The White Fox (31 page)

Bál’s eyes flashed open. Jack could only imagine what the demon had whispered to him inside his head, but he could tell it had severely shaken him. He spun around, obviously shocked at his surroundings, until his gaze fell on Jack, on the Seventh Shard, and then on his own.

“Put away the Light,”
repeated the demon.

Jack’s and Bál’s eyes locked, and in an instant of simultaneous realization, they knew what they had to do. With the smallest head motion possible, they nodded at each other.

“Not a chance in hell,” the dwarf said calmly, turning to face the demon.

Jack did the same. His mind was oddly clear now; he could see straight ahead, and he could feel his brain pushing away the parasitical influence of those twin cores, like fog ripped apart by sunlight. The Seventh Shard was shining at his throat. He unsheathed his sword in a flash and held it aloft, crossing it with Bál’s drawn axe in an
X
between them.

From deep within the Seventh Shard, he felt the power engulf him. White light surged up his rapier, just as a corona of crimson flames blasted up Bál’s axe. The two intertwined at the point of contact and launched high into the air. A shard of incandescent crystal light, encircled by a thick coil of inferno, bolted towards the demon—a white fox and a red ram charging as one. It struck the creature squarely in the chest, ripping a gigantic breach through its core.

The demon shrieked, the noise recoiling off every boulder and mountain in the surrounding valley, as its essence was rent apart. The last image of the infernal lobster was its writhing form before it imploded in a tsunami of black smoke, its remnants dissipating into the dark lake below.

Jack and Bál stood, stunned, trying to get a hold of what had just happened.

Around them, a ragged combination of elves, pretend elves, dwarves, and goblins clambered to their feet, attempting to extricate the remaining black slime from their clothes and hair. The combination of light and fire had gone, the Shards were no longer glowing, and there was no sign whatsoever of any demons.

Sardâr was the first to speak. “Jack, Bál, one of you needs to seal that Door.”

“What?”

“That is a Door to Darkness,” the elf replied, his arm raised above his head to indicate the dark maw in the fabric of the sky.

They all looked up, and Jack received the same heady feeling of sickness as when sensing a demon.

“It’s a remaining passageway between Light and Darkness, just like the one on Earth.
That’s
why I went searching in Mount Fafnir in the first place. I thought I might find the entry point. As long as that’s left open, Darkness will continue to seep into this world. You need to use a Shard to seal it. Either of you.”

Jack unlooped the Seventh Shard from around his neck.

He was interrupted, however, by Bál speaking. “I’ll do it.” Jack looked at him quizzically for a moment, then shrugged and stood back.

Bál raised his Shard above his head and pointed the jagged edge towards the sky. The thinnest possible beam of scarlet light shot upwards from the point like an arrowhead, shooting vertically into the air. It struck the dark mass at its very heart.

Instantly, the earth began to rumble, the debris around them bouncing off the bridge, as the black typhoon retracted. It coiled inwards, as if being sucked down a drain, compressed into the smallest imaginable space at the point of the red beam. Then as the rumbling ceased, it vanished with a crackle of air, and was gone.

Dawn broke over the peak of Mount Fafnir, the golden light surging across the valley.

The following hours passed like a haze to Jack. He barely had time to exchange a few words with Ruth before they bundled back into the fortress and the all clear sounded.

Dwarves began to emerge from every guarded room and declaim the wreckage of their valley. Whilst soldiers—assured multiple times that there would be no lurking demons on the battlefield—searched for the dead and any survivors and miners started the arduous task of clearing the rubble away, refugees began flooding back into the main chambers of the colony.

Jack, Lucy, and the crew of
The Golden Turtle
were immediately put to work distributing rations to all members of the population. The goblins, meanwhile, were escorted secretly into a hidden chamber by Sardâr, Adâ, Hakim, and the king. Jack understood the reasoning. The vast majority of the civilian dwarves, hidden underground, would not have been aware of the Door to Darkness being opened, and so they were still under the impression that the goblin army had caused the ravaging of their homes. It would have been hard to keep the surviving goblins being lynched by the angry mob, even though they had lost many more of their fellows in the battle than the dwarves had.

Finally, just after midday and a long council with Sardâr, the king emerged from his throne room and proclaimed that he had a speech to make to his subjects. Every dwarf in the fortress was to assemble in the now partially cleared valley to hear these very important words.

It took an entire hour and a half to marshal the dwarf populace outside—for many of them, the first glimpse of the havoc that had been wreaked. Once this was done and the fortress had been completely emptied, the king climbed on top of a large piece of rubble as a makeshift podium. Jack, Lucy, and all the real and pretend elves were told to come up and stand beside him.

It struck Jack for the first time just how many people there were here—the uniformed guards, tunic-wearing miners, administrative scribes, peasant refugees, and forge blacksmiths clad in their thick overalls—at least a thousand denizens or visitors to this battered colony-city-fortress. He could tell he was not the only one who noticed too late that the king was now the shortest on the podium.

This did not seem to deter him, however, as he began. “Last night,” he declared in a voice much louder than his usual one, which carried right to the back of the crowd, “we, the people of Thorin Salr and the surrounding localities and villages, suffered a merciless and unprovoked attack by external enemies. There are many amongst the citizens I see before me who would have me blame the goblin tribes and have done with it. There are even those who would want me to marshal our soldiers and launch a counterattack into the Wastes.”

There was a cry of consent from a large minority of dwarves in the crowd.

“That, however, would be an injustice and a travesty.”

Widespread murmurings.

“We were not the victim of a malicious attack from goblins, though that has not been unknown in the past. The attacks on your villages and on this city were indeed perpetrated by goblins—but goblins manipulated by a malevolent force behind them. A force, moreover, that used Dark alchemy to attempt to destroy our kingdom. I have communicated with the kings of our neighboring states, all who attest to having been the victims of similar attacks. These attacks were masterminded by an organization of sorcerers who call themselves the Cult of Dionysus.”

There was a general cry of outrage at this. Thorin was clearly right in that there were elements amongst his inhabitants who were pushing for a counterattack.

“Yet we repelled them,” shouted the king, overcoming the cries of outrage. “We repelled them through our belief in the righteous defense of our homeland!”

The cries of outrage morphed into cheers at this change of tack.

“However, this victory does not belong to dwarves alone. The small force of heroic warriors that has ensured the safety of our kingdom was made up of dwarves and elves”—he gestured to those either side of him—”and goblins.”

Shocked silence dissolved into whispers, as, at Thorin’s beckoning, Vodnik and the surviving goblins climbed the rubble from out of sight to stand next to the king. They looked very awkward before a crowd of a thousand dwarves and did not seem to know what to do with their hands. The one with the bleeding shoulder was heavily bandaged now, though he still looked drawn and pale.

“These goblins,” Thorin continued, “lost far more of their fellows than we did of ours. Yet when a brave regiment of dwarves and two elves left the fortress to assist their surrounded companions, these goblins chose to fight on our side rather than to flee. Together they repelled the forces of Dark alchemy that threatened us and allowed us to be standing once more in this valley today. For their utmost bravery in the face of adversity, I have chosen to award all these warriors honorary citizenship of our kingdom.”

There was a pause once the king finished speaking, in which the mood of the crowd was unreadable. Jack stood next to Lucy, feeling extremely tense. If the dwarves decided they didn’t like this idea, there were easily enough of them to overrun the podium and probably crush all those standing on it in the process.

But his fears were unfounded. It was only a few seconds before the first claps sounded, and within a few more cheers were resounding around the valley as Thorin crossed the podium, shaking the hands—and cracking the knuckles—of each of them in turn.

Once he had finished and the cheering finally ceased, he began again. “This experience, trying as it has been, has certainly taught me a very valuable lesson. The feud between dwarves and goblins, not only in this kingdom but across this continent, is absurd. Last night showed that when we cooperate, we can achieve much more than when we fight amongst ourselves. I therefore propose that friendly relations begin from today with the goblin tribes of the Wastes, and at the first opportunity, I will call together the other dwarf kings and goblin chieftains in the first Dwarf-Goblin Conference of the Stórr Mountains.”

Bál stepped forward to speak, clearing his throat.

Jack could tell the strong political position he held even by the silence that descended upon the crowd again. As the head of a potential resistance to this new stance, his view was very important.

“I second this proposal,” he said loudly. “My experiences in the last hours have led me to reevaluate my position. Early this morning I fought alongside some of the bravest soldiers I have ever met, and many of those were not dwarves. I welcome this new opportunity for good relations.”

Another cheer began, intensifying even more as he too cracked knuckles with the goblins on the podium.

The late afternoon was passed in much the same manner as earlier in the day but with a more elated sense of purpose. The goblins, no longer under threat, assisted in shifting the rubble and recovering the bodies of the dead. In accordance with their tradition, a pyre was constructed away from the fortress, on which the bodies were cremated. Meanwhile, the dead dwarves were taken out of the valley to an ancestral barrow ground and laid to rest there. Neither side questioned or impinged upon the other’s traditions.

Jack and Lucy spent the remainder of the day with Ruth, Adâ, and the crew of
The Golden Turtle—
the same group, in fact, that had first travelled under the ocean that lifetime of three weeks ago. Things could not be more different now. The extremes of Adâ’s cool aloofness and Lucy’s spoilt moodiness had gone, and all four of them laughed and joked together. As before, Jack found himself watching Ruth in idle moments and looking away hurriedly whenever she noticed.