Guild Wars_ Ghosts of Ascalon - Matt Forbeck [38]
“Stay for a moment, Doomforge,” Soulkeeper said. “The rest of you are dismissed. I suggest you get some rest before dinner. You’ll be shown to your rooms.”
The two humans and the sylvari left the general’s chamber. Dougal noticed that Riona had a grim, thoughtful grin on her face and probably could guess the nature of the conversation between the two charr on the far side of the door.
The hylek crusader took them to their rooms. Riona nodded at her door, then said, “I need to run a few errands here in Lion’s Arch. I will join you at dinner.”
“And I would like to explore the Vigil House further,” said Killeen. “I think I saw some other sylvari in the halls.”
“You two have fun,” said Dougal. “I for one am going to follow General Soulkeeper’s orders and take a nap. It has been too eventful a day already, and it is still early afternoon.”
The three split up, Killeen leaving with the hylek, asking questions as they walked away. Dougal watched them leave and lingered for a long moment in the hall. Now that he was committed, he wondered if he had the right to drag Riona and Killeen back into the deathtrap that was Ascalon City. Perhaps the charr was right: traveling light and fast would be the best approach.
“Never adventure with people you would hate to see die,” he said to himself. Lost in thought, he didn’t realize that his door was already ajar as he strode into his quarters.
Dougal closed the door behind him without looking, staggered toward his bed, and set his pack down. The long day had finally caught up with him, and he wanted nothing more than to sleep. Almorra Soulkeeper had kept talking about how time was of the essence. If this was the last night he’d see a bed for a long while, they’d have to drag him out of it, even for dinner.
That’s when he heard the heavy footfalls behind him.
Dougal spun about just in time to see a mountainous form emerge from the shadows behind the door and come straight for him. The norn stood over nine feet tall and had as much mass as a full-grown bear. He wore his bright blond hair tied back tightly behind him in a warrior’s braid, and the light from the lanterns on either side of the bed glinted in his ice-blue eyes. His naked chest was crisscrossed with a maze of swirling tattoos, and he wore only a fur-trimmed kilt and a pair of soft leather boots, both of which bore black splotches of old blood.
The norn let out a bloodcurdling war cry that reverberated off the room’s stone walls. Dougal ignored the scream to concentrate on the razor-sharp edge of the double-bladed axe the norn swung toward his head in a fatal arc.
Dougal let his feet spin out from beneath him as he hurled himself toward the bed. The axe sliced close enough to him for the rounded side of its steel head to glance off his temple as it passed over him. He bounced off the bed, which would have put him in the path of the axe’s backswing but for the fact that the first strike had bit deep into one of the bedposts with a sickening crunch and stuck there.
Dougal scrambled away from the bed as the norn took hold of the axe’s handle with two hands and pulled. Dougal cursed the fact that he still didn’t have a sword and made a mental note to have Almorra make good on her promise, should he live that long. Away from the bed, he drew his knife, but when he looked up at the norn—who glanced back as he continued to struggle with and curse at his axe—the modest blade seemed next to useless.
Dougal hunted around the room for something else to use as a weapon. He spotted a toppled chair lying before an overturned desk near the large unshuttered window, and he dashed over to snatch it up over his head.
The norn snarled in frustration. “By the Bear!” he said in a booming, slightly slurred voice. “If you refuse to release my axe, you damned bedpost, then you will pay!”
The norn reached out and grabbed the top of the bedpost, then snapped it from the bed with a mighty twist of his wrist,