Chapter 1: Blearn Mountain

TWO REALMS

Orc blood!

To Lord Korwyn the hint on the breeze registered metallic on his tongue, Orc blood!. He stopped his stealthy climb up through the sun seared rocks to listen, to better hear what was befalling upwind. Yes! It was clear now. The unmistakable chink of steel on steel accompanied that rancid scent, somewhere to the right side of his selected route up the side of the mountain. Perhaps some other desperate merk had been sent on this fool’s errand, to save a princess from a fate worse than death. The battle might provide him welcome cover to slip unnoticed past any Orc guards and into the bowels of the mountain, he mused, to where the Princess Myr’s amulet was still giving off a faint signal. But rather than move on, he hesitated ... just for a moment.

“Clive! Clive! Wake up,” Carole insisted, shaking Clive awake none too gently by his shoulder, “honestly, five minutes after you’ve had your tea and you’re away off into your own little world of goodness knows where again.”

“Well, I can dream can’t I?” he muttered, adding to himself, ‘It’s the only place around here where I can get any respect.’

“Well, shift your arse, sunshine, we’ve got parents’ evening at the school with Michael’s form teacher in twenty minutes. He needs to get on if he’s going to pick up a decent job when he leaves school.”

Day dreamer suburbanite engineering office order processor Clive was reminded by talk of jobs to worry about the possibility of his own redundancy, with half his department having departed over the past few months already. Two of his ablest staff had taken the less-than-generous redundancy package that had been offered in the first round of job cuts, knowing they already had other more secure jobs to go to, and one other departure left through the natural wastage of accepting early retirement.

Clive had been bullied into accepting the previously unacceptable situation by his boss. Aware that there were no replacements coming, he was told he needed to make himself more efficient, that was the message coming down from on high. It would mean cutting back on tailoring work to better fit clients’ individual needs, it meant fewer checks on products and less attention to detail, even though, Clive pointed out these cuts would lead to poorer quality product, more spoilage, missed delivery dates, and a lot less customer satisfaction. In their turn this will inevitably result in fewer orders coming in, through which to share unavoidable fixed costs, leading to spiralling decline which will inevitably end in closure or takeover. Clive pointed out that the admin costs for half the throughput was the same as double the quantity, so we needed to sell more product, not less in order to be more profitable; the previous voluntary redundancies had lost the firm their best estimator and best telesales operator, so they now had less accurate estimates, leading to more materials wasted, less competitive prices and falling sales which imbalanced their ratios of produce to overheads. Clive’s boss didn’t seem to grasp the concept of how to run a business and Clive was told, “That was what the company apparently wants, so that was what we are going to get.”

Clive couldn’t see himself moving until pushed, he had fourteen years invested in the company, shipping out now would lose the inevitable redundancy payment due.

His wife Carole has a PhD in maths but, after taking time out from her career for their three kids, Michael, Katie and Cloë, was filled with disappointment by having to accept a local school teaching post last year and finding her return to work both tedious yet unnecessarily more stressful. The nearest decent university was too far to commute to, as she needed to be home in time to look after home and children.

She continually took her frustration out on Clive, so he decided to keep potential flash points like the company closure and redundancy risk from her. That was now proving his undoing.

Carole felt stuck in a rut, so she extended this to the home and the less adventurous holiday destinations forced on them by having young children. Now the kids were a littler older, she wanted to book an expensive Caribbean holiday, as well as spend a further six grand of their meagre savings on largely cosmetic work on the downstairs cloakroom, that only the kids and occasional guests seemed to use anyway.

At least she had the church activities to keep her occupied, while he had his garden and his vivid imagination to escape to. The garden shed was his man-cave, where he could daydream on swashbuckling with pirates, exploring new worlds or, like his current on-going daydream fantasy, rescuing a damsel princess in distress from inhuman beasts against impossible odds.

“Michael really needs to work harder on his English if he is to...” droned on the most boring teacher’s voice that Clive could remember, at least since he left school twenty odd years ago. The teacher was barely out of short trousers, yet was trying to lord his mastery over his pupils’ parents. Clive shook his head and closed his eyes, just for a moment.

No, he couldn’t do it. Korwyn couldn’t just leave the Orcs to kill this poor merk knight, be he man or dwarf, in service of the High King of the Dwarves. He felt the ache in his left shoulder every morning as testimony to his impetuosity, but that was how he was made.

Once he had decided on his course of action, the need for quiet progress had passed, and urgency spurred him on over the broken terrain of the mountain. The sounds of battle grew louder as he scrambled across the rocks in the direction of the fracas. He spurned the new Dwarf blade hanging from his belt, gifted by an unknown but insistent crone on his way into the Dwarf Palace, and gripped the familiar handle of his double-headed axe strapped to his back, a well-practised tug on the rawhide knot fastening, releasing the fearsome weapon into both his willing, waiting hands.

Several orcs had their backs to him, but he laid them all low with a single mighty swing of the double-headed axe, like they were ripened sheaves of barley, without them even uttering a sound. An Orc on the other side of the battle yelled out a guttural warning, before it too was slaughtered, in its momentary distraction, by the original fighter who was still the main focus point of the one-sided battle.

The fighter had its back to Korwyn, but it took only a glance by him to realise it was an Elf, a female one at that, to whom he had come to rescue. Her long green hair, tied in a pony tail, swished back and forth as she meted out mortal blows to her enemies. The tiny wings on her back, either side of her stowed longbow, were keeping her just off the ground while she did her best to make many Orcs’ mothers weep, although Korwyn doubted they had any mothering affection for their hideous hatchlings.

The sight of the Elf longbow, even though it was not currently in use, sent a sharp stab of pain through Korwyn’s old shoulder wound from ten years previously.

The Elf slashed at the enemy hordes with a steel sword in one hand and a smoking lightning stick in the other, the smell of burning Orc flesh becoming almost overwhelming.

As a few Orcs turned in realisation of the new danger in the shape of the human, they were too late as Korwyn slashed right and left, kicking underfoot any who escaped immediate death from the double-headed axe blade on either deadly sweep. In a matter of seconds the fight was over, the few still breathing dispatched with a touch of Elvish lightning or misshapen skull crushed by human dragonskin-clad boot, until only the two, Man and Elf stood side by side, the only creatures alive above the carnage of the departed.

“My Lord, I find myself in your debt,” the Elf finally spoke breathlessly, addressing Korwyn with a slight bow of her green-haired head. Even her eyes were a startling green like shining emeralds plucked from a mountain stream. Korwyn had never been so close to an Elf before, at least a live one.

“Hold your thanks, Elf,” Korwyn snarled, “if I knew before I dived into this sortie that you were Elvish ... But once involved in the battle there could be only one outcome. I had no wish to save a rival merk, however I only thought you might’ve been a Man or Dwarf in need of a friendly blade.”

“Ha! So you’re a merk, then, Lord of Man! I might have known you would only serve to save a kidnapped Princess of the Dwarves for material reward rather than for honour intangible,” the Elf sneered back at him, her feet taking up a more defensive stance in case this Man attempted to deliver a telling blow her way.

“So, are you hinting to me that you are only here for the dubious pleasures of Orc slaughter then, noble Lady Elf? What is a poor Dwarf Princess in distress to an aloof immortal such a thee? I was at the Battle of Hawkshart Plain, when the Elves were ranked against both the Dwarves and Man, so that race has every reason to hate you as much as Men do.”

“Ahh! We lost just as many from our ranks as you that day, maybe even more during the aftermath of that battle, Human, and we had so few of us left to lose, we don’t grow quick and linger brief like weeds do. Your side emerged the victors through dint of Dragon treason that day. The plains are therefore yours, the mountain mines the spoil of the Dwarves, the Gnomes and Goblins now have our forests and the rivers have since been granted to the Trolls. To the victors, the spoils, to the defeated we find relegation to the wasteland that no one bothers to claim their own.”

“I have no time to spend arguing the toss of ancient alliances with you, Elf. This place will be swarming with fresh Orcs afore long and I want to be in some shelter with food inside my belly before night falls on this desolate place.”

“Then perhaps we should proceed together, watch each other’s backs until the deed is done, my Lord?”

“No, Madam, I have no wish to share the Dwarf King’s gold with another, for returning his only daughter to the royal fold.”

“Then there is no need for thee to share any just reward, Lord Man, for I am no merk, here only in the direct service of the High King of the Dwarves’ Seven Kingdoms. For me there is no portion of material reward, only the honour earned which would all in good time release me from my appointed obligations.”

“Which is a payment in kind, Elf.”

“Aye, it may be considered thus, but ‘tis no impediment to your full reward of gold, Lord Man.”

“Maybe you be right. We’ll need to move on from here now, in any case, not stand here surrounded by the smell of spilled Orc blood. Are you hurt anywhere, Elf?”

“No, but we need to bury the two brave dwarves who accompanied me as guides and guards before we leave.” She looked around the scene of carnage as she spoke.

“We don’t have time—”

“I’m not leaving them to be eaten by these Orcs!” the Elf insisted with a hiss between bared teeth, “in protecting me, they gave their lives to save their Princess.”

“We cannot bury them in this blasted rock, and it would take too long to build cairns. More Orcs are bound to come soon, especially as night almost falls.”

“It won’t take long, even though I imagine time runs too quick for you mortals.”

She kicked a pulverised Orc corpse off a dead Dwarf lying near her feet. She crouched and pulled the dead Dwarf free of the pile of dead, straightening his limbs and folded his arms over his chest, wrapped around his fallen sword which had been locked in his death grip.

Korwyn noticed another Dwarf’s short legs under a pile of Orcs. Looking around in a sweep and not seeing any advancing enemy, he grunted in resignation and pulled the body clear by its legs, dragging it next to the other. The Elf silently nodded her thanks and moved over to administer to the second Dwarf. Korwyn saw in the dirt another sword that looked like the first Dwarf’s twin, not unlike his own recent gift strapped to his hip, and passed it to the Elf to place upon the corpse, which she laid out in like fashion to the first.

She stood next to the bodies, while Korwyn swept the horizon again, twilight was fast approaching but of fresh Orcs, so far no sign. He was sure that they had little time to spare before they were discovered and attacked. From her bag, strapped around her narrow waist, she drew forth a small leather pouch, dark green in colour. Loosening the tied fastening, she shook a little dust from the bags onto the bodies, from head to foot, before stepping back away from the bodies and stood still. Korwyn silently followed her lead, standing next to her.

In front of his eyes both bodies disintegrated completely into a thick cloud of dust, which rose high in the sky, clear of the mountain summit. Not one cloud it now seemed but split into two distinct but hazy clouds, ones that somehow seemed to drift against the flow of the wind and heading towards the southern horizon and in the direction of the Land of the Seven Kingdoms, as if they had their own power source, soon lost from view in the gathering twilight. Korwyn stood watching them go, fascinated.

“Come, we must go!” she snapped, waking him from his reverie.

“Come on, Clive,” snapped Carole, “Mr Jamieson needs us to leave so he can talk to the next set of parents. Honestly, you’re as dozy as a dormouse on Valium. Did you pay attention to any of what Michael’s teacher said?”

Of course, Clive couldn’t remember a single thing, lost in his fertile imagination, his nostrils still filled with Orc blood on the side of a dark mountain, far from the plains where Man lived and the patchwork of green fields in the fertile Peninsular which was Lord Korwyn’s own domain, left far in his wake after a decade of walking off his heartache and pain.

“Of course dear,” he lied, as they walked to the main school hallway where some of his son Michael’s art work might be displayed.

Later, Clive soaked in the hot bath after supper, relaxed and closed his eyes, desperate to get back to his exciting adventure on the slopes of that cold dark mountain.

“Do you want that heated up?” The Elf asked, as he unwrapped a linen cloth containing a pie of meat, root vegetables and grain, wrapped in crumbling pastry. “No fire, but using this,” she continued, in reply to his raised eyebrows, indicating her lightning stick.

“No, it’s quite perfect when it’s cold,” he lied, trying to get himself comfortable, wedged between rocks a quarter of the way up a mountain, with the winds generated by the passing of hot day into cold night, trying its hardest to dislodge them. He bit into the pie, the pastry was hard, dry and crumbly, despite the protective wrapping of linen cloth. The Dwarf pie, one of half a dozen picked up from the Dwarf city market four days ago, tasted nothing like those his blessed widowed mother used to make, but it was enough to partially fill the emptiness in his stomach, though did naught for the emptiness of his heart.

He pulled his heavy dragonskin cloak tight around him against the cold, while marvelling that the Elf wore light silvered armour which barely covering her modesty, plus a thin plate of armour on her forearms and shins. She did not appear to suffer at all from the cold wind. She was slightly built but with long, lean, well-defined muscles. She was shaped much like a female of his own species, as far as he could see, her face would have been pleasing, were it not on an Elf, an enemy of Man, the killer of his father and inflictor of the wound which still affected his less favoured shoulder. She had breasts, small and rounded under a short tight shirt that exposed the lower part of her belly, exposing a belly button which showed their kind’s reproduction was clearly similar to humans, unlike these Orcs, who he understood were hatched from eggs, which explained why there was always so many of them. Her legs were long, though pulled up beneath her, the thighs bare, her knees would have been as attractive as any he had seen, were they attached to a human female. While he watched her, she took a tiny package from her pack resting on her hip, suspended from a fine cord around her opposite shoulder.