No Good Deed Goes Unpunished

A Chapter by Eddie Davis

Amala is abandoned by those she rescued, to battle the Orcs alone.

She hadn’t heard the crack sound due to the silencing effect of the enchanted stone, but she saw the Orc snap the whip a second before the leather cord wrapped tightly around her ankles. She fell hard onto her butt, but held onto her swords. Immediately the Orc began pulling on the whip, attempting to drag her toward the door where the other Orcs were massed.

Amala glanced around frantically, wondering where the Prince and his men were and why they hadn’t come to her aid. Then, out of the corner of her eye she caught the movement of someone quickly creeping up the stairwell to the roof. They were making an escape while she was the focus of the Orc’s attention.

She had no time to really let this knowledge sink in, for she was seconds away from death. With her left sword she slashed furiously at the taut whip cord and it snapped upon contacting her enchanted blade. This ended the ‘reeling in’ from the Orc, but the end of the whip was still tightly wound several times around her ankles and she could not quickly cut through it with the Orcs now charging in to attack her.

Amala swung both swords crisscross at her attackers and that delayed them for a moment. In that moment she arched her back and somersaulted backward, still with bound ankles, but now at least on her knees.

A huge Orc rushed her, bringing down at her head the largest mallet she had ever seen. She knew a parry would not stop the weapon, so she rolled sideways, careful to tightly grip her swords. The evasive action saved her head from being smashed into the stone floor of the guardhouse, but her arm caught the edge of the blow, sending jolting agony down into her hand.

She managed to hop upward into a standing position, but without the use of her bound legs, it wasn’t a more secure stance. Abruptly, the Orc with the mallet swung sideways and she tried to jerk out of the way of the huge hammer, but the head of the weapon grazed her hip. This time the blow sent her off her feet, skidding across the floor several feet to crash into an overturned table.

Though engulfed in pain from the blow, she knew she only had moments before the Orcs would lunge forward upon her. Finding the locket that contained the darkness stone in her pocket, she quickly opened it and immediately the room was blanketed in darkness.

She didn’t wait a moment, but crawled quickly out from under the table toward the back of the room, falling over debris and bodies in her haste to get out of the area.

As she scampered on her knees, she bumped into a small stone next to a chair. She scooped it up and continued to scramble backwards until she encountered the legs of another table. She slid in underneath the table, finding that it rested against the back wall of the room. Feeling in the dark, she found her boot dagger and sawed carefully at the tangled whip cord still binding her. In a few moments she was freed.

Amala pulled her swords close to her, drew her knees up to her chest the best she could with her heavily bruised hip, and wrapped her Elven hood around her. Then, after searching her cloak pocket for the other lead locket, she plopped the silence stone she’d just recovered into it and closed it.

Suddenly there was once again sound, the noise of brutes stumbling around and falling over things. For a brief moment after the sound returned, there was a lack of movement, then, an Orc voice said,

“Hey! I can hear!”

A furry of voices filled the room as all the Orcs began speaking at once. They were trying to navigate the darkness of the room, searching for her, but were very, very fearful of stumbling upon her.

She heard an Orc slowly advancing toward her. He was using the sense of feel alone to guide him, and she was debating striking at him in the blackness, when, from the roof, there came the sound of footsteps - probably the movement of the cowardly prince and his cavaliers making their escape without the knowledge that the sound enchantment below had ceased and that they could now be plainly heard.

“Hear that?” One Orc said, “She’s on the roof!”

“She’ll be trapped up there!” Another Orc commented.

“If we could just see.” Still another Orc added.

Amala decided to aid them. She pulled herself into a ball under the table and drew the Elven cloak tightly around her. Under the cloak, she closed the lid of the locket holding the darkness stone, and in the blink of an eye, everyone in the room could see again.

She held her breath, hoping that she was concealed enough under the table with the camouflaging effects of the Elven cloak hiding her in the dim light provided by the wall mounted oil lamps.

“Hey!” Three Orcs said at the same moment the locket closed around the enchanted stone.

“Come on!” One yelled and there was the sound of running footsteps. Amala’s hands fell to her swords, but the footsteps were racing to the stairwell and a moment later she heard them stomping their way up and then pounding on the wooden hatch that apparently the prince and his men had locked from topside after they had fled to the roof.

“Get an axe, hurry! You - go get the Baron, tell him the Drow witch, prince, and his men are on the roof.”

Amala heard the sounds of running and she hazarded to peer out from her cloak. She caught the sight of the bottom half of an Orc racing to the front door of the guardhouse and barking out commands to the other Orcs outside.

“Hey, look!” A few moments later came a voice from outside, “There they go! They jumped off the roof! Hey! Come on, they’re running south toward the village path! Come on, we’ve got ‘em trapped.”

“They’re going for the horses!” Another Orc yelled.

“Come on, we can still cut ‘em off!”

An Orc rushed into the guardhouse and yelled to the Orcs on the stairway, “They’ve jumped off the roof and are trying to get to the horses up at the village.”

“We’ve got guards posted there, they might hold ‘em long enough for us to get there, come on!” The sound of running feet rushing down the stairs filled the air, and she peeked out in time to see them racing out the door.

Breathing a sigh of relief, Amala was about to climb out from under the table when the door suddenly opened and she quickly slid back under the table.

“What a mess!” It was the voice of a very annoyed Bristane.

“Sorry, sir, we had her cornered, but she had some damned Drow magic - made the room go dark again and since we still couldn’t hear anything, she got up the stairs and joined the cavaliers, I guess.”

“You guess? I’d say it was certain, Nord! This is an absolute disaster! If Edwarren gets away, we’ll all be dead. It had to work flawlessly, Nord! I told you it HAD to be flawless!”

“I know, Baron.”

“Well then, what are you going to do to make it right?” The man yelled, pounding his fist on the top of the only other upright table in the room.

“They’ll have a hard time getting the horses - we have ten men guarding them, plus the women will assist our guards.”

“Do you honestly think they can stop them? That Drow witch alone could take out your men! Look around, Nord, she did all this herself!”

“Well, what if we just picked them off with arrows - at least we could kill the prince.”

“It has to look like an Imperial assassination, Nord! How many times do I have to tell you this?!”

“We could switch out the arrows after we kill them " there are Imperial archers.”

“No… oh, perhaps that will work… I don’t know, Nord, this is all a disaster! If one of them gets away - even that dark Elf she-devil- they will know I’ve been here. They’ll tie me in.”

“You should’ve just let us take care of it Baron. They’d never have known you were behind it.”

“Shut up - this is your fault to begin with! You let the blasted coach get through! Any minute we may have the whole damned Southgate garrison marching up the pass.”

“We have the portcullis lowered.”

“Big deal! They’ll just lift it.”

“We’ll lock the pulley on our side, that’ll slow ‘em down.”

“But it won’t stop them.”

“We’ll have time to escape… if they even come.”

Bristane sighed, “Oh, they’ll come; I can assure you of that. I should have just hired an assassin- made it look like an accident. I wanted it to look like General Fortatius was behind it. It made sense, Nord - Edwarren and Fortatius are arch rivals. That way Northmarch would be certain to want to keep out of the Empire. There is nothing like the death of a beloved prince to stir up patriotism, and I could have channeled that to keep Northmarch out of the Empire.”

“But it’s a subject nation to the Empire now, isn’t it?”

“Yes, but we control our own Government, you idiot! Who knows who a new Emperor would appoint as King of Northmarch if we were part of the empire? With Edwarren dead, it would fall to the Barons to determine the succession after Haroldris’ death.“

“Haroldris’ fairy Queen can’t take the crown, and when the princess was killed years ago, that just left Edwarren. But he also has Imperial ambitions and if we become part of the Empire with him as the new Emperor, he’ll give control of Northmark to a legate or governor, not the council of barons. “

“I’d be out of a position, Nord. That’s why we need to kill the prince and make it look like Fortatius was to blame. Then we select the new king-”

“-And you think that’d be you?”

“Well, yes, but even it if it wasn’t, we’d still have our control over our nation. A council of Barons advising the King rather than senators, governors and an Emperor who is two thousand miles away and that is most concerned about Aeropolis and pleasing his Imperial senators rather than taking care of his barons as a King is supposed to do.”

“As the prince isn’t nearly, shall we say, ‘diplomatic’ as his elderly father, you can be sure that sooner or later, your people will be killed or forced out of the mountains. Remember, Nord, unlike Haroldris, he will have Imperial legions of men to complete the job.”

“So what will you do if he gets away?”

“Probably have you killed, Nord, you and your men. So you had better make certain that you get him, his men, and that Drow female too. No witnesses, Nord.”

“I understand, sir, I’ll see to it myself.”

“You had better. Now go and get them; I will continue to set things up at the ambush site. You bring their bodies there quickly and perhaps we can salvage this whole thing. Get moving!”

The Orc hurried out of the guardhouse, and after a few moments pause, Baron Bristane left as well.

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