Celegaer met his gaze, and there was despair in the black eyes. After a moment, Celegaer spoke.
“Search every structure, every hole. Find them all, down to the smallest infant. Kill them all. No survivors. No prisoners.” The Elven commander’s voice was harsh.
He turned away, striding toward the nearest hut.
The Elves fanned out, spreading across the cavern floor.
For a moment there was silence.
Then Celegaer screamed, and the cavern exploded in a harsh babble of barks and whines.
Kellen ran in the direction of the scream. He was too late. Celegaer was dead, his face and the front of his armor eaten away by a liquid thrown at him by a Shadowed Elf female who had just come out of the stone hut. The archers on the rim had filled her body with arrows, but they had been too late to save their commander.
Celegaer’s troops were staring down at him in shock and horror.
“Search the hut!” Kellen ordered. “Keep your shields forward—we know they use poison as a weapon—now we know they use acid, too.”
He moved on quickly, heading for the next hut. The doorway was low; he had to duck to get inside.
It was one room, windowless, and it stank. It contained a pile of furs and three small children.
I can’t do this, Kellen thought in sick horror. He knew they weren’t children—they were Shadowed Elves—but they were young things. Very young. They hissed at him, cringing back from the light.
Then suddenly all three of them shrieked and sprang at him. There was no fear in their bulging pale eyes, only the berserker madness of cornered rats. They swarmed up his body, scrabbling for every purchase, clawing and biting at everything they could reach.
Reflexively, Kellen knocked them away, but they kept coming back. He could see their glistening, needlelike teeth, smell their rank, poison-tainted breath. No matter how many times he flung them away from him, they sprang up and lunged for him again.
Then one of them pulled Kellen’s dagger free of its sheath.
It was an Elven dagger, made of deadly Elvensteel and designed to pierce any opening or weakness in the Elven armor’s defenses. Seeing the length of gleaming steel in the young thing’s hands made all of his battle-honed instincts rouse at once. They weren’t children anymore—they were the enemy.
With a gasping cry, he struck the Shadowed Elf child as hard as he could, then grabbed the other two and flung them against the walls of the hut, stunning them.
Then he took his sword and killed them all.
Bile rose in his throat as he retrieved his dagger, and Kellen breathed deeply, trying to center himself again. But the self-forgiveness he sought would not come. He had killed children. How could he accept that?
I will have to find a way. Or not. And whether I can or not, finding out if I can will have to wait. Because my comrades are dying now.
Gritting his teeth, Kellen left the hut.
All around him, the battle was going badly. There weren’t as many of the enemy this time, but the Elves were taking terrible losses. They simply couldn’t bring themselves to attack and kill what they saw—despite everything—as women and children.
And it was costing them dearly.
Suddenly the cavern was ablaze with light—as bright as the noonday sun at midsummer. Kellen looked up, and saw that the entire roof of the cavern was glowing with bright blue Coldfire.
Jermayan and Ancaladar had arrived.
“Pull back. I’m going to burn the huts.” Jermayan’s voice spoke quietly, as if in his ear, and Kellen could tell by the startled expressions on the faces of the Elves that everyone else had heard it too. They began to retreat.
But it was easier asked than done, especially when they had to protect their wounded and recover their dead, and it was several minutes of hard and bloody fighting before that could be accomplished.
The Shadowed Elves fought viciously, as much like animals—or insects—as like thinking beings. They did not seem to care if they sacrificed any of their own—down to the smallest infant—if it brought them a greater chance of killing one of the Elves. In cold disbelief, Kellen saw the Shadowed Elf archers using their own young as shields, saw children younger than the ones he’d killed springing upon Elven warriors, armed with jars of acid like the one that had killed Celegaer. He dragged one of the Elves out of the way just in time, striking his young attacker dead. The spilled liquid fumed and bubbled over the corpse, smoking and stinking.
The Elves were barely clear of the huts, fighting their way toward the staircase, when suddenly every stone structure within the cavern save for the staircase burst into flame.
That isn’t possible, thought Kellen in awe. Any Wildmage or High Mage could summon Fire—but only to burn what would burn naturally. But this… ? The stone itself was burning as if it were seasoned wood drenched in lamp oil. In seconds, a roaring wall of heat separated the combatants from their prey.
Shadowed Elves—bodies aflame—ran from some of the huts, only to be cut down by the archers, in mercy.
The Shadowed Elves who had not been in the huts were trapped by the walls of flame. Their response to the sudden wave of magic was one of utter terror. The archers who had been holding living shields threw them down and tried to flee, but there was nowhere to go, save into the Elven army.
It was no longer a battle, but a massacre. Some of the Shadowed Elves ran toward the flames. Kellen saw females grab struggling children and throw them into burning huts, the structures already collapsing into ash. The archers shot all they could before the flames took them.
It was over quickly. The huts were gone, the stone burned away to ash. A wall of icy air filled the cavern, wiping away the furnace heat. The stone floor creaked and groaned, forced to cool as quickly as it had been heated.
Ancaladar launched himself from the rim of the cavern, landing in the now-empty space.
Kellen glanced around quickly, feeling a deep pang of relief to see that Idalia was still on her feet, though her garments were tattered and blood-soaked and her face was grim.
All of the Elves looked stunned. They’d won the battle, but at a terrible cost, both physical and spiritual.
Which is what Shadow Mountain wants, Kellen realized with a flash of insight. THAT’S what this war is about. It’s just another kind of drought. The last one starved the land. This one starves the spirit.
Realizing that, he felt his own soul-sickness ease. He’d hated what he’d done here today with all his being. But it had been necessary. The Shadowed Elves were Demonic in nature. They were creatures of the Endarkened, created as a trap for the creatures of the Light. To show them mercy would be to doom the Light.
I pity them, because I think they have no choice to be other than what they are. And I forgive them, because they have no choice. But I have a choice to fight for what I think is right, and I also forgive myself for making it.
But the Elves—oh, it was different for them. Not only had they been killing women and children, they had been killing kin. Blood of their blood. Tainted, but still their own.
I have to figure out how to take that guilt away from them…
Kellen took a few steps toward Jermayan and Ancaladar.
“It took you long enough,” Kellen said. He could sense the tension of the Elves—normal Wildmagery was one thing, but what they’d just seen went far beyond that.
“We were hunting Shadowed Elves,” Ancaladar said in his deep soft voice. “And a way here that I could pass through was hard to find.”
Jermayan was looking past Kellen, searching the armored figures for familiar forms. He came over to Kellen.
“Celegaer?” he asked in a low voice.
“Dead,” Kellen said. “Vestakia is waiting outside with Adaerion and the reserves. We didn’t want to risk her.”
“Better she not see… this,” Jermayan said grimly.