The barrels pointed over the tower railing at the meadow beyond the walls. Standing here, Dan could see Ula’s point about needing to clear the meadow as a kill zone.

  Ula grabbed the gun’s handles and pulled them to one side. Metal screeched against metal, resisting her efforts, but then came unstuck, and she was able to swivel the weapon noisily back and forth, covering 360 degrees.

  A little oil, Dan thought, and the thing would turn smoothly.

  “How does it work?” he asked.

  Exhaling a cloud of dark cigar smoke, Ahneena ran her fingers over the ancient weapon. “It hasn’t been fired since I was a little girl.”

  Only a couple of thousand years, Dan thought sarcastically. Should work like new.

  “These bins were filled with metal balls,” Ahneena said, pointing to the large wooden bins to either side of the war machine. “Crew members would load these projectiles continuously into the hopper.”

  The old woman shuffled to the wall. “These winches,” she said, and strained against the wheel for a moment before turning to Dan. “I’m sorry. Could you lend an old woman a hand?”

  “Sure,” Dan said, taking over. The wheel stuck for a second, but he twisted hard, and it broke free of its rust. As he spun the handle, one of the ammo bins lowered through a hole in the floor.

  “The tower beneath us is full of ammunition,” the matriarch explained. “The fire team would empty a box and send it through the floor. An ammo team below would refill the box and hoist it back up before the gun had emptied the other bin.”

  “Good system,” Holly said. “But how does the weapon work?”

  “Ah yes,” Ahneena said and shuffled over to the gun. “You load ammunition in this hopper,” she said, pointing to the large metal funnel that rose from the frame. “Aim the weapon and step on the trigger pedal.”

  It really is like a Gatling gun, Dan thought. “But what makes it work, magic?”

  “A touch of magic,” Ahneena said, “but mostly mechanical ingenuity.” She pointed to the scaly black tube that dropped from the frame to the metal pipe. “That hose is made from dragon skin,” she said. “Flexible and impervious to heat, which allows the Fist to swivel back and forth without interrupting the supply of steam.”

  “Steam?”

  The old woman nodded. “Long, long ago, the elves who built Fire Ridge drilled deep into the ground and tapped into a scalding hot spring. They ran pipes beneath our floors and inside our walls. Every winter since, the hot spring has kept Fire Ridge warm.”

  Geothermal, Dan thought. Radiant heat.

  “My grandfather tapped into the line, married it with a smaller water pipe, and created a constant source of super-heated steam.”

  Ahneena pointed to the handle atop the pipe. “When that valve was opened, steam would flow through the hose into the Fist. Ammunition would roll down the hopper and feed into the breech. The steel balls are only slightly smaller in diameter than the barrel, so when a round of ammunition rolled into place, it would seal off the chamber.”

  The old woman pointed to a lever. “Sliding this lever forward would fill the chamber with pressurized steam, firing the projectile.”

  Dan nodded approvingly. The Fist was quite a machine.

  “As a girl, I enjoyed watching the fire team. They worked so quickly. The Fist fired seven rounds with every revolution. Experienced operators managed two revolutions per second.”

  Dan whistled. Fourteen rounds per second? Eight hundred and forty rounds per minute? The Fist of Fury could wipe out a raiding party before you could say let sleeping elves lie.

  “What’s the range?” Holly asked.

  “All the way across the meadow,” Ahneena said.

  Dan stared across the vast distance. That had to be three football fields, maybe longer.

  “Does the weapon still work?”

  The matriarch shook her head. “None of the Fists have worked for a long time.”

  “There are more Fists?” Dan asked.

  “There were six,” Ahneena said, “one for each tower. Seven, if you count the mobile unit that my grandfather designed for his war wagon. But neither the war wagon nor the mobile Fist were ever completed, and five of the tower guns broke down thousands of years ago.”

  Ula, who had been examining the weapon in silence, finally spoke up.

  The matriarch nodded.

  Holly interpreted for Dan. “Ula thinks we should pull it apart and clean everything.”

  Dan turned to the hobgoblin with a smile. “I like the way you think, Ula.”

  24

  Grinding Away

  “I know you are afraid,” Dan told the hundred or so red elves assembled in the courtyard before him. “I want you to channel that fear into force when the slavers come screaming over these walls.”

  The red elves shuddered, clutching their new spears, which they had fashioned from meadow saplings.

  Clearing Ula’s kill zone wasn’t the most important task, but Holly had suggested doing that first. Removing skinny trees and brush was going quickly. The work gave the elves a sense of purpose and accomplishment, built momentum, and gave Dan an opportunity to praise them.

  Otherwise, the elves had provided few opportunities for praise. They showed up late to training, talked in the ranks, and spent more time shooting him sultry looks than actually paying attention to his lessons.

  Mornings were reserved for military training. Afternoons were given to grunt work. Only they weren’t getting much accomplished in the afternoons, because the red elves kept collapsing from fatigue.

  He had begun to fear that they wouldn’t be ready in time. The elves of Fire Ridge were simply too weak, unfocused, and lazy to work hard, no matter how many times Dan explained the stakes and urgency.

  He stared at them now. A few seconds ago, they’d all been shuddering at the thought of slavers coming over the wall. Now, half of them were giving him bedroom eyes and the other half were staring off into space, hip-bumping each other, or dragging the butts of their spears along the paver stones, making an annoying grating sound.

  Frustrated, Dan said, “You do want to survive, right?”

  The elves nodded.

  “And you do believe that the slavers actually are coming, right?”

  More nodding. Wide eyes stared at him, suddenly frightened all over again.

  “Good,” he said. “But if you want to survive the attack, you have to—”

  “Butterfly!” one of the red elves chimed, and the whole group forgot what Dan had been saying and chased after the fluttering speck of blue, tittering like children.

  “They’re doomed,” he told Holly, who shrugged.

  “Maybe you should take a look at what’s happening over there,” she said, pointing toward the alley that connected this courtyard to the next.

  He left the giggling red elves and followed Holly toward the adjacent courtyard. Ula’s deep voice ricocheted off the narrow walls of the alley.

  Entering the courtyard, Dan smiled.

  Ula was shouting at her red elves, a hundred or so in all.

  Unlike his elves, Ula’s charges stood up straight. Their eyes were frightened.

  Each of the elves held a bow and wore a quiver of arrows. Holly’s archery reconstruction team, comprised mostly of the elderly, had been working day and night.

  Ula shouted, marching back and forth with a sapling branch swagger stick tucked under her arm.

  The red elves flinched.

  Holly grinned.

  “What’s she saying to them?” Dan asked.

  “She’s telling them that they’re pitiful and that they’re all going to die. She’s been giving them names like Kill, Rape, and Eat because she says that’s all that they’re good for. See that one over there?” she said, pointing to a plump elf near the center. “Ula named her Maim for Laughs.”

  Dan shook his head. “It’s too much. Look at them. They’re terrified.”

  “They’re listening,” Holly said. “What are your trainees doing?”

  “Chasing butterflies.”

  “Exactly.”

  Ula lashed her students with a stream of harsh-sounding Hobgoblin.

  “She’s telling them to practice hard. Then they might manage to avoid eternal disgrace by at least killing a slaver before dying themselves.”

  On Ula’s command, the elves turned to face targets thirty yards distant. As Ula barked instructions, the elves nocked arrows, drew back, and fired.

  The arrows hit the targets almost simultaneously. Shafts jutted from all over the bales, but at least they had hit the targets, and Dan was impressed by the way they’d all fired together.

  Almost all of them, anyway.

  One elf, having fumbled his shot, was now struggling nervously to nock the arrow and try again.

  Ula strode across the field and struck the elf across the back with her swagger stick.

  Dan winced.

  The elf cried out but didn’t drop to the ground, as Dan would have expected. As the warrior woman loomed over him, shouting into his ear, the elf nocked the arrow, drew the string, and fired. His arrow struck a bale center mass.

  Ula looked up with a smile, showing Dan her tusks.

  “All right,” Dan said, understanding the situation now. He’d spent a lot of time talking to the elves, trying to explain why the training was important, hoping that they would become internally motivated. That had been a mistake.

  They didn’t need to understand. They needed an ass-kicking. Then they would learn how to survive. “I’ve been too nice, too patient. I’ve literally been killing them with kindness. From now on, Ula is in control of military training. We’ll follow her lead.”

  Holly nodded, smiling. “Excellent decision, husband,” she said, and walked off to tell Ula.

  From that point, things moved more smoothly. Ula simplified training and implemented clear expectations and swift, consistent discipline. As a result, the red elves took their training more seriously, started to improve their skills, and even listened better throughout the rest of the day, as they worked on rebuilding the fortress’s defenses.

  Holly recruited several elves to help with the Fist of Fury. There were a million other things that Dan wished Holly could be doing, but fixing the big gun was his top priority. That thing could end the fight before it even started.

  Meanwhile, Dan worked from dawn till dark on improving their defenses. Under his direction, the elves continued to clear the meadow. He wanted nothing but mud all the way to the forest.

  He didn’t have much hope that the red elf archers would become accurate enough over the next month to kill many raiders, but perhaps they would wound some before they reached the wall. He positioned spears along the walkways at the top of the wall to deal with the raiders who made it that far. Injured or otherwise, they would have a hard time coming over the top.

  There was no time to replace the missing gate between the stone wall’s guard towers, but using Holly’s ox, which had come to life over recent days, along with ropes, pulleys, and elf power, Dan braced two fallen palisade logs across the opening in a giant X. Then they filled the gaps with planks salvaged from condemned buildings.

  This crude patch job was a half-assed solution, but it would slow down the attackers, and Dan lugged heavy stones into the guard towers. The elves could drop the rocks on anyone trying to break through the crude wall.

  When he carried the first load up to the tower, he beheld a discouraging sight. The Fist of Fury looked like it had exploded. Holly and her crew had completely stripped it and spread out the parts. The tower floor looked like the dig site of archeologists unearthing a dinosaur with metal bones.

  Turning a cylindrical bolt in her hands, Holly spoke in rapid Elvish to a girl named Teeka. The red elf nodded and jotted down notes.

  “It’s not as bad as it looks,” Holly said, apparently reading the panic in Dan’s eyes. “We have to replace a few cracked parts, but we can scrap the dead guns for parts.”

  “All right,” Dan said, forcing a smile. “Good work.”

  He left them to it and continued carrying stones to the ramparts. Glancing across the meadow, he felt a little better. Under Ula’s supervision, the elves had already cleared a lot of brush.

  For as valuable as Ula proved to be with brainstorming defenses, whipping the red elf recruits into shape, and overseeing the brush crews, she remained an extreme pain in the ass once a day.

  Dan would be on his way to breakfast or heading to bed, and the crazy hobgoblin would ambush him, spewing insults.

  One night, while Ula was barking insults, Dan asked Holly, “Does deel mean dick?”

  Holly smiled. “Very good. Your first word in Hobgoblin. She’s saying that you have a small penis.”

  “Wow,” Dan said, smirking at the ranting hobgoblin. “Lame insult.”

  “Actually,” Holly said, “it’s more imaginative than it sounds. Technically, she’s saying that you have the penis of a preteen pixie.”

  Dan shrugged, mildly impressed.

  Then Ula charged him.

  As always, she fought like a rabid tigress, but this bout ended the same way as all others, with Ula on the ground, pulling down her bikini bottoms and offering herself to him.

  Dan was so tired of fighting her—and Hades, just plain tired after these long, back-breaking days—that some nights, he almost wanted to mount her and be done with it.

  Almost.

  He had come to appreciate the warrior woman’s work ethic and dark humor, and after wrestling with her on a daily basis, he couldn’t help but fantasize what it would be like, using her shapely and muscular body for more pleasurable purposes. But he didn’t have the time or energy for an additional wife.

  These long days left him exhausted. With Nadia away, he’d been getting more sleep, but she would return soon, and in a few short weeks, Holly’s ovulation would be behind her, and his horny grey elf wife would attack him with a vengeance.

  Beyond the physical, he had to make sure that everything was squared away with Holly and Nadia before adding another woman to his life. Things with Holly were fine. She was steady as a rock and completely absorbed in rebuilding Fire Ridge.

  He couldn’t stop worrying about Nadia, though. She was smart and tough, an experienced thief—probably fourth or fifth level, he guessed—and a frigging werewolf to boot. So worrying made no sense. But when you love someone, you worry about them whether it makes sense or not.

  And he loved Nadia.

  Loved her and wanted her back.

  She’d left in a huff, convinced that Dan and Holly were putting the elves in front of Zeke.

  And maybe they were, despite their arguments about dreams versus reality, but whatever the case, Dan wouldn’t turn back now.

  He had promised Ahneena and the elves that he would help them prepare for the attack, and by Crom, he was going to do it, even if he destroyed himself in the process.

  25

  Relax…

  Dan roared, straining beneath the weight of the great stone.

  The thing had to weigh 300 pounds. Old-world Dan would've thrown out his back just looking at it.

  He bent his knees, arched his back, and hoisted the massive rock to his chest. Then he adjusted his grip and pressed the stone over his head.

  “Out of the way,” he growled.

  The red elves crouching atop the crumbled section of wall scampered to safety.

  Dan stepped forward and settled the giant stone into the gap.

  The weather had taken a turn after a recent rain, and the day felt more like November than October. He was thankful for the cooler air.

  He smiled. His muscles ached after days of rebuilding the main wall, but damn, it felt good to be making progress.

  His crew of red elves had really come together. He no longer needed to yell at them to keep a steady supply of mortar coming, and some of them were getting good with trowel work.

  The elves called down from above, helping Dan to center the big stone. Once they had the rock in position, Dan studied the gaps, sorted through the rubble for shims, and jammed the smaller stones into place, eliminating any wobble. The elves followed after, adding more shims and packing the joints with mortar.

  “Nice work,” he told them.

  He felt a tap on his shoulder and turned to see his blond wife smiling up at him.

  “Hey,” he said.

  “Hey, yourself,” Holly said, handing him a goblet. “This looks like thirsty work.”

  “Thanks,” he said, gave her a quick kiss, and took a long pull of the sweet wine.

  Only after he swallowed did he realize just how thirsty he had been. Sometimes when he was working, he got so obsessed that he didn’t register hunger or thirst.

  “Hits the spot,” he said, and gulped the rest. Then he noticed her bandaged hand. “What happened?”

  “Steam burn.”

  “Are you okay?” he asked. “Why didn't you use a healing spell?”

  Holly smirked. “I did. This is what's left.” She unwrapped the bandage and showed him the red, blistered flesh beneath. “It's not that bad.”

  He winced. “I'd give it a kiss, but I'm afraid it would hurt.”

  “You're sweet,” Holly said. “Come on. I want to show you our progress.”

  Dan hesitated. He was excited to see what she’d been up to, but he had so much work to do.

  “You are taking a break,” Holly said, grabbing his hand and pulling him toward the tower. “That’s an order, mister.”

  Turning back to his crew, Dan called, “You know what to do.”

  The elves nodded, already hard at work.

  Holly led him up the stairs. Entering the tower, he laughed. “You are awesome!” he said. “I can't believe you got it all put back together. Great work!”

 

1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28