Elf-Boy's Friends 33
Dragon and Raptors
by George Gauthier
[The further adventures of characters from the novel 'Elf-Boy and Friends']
Chapter 1. The Cave of the Mountain River
"So where shall we go to next?" Axel asked his fellow travelers in the Corps of Discovery.
The twins looked at each other, struck by the same thought. Karel nodded for Jemsen to go ahead and speak for them.
"The League of Independent Towns lies to the west. That could be our next stop. We really didn't get to see much of it years ago when we passed through on the way to the Commonwealth."
"Or... " Dylan began, "we could go looking for these Snow Elves of whom Master Padraig spoke. I hadn't even know that elves could be shape shifters."
"Nor I." Madden Sexton allowed
"How about visiting your own people Dylan, the sylvan elves." Liam asked. "Medkari maps show the location of several elven vales in the Northlands."
Drew shook his head. "I have a better idea. Let's visit the dwarves. Their caverns are always pleasantly cool. It will be a welcome change from the tropical heat."
"I don't know..." Karel began. "The last time you persuaded us to go to someplace cool we wound up in the middle of a war with the orcs."
"That was hardly my fault. And you have to admit that until the orcs showed up things were really pleasant high up in the mountains with cool air, stunning scenery, good food, and pretty boys among the staff. What do you think Finn? Wouldn't you like to get out the heat for a change? It must bother you more than anyone."
Finn nodded. His people weren't called Frost Giants for nothing. Their original homeland lay in the temperate zone where it got cold enough in winter for snow and ice. Besides, a physique standing eight feet tall and packing six hundred pounds generated a lot of body heat and had trouble shedding it despite two auxiliary hearts which not only helped pump his blood but aided shedding body heat by vasodilation.
"That's true although I haven't felt the heat bad here on the shores of the Lesser Inland Freshwater Sea. There's usually a breeze, and we were out on the water so much or swimming. Still I am attracted to the coolth of the caverns."
After some further discussion a consensus developed to visit the dwarves. They were sure to be welcome. The twins after all wore the blue tattoos marking them as dwarf-friends. Finn too was a dwarf-friend though as a Hand of the Commonwealth, he could not accept the friendship tattoo the dwarves of New Varangia had offered him. Instead, when they forged his new war hammer Mjolnir, they had inscribed the friendship design on its face. So that made three dwarf-friends in their party.
"All right," Dylan conceded, "but afterwards we really should look up these Snow Elves. They are said to be beautiful beyond compare!"
That brought general agreement. So it was to be dwarves first and snow elves second.
Finn accepted the consensus: "Sounds like a plan."
Before they took off, Dylan took his leave of aged Beast Master Padraig who gifted him with a leather bracelet indicative of his new status. Then the whole Corps of Discovery said their good-byes to Farhad and Kyle. The young fetcher cum wine boy enthused that he had already written to Raqqub. Kyle and a friend were putting their heads together to devise a business plan for an aviation industry centered on the Vale of Asshur, the future aerial crossroads of the North, to hear him tell it.
Instead of wearing their usual uniforms or expeditionary outfits Drew, Liam, Axel, Dylan, and the twins chose their new square cut low-rise short shorts made of thin silk which were color-coded green and blue for Jemsen and Karel respectively but white for the other boys. After all, their plan was to kick start a fashion trend about what a sexy boy should wear on occasions when he wasn't going around skin-clad or sky-clad as many were calling it these days. No time like the present for getting that ball rolling.
Drew caught Karel admiring the sculpted musculature of his slender legs, almost entirely bared by the skimpy shorts which had only one inch of inseam. Admittedly the blond twins' shapely limbs were worth showing off. So too were their torsos which were bare down to their hip bones. Same thing for all of them really; the six pretty boys in the group all had tight taut bodies. The bigger fellows Finn Ragnarson and Madden Sexton wore more conventional outfits of trews and shirts over their powerfully muscled physiques.
North of the Vale of Asshur lay a region of dissected plateaux -- a karst landscape underlain by beds of limestone honeycombed with caves and underground rivers and pockmarked by sinkholes. The surface was covered with dense forest thanks to a rainier climate than the lands to the south thanks to the prevailing winds which brought moisture from the outer ocean which lay only two hundred miles to the north.
With Axel and his gift of Unerring Direction for navigation Drew had no trouble leading the way to the Cave of the Mountain River, an enormous cavern system with a main passage over three miles long, one-hundred fifty yards wide, and up to two-hundred high.
Once the twins and Finn established their bona fides as dwarf-friends, the dwarves made much of them, ushering them into the huge cavern ahead of a latest group of visitors who were just getting off the sturdy ponies that had brought them up from the river town which served the area. The ponies would be stabled outside the caverns. The dwarves had no patience for the mess draft animals left behind. Better their droppings were used to fertilize the fields.
This geological wonder drew visitors from afar. At first even their well-off clientele might grumble at paying two silvers just to get in, but no one ended his visit thinking it had not been worth the price of admission. The entrance was by a natural fissure in the rock which the dwarves had widened and improved by chopping stairs and installing bannisters and gravel walkways. Visitors walked down a dim passage illuminated only by balls of cold light into a gigantic chamber bathed in sunlight where a section of the roof had fallen to create a skylight.
It was the largest enclosed space any of them had ever seen. Sunbeams slanted into the cavern falling on a rocky river threading its way the length of the green floor. Shade-tolerant plants of all sorts ranging in size from mosses to sizable trees flourished in soil that had been deposited by the winds on the floor of the cave over the centuries and added to by dwarf gardeners. Even the boulders were covered with lichens.
Axel looked about in awe and wonder and exclaimed:
"By the gods!"
"You called?" Finn asked, eyebrows raised interrogatively.
Axel chuckled and shook his head.
The two friends had a running gag about whether Finn wasn't starting to identify too closely with his persona as an avatar of Thor, thunder god of the ancient Norse, the remote ancestors of the Frost Giants.
The dwarves made a good living from their geological wonder, not only from charging admission but also by offering upscale lodgings, meals, entertainment, and guided tours. The exhibits in the museum included maps, cutaway scale models of the three largest caverns with skylights, and woodcut illustrations of the more notable rock formations. A series of drawings and text explained how the cavern had been formed over the ages by the dissolution of the limestone of the karst landscape by slightly acidic water.
There was even a menagerie with live and preserved specimens of the odd animals that inhabited the cave system like species of blind fish and colorless prawns of quite an extraordinary size, which natural philosophers attributed to the alchemical properties of the river water though these supposed properties did not seem to affect mammals the same way. Neither the dwarves themselves nor their domestic cats were any larger than normal.
The enterprising dwarves also sold souvenirs and trinkets of their own manufacture in a gift shop though the best seller was really a product of nature itself rather than of dwarven industry: geodes halved and polished to display the beautiful crystals inside. The twins bought a couple to add to the collection they had started at Stone Mountain years earlier.
Seven levels of windows cut into one wall of the cavern provided light and air to the apartments of the dwarves who dwelled therein.
"We live in more comfort than most dwarves do." Anton Kantor, the mayor of the local dwarves told them. "Between the coolth of stone and the warmth of the sun and the air, our homes aren't chilly like most cave dwellings, so you will be no more than comfortable cool in even those extremely abbreviated shorts of yours. "
"Comfortably cool!" Drew sighed. "Exactly what we came for."
"Not only you. The coolth is a large part of the attraction of a health resort operated by an enterprising human couple. He is an herbalist and apothecary and she a Healer and nutritionist. Their advertisements and flyers acclaim the restorative effects of a sojourn away from the unremittingly tropical climate of most of Valentia. And indeed, some of their clientele are regulars, well-off folk who stay here every year during high summer for a month or so.
"Their system of integrated health, as they call it, also claims healthful properties for the river waters. Drinking and bathing in them will supposedly detoxify the body, purge it of the ill-effects of sloth, unhealthful diets, and over-indulgence. Moderate exercise such as walking and swimming are also part of the program as is a system of graceful rhythmic movements said to promote a state of mental calm and clarity as well as being good for both the musculature and the joints."
"We dwarves make no such claims ourselves for the waters, though we certain take advantage of the employment opportunities the resort provides. And who knows? There may actually be something to it. About three centuries ago a young journeyman druid named Kyle visited the caverns. This Kyle pronounced the waters not only wholesome and safe but opined that they might very well contribute to longevity. In any event, it can do no harm and likely some good for city folk to take up a healthful diet heavy on fruits and vegetables and fish but light on red meat, sweets, and spiritous liquors."
"I cannot offer you a tour of our domestic galleries. Their low ceilings make that impractical. We dwarves get by fine with five-foot ceilings, which not only saves on the labor of excavation but also acts as a security measure, facilitating our defense and hindering attack by taller foes. I am afraid Sir Finn you would have to crawl and most of the rest of you stoop to get through our galleries."
"Not that we have any real threats to worry about. We live here quietly, enjoying peace and the modesty prosperity which our tourist business provides. Oh and we also produce intricate clockwork mechanisms for a firm in a nearby city."
Dwarves were noted as metalworkers, something which endeared them to Finn's heart. He had started as a blacksmith.
"How many of you live here in these caves?" Jemsen asked.
"Just over six thousand, more than half in the first great cavern, so we have plenty of room for expansion. We grow no crops inside the caverns. Our farms are all outside and open to the sky. Our main crops are breadfruit trees intercropped with earth apples [i.e. potatoes].
Oh, just like the orcs!" Axel remarked.
"Er... if you say so, son. We also grow nuts, fruits, and vegetables. Grain or rather flour is something that has to be shipped in, otherwise no pastries. What a shame that would be!"
"I'm rather fond of fruit tarts myself." Axel admitted.
The mayor nodded and smiled. "Then you have come to the right place. We dwarves are known for our sweet tooth."
"I know that several of you have the gift of Unerring Direction and at least one of you can Call Light, but I caution you not to explore any of the dark tunnels beyond the inhabited zone. In the early days we lost several teams of scouts who set out to map the lower regions beyond the cascade at the lower end of the cave where the river dives deeper into the earth. Since then we have stayed within our bounds. You should do likewise."
"We shall." Finn affirmed seeing the the dwarf really was afraid of what might lurk in the unexplored chthonic depths of the limestone caverns. Dylan's empathic gift confirmed that the mayor was totally sincere and genuinely frightened of whatever menace might lurk in those unexplored chthonic depths.
"Mayor Kantor" Drew asked. "would anyone object if I flew my speedster through the skylight in the roof? It would make me the first flyer in the history of the planet to fly underground!"
"Aren't you afraid of a crash?"
"My little aerocraft is quite agile and will easily clear the opening. Besides, I am strong enough to take complete control of its flight and maneuver my autogyro by main force if it comes to that."
"Drew is a mighty fetcher, able to lift a pair of brontotheres into the sky." Axel supplied helpfully.
The mayor told Drew to go right ahead. He would alert everyone that a surprise was at hand, and also to watch out, just in case.
Drew went out the cavern entrance to his speedster and ran through a pre-flight check. Then he got into the cockpit and lifted off. In a moment he was over the skylight and the next he had dropped safely through with plenty of clearance for the whirling rotor.
"There he is" Dylan cried. "It takes guts to fly an autogyro underground." he said and assured the others that Drew would get a good story out of this exploit.
Indeed. To the delight of the resident dwarves and visitors, Drew flew the length of the cavern, circled back, zoomed close to the ground and back up to the roof. At one point he made his aerocraft loop the loop. Drew wasn't really going fast enough for the risky maneuver so he fudged things at bit. Once he reached the top of the arc he had invoked his telekinetic force to make his speedster complete its loop rather than stall and drop. He did it so smoothly that none of the onlookers suspected the adjustment he had had to make. No matter. It was the result that counted.
Drew finally touched down to a hero's welcome. Meanwhile Karel and Jemsen finished their sketches of Drew's notable flight and gave them to him for keepsakes.
Mayor Kantor expressed his hope that one day autogyros would ferry visitors to the caverns from the river port making the demanding pony ride unnecessary. Drew told him that commercial aviation in the Northlands might begin within a year though he could not predict when anyone might operate an aerial shuttle to the Cave of the Mountain River.
It happened that Finn, Madden Sexton, and the mayor were standing next to each other. Struck by the similarity in the muscular builds of the dwarf, human, and giant, Karel nudged his twin with an elbow, pointed at the group with his chin, and sliced the air palm down three times successively higher each time. Karel's gestures expressed the notion of small, medium, and large as effectively as any words. Jemsen got the message and grinned.
A while later Madden Sexton got the twins alone and told Karel.
"Don't for a moment think that I didn't see you just now."
"Oh?" the blond boy asked innocently.
"I saw you out of the corner of my eye. These days my peripheral vision is wider than before both horizontally and vertically."
"How come?"
"It's a side effect from when the New Forest helped me augment my sight to let me see heat. My eyes had to be larger so my skull was reshaped with larger orbits which also gave me a wider visual field."
"Anyway, for the record, dwarves really are proportionally wider and thicker of limb and trunk than any human or giant. They were designed that way to deal with heavy gravity planets out there in the cosmos."
"OK." Karel conceded. "Since you seem knowledgeable about such things, can you tell me what kind of worlds Frost Giants were built for?"
"New worlds. It was the mission of the Frost Giants to explore and open up newly discovered planets."
"In the days of the galactic empire space portals were unknown until the very end and the ships that sailed among the stars were slow often taking weeks between landfalls. It needed a special breed to open up new planets for settlement, and the settlers could not take all their technology with them nor maintain it in their new environs. Another way of putting it is that they could not transplant their civilization wholesale to a raw far-off world."
"Humans had to get back to basics, relying on draft traction and muscle-powered tools and weapons to survive for generations, long enough to develop the resources to pay for the automatic factories and the machines that made machines that made machines upon which their civilization on the older worlds depended."
"So their natural philosophers -- or scientists and they called them -- created the Frost Giants from a promising human stock, the Norse of old. Tough and resourceful, Frost Giants could rely on size and physical strength plus their skill at forging metals to survive and ultimately thrive with only basic technology. In later waves of settlement, settlers were endowed with magical gifts to make life easier and safer and open the galaxy to other races like the elves and orcs."
Anyway, Dylan and I are up for a swim. Are you guys game?"
They were.
Chapter 2. Out of the Chthonic Depths
While Jemsen and Karel, Madden Sexton and the elf-by Dylan swam and splashed in a pool, the other half of the Corps of Discovery went rock climbing in the next cavern upriver. They had to pass through a natural tunnel the dwarves had enlarged and improved with a wide path along one side for pedestrians and push carts.
Beyond the tunnel were a series of smaller chambers and then, perhaps half a mile deeper in came the entrance to the second cavern. Though also inhabited it bore fewer marks of civilization than the first.
The chief attraction of this second great cavern was rock climbing. One section of the wall rose in steps like a ziggurat. Once you got to the top you could slide back down via a zip line, a thrill in itself.
Now Drew Altair and Finn Ragnarson were experienced climbers, in Finn's case going back to his mountainous homeland. Drew and Finn and the twins were past masters of the sport of rock climbing whether with equipment or free climbing having gotten started years earlier during their mission to the Far West.
Drew and the twins were also aficionados of an acrobatic game similar to the modern sport of parkour which treated a whole city as an obstacle course and a training ground for skills useful for escape and evasion. You relied only on the unaided abilities of the human body to run, climb, jump, fall, swing, slide, and tumble. No equipment: no ropes, no hooks, no grapnels.
Liam had a head for heights and was agile enough to scramble about a ship's rigging but otherwise was not an experienced climber. Neither was Axel and with his new gift not particularly inclined to learn. Why do things the hard way? So those two essentially went along for a chance to explore the second of the three huge caverns in the company of their friends.
"I thought we'd agreed we would free climb today and show Axel and Liam how we do it." Drew asked puzzled as Finn unlimbered his climbing belt.
"True we agreed to climb without ropes and pitons and carabineers, but this belt is just a safety precaution in case I slip and fall."
"How can a belt help you in a fall? Anyway you can always count on my telekinetic gift to buoy you up."
"Ah, it is not the belt itself but what I am about to strap it to that will do the job, without your assistance, much as I appreciate your being at hand."
Drew watched, understanding dawning as the frost giant attached his war hammer Mjolnir to the harness.
"I see. In an emergency you could slow your fall by engaging the magnetic field of the planet to push on Mjolnir. "
"Exactly. In fact my control is now strong enough to counter gravity entirely. If I fell, I would touch down as light as a feather."
"So, if you are really that strong," Axel began, "why not use Mjolnir to fly on your own? Yoke or hammer, if you can make it move through the sky, then just hang on and go with it."
Finn slapped his forehead.
"Of course! I feel really dumb, Axel, for not having thought of it myself."
"Don't be too hard on yourself, Finn. We have seen time and again that those who cannot fly themselves have a better perspective than those who are too close to the problem. Which is why I became a Pioneer of Flight and the twins, Nathan, and Eike too."
"OK, forget rock climbing. Today I learn to fly on my own. That way I will be able to fly long distance in my autogyro or make short flights with Mjolnir just by hanging on to the loop at the end of the haft."
"Is that strap really strong enough to take your weight and for the dynamic strains which flight will put on it?" Liam wondered. As a former teamster Liam had a very good idea of the strength of leather harness.
"Plenty strong enough. It's a sandwich of four-ply leather over a wire core. The dwarves made the loop strong so I could whirl my hammer like a flail."
With that Finn whirled his hammer and when it had swung to the right direction lifted into the air. Once he corrected for the residual whirl he flew straight all the way to the roof then the length of the cavern. On the way back he veered left and right, up and down to gauge his agility in the air. Upon his return Finn dropped down next to the others, landing as light as a feather and let out a whoop.
Raising him hammer high he shouted his battle cry:
"By the power of Thor!"
A crash of thunder punctuated his utterance.
"Wow!" That was pretty impressive Finn," Axel said. Then with a wink he added: "Or should I call you Thor?"
"Only in battle Axel -- when I am trying to scare the crap out of our foes."
Axel turned to Drew and told him:
"Drew, you gotta write this up for both the Capital Intelligencer and your journal `Magic'. It's not only Finn. This technique will make a flyer out of any strong Masters of Magnetism."
"Don't worry. I will."
Meanwhile, back at the first cavern the twins and Dylan stood chest deep in a pool of water and engaged in a game something like flinging the Zinger only with an inflated ball. The idea was to smack it two handed and lob it into the air toward the next player with the object of seeing how long they all could keep the volley going.
It was a lot fun with all the splashing, jokes, and laughter. When the ball landed in the water and a player dived after it the game degenerated into cheerful grab-ass rambunctiousness. Really just an excuse for bare-ass horseplay in Madden Sexton's opinion, which went a long way to explain all that clean-limbed wrestling and dunking, tanned limbs flailing and firm rumps upturned.
Madden Sexton lay back on the grassy verge, a neutral observer smiling indulgently at the antics of the younger set. They really were a great bunch of kids. They had it all: good looks, strong healthy bodies, smarts, and friendly outgoing dispositions. Even more important to a man of action like Sexton they had proven their courage and loyalty to comrades time and time again.
Sexton really enjoyed the company of these splendid youths, upon whom he had no carnal designs but sought only the pleasures of friendship and good fellowship. While among them Sexton could relax. He had no need to stay on the alert. No danger threatened them seriously or really could given their strong powers and abilities, both natural and magical.
Even the emergencies they had confronted along the way had not put their own well-being in peril, neither at the landslide nor the tin mine nor the locusts in the Hot Lands. And where they were heading they would not run into trolls or orcs or centaurs or barbarians. Nor the tyrants, slavers, raiders, and bandits he had fought against time and again on the eastern continent of Karelia.
Their confrontation with a pair of dire wolves on the shore of the Lesser Inland Freshwater Sea was something Sexton could have handled if Dylan had not invoked his powers as a beast master. Endowed with the strength of a Frost Giant and armed with a heavy-bladed kukri Sexton would have cut the beasts to pieces. Alternatively he might have torn them apart while in his wolverine form. A pair of dire wolves against a wolverine of his size was no contest at all.
No doubt about it. This journey of exploration was good therapy for someone who had seen too many of the bad things that could happen to good people and who had witnessed and participated in far too much violence during his three centuries.
Sexton grunted, amused at where his thoughts had taken him. Was he starting to feel old?
Cries of alarm interrupted Sexton's reverie. The shouts came from the lower end of the cavern, where the Mountain River disappeared over a cascade into a deep channel no one had ever followed or rather returned from. Sexton brought his enhanced vision to bear and saw that dwarves and visitors were fleeing for their lives from a monster out of a nightmare.
"By the gods!" Sexton exclaimed, shaken by what he had seen. As indeed anyone would have been.
A gigantic snake slithered across the floor of the cavern snatching up hapless dwarves and visitors and swallowing them whole with a convulsive gulp. The monster must have been ninety feet long with a body nearly five feet in diameter at its thickest. The head alone was as large as a man and had jaws that gaped four feet. It seemed there might be some truth to the claims about the river waters after all. It must have taken centuries for a snake to grow to such proportions.
The monster lacked the fangs and venom of a viper and did not employ constrictor tactics. Instead it simply ingested its prey live. Its very size was a weapon too, letting it bowl over the dwarves, humans, and elves which had become its prey and crushing them with its weight. The head was a battering ram which shattered first a gazebo and then a food stand behind which victims had sought to hide.
The monster's thick skin was largely immune to blades and missile weapons, few of which were at hand in any event in such a peaceful setting. In their desperation some victims resorted to hurling rocks or whatever came to hand.
A fetcher might have succeeded by driving a rock through an eye socket into the skull and scrambling the snake's brains. Alas among the dwarves fetchers were few and far between. The levin bolts hurled by one dwarf would have stopped a man's heart but did little more than anger the monster. It was not used to prey which fought back, an overturning of the natural order of things.
Several dwarves tried calling light, but the head was too big to englobe. When a dwarf die direct a globe of light against the snake's flank he was thrown against a wall by its reflex action. That left him with a concussion and a broken shoulder, but at least he was alive and his injuries were well within the capabilities of Healers to mend.
A fledgling firecaster, a teenage human just coming into his powers, threw a stream of fire at the snake's snout which made it draw back its head. That gave him and his younger siblings a chance to get under cover.
One father saved his family by darting across the path of the snake while shouting and waving his arms to attract its attention. As an elf he was too tall to just race upright into a tunnel sized for dwarfs so he dove in head first hoping to scramble deeper. Alas the snake closed it jaws on his lower legs, dragged him out into the open, flipped the elf heels over head and let him drop into its gullet. That was only one of more than a dozen deaths which followed.
A brave dwarf stood his ground at the entrance to a tunnel and held the monster off briefly by snapping electrum sparks into its maw by the double handful. Unlike the elf he was short enough to turn and run into it full tilt and almost got all the way in when the snake caught him around the ankle with its flickering tongue.
The dwarf might have died then if he had give into panic and scrabbled uselessly at the floor of the tunnel. Instead he turned and jackknifed his body and put both hands on the tongue and directed into it as many sparks as he could as fast as he could. All of the electric charge and most of the heat went into the snake but he still had the inside of his hands burned. The effect on the snake was all he could have hoped for. It let go of him with a horrible hissing and left in search of easier prey.
The dwarf's brave stand not only saved the lives of those who ran past him into the tunnel but also those of others who got to cover while the snake was occupied with him.
"Dylan, can you do anything with the creature?" Sexton asked.
The elf-boy cum newly fledged beast master broke off mental contact with the snake and shook his head.
"No. I looked into its mind, and I now know that the snake is deep into a killing frenzy, literally driven mad with hunger from having had to survive for centuries on meager rations in the chthonic depths. It now senses more meat in one place than it had ever imagined existed. It won't stop feeding till it has had its fill."
"Will the dwarves be safe in their domestic caverns with those narrow corridors?"
"Yes -- for a while anyway. The snake won't poke its nose into narrow passages when there is so much meat on the hoof out in the open or in flimsy shelters it can batter down."
"Can we blind it with arrows? If we all had our bows I mean."
"You could sink shafts into its eyes, but that might only enrage it not disable it if you don't penetrate the brain, which even in so large a creature is pretty small. It no longer relies on its eyes anymore, not after centuries in the dark. The eyes still work, but the brain has largely forgotten how to process the signals the eyes send. No, it hunts now by smell and by detecting body heat."
"Anyway here we stand naked and unarmed. Even a wir wolverine like you Madden would be overmatched by so gigantic a foe."
Actually Sexton wasn't so sure a fight with even a snake this size would be so one-sided. It had neither fangs nor teeth but simply swallowed its prey whole. If brother snake tried that with him, he would soon find out that he had bitten off more than he could swallow. Transformed into a two-hundred fifty pound wolverine with the strength of a Frost Giant he would slash the inside of the throat. The pain would distract the monster and keep it from swallowing leaving Sexton free to tear its throat out from the inside, almost certainly inflicting mortal damage while cutting his way into the clear. Still that tactic was only a last resort and one he would not care to volunteer for.
"What can you twins do?" he asked.
Jemsen shook his head. I cannot make the earth swallow it up. The floor of the cavern is bedrock not soil. Soil flows, but rock is stubborn and only breaks. Anything I tried could very well shake the cavern enough to bring the roof down on all of us."
"Nor can I deploy sun mirrors against it," Karel said. "now that the sun is no longer shining directly through the skylight."
"If only the others were here!" Dylan cried. "Liam could destroy it with white fire or Finn with lightning bolts. Or Axel could cut the monster in half by teleporting its head away from its body."
"That's it! I'll chop its head off." Karel cried then answered their puzzled looks with an explanation:
"It's a new tactic which I have been working on, though I on a much smaller scale, a way to use a shield of hardened air offensively."
"How can that work? Are you going to bash its head?" Sexton asked.
"No. I won't use the flat but the edge and cut the monster in two. First though I need to get atop that outcrop for a better view of things. Jemsen, let me hop on you piggy back then use gravitational repulsion to lift us both to the top."
"You got it, Karel."
In a moment both twins were positioned atop the outcrop. While Karel firmed up his blade of hardened air, Jemsen did what he could with earth magic, rolling boulders at the snake to smack it and block and distract it which gave more than a score the chance to duck into cover. It was too bad Jemsen couldn't lift boulders with gravitational repulsion and drop them on the snake, but that power worked only on his own body.
Forging his new weapon took Karel longer than just throwing up a shield of hardened air. The edge of the blade had to be as hard and as keen as physically possible. Karel didn't have the words for it, but a natural philosopher would have told him that his blade had a monomolecular edge, than which no solid blade could be sharper.
Finally ready, Karel positioned his weapon above the snake and just back of the head. Giving an emphatic chop with his hand he drove it down with all his power through the spine and flesh and into the rock beneath, separating the head of the snake cleanly from its body. The huge headless body writhed and threw itself about in its death throes, its thrashings still a danger to anyone who got too close, but the worst was over. Karel released his weapon which dispersed into gas.
Once again the twins had saved the day.
Chapter 3. Memorials
After the bodies of its victims were cut out of the snake's belly Mayor Kantor had the head placed inside a cage and set atop a natural stone pedestal accessible only by ladder to keep terrestrial and avian scavengers from getting to it. Over time maggots did their grisly work of consuming the flesh.
In a few weeks, with the flesh gone and the skull bleached by the sun, the dwarves had the centerpiece for their memorial. It was posed with the jaws gaping menacingly, the better to display the fake dagger teeth which the dwarves had carved from the bones of the snake and set into the jaws.
The huge carcass had been flensed manually and the skeleton exposed to the elements after which the dwarves collected the "dragon bones" and used them like ivory as the raw material for not only the dragon teeth but small items like chess sets, handles for knives, flutes, keepsakes, and anything you could think of.
Karel's blade of air had cut a deep gouge into the rock beneath the snake. That very spot was chosen as the location of a memorial the grateful dwarves planned to erect to the heroism of the Dragon Slayers, as the dwarves proclaimed the twins to be with considerable poetic license. Dragon sounded so much more dramatic than gigantic grass snake, which was what the monster really was, size notwithstanding.
The dwarves had asked a pair of visiting artists, both human, to create the memorial. The dwarves realized that only human artists would be familiar enough with human anatomy to depict it realistically and artistically enough to inspire in the viewer an appreciation of the youthful male beauty of the two young heroes.
The artists Baggio and Lorenz were lovers, youths in their very early twenties who were happy to provide their professional services, not only out of gratitude to the twins for saving them from a horrible death but also for the chance to establish themselves professionally. Once the Guild of Artists accepted the sculptures as their master pieces they would rise from journeymen to become masters or full members of the Guild. Both were of middling height, handsome rather than pretty or cute, Baggio a brunette and Lorenz a blond.
The memorial was to depict the twins in bronze in high relief and life size entirely nude, as they had been in the battle. Jemsen would be shown punching to the left, rolling a boulder at the snake while Karel's action pose would catch him as his hand chopped the air guiding his blade to decapitate the monster.
The bronzes would be cast from a clay model back at their studio. So the artists had to pose and sketch the twins right there in the caverns and not just in the chosen poses. To become familiar with the physiques of models who would not be at hand for the actual sculpting the artists would need sketches in many poses: standing, sitting, squatting, prone and supine, spreadeagled and arms akimbo, running, climbing, and so forth.
One pose the sculptors insisted their models adopt was the backwards arch, a body position also called a bridge. A acrobatic pose it required the model to lie on his back with knees bent and feet flat on the ground while he reached over his shoulders and placed his palms on the ground fingers spread and pointing to his heels. Bracing himself the model lifted his body off the ground to form an arch.
With every muscle straining, head down, chest and hips high, arms and legs spread, buttocks rigid, belly and manhood totally exposed and vulnerable, it was just about the most erotic pose in the repertoire of sculpture. Though in a committed relationship, the artists were not immune to the beauty of the youthful male form as exemplified by Karel and Jemsen who modeled for them in that order
Just as Karel was settling into his pose, Lorenz reached out naughtily to arrange the boy's dangly bits before he picked up his pad and sketched rapidly. A while later he confessed:
"I hope you don't mind my touch Karel but sculpting is not only a three dimensional art form, it is tactile as well. We shape the clay model with our hands, which is why I must touch your body everywhere to learn and memorize its contours. The sketches are really just aids to memory. Physical contact is what counts. Besides, I simply cannot resist. Your body is utterly delectable."
Karel rolled his eyes but held still as the brazen artist ran his fingers lightly over the corrugations of Karel's belly, circled his navel with his index finger, and stroked the blades of his hipbones and the inside of his thighs. He gripped Karel's taut buns the better to gauge their firmness then swept the blade of his hand along his model's cleavage which, disappointingly, were too clenched for the artist to delve deeper.
Never displeased when homage was paid to his physical beauty, Karel allowed these liberties, nor was he surprised at the rush of heat to his belly which made his cock plump up, lift off, and cantilever over his flat belly throbbing and leaking seminal fluid.
Karel's arousal emboldened the brash artist to cup the boy's ball sac with one hand while stroking the shaft with a thumb lubricated with Karel' own seminal fluid giving special attention to the sweet spot. It wasn't long before Karel's member was poised on the edge of release. What took him over the top was when Lorenz knelt beside Karel and tongued and nibbled his nipples. Karel groaned as he orgasmed and shot his seed all over his chest and belly and face then collapsed to the ground in post-coital lassitude.
"Wow, that awesome." Karel declared, not at all embarrassed at having been used as a sex toy.
Not to be outdone by his twin, Jemsen got his turn the very next day with Baggio.
In time the sculptors Baggio and Lorenz not only achieved the rank of Master Sculptor, they also published a book which was another memorial to the battle of the twins against the "Dragon", as the dwarves insisted on calling it. Its first section described in vivid prose and pictures the horrors of the monster's attack which they had witnessed, supplemented by interviews with the twins, dwarves, and fellow visitors.
They drew the dragon just as it had been in life, save for the addition of dagger teeth for consistency with the wishes of the dwarves. In the second section were engravings and details of the finished memorial plus the best sketches of the twins, displaying them in all their athletic and sky-clad glory.
The book went on to earn the authors a small fortune and not just from those who bought it for the nude pictures of the famous twins. Drew himself said it was quite a good job of reportage though he had reservations about calling the monster a dragon, but the twins were happy enough with their new title of Dragon Slayers. The artists sent enough signed copies for all of the members of the Corps of Discovery plus a copy for the library of the Institute of Wizardy and Magic and another for the Honorable Guild of Geographers of which the twins were members.
As a living memorial to their heroism the dwarves added a small numeral to the twins' friendship tattoos to show that Jemsen and Karel were now dwarf-friends twice over, the very first in living memory.
Naturally Karel made a joke of it.
"So what should we call ourselves now that we have four tattoos: the `even more famous twins Jemsen and Karel?'"
A wordsmith by trade, Drew had no trouble coming up with a counter-proposal:
"How about the `ever more famous twins Jemsen and Karel', to allow for you guys acquiring yet another tattoo, say from the orcs, or even other races beyond that, perhaps on other continents?"
"Very funny."
"I guess we'd better stick with the original formulation." Jemsen conceded.
The Corp of Discovery remained at the Cave of the Mountain River for another ten days, even staying overnight in the third great cavern farthest upstream. With a full moon that night the light streaming through the skylight reflected off bits of mica in the walls and made it seem like the field of stars in the vault of the sky. It was magical.
Then it was time to fly northwestward heading to the forest the Snow Elves were said to roam. On the way they planned a stop to see another remarkable geological formation: the Stone Ring.
In time visitors to the Cave of the Mountain River got it in their heads that powdered dragon bone had aphrodisiacal properties and could restore failing male potency. The dwarves were scrupulous in never asserting such claims themselves, but neither did they go out of their way to deny them. To anyone who asked, the dwarves would only say that yes, they too had heard claims of medicinal properties, and no, they could not confirm them of their own knowledge.
When they heard about it Madden Sexton and Dylan took the attitude that a legal trade in bogus dragon bones was innocuous. Better it were dragon bones than brontothere horns.
After expenses, the profits from this lucrative trade in dragon bone powder and dragon bone trinkets went to the families and survivors of the monster's victims. In recognition of his courage the municipality granted the dwarf who had stood his ground and flung electrum sparks a three year tax holiday.
A year later, a natural philosopher by the name of Konrad Zwiller, a zoologist who specialized in the study of reptiles, visited the caverns to examine the skull of this so-called dragon. Puzzled at first, Zwiller looked long and hard at the skull then threw back his head and laughed and laughed till tears ran down his cheeks.
Mayor Kantor found out what the man had figured out and asked him what he intended to do about it.
"Why nothing, my dear fellow. As far as I am concerned it is a fine joke on the world. Those dagger teeth are such a nice touch. And since dragons are mythical anyway the name is available as a label for a real creature like your monster here. So dragon it is."
"Besides I happen to have met the famous twins Jemsen and Karel. They attended one of my public lectures, you see. So I know that they are rather proud of their recently acquired title of Dragon Slayer. I will tell them how realistic those dagger teeth look, but don't worry: except with them, my lips are sealed."
When it was time for Zwiller to settle up he found that the proprietors of his lodgings had applied a fifty percent discount to his bill. And his name was inscribed on the monument as one of the public benefactors whose contributions had made it possible.
Chapter 4. The Stone Ring
Once past the karst region, the autogyros crossed a range of folded mountains, their summits low and rounded by eons of erosion and with trees growing right up to their summits. Past the mountains lay rolling plains. In the distance were fields and villages but below the ground was covered by bracken and gorse. Gorse were thorny shrubs up to ten feet high with tiny leaves and showy yellow flowers. In the middle of the gorse thicket was another geological marvel, a ring of stone forty miles across. This was the Stone Circle they had been told of.
Created millions of years earlier by a meteoric impact, the ring of stone still stood fifty feet high on its outward face and nearly one hundred feet high inwardly toward the sunken forest it encompassed. For about half the circumference its walls were nearly vertical much like a palisade. The rest of the circuit was rugged and steep though good climbers could get across. The central forest was dense, its canopy broken only by a string of lakes and a a few clearings. In its very center stood a sharp peak twice the height of the walls, the result of tectonic rebound from the tremendous impact.
As their autogyros approached the ring flashes of light from a signal mirror caught their attention. It was clear that the locals wanted them to land near the fortified gatehouse which controlled the only pass into the land within the ring of stone. Close up they could see that the ancient fortification was crumbling with cracks in the masonry walls and holes in the roof. Nearby were sheds and barns, orchards, and fields of maize, beans, yams, and earth apples.
An officer of the garrison escorted by two soldiers came out to meet the Corps of Discovery. The leader was a man of late middle years, fit and whipcord lean. Though his face was lined and drawn he had the soldierly bearing of a lifelong military man. The two soldiers with him bore the officer a family resemblance. Both stood easily, one to each side, their right hands resting lightly on the pommels of their swords. Theirs was the stance of soldiers who were not expecting trouble and certainly not looking for it, but were ready for it just in case trouble came looking for them. Addressing Finn whom he took to be their leader from his size and apparent power if nothing else he said:
"My name is Captain Salter. We don't get many visitors out this way, certainly not in one of those new flying machines much less three at once. Now who might you be and what business do you have here?"
Finn introduced the Corps of Discovery and briefly described their mission.
Salter nodded. "Your names are not unknown to us. Even way out here we have read Drew Altair's best-selling books, though we never thought we might meet their protagonists such as the famous twins Jemsen and Karel. Yet here they are."
"In the flesh!" Jemsen acknowledged.
"As to you Finn Ragnarson, they say that you are an avatar of a thunder god, though surely that cannot be literally true."
"Of course not. I invoke that name for tactical purposes, to dishearten my foes. I am really a Frost Giant with a unique magical gift and a set of powers like those of the Norse god of yore."
"I am glad to hear you are not taking yourself too seriously." Salter said with the first smile they had seen on him.
"Little chance of that, not with that cute copper-topped lad over there to keep me grounded in reality."
Axel grinned.
Captain Salter wound up the meeting with:
"Lets go inside and get you settled. Part of the roof has fallen in, but with our garrison so much reduced from what it once was, we can accommodate you easily enough. If you plan to stay over more than a day I'll have to ask you to cover our expenses."
"Understood. May I ask how the garrison supports itself. You might grow your own food, but how do you pay for other necessities if you are not on the payroll of a state?"
"We grow most of our own food and also make both hard cider and apple brandy from our apple orchards. Besides that the nearby villages pay us to patrol the area to protect them from raiders, bandits, and road agents. We used to earn a fair amount from the sale of raptor feathers. The wing feathers of the raptors fetched premium prices for three centuries. The earnings allowed us to purchase the little luxuries that make the difference between a life enjoyed and one only endured."
"Alas the bottom fell out of the feather market a dozen years ago and even our sales of apple brandy declined from competition with new producers. More than half our little colony has had to pull up roots and settle in nearby villages where the land is better for growing staple crops than this close to the Ring."
"The loss of so many friends and neighbors caused us much pain. Ours is a hereditary calling, and we are all cousins to one degree or another, a clan if you will, though our young men sometimes take brides from elsewhere to prevent inbreeding. We now number just over two hundred, only sixty of those trained soldiers. Our reverses meant giving up our dream of one day destroying the raptors and settling the fertile lands within the ring. But let's save the rest for when we sit down to supper."
With that, the pilots secured their autogyros, immobilizing the rotors and staking the craft to the ground then carried their gear into the fortress. The accommodations were not a barracks as they had halfway expected but a set of apartments, family quarters in the old days. Neat, airy, and swept clean though with only the minimum of furniture they were comfortable enough.
Dylan assured Finn that his empathic sense had detected no deceit only honest concern about their unpromising future.
Contrary to their expectations of a grim military mess hall, the dining hall was bright and airy; its walls were hung with watercolor paintings of landscapes and sunsets by the locals. The only military touches were the hierarchical arrangement of the tables and perhaps the scrupulous hygiene and cleanliness. Those of the colony who were not in uniform wore simple trews and shirts and boots for the males and skirts and blouses and sandals for the females.
The visitors took the seats of honor at the head table along with Captain Salter and the civic leader of the colony, an older man whose name was Xander Larson. The entire population sat on benches at the other tables. The tasty fare started with onion soup with croutons to wake the appetite. After that came fried breaded fillet of fish, cornbread, baked squash, and steamed vegetables buttered and sprinkled with grated cheese. Among the guardians their communal evening meal was a long-standing tradition.
Finn explained that though the expedition was an official undertaking of the Commonwealth of the Long River, it was strictly a civilian undertaking, as witness the lack of military uniforms. The twins, Drew, Axel, and Liam were dressed in their new square-top low rise short shorts. Dylan and Madden Sexton wore the uniforms of forest rangers, who were law enforcement officers, not military, as he was himself in his capacity as a Hand of the Commonwealth.
"One of those Dread Hands, eh."
"When we have to be." Finn admitted.
During conversation with Captain Salter and Headman Larson, the Corps of Discovery learned that it was the druid Kyle who established the Guardians of the Ring. Their job was to contain the reptilian raptors with the walls of the ring until some way could be devised to exterminate them.
"Are you saying it was Kyle who confined the raptors in their stoney prison."
"Not at all. They were already there. The ring was not their prison, not originally, but their refuge from the brontotheres who had wiped their kind out everywhere else except here. Brontotheres were too bulky to negotiate the narrow tortuous passage our fortress now blocks. The brontotheres left the region a millennium ago which allowed the raptors to come out and and prey on livestock. After seven centuries Kyle helped us confine them within the ring."
"Why didn't the druid just wipe them out?" Finn wondered.
Salter shook his head.
"That was beyond the powers of a mere journeyman druid as he was then. Kyle did give us the key insight that kept the beasts at bay for so long. He observed that raptors could not swim. They are all bone and muscle and sinew so their bodies are denser than water. Once they got in over their heads they drowned."
"Kyle used earth magic to create a moat in front of our wall. It held the raptors back until an earthquake drained the moat and diverted the stream that had fed it. Since then we have had to hold the raptors back with masonry and cold steel. Not entirely successfully, I will admit."
Can you describe a raptor." Finn asked. "None of us knows what one looks like."
"I can do better than that. I can show you a mounted specimen and a skeleton with its bones held in place by a metal armature. But I see the servers are bringing out dessert. Tonight it is blueberry pie. Let's tuck in. The raptors will keep."
"Right! Blueberry pie first, raptors later." Axel enthused. The young Jumper was inordinately fond of fruit pies and fruit tarts.
The raptor specimens showed how formidable and fearsome the predators were. Raptors were bipedal reptiles with a large toothy elongated head atop a short neck, four strong limbs, and a long tail for balance. At the end of the forelimbs were clawed hands armed with three curved claws for grasping.
The raptor walked on its hind legs though only on the third and fourth digits of their feet. The second digit was formed into a large, sickle-shaped claw held retracted off the ground. It was used to rip out the throat of prey.
"The throat? Why not target the abdomen and disembowel their prey?" Jemsen asked.
It was Sexton who answered. "Look there. The sickle claw does not have cutting edge. It cannot tear the belly open."
Salter nodded. "You have a keen eye."
"It comes with the territory. I am a shapeshifter, a wir wolverine."
"Indeed. Remind me not to get you mad at me. Wolverines have a fearsome reputation."
"Just what is it that the raptors hunt?" Karel wondered. "Surely they would have wiped out deer and other such large prey by now."
Salter answered that lack of big prey kept their numbers in check. Raptors had to hunt smaller animals, burrowers and arboreal creatures when they chanced a descent to ground level to drink or to mate. Thus raptors went after badgers and muskrats, porcupines, anteaters, spider monkeys, possums, squirrels and sloths.
"Raptors like to jump on their prey, hold it with their front claws and tear into it with their sickle claw and bite and tear. We never confront them in the open on level ground. That's plain suicide. Even with armor they could knock us down and then finish us off with their claws and teeth."
"Another thing is that they cannot really climb. Their wrists don't rotate and limbs ending in tearing claws are not much good on rock. Otherwise there must be a dozen spots around the ring when an agile man could scramble over the barrier. Even more with equipment."
"Above all we never let them get close to us. The recurved bow and the boar spear are our main weapons. If only we could carry the battle to them and clear them out of Ring entirely. That has been our dream -- to consecrate this land to civilization."
"The ring, the forest within, and the land around it out to a day's ride are not in the territory of any country. The Ring is legally ours. We were granted sovereignty by the Druids of Haven in the person of the druid Kyle."
"We know of this Kyle. He it was who helped the Medkari settle the Vale of Asshur." Finn told him.
"Kyle told us that he would send help, but nothing ever came of it."
"Alas" Drew began, "Once Kyle became a senior druid he was posted to Karelia. There he he died not many years ago when a landslide crashed into the lake where the druids had their headquarters in a spacious villa and caused a tsunami."
"That explains why no further help was forthcoming." Captain Salter said sadly.
"Maybe not then, but now help is once again at hand. Us." Madden Sexton affirmed.
"How can you help?" Salter asked. "Can you destroy the raptors for us."
"That would require a long campaign for which we don't have time, but we can equip you Guardians to do the job yourselves with air guns. They are the ideal stand-off weapon."
Axel fetched his own and Sexton's air guns and explained how they worked.
"It strikes me that these air guns of yours are instruments of precision manufacture. They cannot come cheap. I don't know how we could pay for them."
"You won't have to." Finn told him.
"I propose a fair exchange. You get air guns and diplomatic recognition of your sovereignty. You let us build an air field to support civil aviation: the postal service initially and later passenger and freight traffic. The Ring is ideally located to be a link in a chain of airfields which will connect the Commonwealth to the northern ocean. We might also want to establish a single holograph station here for a postal heliograph line stretching between the Commonwealth and a port on the Northern Ocean."
"We accept, and most happily!" Salter and Larson declared then added:
"And I can see also where we might go into business to accommodate travelers, providing lodgings and food and drink. We could attract tourists too. The Ring is the geological wonder of the northlands. Well, after the Cave of the Mountain River that is."
The plan the two sides worked out called for the Guardians to recall all their scattered brethren. That would give them a force of nearly two-hundred soldiers and a total population of well over seven hundred. Later they would invite folks from neighboring villages to settle among them.
Liam opened a portal to the capital for him and Finn. While the Frost Giant reported to Baron Jarmond, the Chief Hand and arranged for a shipment of guns, Liam went by the offices of the Capitol Intelligencer to deliver Drew's latest reportage. Then he swung by the Institute to fill Sir Willet in on what the Corps of Discovery had been doing. There he found the war wizard immersed in a study of the theory of magic investigating just how the minds of sentients could tap into and modulate the basic power of the universe, understood to be a field of bound energy that existed everywhere and every-when and could be freed to power magic.
Afterwards Liam rejoined Finn and opened a portal back to the Ring. Teamsters drove two wagons loaded with air guns, ammunition and ball molds for making more, tools for repair and maintenance, and spare parts. It was enough to equip a battalion of infantry.
Finn also handed Salter a pouch of gold coins and another of silvers, seed money the Guardians could use to buy the equipment they would need to settle the lands they hoped to conquer. Salter was loth to accept charity, but Finn told him to consider it rental for the future air field and as an earnest of the Commonwealth's good intentions.
Chapter 5. Raptor Armageddon
Over the next few days, Finn and Drew with the twins and Axel as passengers scouted the ring via autogyro to gain a bird's eye view by which to check the maps the Guardians had drawn of the land within the stone ring. That gave Jemsen an idea. Calling them together he explained his plan to isolate and seize a portion of the land within the ring to allow for immediate settlement.
"As you can see on this map, these two lakes plus a couple of smaller ones are connected by shallow streams. I propose to use earth magic to lower the land under the streams, thereby creating a single continuous lake arcing across this sector of the circle and enclosing about one-sixth of the area, some two hundred square miles or so. The western end already abuts a cliff so we know the water there will be deep enough to block the raptors. At the eastern end I'll build a sill and extend it out into the lake to ensure a depth of twenty feet along most of it. This lake will become a moat behind which you can establish yourselves.
"I see. And for future expansion, we could cross the lake in boats or build a pontoon bridge for access to the rest, clearing it in bite size portions behind canals or palisades." Salter was immensely pleased with this development.
"And to start things off on the right foot, the members of the Corps of Discovery have agreed to lend their powers to the clearing of this first slice of the territory." Finn promised.
Dylan wanted to know if the raptors had any natural enemies he might enlist in their cause. He was told of a jaguar species larger than any other. The males ran up to four hundred pounds and rivaled the raptors for the role of apex predator. The jaguars preferred to live by rivers and swamps and in dense forest which provided thick cover for stalking prey.
Solitary hunters, their favorite tactic was to drop from above to stun their prey with the impact of their fall then bite between the ears driving their canines through the skull and into the brain. That made for a safe quick kill.
Jaguars could match a raptor in single combat. but rarely attacked since raptors roamed in packs of three or four, which was too much for a single cat to take on. If caught on the ground, a jaguar would retreat, taking to the trees or jumping in the water to get away. Jaguars were excellent swimmers. Needless to say there was no love lost between the predatory species.
Dylan thought he could build on that. For starters though he would march prey species like badgers, porcupines, and opossums through the forest to lure raptors into ambushes.
Over the next ten days the Guardians got ready for their first ever offensive campaign. On the appointed day the Corps of Discovery donned military outfits and armor, ready to do battle. The plan called for Madden Sexton in his wolverine form to stand guard on Dylan. Sexton was sure his preternatural strength and speed and reflexes made him more than a match for a pack of raptors especially with his claws coated with Aodh's venom.
Drew and Liam would invoke their telekinetic powers to whirl steel spheres at the raptors on offense or in a tight arc defensively if they got too close. Liam's white fire was to be held in reserve just in case.
The trio of the twins and Axel would provide covering fire, the twins with long bows and Axel with his air guns. If need be Axel could jump fighters to safety if they looked likely to be overwhelmed.
The Guardians of the Ring realized that the battle would often be fought at close quarters in a dense forest which would allow the raptors to get close, too close really. The solution was portable mantlets, basically lightweight triangular wooden sheds which six shooters could lift and carry to shelter them from the claws and teeth of the raptors. The raptors would not be able to get at the men inside, but the soldiers could shoot the predators at point blank range from the two loopholes in each side and the single loophole at each end.
Those recalled to the colors manned the fixed defenses and constituted a mobile reserve while the sixty experienced soldiers marched under the ten mobile mantlets. Finn Ragnarson was stationed with the command group to help oversee the offensive. All were sure their plan would work, built as it was upon the military ideal of operating on the strategic offensive but tactically on the defensive.
And so it turned out to be. Jemsen isolated the battlefield by connecting his chain of lakes. From that point the campaign was mostly a series of skirmishes between a small pack of raptors and the shooters sheltered inside one or occasionally two mutually supporting mantlets. Dylan watched from a height or a tall tree and paraded prey animals past the sheds to draw raptors to them or occasionally a jaguar which the soldiers ignored.
Only one soldier died when the crew of a mantlet stumbled and overbalanced and fell over. That exposed the legs of the soldier long enough for a raptor to drag the poor man from within. In the moment it took his five teammates to right their shelter all three raptors in the pack pounced on the man and literally tore him limb from limb before the horrified gaze of his comrades. Leveling their air guns they took their revenge.
One soldier in another crew got rather too enthusiastic and poked his air gun too far through the loophole. That carelessness got his left hand bitten off. His comrades applied a tourniquet and sounded a horn which brought Axel to the scene. Timing his move, Axel touched the shelter and jumped it and all within to the infirmary of the fortress, a jump he had practiced beforehand for just such an eventuality.
The twins and Axel chose an exposed position in the middle of a small meadow. No less than five packs of raptors, twenty-three in all, converged on the trio who seemed to be standing out in the open, vulnerable and unprotected. The short distance from the tree line to their prey could be covered in seconds.
Bowstrings twanged as the twins sank a dozen shafts into the on-coming predators though it usually took two each to be sure of stopping them. Face on the raptors made a narrow target much of it bony head, ribs, and limbs. Still their years of practice and their gift of Unerring Direction made the twins the deadliest archers on the planet.
Axel had had less than a year to practice with his air gun but he too had that same magical gift. He made his shots count though it took two or three bullets to put down an enraged raptor. When his air gun ran out of bullets he did not bother to reload it or recharge its air reservoir. Instead he switched to the shorter carbine version and cooly resumed shooting as they closed the range.
That left seven raptors who got within striking distance only to fetch up on Karel's invisible defenses. The young air wizard had created a new version of his blade of hardened air. Instead of a vertical cylinder around the trio, it was in the form of a flat ring slanting upward from the ground to about shoulder height, so the defenders could shoot over it. The outer rim sported a monomolecular blade like the weapon Karel had used against the "dragon" back in the caverns.
With the blade braced on the ground the charging raptors own momentum was their undoing. They ran onto the blade and literally cut themselves in two, their forward parts sliding messily and bloodily down the shield to land at the feet of the defenders while the rest of their corpses dropped outside.
"Well done Karel! You stopped them cold."
Karel grinned and joked:
"It's so much easier when your foes do you the favor of committing suicide, isn't it Jemsen?"
His twin clapped his brother on the shoulder then turned and said:
"And good shooting there too Axel. You must have dropped five of them."
"Six actually, but who's counting?"
The climactic battle took place at the end of a rocky peninsula into the lake where the soldiers in their mantlets formed a shallow U. That left the flat rocky expanse in front of them as a perfect killing ground. To the right of the line of mantlets, behind another of Karel's sloping air blades stood the twins and the command group of Salter, an aide and his two guards armed now with airguns as well as swords plus Finn, all brought there by Liam in his transport aerocraft which he had then flown back to the fortress. Autogyros were too precious to hazard on a battlefield. Afterwards Liam gated back to the lake shore. Dylan and Axel and Madden Sexton in his wolverine form anchored the left, standing behind a chest high boulder pressed into service as an impromptu breastwork.
Finn had reminded his friends that they must let the Guardians take the lead in destroying the raptors. This was their very first campaign where they had gone on the offensive, a fight which they were taking the attack to the enemy not merely fending them off or blocking attempts to exfiltrate. A victory won mainly by their own efforts would give the Guardians confidence in their new weapons and tactics and in themselves as soldiers not just glorified game wardens.
Liam was to hold his white fire in reserve. Same thing with the others and their major powers: no tornados, lightning bolts raining down from the sky, no sun mirrors turning the raptors into ash, nor chasms in the earth opening up to swallow the creatures. Let the guardians win the fight for their future homeland.
Just as everyone got into position a horde of prey animals burst out of the forest, initially drawn by Dylan's powers and now just fleeing the on-coming raptors. Once released from Dylan's control they scattered, many plunging into the lake to swim to safety.
Behind them surged a pack of seventy predators. They raced forward screeching their defiance only to be met by a hail of lead from the air guns, arrows from the twins and Dylan, and lightning bolts from Mjolnir.
A pack of four swung to the left of the defense line and targeted Dylan, Axel, and Sexton, but the wir wolverine made short work of them. His magical strength and speed made it look as though the raptors were moving in slow motion. And once he cut them with his poison coated claws, all they could do was scream in pain and writhe on the ground, making it easy for Sexton finish them off by tearing through the top of their skulls and ripping out their brain pans. Wolverines were messy that way.
Another raptor tried to flee the killing ground, but the wir wolverine dragged it down. With the poison he had painted on his claws worn off, this was one kill he had to make the hard way: pitting strength against strength, his teeth and claws against the raptor's. That just made the fight all the more satisfying. Wolverines are fierce that way.
For their part Liam and Drew whirled their steel spheres to stop a trio of raptors which had approached through the shallows to the right of the line of defenders.
The shooting from the mantlets halted as the air guns ran dry. Captain Salter had his aide sound a horn, the signal for the men inside the shelters to pick up their mantlets and swing them around to present the other side to the killing ground. That gave the soldiers at those loopholes a chance to shoot with their fully charged air guns while the others reloaded and recharged their air reservoirs.
Shooting eventually fell off for lack of targets.
Eight wounded raptors had turned to flee and actually got out of range only to run into Dylan's big surprise: the jaguars. Roaring their hatred nineteen big cats pounced on their enemies. With two or three jaguars per wounded raptor the outcome of the fight was a foregone conclusion. Only one jaguar died, and two more had gouges to the shoulders left by sickle claws aimed at their throats.
Disdaining the flesh of the raptors the jaguars turned to leave pausing only long enough to study the strange two-legged creatures who had briefly been their allies. After seeing how powerful the two-legs were the jaguars ruled them out as future prey. Then they faded into the trees and went their separate ways.
Pairs of spearmen stepped out from inside the mantlets and finished off the wounded raptors with boar spears. One soldier got careless when approaching a dying raptor and took a bad slash to a leg. The others took notice and made sure to approach the beasts from behind.
The final count was one-hundred thirty-seven raptors. Only a few juveniles were ever seen on the near side of the lake which served as a moat, and they were easily killed. The land was now safe for settlement and civilization. Acting on Sexton's suggestion, the guardians later released antelope and deer into the forests to restore the balance of nature. Better the jaguars have wild animals to prey on instead of livestock.
Sexton himself was in fine fettle, relaxed and cheerful after expending all the nervous energy that might normally have had to be relieved by a walkabout in his scrap with the raptors. For the wolverine in him, a tough fight was positively therapeutic.
Finn pitched in helping with the metal work, working at a forge to form door hinges and lantern brackets and stove grates for the houses that were soon going up. Fields were laid out and granted to all the families including those who might have arrived too late to fight but not to build. It would be years before the guardians would be ready to expand across the boundary lake, but the foundation had been laid for what in time became an exemplary polity on the continent of Valentia.
When the eight of them were alone Sexton asked Finn:
"Why are you making such an effort to promote aviation?"
"Er, I guess it is time to fill you guys in on the new orders I got when I returned to the capital to arrange for air guns for our new friends."
"Baron Jarmond picked up on the strong interest throughout the Northlands in flying in autogyros. After he brought that to the attention of the High Council I got orders to include the Stone Ring and the other locales as stepping stones to a shipbuilding port on the Northern Ocean."
"Why?"
"The Commonwealth will one day have seaports on the southern ocean. We need to learn how to build stout ships suitable for navigating the tempestuous outer ocean and not just in coastwise trade as now happens."
"With all we have on our hands in the Far West and Amazonia is the Commonwealth seriously thinking about expanding north as well as south?"
"No, nothing like that. The Commonwealth has no territorial ambitions in the north. We do not want to annex these lands, or even turn them into protectorates. Nor do we want formal alliances whether political or military, offensive or defensive. We also won't try to set up a customs union or even a free trade area."
"So what are we after?"
"The High Council calls it a Co-prosperity Sphere, a loose group of independent but friendly states linked by communications, trade, investment, travel and tourism, and cultural exchange."
"The postal service can link our lands via surface mail, air mail, and later heliograph lines. Once locals establish air fields and air services, they can operate the postal autogyros under contract, similar to our arrangement with operators of mail coaches. As aviation develops, passenger and freight traffic will develop."
"That will boost the opportunities for trade, commerce, and investment in modern industries. In time these states will find it in their interest to adopt our commercial code as other states around the Great Inland Freshwater Sea have done along wth common courts to enforce them."
"Books printed with moveable type already circulate in the North, but they are lagging in setting up print shops, book publishers, and news-papers. That is where your family firm Drew can help. "
"Right. We not only run the Capitol Intelligencer and the Western Intelligencer out west in Caerdydd, we own print shops and foundries for moveable type and wood pulp plantations. Once the northerners start up news-papers they will be able to join the centralized news service we have set up, the Press Association of Valentia which flashes stories to subscribers via heliograph."
"So you see," Finn concluded, "we do have ulterior motives, but they are benign."
Their visit to the Stone Ring was one sojourn where none of the members of the Corps of Discovery found romance. Not that the guardians were hostile to the notion of same gendered love, only indifferent.
Author's Note
This story is entirely fictional, with no resemblance intended to any person living or dead.
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This story is one of an occasional series about the further adventures of the characters introduced in the fantasy novel 'Elf-Boy and Friends' and published by Nifty Archive. The chief protagonist of the novel, Dahlderon, elf-boy and druid, will appear in these stories in a supporting rather than starring role. Each story in the sequence stands on its own, with the focus on one or a few of the original characters.
Readers who like these stories might want to try my two series 'Daphne Boy' and 'Naked Prey' in the Gay/Historical section of the Archive. My 'Jungle Boy' series of Hollywood tales is posted in the Gay/Authoritarian section. The recent series 'Andrew Jackson High' relates the trials and tribulations of five of its gay students. For links to these and other stories, look on the list of Prolific Authors on the Archive.