“Is that really so important? Well then, have we a deal?” Suovik reached his hand out for the key.
“No,” the dwarf forced himself to say. “Take your junk and get out of here.”
“Is that your last word?”
“Yes!”
“What a shame,” the man sighed. “I wanted to do things in a friendly way.”
The door opened and five shadows slipped into the room. Frahel turned pale.
Despite everything, Elodssa still somehow managed to lose his way and turn off into the wrong corridor. For a moment the elf’s dark skin was covered in sweat at the sudden thought that he was lost. But after walking back and turning twice to the right, the elf found himself in a familiar corridor with a low ceiling.
Eventually he found himself outside Frahel’s workshop and pushed the door open.
The dwarf was lying on the floor as dead as dead could be. A man was frozen absolutely still over a key—his key—singing a song in the ogric language, and the artifact was responding with a poisonous purple glow, pulsating like a living heart in time to the words.
The singer cast a single swift glance at the elf and snapped: “Kill him!”
Five orcs with drawn yataghans came dashing at Elodssa.
Elodssa’s s’kash slid from its scabbard with a quiet rustle as his other hand grabbed the dagger from his belt and flung it at the shaman. The blade sank into the stranger’s neck below the Adam’s apple and he slumped over onto his side, wheezing and bleeding heavily. Now he could not say another word and he would not use any magic. The purple glow that had been spreading around the key began gradually fading. But the elf could not take the artifact yet—the first orc had drawn back his yataghan to strike. The s’kash and the yataghan clashed, parted, and clashed again. The orc jumped back, waiting for his fellows to move up.
“You’re finished, you scum!”
Elodssa did not bother to answer. Of course, five against one was very bad odds, but the elf was saved by the fact that he was standing in the doorway and only two of them could attack him at once.
“Duck!” a familiar sharp voice said behind him.
He did as he was told and the bow that appeared above his shoulder fired an arrow that buried itself in an orc’s eye. Another shot, and a second orc fell, shot through the heart. Midla fired her third arrow point- blank into the face of the enemy running at her. Elodssa joined in the fight, giving the elfess time to put her bow away and draw her two swords.
Dodging a blow from the right, he raised his s’kash over his head, offering the flat side of the blade to his opponent’s yataghan. The orc was caught out, his yataghan slid along the downward slope of Elodssa’s s’kash, and the force of his own blow carried him forward an extra step, exposing his flank. The elf’s curving blade sliced through his opponent’s left arm and deep into his side. The elf then raised his weapon, stepped to the side— and the s’kash severed his enemy’s neck, sending the head tumbling across the floor until it stopped somewhere under the table.
Elodssa hurried to assist Midla, but she had already dealt with the final orc herself. There were two curved blades protruding from the enemy’s dead body. Midla slumped back against the wall, hissing in pain as she squeezed shut the gaping yataghan wound in her leg.
“Are you all right?”
“No, by a thousand demons! How could you be so stupid as to come here alone? What if I hadn’t got here in time?”
“I’d have had to manage on my own,” he said, tearing up a cloth he had found in the dwarf’s workshop.
“On your own,” Midla muttered, tightening the knot. “That wolf’s spawn even managed to wound me.”
“Can you walk?”
“I don’t think I’ll be able to walk for the next few months.”
“We have to get out of here. Who knows how many enemies entered the galleries.”
“Are these the ones who killed the guards on that distant gate?”
“Probably. I’ll carry you.”
Midla simply nodded. “Pull the swords out of the body—they mean too much to me.”
“Of course.” Elodssa pulled the twin blades out of the dead body, handed them to Midla, and set off toward the body of the man, intending to pull his own dagger out of it.
In defiance of all the laws of nature, the shaman was still alive, although there was bloody foam on his lips and it had dribbled down onto his chin and beard. Elodssa indifferently tugged the dagger out of the wound and listened to the man wheezing, gurgling, and whistling.
“You . . . ,” the man began, trying to say something. “The Ma . . . ster will po . . . ssess the key . . . any . . . way.”
“I don’t know who your master is, but elves don’t part with their property that easily.”
