Stardeep_ The Dungeons - Bruce R. Cordell [56]
Arrows burst from the boughs of the encircling forest, a rain of flint-tipped death, falling among the Knights, dealing death or mercy at random. The screams of horses and Knights marked a sudden and growing knot at the Causeway's middle-horses went down, breaking Knights beneath them, but worse, clogging the charge line.
Figures clad in green, gold, and dun broke from the eaves, light and silent, drawing bowstrings for another flight even as they ran. Astonished shouts greeted the attack, followed closely by the ring of sword on steel, axe on bow. The natrow line of the Causeway became choked at its head with grappling, hacking figures. The blood of wood elf, half-elf, and star elf mingled in the dark waters of the hidden Chabala Mere.
The Empyrean Knights were outnumbeted, but despite the bloody toll exacted by their foes, and regardless of the fair-featured nature of their enemy, the defenders slashed the wood elves, split chests protected only by stitched leather, cracked wooden shields, and finally slew the Yuirwood elves to the last man and woman.
Silence descended for a beat, followed by a victoty shout. The Empytean Knights had again defended Stardeep's entrance from the latest infiltrating attack by the suddenly, unaccountably warlike wild and mixed elves of Aglarond.
Kiril topped a wooded rise and saw the great boulder beneath which she had once so often rested, though now it was tufted with patches of snow. A little farther, there was the old birch ttee, still standing tall and regal among the conifers after so many years. Here was the narrow ravine that sheltered a small, trickling tributary to the Chabala River, which fed into the Mere-on which sat the Causeway.
"We're close," she threw back over her shoulder-her right shoulder; Xet perched on the left. Gage stiffened, as if hearing difficult news, then showed her his impish smile. Her self-proclaimed friend seemed oddly shaken since their encounter with Sathra. His jokes were few and far between, and forced. A strange melancholia gripped him. Of course, she didn't have time to worry about him now. She could be moments from finding Nangulis!
If she allowed herself, she could project herself back into the memories of her life before the events of the last decade, before she'd become merely a "swordswoman." When she had been a Keeper of the Cerulean Sign. When she had performed an important duty, one she had executed fot yeats. She and Nangulis both-he in the Inner Bastion, she in the Outet, though no day passed that didn't allow time for them to be together, either within the guarded bulk of Stardeep, or beyond its dimensional veil in the sunlit groves of the Yuitwood.
When off duty, she and Nangulis spent more time in Faerun than in Sildeyuir, for that realm, their home, required a longer trek than a mere stroll down the Causeway. If the Ttaitor were ever to escape, Stardeep's remote location would prove a buffer between the Traitor's curses and the home realm. The elders sited the dungeon in a tenuous pocket of Sildeyuir, one they further splintered in order to make it its own discrete space. To penetrate the starry realm, if he escaped, the Traitor would have to emerge, when open, on the tightly controlled Causeway, then travel overland through the Yuirwood to find the closest active menhir gate.
Either that, or travel the ancient dungeon tunnels beneath Stardeep, where the mazelike passages, dug by no star elf, were black mystery. A mystery, except that if one traveled their labyrinthine twistings all the way through, one might find a way back to the realm from which Stardeep was calved. When she'd first come to Stardeep, Kiril thought the connection was myth. But upon becoming a Keeper, she'd learned such a path indeed existed, but it was a path possible only for those possessed of great power. Dire threats menaced all who attempted that dim