Siege of Stone

by Terry Goodkind

  “Emperor Sulachan does not take orders,” Nicci said.

  The sour-faced sliph’s form shifted and reshaped, reflecting the magical light in the air.

  “Take me to Serrimundi,” Nicci said again.

  Clearly angry, the sliph lurched up to engulf her. “Breathe!” she commanded, then dragged Nicci under.

  CHAPTER 67

  The camp was devastated, as was the general’s heart. As a military commander he felt the pain and anger as he considered how many soldiers he had lost in one day. Killing the smug emissary from Ildakar had done almost nothing to assuage the pain. Nevertheless, Utros had made his answer clear.

  Ildakar would fall, under his terms.

  All these men had sworn their loyalty to him centuries ago. Without a qualm they had offered their lives in service, but none of them knew when they marched away from Orogang that they were giving up their homes, their sweethearts, their children—forever. Now their comrades were all they had.

  Utros stood outside his makeshift new command tent, a large structure stretched across support beams. The fabric was stained with soot, salvaged from a scorched wagon that soldiers had dragged away from the flames. A gray drizzle had extinguished any fires that still smoldered, but the smell of bitter ash lingered in the air.

  Though the recent attack was incredibly devastating, he suspected that it was the worst that Ildakar could produce. Perhaps the great city was now mostly defenseless. The giant warriors had been destroyed, and Ildakar surely had no more of them, or they would have turned them loose during the battle.

  The dragon had also wrought a terrible amount of damage—damage that should have been inflicted on Ildakar. Iron Fang had commanded him to summon the monster, but Utros had experience with the capricious and vicious nature of dragons. In hindsight, he wasn’t surprised at what Brom had done.

  In the aftermath he had to report his failure to Emperor Kurgan. He had lost tens of thousands of men to the Ixax warriors and the dragon, without a single stone being knocked from the city’s walls. Sadly, Utros would also have to confess his failure to Majel, which made his heart and mind heavy.

  In the smoky daylight he stepped up to the blood lens, staring at its curved surface like a man gazing into a mountain tarn. The murky glass did not reflect back at him, nor could he see through the greenish mists, but Ava and Ruva touched the markings around the lens and called upon their gift to illuminate the runes. Energy sparkled through the glass, then clarified until the veil to the underworld became transparent.

  Iron Fang and the raw, red form of Majel were there waiting for him on the other side of the lens. “I am ready for your report, General,” Kurgan said, showing off his sharp metal tooth. “Did you follow my commands?”

  “Yes, my emperor. My sorceresses worked their spell. We summoned a dragon as you commanded.” Utros felt the words like hot lead in his mouth. He chose his revelations carefully, but he was only delaying his shame.

  Kurgan was delighted by the news, but Majel’s skinned face bore no readable expression. Iron Fang roughly grabbed his wife’s peeled shoulder and squeezed the exposed meat. “You see, your lover hasn’t failed me. Tell us, General Utros! Have you finally broken Ildakar? Is the city now conquered in my name?”

  Utros lowered his gaze. “I am afraid not, my liege.” The two sorceresses stepped back, their faces drawn with concern. This was his battle to face. “The dragon came and was bound to me. I forced it to attack the city.”

  “Then Ildakar should be a smoking ruin by now!”

  Majel breathed out a long, low sigh. “Oh Utros, what happened?”

  “The dragon broke its bond and turned on us instead. Someone in Ildakar was powerful enough to disrupt the magic, and the monster killed thousands of my soldiers.” Utros squared his shoulders. “The wizards of Ildakar also created two giant warriors, which they unleashed against my army. More than thirty thousand of my fighters were killed before we destroyed them.”

  Kurgan was furious. “And you allowed this? You call yourself a great commander!”

  Utros had never boasted about being a great commander, although he did his best to be one. From the emissary Nathan, he knew that history had painted him as a hero, as a genius. In the past, his victories might have warranted such a characterization, but after the recent losses and tremendous setbacks, historians might describe him differently.

  “I will continue to do my best, Emperor Kurgan. Our siege will break the city, but it may take time.”

  “Time,” Kurgan said with a rude snort. “You have already had fifteen centuries. Should I wait another hundred years? A thousand? You are a failure and a disappointment, General Utros. You marched off with my invincible army to conquer the world, but you took too long. Because you were gone from Orogang, my people turned against me. If you had been there, my reign would not have ended. My empire would have endured.”

  His words came out fast and angry, dripping with venom. Kurgan pressed closer to the lens so that his image filled a large portion of the glass. He sneered. “Then again, if you had been there, then you would have betrayed me with my wife, again and again in your tent or in my own imperial bed.” He glowered at Majel, who stood woodenly, her torn face quivering.

  Kurgan reached out and stroked her slick cheek, where he had carved the skin off her face with a filleting knife. Utros clenched his fists, wanting to reach through the lens to grasp Kurgan around the throat.

  “But she loves me now,” Iron Fang said. “Here in the underworld, poor Majel understands her error. The Keeper has left her physical form like this, so she can always remember what she did to me.”

  Majel also caressed Iron Fang. Her voice wavered. “Yes, my husband.” Utros had heard that voice so many times whispering in his own ear. “Loyalty is stronger than love.”

  “I am so sorry, Majel,” Utros said, a groan deep in his throat.

  “My wife is none of your concern,” Kurgan snapped. “You are my general. You could have had any whore in your camps, yet you chose the one woman sworn to your emperor.”

  “I am yours now, my love,” Majel said to Kurgan, not looking at Utros, whose heart felt stony, his emotions broken. Iron Fang kept staring through the lens at him, impatient and annoyed, and he slapped away the fawning caresses of the mangled woman. “Swear your loyalty to me again, Utros. Promise that you will defeat Ildakar and then finish conquering the Old World. For me.”

  “I swore it to you a long time ago,” Utros said. “That hasn’t changed.”

  He knew that Majel was just speaking the words, forced to stay with the emperor in the underworld. Could a spirit feel pain? Physical pain? Certainly emotional pain—he could read it in her face. But something had changed deep within her. She had not forgotten him, but maybe her love had died when her physical body did.

  “Majel…” he whispered.

  Kurgan shoved her away, and Majel’s bloody form fell out of view. Iron Fang’s image filled the entire glass oval. “You are my general. You are my servant. You are my slave. Even from the underworld, I am still your emperor. Swear to me that you will conquer the continent, as you were meant to do.”

  Utros clenched and unclenched his stony fists. “Yes, I swear it.” He could no longer see Majel’s mutilated form, but Kurgan was even more hideous in his own way.

  Utros did not make empty vows. He had spoken the words many times. He knew that loyalty was stronger than love, and his hundreds of thousands of soldiers were entirely loyal to him. His soldiers had often told him so, but he was blinded by his own loyalty to a petulant leader who did not deserve it. His every victory was for the glory of Iron Fang, while the soldiers in his army did it for him.

  If Utros did tear down Ildakar and conquer the Old World, maybe he should do it for his own purposes, rather than for the unworthy emperor. Such a man did not deserve to rule. Such a man was dead because his own people had torn him apart.

  Such a man should no longer be issuing orders to General Utros.

  P
erhaps it had been a mistake to create this lens. Emperor Kurgan no longer had anything to say that Utros needed to hear. The general didn’t bow, didn’t speak another word to his emperor, whose face still filled the lens.

  Instead, with a sweep of his hand, he smothered the magic in one of the glowing runes, and the images faded back into impenetrable green mists.

  CHAPTER 68

  Inside her villa, Elsa sat in the courtyard next to her peaceful fountain. The sound of the running water helped inspire her, and Nathan felt the same. She had sheets of paper and a stylus on which she drew experimental designs, spell-forms, and connecting runes that she could activate using transference magic.

  Nathan had taken several old volumes from Renn’s cluttered library, tomes of magical lore that the wizard had shared with Lani. Nathan felt a pang for what had happened to the sorceress. He rubbed the scar on his chest, feeling occasional slivers of phantom pain in his heart.

  General Utros had no idea how weakened the wizards of Ildakar had become, so many powerful duma members gone. Nathan was determined to find some other unexpected defense before the ancient general recovered enough to make a new move. “Dear spirits, how do we do this ourselves?” he muttered, but Elsa was too deep in concentration to hear him.

  She bit her lower lip as she scribbled small designs and added connecting lines. “Transference magic is usually a stage-to-stage spell, one spell-form connected to a counterpart, using the magic in an even exchange, but in order to increase the power, maybe we can segregate, then amplify it.” She tapped her stylus on the paper where she had drawn eight smaller runes in a circle and connected them like the spokes of a wheel. “Through a central point, we can widen the flow, like a pipe delivering water.” She glanced over at her fountain. “If the pipe is only as wide as your finger, that limits the amount of water you can transport. But if we widen the conduit to a foot in diameter, imagine the water we could deliver.” She scribbled on her paper, then glanced up at Nathan, who was looking at her with admiration.

  “I see what you mean, my dear,” he said. “Are you suggesting it might be possible to flood the entire plain and wash away the siege?”

  “That might do, but it’s not necessarily destructive enough,” Elsa said. “I was thinking of a flood of magic. Let me keep developing this.”

  Glad to be in the other woman’s company, Nathan paged through the books. He saw notations Renn had made in the margins, but the portly wizard had not been in the mind-set for war when he did his research. He’d been looking for ways to combine wind chimes and fountains for his own villa.

  After several hours of his fruitless searching, while Elsa expanded her transference runes, they both needed to rise and stretch. “Let’s go see what Olgya is doing in the silk spinners’ guild,” Elsa suggested. “We shouldn’t dismiss any possible advantage. Maybe she has come up with something.”

  “I am curious about the weaving operations myself,” Nathan said. He had cleaned his white robes and admired the cool and comfortable silk. “Her new enhanced fabrics are nearly as good as armor. If you will lead the way?”

  They walked through the nobles’ district, passing citrus orchards and lush flower beds. The trees along the next boulevard had darker leaves and were manicured into rounded shapes, but some were entirely stripped of leaves. Workers stood under the trees with baskets, plucking leaves in a swift methodical motion. “What are they doing?” Nathan asked. “Are the leaves used for food? Medicine? Spices, maybe?”

  “They are mulberry leaves.” When she realized he didn’t understand the significance, Elsa added, “Silkworms prefer to eat mulberry leaves.”

  Ahead, Nathan saw a large open structure with tall support beams and cross braces over the roof. Smaller open storehouses were stacked with bolts of colorful cloth, one on top of the other, like rolled rainbows.

  Dozens of people moved in and out, including workers with baskets full of dark leaves. Doorway curtains breathed in and out as a pair of men hurried along with a bolt of bright red silk. Nathan heard the voices of workers inside the building, along with another sound … rustling, rattling, whispering. Elsa pushed aside the gray doorway curtain and led him into the cavernous warehouse.

  Nathan felt as if he had fallen into the web of a tunnel spider. The walls and rafters were covered with meshed webs, sheets of silken strands that extended for twenty or thirty feet. Drooping banners hung down like the sides of a sagging tent. He smelled a sweet resinous scent that clung to the fibers.

  Workers dumped baskets of leaves into wide troughs, and Nathan saw green worms as long as his forearm, chewing and squirming. With their blind, flat heads, they gorged themselves like maggots on rotted flesh. Men and women bustled about, stepping around Nathan and Elsa.

  Olgya stood near several rattling and clacking looms where workers fed in the raw silk threads and created sheets of the marvelous fabric. She quickly finished her instructions to the weavers, then turned to Nathan and Elsa with a frown. “Is this duma business? We are working as swiftly as we can.”

  “We just wanted to have a better understanding of your efforts,” Nathan said. “I have never seen silk weaving before.”

  “The worms make the silk strands,” Olgya said. “We make the fabric.” Tense with her desperate work, she was a wiry mass of energy. Her silk robes were patterned with beautiful designs, primarily green and blue with a flash of red and orange. Her many ribboned clumps of hair looked somewhat disheveled. “The worms eat and eat, and they mature in only a few days, thanks to fleshmancy, and they no longer go into a pupa. They used to mature over time and then spin their cocoons, which we unraveled for the silk, one cocoon per worm. These altered worms are different, larger, and they produce large, furry cocoons that provide all the silk we need, and they remain worms for at least ten cycles. They spin a cocoon and then go back to eating until they’re fattened up, and soon spin another cocoon.”

  Green, quivering worms crawled out of the troughs, finding a perch in a network of dowels and false branches, where they extruded glistening strands from spinnerets. Even as the cocoons hardened, workers detached an anchor line of the threads and then rolled the fibers onto wooden batons, which they took over to the looms.

  “And this silk will help in the war effort?” Nathan asked.

  Olgya showed them the magical loom, a clattering wooden machine with metal hinges, wires, and cross wires that held the emerging fabric. Runes carved in the wood glowed a pale blue, and the silk fibers absorbed some of that glow as the cloth grew inch by inch. Weavers used their gift to guide the process.

  “The new silk is highly protective.” Olgya took them to the far end of the loom, where the fabric emerged. “Special pigments further enhance its strength, but this is already ten times stronger than normal silk and it can protect our people against the blows of enemy soldiers, like fine mesh armor.” She gave Nathan a challenging glance, noting the ornate sword he wore at his side. “Try to cut this silk with your blade. Thrust the point right through.”

  Nathan withdrew his sword. It felt good to hold the weapon, and he poked the sword into the silk, but the sharp point didn’t cut through.

  “Harder!” Olgya commanded.

  He stabbed downward so that the fabric belled out, showing the pointed shape of the tip, but he couldn’t pierce the cloth.

  “Harder!”

  Nathan pulled back and thrust with all his strength, jabbing and jabbing as if the cloth represented his most hated enemy, but he still couldn’t pierce it. The cloth remained rigid enough to stop most of the damage to the skin of its wearer. “I must say I am impressed.”

  “Enemy arrows or blades cannot penetrate it. Our soldiers will be safe, although it was not enough to protect my Jed.” Her firm voice suddenly cracked. “That boy did not want to fight, and he paid the ultimate price. I never thought to raise him as a soldier, since he was the son of a gifted noble. Why should he ever have to worry about being killed in battle?” She shuddered, and then her expression bec
ame stony again. “We all have to fight. We all do our part, even the silkworms.” She looked at the thick cobwebs of fresh silk fiber. “We are driving them to burn their energy, and some of them don’t survive.”

  Three silkworms drooped over the edge of a trough and fell, flaccid and limp. Workers plucked the soft bodies and cast them into a basket full of dead worms, while others dumped in more mulberry leaves for the thriving worms to devour.

  Nathan listened to the chitter and rustle of the voracious creatures as they ate leaves and spun their cocoons, as the loom rattled and clacked, as the workers rolled the fresh silk fabric and carried it to the storehouse.

  “We each do our part,” Elsa repeated. “Because if we fail, Ildakar fails, and then we all die.” She turned to Nathan with an incongruous grin on her face. “But I have just realized exactly what to do with my transference magic, and how I can smash a good portion of the siege army. I think this will work!”

  CHAPTER 69

  Thora remained locked in the dungeon cell, bored and frustrated, but this time the prison was of her own making. Although protective runes were again chiseled in the stone blocks around the door, she knew how to break free. She could smash her way out of the cell any time she chose, and her captors knew that. But she refused.

  How odd, Thora thought, that the people who had betrayed her, the people who considered their own sovrena to be a danger to them, would grant her such a measure of trust. Yet, she had surrendered, and she did indeed want to save her city. She remained in the cell, bound by chains of her own guilt. For Ildakar.

  Though she sat quietly, her thoughts never rested. For hours at a time, she would ignite a bright glow that illuminated the bare stone walls. Other times, swallowed by black thoughts, Thora preferred darkness and she would sit surrounded by possibilities.