Son of Thunder

CHAPTER 18

Sungar smiled though his flesh was raw and his cheeks were flecked with blood. Another afternoon of torture had ripped away all of his strength, but he smiled and laughed through it nevertheless. A trace of light filtered through the tiny window at the top of his cell, casting patterns across the walls, and somewhere nearby a bird chirped merrily, lightening Sungar's spirits.

"It will not be much longer now," he said.

"Can you be certain?" asked Hurd through the wall.

"You said it yourself," Sungar said. "The first time we spoke. Change is coming to Llorkh. And you wanted to live long enough to see it."

"I hope you're right."

"I am." Sungar said. "The old chief has shown me so."

"This place can have strange effects," Hurd cautioned. "We cannot always trust our senses."

"Simply believe, Hurd," said Sungar. "Even false belief will give you the strength you need when the time comes."

"I want to kill him," said Hurd. "I mean Kiev, though I would surely gut Geildarr if given the chance. But Kiev, who's brought such pain down on us. I'd love to see him pay. I wouldn't even care about seeing him suffer. That'd be playing his game. The quick death he denied us… that would be fulfillment enough."

"Let your anger brew," Sungar advised. "All the rage you've kept in check for all these years… now is the time for it."

The Thunderbeasts made camp in a field of brown grass, south of Loudwater. On Rask's advice, they chose to avoid the towns and major roads as much as they could, for the area crawled with Zhentarim, and they did not want Llorkh to have any forewarning of their approach. Kellin tossed and turned in her bedroll then rose, the full moon dappling her dark skin in tones of silver. Vell was keeping watch, silently staring into the distance.

"How do you feel, Vell?" she asked softly, so as not to disturb the sleeping warriors around them.

"Fine," he said. He turned to her. "As angry as I am at the Shepherds, there is something reassuring in knowing exactly where I stand. I thought Uthgar cursed me with this-he did not."

"But you transformed again," Kellin said. "How do you feel about that? I realize Uthgardt are unaccustomed to speaking of feelings, but-"

"I kept more of my own mind this time," said Vell. "That is good."

Kellin nodded.

"What troubled me is how comfortable I felt in that form." Vell forced a smile. "In a body so foreign, so unlike my own, so huge and scaly-I felt like myself."

Kellin embraced him. This took him by surprise. The gesture meant more to him than any words of reassurance. In the moonlight, he closed his arms around her as well, and for a long time they stood in a shared embrace, their heads resting on each other's shoulders. He felt warm and welcome in her arms, and his heart beat fast. For the first time in a long while, he was moved by something other than anger. He was of age to select a wife from among the Thunderbeast women, but the warriors of greater repute and importance took precedence. Before Runemeet, he had always hovered on the margins of his tribe, and not only because of his eye color-though that served as a reminder of his differences.

She whispered into his ear, "I would not wish your predicament on anyone. The Shepherds were wrong to do this to you, and you are brave to have borne it this far. You are the bravest man I've known." He began to speak, but she shushed him. "When this is over, if you do not want to return to your tribe, there will be a place for you with me."

"Will we be lovers?" Vell asked. He surprised himself with the question, and he began to recant. "I mean…"

"No," said Kellin. "It's an important question. I don't know yet. We'll see how this turns out. Unless you think Lanaal…"

"No," Vell said. "Not Lanaal."

"You and she have so much in common," Kellin said.

"And so little in common." Vell moved a tentative hand to stroke the black curls that hung down over her shoulders.

"You don't have to accept my offer," Kellin said, resting her head on his shoulder. "This is your choice. Maybe you'll decide that your place is with your people."

"Up until now," Vell answered, "I had no way to even contemplate leaving. But you had never met me, Kellin. Before Runemeet, before Morgur's Mound, Vell the Brown was an ordinary man, unremarkable in most ways. Take the behemoth from me, and I fear that's what I'll be again."

"Don't think that way," said Kellin. "Look where it's led you. You've traveled far outside the world you knew, met creatures you never could have expected-elves, korreds, treants, and a half-orc, not to mention a sorceress. You've shared harsh words with your own ancestors. These experiences cannot be erased, nor the experience of carrying all this weight. You will emerge a stronger person, and that's how you will stay."

Vell said, "Another thing I'll have to thank the Shepherds for." He let out a soft chuckle that let Kellin know it was just a bitter joke.

Together in the night, with barbarian warriors sleeping all around them, they clutched each other tightly, nothing more needing to be said.

Rask used the tip of his sword to trace a map of Llorkh in the dust at his feet, digging a furrow around it to represent the ditch. He drove the sword's tip deep into the ground at the city's center, to represent Geildarr's manor and the seat of government for Llorkh: the Lord's Keep. The party hid among the foothills of the Graypeaks, keeping a distant watch on the Dawn Pass Trail to the north, where the occasional caravan crawled to or from Llorkh. They crouched in the tall grass that swayed in the wind as larks chirped their autumn songs.

"Much of Llorkh is unpopulated," Rask explained. "Or so it was. I should remind you that I have not been there in many years. The population dwindled after the mines closed, so the town has many untended, uninhabited buildings. Geildarr fortified the walls and built a great ditch around Llorkh.

"We face one major problem," Rask went on. "Llorkh is a Zhentarim stronghold. It is no place to live, though many do live there, poor souls. In truth, it is a fortress for the protection of caravans, and nothing else. Geildarr's Lord's Men number in the hundreds, and with so many caravans passing through the city, the number of soldiers within the walls is usually high. And there are but eight of us."

"We faced a vastly superior force in the Fallen Lands," Thluna said, "and we were victorious then." He looked at Kellin, then at Vell. "We have a magic user, as we did then, and something else of perhaps even greater power."

"I will do all I can to create havoc. With care, I could collapse buildings, stopping many of our enemies," said Vell. "But it may not be enough. It seems Geildarr is a powerful wizard himself."

"More than that," Rask added, "Llorkh houses a large and powerful church of Cyric. If Mythkar Leng still rules there, he is a mighty spellcaster in his own right, and a cruel-hearted sadist. Once, when I was just a child, my parents and I sat in the Dark Sun temple. As caravan guards, it was required that they occasionally sat in on these ceremonies, though none of us revered Cyric. Leng detected our lack of faith instantly. The service included the ritual sacrifice of an enemy of Cyric, in this case a halfling who Leng said was a Harper agent captured in Loudwater.

"I dared to turn away as they disemboweled him on the altar. Leng took me from the audience and flogged me as Cyricists looked on in amusement, not as punishment for my lack of faith, but for my parents' disinterest." Rask paused a moment at the difficult memory.

"At the center of Llorkh is the Lord's Keep, a well-guarded tower of a building. Surely this is where Geildarr would keep the Heart of Runlatha, if he has not yet shipped it to his Zhentarim masters. So you see what we are up against. A bold assault would be suicide."

"We are prepared for whatever our chief wills," said the warrior Ilskar. "It would be a glorious fate."

Thanar rested a hand on his shoulder. "Glorious perhaps, but not smart. What is our mission here? It is threefold: free the behemoths from their bondage, recover the Heart of Runlatha, and rescue Sungar. For the moment, we do not even know if these things reside in Llorkh."

"I can assure you that they do," said a mellifluous voice. They spun to find Lanaal's delicate elf face staring at them from the long grass. The elf laughed.

"I should have known you would put in an appearance at the right moment," said Rask.

"Lanaal!" Vell said. "How did you find us?"

"It's not hard to find someone when you have so many spies." As if on cue, the larks around her chirped louder. "With my own eyes I have seen your chief Sungar, resident in the dungeons under the Lord's Keep. He has been tortured but has not lost his spirit. He believes he will be liberated, and from what I heard, has seen a portent that told him so."

"Praise be to Uthgar," Thluna said, closing his eyes in his relief.

"And the behemoths?" asked Vell. "What of them?"

"You will likely sense them when you get closer, and you will know their agony as if it were your own. They are tethered by magic in Llorkh's Central Square. I have much more to tell, and doubtless you do as well, but this I must say first. Vell, I kept my promise and sought out an old elf hermit in the Am Forest whose only name is Lynx-Eyes. He is rumored to have an affinity with cats, akin to mine for birds. Lynx-Eyes was obstinate at first, but I persuaded him to help me. He claimed to have an ability I had never heard of before. He says he can not only transform into a cat, but can allow willing comrades to do the same."

Vell's face went blank. Could this be? The Shepherds would surely have mentioned such a thing, unless they didn't know of it, and why would they? How often, in all of their centuries, would they have tried to bestow their powers upon mere humans?

"If true, this could be our answer," said Thluna.

"I could not ask this of you," said Vell. "Even if it is true, and even if I am capable of it, how can I ask any of you to…"

"I will accept it," said Hengin unblinkingly.

"I cannot ask you to share my curse," Vell told the warrior, "and neither can Thluna command it…"

"We are able to choose, Vell the Brown," said Draf. "We choose this."

"It shall be only for a short time, Vell," said Thanar. "It is the only way."

Rask Urgek smiled, widely enough to show his orc fangs. "I, for one, look forward to bringing as much of Llorkh crumbling down as I can."

A cold autumn wind passed through the silent streets of Llorkh in the dark of night. It chilled the bones of the city's most unwilling residents, the behemoths, who shuddered in the square where they stood imprisoned. A quiet moan of protest from one grew to a low, mournful symphony, as more and more voices joined in, filling the night with the tones of their sadness.

Throughout Llorkh, the poor townsfolk awoke and lay in their beds, hearing this unearthly choir. They had gawked at the behemoths when they had walked the streets of the town, and were sympathetic, for they knew fellow prisoners when they saw them. Some townspeople were old enough to remember the murdered mayor Phintarn Redblade, and the days before Geildarr and the Zhentarim, when Llorkh was an honest mining town down on its luck-a place where dwarves and humans lived together in peace. Their sobs joined the cries of the behemoths.

That night, no soldier slept soundly in the barracks. Halfhearted rumbles were shared about orders to silence the inconvenient beasts, but none could bring themselves to do it. A profound unease they could not name settled into their spirits. Even Geildarr woke in his bed high up in the Lord's Keep, wandered to his balcony, and stared down on the Central Square and his unfortunate pets. His hands trembled as he gripped the railing, and he soon turned away and shut himself back into his room. He fetched the Heart of Runlatha, felt its warmth, and let its red glow wash over his hands. Clutching it to his breast, he settled back into his bed and tried hard to get back to sleep.

So many floors below, Sungar and Hurd shared no words, for none were required. They were ready. The time was upon them-if they had any doubts, they were settled for good once the cries of the behemoths ceased, and suddenly, a signal if ever there was one: a mind many miles away reached out and touched them, soothed them, making them ready for the battle to come.

The two prisoners in the dungeon imagined the warrior gods of their esteem-Uthgar and Gorm-standing together, armored and prepared for war.

An expectant mood settled over the scarred town of Llorkh. At long last, it was on the brink of something new.