hope and blood and death. It was not a sound I had heard before, but had heard described and even then it took a few moments for me to put things together. The Carnian soldiers had seen the wall on fire with parts of it being knocked over and had taken advantage of the opportunity that had presented itself. The Carnian soldiers appeared to be attacking in two prongs towards the fires, for the orcs began to mass at these locations. It was difficult for them, for they had no wish to stand too close to the fire. I moved cautiously closer and cast Elemental Explosion at the mass of orc invaders. The orcs on the other side of the flames loosed their crossbows and I cast another Elemental Explosion spell at them as they reloaded. Orcs were rushing towards the point of attack from the north but I didn't believe they would make it in time.
My guess was proved correct when a sphere of earth burst through the flaming wall sending parts of the palisade flying through the air! There was a Carnian War-Wizard on the other side!
Through the hole they burst! Knight after knight on horseback streamed through the gap and split left and right once through. Then came soldiers in chain mail with high tower shields and long swords. The knights rode down the orcs behind the palisade wall, skewering them on long spears or trampling them to death under steel shod hooves.
The Carnian soldiers had spread out, away from the gap in front of me, so I cast Invisibility once more and strode confidently through the hole in the wall pushing back the growing headache that indicated that I was coming close to magical exhaustion again. I didn't want to risk that again, not with the price so high from the last time it happened.
The grass beside the road ahead was torn up and muddy with the charging of the horses and off in the distance I could see the tents of the Carnian Army. It was towards that camp that I aimed to walk, hopefully there would be someone there that I could talk to about Easthaven.
