Sy-wen climbed atop Kast, settling her legs around the base of his neck. He felt the warmth of her skin through her thin suit, through his thick scale. “Are you ready?” she whispered.
A rumble built in his chest.
“Then fly, my dragon, fly.”
He bunched his legs and obeyed, winging upward with a burst of muscle and speed. Through their bond—dragon and rider—he sensed the flush of her exhilaration. She leaned closer, her warmth melting her into his heart, her sensations blurring with his own.
Their two bodies became one. Was this what it was like for Ragnar’k? No wonder the dragon loved her so.
Kast wound on a rising thermal, spiraling up from the beach. The world spread before them.
To the east, he spotted five of the Thunderclouds. As he watched, a burst of lightning crackled down from one of the ships’ keels to strike below, but he was not yet high enough to see the target. A shoulder of the mountain still blocked his view to the dockworks.
Off to the south, the Dre’rendi fleet lay outside the rocky Crown. War machines snapped with sharp thunking twangs, casting rocks and flaming barrels of pitch over the shoals to the shadowed shores. Other smaller ships darted through the gap in the broken Crown to take up positions in the lagoon, aided by a surge of dragons at the lead.
What are they fighting? Sy-wen asked, echoing his own thoughts.
He climbed higher, gliding up over the shoulder. Then the beseiged southern port came into view.
The lurker in the gate had indeed been driven out of hiding and into the open. Sy-wen gasped.
The oily darkness flowed and rolled over the ramshackle township, pouring through the streets, a living pool of blackness. It spread out in a thousand streams, feeding along the dockworks and piers, rippling into the lagoon’s murky waters. Half its bulk had already spread along the shore and into the lagoon.
And still it oozed outward and along the shores.
“What is it?” Sy-wen asked.
The answer came soon enough. With a rippling convulsion along its bulk, an army appeared out of the darkness: men, beasts, and monsters. They shed their darkness, stepping forth, birthed out of the oily beast. Only thin tethers of blackness remained, attaching each soldier to its master.
From the lagoon, hundreds of ships suddenly rose from the watery depths, tangled in masses of black snakes. Dead men rose from the algae-covered decks, trailing black umbilici, slaves to their master.
“An army of the dead,” Sy-wen mumbled, horrified.
Then, worst of all, from the midst of the shrouded township, another ship lifted from its wet grave, its hull caved in, its keel cracked. Kast recognized the missing Thundercloud. It rose now, not upon the elemental glow of its keel, but upon a twisted pillar of oily darkness. Upon its decks, too, sailors slowly stood: elv’in trailing black tethers, slaves now.
“How can we defeat a legion that’s already dead?”
On the shores, a flow of creatures poured out of the black womb of the oily creature, all of Blackhall, slaves to the darkness: one army, one purpose.
And still the flows of damnation rolled forth from the gate.
Sy-wen spoke his own heart. “We’re doomed.”
“Hurry, men!” Tyrus yelled as he raced his mare over the last of the Black Road, risking a glance behind him.
The tunnel of d’warf statues wound back across the volcanic span. Fletch, Hurl, and Blyth followed on their frothing, wild-eyed mounts, chased in turn by Sticks on foot. Beyond the giant pirate, the remainder of the d’warf legions kept steady pace. Despite the bloody run and carnage, the soldiers had not lost a step. Watching them this day, Tyrus understood how the d’warf armies had been so critical to the Dark Lord’s conquest of the lands of Alasea. They were a tide of muscle, steel, and determination, impossible to turn aside.
Riding past the last of the stone d’warves, Tyrus burst from the granite passage and galloped the last stretch of open stone that lay before the Northern Gate. Just past the threshold, a solid iron gate blocked the way into the mountain, lowered earlier as it grew clear to the hidden gatekeepers that the d’warf army would span the Black Road.
As Tyrus rode toward the iron gate, skal’tum screamed, sensing their prey escaping, but they were kept back by d’warf archers positioned with crossbows in the shadow of the gate.
Free of the tunnel, Fletch added his own arrows to the bolts, taking out a skal’tum overhead. It tumbled to the rocky shoals below.
Galloping under the deadly volley, Tyrus reached the massive iron door and slid from his saddle. While he might ignore his exhaustion, his body could not. He fell to his knees, then his hands. Sweat streamed from his face.
His hill horse nickered and ran in tight circles to the side.
The world swam around him for a moment. Hands grabbed him and hauled him up. He glanced to right and left: Sticks and Blyth. “I’m fine,” he mumbled. “My legs are just horse sore.”
“Sure they are,” Blyth said snidely. “Though your hands might be black as stone, your face is pale as my bare arse.”
Tyrus smiled sickly. “Thanks for that comparison. As if this day wasn’t horrible enough.”
Sticks stood over him. “We’re safe for the moment. Rest and gather yourself.”
Tyrus looked beyond the giant. Hurl and Fletch had joined the d’warf archers in keeping the remaining skal’tum at bay. More and more of the d’warf legions poured from the tunnel to aid in the defense before the gate.
Wennar lumbered up to them. The older d’warf leader looked hardly winded. But his eyes marked the terror of the crossing, and his bright armor was stained with scorch marks from the dripping gore of the skal’tum. “What now?” he asked, glaring up at the solid wall of iron. “We’ve won here, but to what end? This gate is thicker through than the reach of my arm.”
Tyrus nodded. “We have to get through. The other half of the Alasean army already wages war on the Southern Gate.”
Wennar slammed a steel-gloved fist on the door in frustration. The clang echoed back to them.
Blyth shook his head. “Why didn’t I think of that? We’ll just knock and ask politely to be allowed inside. I’m sure they’ll oblige.”
Wennar frowned at the first mate, while the screeches of monsters wailed behind them. “We can’t hold this post forever.”
Tyrus stared dully at the iron wall, too tired to come up with an answer.
Sticks nodded toward the gate. “Captain, can you change iron to granite as easily as you’ve done with flesh?”
“I . . . I don’t know,” he answered truthfully. “But even if I could, I don’t have the reserves for something this size.”
His words did not seem to faze the giant. Sticks turned to Wennar. “D’warves are the best miners in the world.”
The d’warf general swelled his chest. “I defy any to say otherwise.”
“And you’ve hammers here? And pikes?”
Wennar nodded.
“Bring them to us.”
Wennar glanced to Tyrus with a frown.
Understanding grew in Tyrus. He nodded to the d’warf leader. “Do as he says.”
Wennar turned, bellowing orders in the d’warvish tongue.
With a sigh, Tyrus swung back to the door. “I still don’t know if I have enough reserve.”
“Could you draw back some magick from the d’warves who are already stone?” Sticks asked.
“Not after they were brave enough to face the petrifying magick a second time. For now, they’re safer as stone. If we survive this, I’ll bring them back.”
Sticks simply grunted. With no other answer, Tyrus lifted his hands, still black from the backwash of his spell casting. He placed dark palms on gray iron. Closing his eyes, he pushed his energies into the iron. Slipping into that otherworldly state, he willed metal to stone.
Sounds muted; even his heart seemed to slow. But he felt petrifying force pumping out of him with each faltering beat. Before long, he knew that if he cast much more,
his heart would slow to a stop, becoming stone, too.
Strangely, he found he didn’t care. A part of him quailed at this lack of concern, but he could not muster a challenge to the obstinate disinterest of true granite. Or maybe the torpor was simply his own heart, and the endless doubts that settled with the same weight as stone. It was all too much. He could not do this. He was not his father’s son.
Then he was suddenly ripped out of this stony lassitude. The world snapped back to him with screams, bellows, clash of steel—and pain. His arms burned with a deep fire. A moan escaped his lips, flying away like a frightened bird.
His vision focused back on Sticks, dragging him back from the iron gate. “That’s enough, Captain!” the giant yelled.
Tyrus found his voice. “Did I . . . did it . . . ?”
“Look for yourself,” Blyth said, standing back out of his way.
The gray iron was marred by a swath of black stone wide and high enough to ride a horse through. Already, Wennar’s d’warves set to work at shattering through the stone.
Tyrus stared up at the wall of iron. They would be entering Blackhall. He had done it.
“Your arms, Captain.”
Tyrus saw that from his elbows on down, he was solid granite, black and unpolished. But with the painful tingle of blood reentering a sleeping limb, his own blood drove off the magick. Slowly stone turned back to flesh.
Blyth was at his side now, giving the d’warves room to swing their hammers. “You were stone all the way to your shoulders—even your neck.”
“We were afraid we’d lose you,” Sticks added.
Tyrus remembered his slowing heart, his lack of will to fight the torpor of true stone. He knew how close he had been to losing himself. But instead, he mumbled, “It’s nothing.”
Behind him, the clang of steel exploded into a crash of rock. He swung around. The window of stone in the wall of iron had been shattered. Working quickly, the d’warves cleared the debris as the last stubborn chunks of granite shattered from the iron frame under skilled hammer blows.
Wennar sounded the horn, signaling his lieutenants to be ready to march. Tyrus and his men remounted their steeds. Tyrus kicked his horse forward. If there was a trap laid beyond, let him face it with his magick.
He ducked slightly to pass through the hole in the gate. He held his breath, not knowing what to expect, sword in one hand, the other on his reins.
He was not prepared for what he saw.
He straightened as he passed through the gate. The others followed, gasping as they clopped slowly into the main hall of the Dark Lord’s lair.
Blyth voiced his own sentiments. “It’s . . . it’s beautiful.”
His first mate’s description hardly encompassed the wonders before them. The hall was as high as the gate itself, extending forever forward, but not in a stark straight course. It meandered invitingly into the distance. From Harlequin Quail’s maps, this one hall tunneled through the entire mountain, connecting the two gates and widening in the middle into a chamber described as “very, very large.”
Tyrus gaped around him. He could not imagine anything larger. It was like riding into a glass-blown work of art. There was not a single corner or sharp edge anywhere. Everything was curves of polished black glass. Spiraled columns curled from floor to ceiling. Tiers and balconies, festooned in delicate glass flowers and winding garlands, rose along both walls. And throughout the hall, torches blazed, prisming into colors beyond description, turning black-glass flowers into shining bouquets. A short way down the hall, twin glass sculptures erupted from the floor. One shone with a thousand colors of azure, while its twin reflected only crimsons and reds, a fire to the other’s ice. Everywhere there were such wonders of light and glass.
Tyrus stared all around, not daring to blink lest he miss something.
Sticks finally spoke, breaking the charm of the hall upon them. “No one’s here.”
A part of Tyrus had registered the same. Their steps were the only noise echoing down the brilliant hall. The oddity drew him back to the duty at hand.
He swung around. Through the hole in the gate, the d’warf army marched into the hall. Wennar, ever practical, was assigning guards to the position and ordering others to find the iron gate’s mechanism and disable it—with the gate kept closed, it would be easy to defend the small window and guard their backs.
After a few final instructions, they were under way again. Tyrus led the party.
“Where is everyone?” Blyth asked, walking his horse beside Tyrus.
“I don’t know.” The beauty of the place slowly dimmed from his eyes. He recognized shops that he would see in any village: cobblers, bakers, tailors. And while their windows were full of goods, the shops were empty of both owners and patrons.
It was a beautiful graveyard.
Tensions built with each clopping step of his mount. His eyes strained, trying to discern a trap. The colors grew garish. The constant reflection went from tiresome to addling. But there was no sign of the living.
Tyrus pondered this mystery. It was as if the mountain was hollow, a shell around an empty egg. This comparison raised a shudder: another stone egg. But what would this one hatch?
According to Xin, their two forces should rendezvous at the large chamber in the middle of the concourse. Once united, they would strike downward, into the crèche of the Dark Lord himself.
Tyrus tried to reach Xin through his silver coin, but the magicks of this cursed place confounded his attempts. They were on their own until their forces joined.
As they marched, the winding hall stretched on ahead of them. They clopped across glass bridges over chasms that reflected molten fires far below. They passed gardens of statuary, like parks inside the mountain. A league passed under their hooves, then another. The passage became a blur of light and glass. Where was this central chamber?
The few voices that had been speaking or raised in quiet song had long since died away. They trudged onward.
But when they finally reached the rallying chamber, they were well into it before they realized it. The walls to either side had slowly pulled away, like arms opening. The roof arched higher, until it was as if they were no longer in a hall. Walls and roof were gone; they marched across a moonless, starless plain.
Torches had been posted and planted throughout the floor, a flaming forest that spread out in all directions.
Tyrus called a halt to allow the bulk of the d’warf army to join them in the chamber. The legion traveling with them numbered in the hundreds, but they failed to cover more than the smallest section of the entire floor.
“Over there,” Hurl said from his saddle, pointing an arm.
Tyrus followed his direction. The forest of torches blazed brighter there. He unhooked the spyglass from his saddle horn. Through the glass, the blaze grew larger, more distinct. It was a massive fire pit, perhaps the center of the chamber itself.
He lowered the spyglass and frowned. “Let’s make for the blaze,” he said, hanging in his saddle, exhausted.
So they set out again across the vast chamber, moving as a single force, no longer restricted by walls. The distances were deceiving. They marched and marched, but the fire pit never seemed to grow any closer.
“It’s like sailing toward a mountainous coastline,” Blyth said. “It’s farther than it seems at first glance.”
Still, Tyrus refused to relent, and his persistence slowly bore fruit. The fire pit grew from a bright glow to a full blaze. The flames came from a hole in the floor. It gaped large enough to drop a small castle into its fiery depths. The heat kept them from getting too near, but at least the fires would mark their position well.
Satisfied, Tyrus called for them to make camp. He climbed from his horse and fished through his cloak’s pockets for his silver coin. He should try to reach Xin . . .
Fletch appeared at his side. “The fire smokes,” the Steppeman said in his thick accent.
Tyrus noted the worry in his voice and glanced up. �
�The fire smokes. Most do.”
“Not this one,” Fletch said. “Not until just now.”
Frowning, Tyrus rounded his horse’s flank. The fire pit was shooting vast gouts of black fumes from the lapping flames.
“Alert the others,” he ordered Fletch.
As the alarm was raised, Tyrus stared up at the smoke chugging from the fire. There was no hole above the pit, no way for the smoke to escape the mountain. The cloud of fumes grew thicker, a storm cloud building above them all.
Rumbles of unease sounded around him.
Slowly the cloud unfurled wide, smoky wings and snaked out a long, vaporous neck.
Rumbles grew to shouts. Tyrus remained silent, staring. Though the shape was vague, more shadow than substance, he knew what was taking shape before him. He had heard the story from Xin already.
The name formed on his lips as crimson eyes, full of fury and malice, opened in the cloud.
“Ragnar’k.”
With a gasp, Sy-wen jerked upright in her dragon’s saddle as a rip tore open inside her and something pushed through the gap. It felt like the touch of the simaltra, dark and oily, but with something familiar about the touch—something that reached to her heart.
Sy-wen, Kast sent to her, are you all right?
Winds rushed past, blowing back her hood and unfurling her damp hair. Screams rose from the war below, but she ignored them all and searched deeper inside her, touching the awakening darkness, opening a connection she thought gone. Ragnar’k?
What about him? Kast asked, reading her thoughts. He banked away from the fighting, sensing her distress.
Can’t you feel him? she asked. He’s awakened.
I don’t feel anything, but he was bonded to you, not me.
“I feel his rage, smell the smoke,” she said.
Where is he?
“Blackhall . . .” She knew this with certainty. Letting her eyelids drift closed, she cast out her senses along this new path. Images appeared, flickering. She caught glimpses of a cavern, flames, and figures in the dark.
A man stepped forward, sword in one hand. The other hand was raised in clear threat, fingers blackened and unnatural. As he faced the dragon, Sy-wen recognized his rusty blond hair; his mustache; his sea cloak, now stained and torn. “Tyrus,” she mumbled.
Wit'ch Star (v5) Page 53
