Blade of Empire

by Mercedes Lackey

  His sword shattered. Runacar found another. It had begun to rain, and he tilted his naked face up to the warm wetness for a moment of respite, then searched for a new target. Clouds of Silverlight began floating out above the battlefield like a malign shining fog.

  * * *

  Isilla Lightsister crouched at the edge of the trees, clutching a sword she had no idea how to use. The Light was a single constant note in a cacophony of alien spellworkings. She felt as if she could taste them in her throat, and feel them clinging to her skin.

  Once more she summoned Thunderbolt, though the effort made her vision cloud. Her target was not the battlefield—she could not see it well enough to tell friend from foe—but the fire in the forest behind her. Each time she struck, Thunderbolt doused flames and left a charred space where the fire could not pass. If we cannot retreat into the forest, we will not survive the night, she thought grimly.

  Around her, she knew other Lightborn were doing the same. It had been the last order Warlord Challaron had given before he had vanished into the fighting.

  The Gryphons had stopped bombarding the Keep when the storm began. The defenders had dropped Shield. But the ocean was glowing all the way to the horizon, and the great tower of Daroldan was a black silhouette against it.

  She wondered how many were left alive inside it.

  * * *

  The warnings Runacar screamed had become meaningless noise in his own ears. Exhaustion numbed him, so that he did not know whether he bore wounds or not. He could not remember the beginning of the fighting, and he could not imagine its end. Soon he would fall to the ground and be unable to rise, and that coming moment seemed so inevitable that it held no terror for him.

  Then the ground beneath his feet began to dance.

  At first Runacar thought it was a phantasm bred of exhaustion. Silverlight was everywhere, brightening the long twilight and making the colors of evening look false and unreal. He saw a crack appear in the outer wall of Daroldan Great Keep, and shook his head, trying to clear his vision of the illusion, but the crack only widened, and now the shuddering of the ground was too strong to ignore. It flung him to his knees, and for the first time, the screams of terror on the battlefield were louder than the howls of rage. He looked up and saw—above the fog of Silverlight—that the sky was filled with black clouds that glowed with lightning. People had fallen, people were clutching one another for support. Despite the storm, the winged fighters circled frantically just offshore, and the knights’ destriers, at last ignoring their riders’ commands, fled.

  The earth shook like a winnowing sieve. It pulled itself apart, great jagged canyons racing across the ground like earthbound lightning, opening beneath bodies both dead and alive, tumbling them in, and then grinding closed again. People ran if they could. Some ran from one opening fissure only to have another open beneath their feet and swallow them. The sounds of the battlefield were overwhelmed by a roaring louder than storm or ocean or fire, a sound so loud and so relentless that the clamor of the tortured earth almost seemed like silence.

  The burning forest fell, torn apart by the shaking, and the air was suddenly filled with smoke and embers. Great trees, still burning, hurtled from the forest as if they were arrows loosed from some monstrous bow, bouncing and tumbling across the battlefield. The great tall column of the castel cracked and tilted and bulged as Daroldan Great Keep began to crumble like wet sand.

  The shaking stopped, and Runacar lurched to his feet. Eastward, Delfierarathadan—or what was left of it—was hidden in a cloud of smoke and dust reddened by flames. On the battlefield, the survivors stood dazedly, or ran, their motion oddly aimless, as if it did not matter what direction they chose. Some ran toward the disintegrating Keep. Some ran toward the fire. Some ran northward. Many of the chasms in the ground remained open, gulfs few dared to cross, blocking escape.

  The castel was still crumbling, and now the cliff was crumbling, too.

  Runacar took a deep breath.

  “To me!” he cried, in a voice that had been trained to carry across battlefields. “Otherfolk—to me! Leaf and Star!” He swung his sword through the air, brandishing it for everyone to mark where he stood. “Leaf and Star!”

  The air had become very still. Slowly the fighters—many so covered with muck and gore that their species could not be identified, much less their allegiance—began to stand, to gather together, to come toward him. It was an endless-seeming time before the first of the survivors reached him—a Minotaur, three Fauns, and a Bearward—and in that time, the ground shook again several times, but only in small tremors. Once again Runacar repeated Amrunor’s message, and sent them southward. But he remained where he was. It was all he could do for the remains of the army he had led.

  Otherfolk drained away from the battlefield as though they were water flowing from a cracked cup, leaving behind them a slaughterhouse that the land itself had seemingly tried to erase. Gryphons and Hippogriffs dove among the survivors, rising up carrying away whomever they could reach, flying them to safety, returning over and over. Scattered groups of Otherfolk quickly became a steady stream, and Runacar dared to hope that some of the people he’d led into battle might still be saved. Incredibly, many stayed behind to fight on, pointless as that was now.

  The rumbling had stopped, and his ears rang with the silence. Battle cries and the clang of metal on metal were sporadic, muted and distant. Soon Runacar’s eyes burned and he was coughing constantly, as the smoke boiled down from the forest to fill the air. He was desperately thirsty, and thought longingly of the Angarussa, of submerging himself in its sweet fresh water. The Otherfolk moved past him in a wide slow column, wounded supporting wounded, Centaurs carrying Woodwose and Fauns and even Wulvers on their backs. Perhaps some of Daroldan’s defenders had slipped in among the Woodwose. What did it matter now? In a cracked, hoarse voice Runacar urged those who passed him to move faster, faster, get to the sea …

  And still he stayed where he was. He knew he should go with them—Amrunor’s message had been passed, his obligation met—but he could not bring himself to do so.

  A flash of movement caught his eye. A swoop of black wings, and suddenly Drotha was perched upon the top of the still-crumbling castel, wings spread and howling with demented laughter.

  “Get down from there.” The words emerged as a harsh whisper, but Runacar doubted Drotha would have listened even if he’d been able to shout them in his face. Some of those still fighting stopped at the sound of the Aesalion’s laughter and pointed toward him.

  The ground began to shake again.

  This was not one of the small tremblings that had followed the first great shaking. Runacar saw the ground ripple like Great Sea Ocean itself, saw the great fissures reopen as the smoke skirled away. The Otherfolk began to run, screaming as they fled, trampling their comrades in their panic. Runacar tried to stop them, or follow, but it didn’t matter which he chose, he could not keep his balance as the land went mad beneath his body. All around him, Otherfolk were falling, floundering, trying desperately to stay on their feet, trying to run …

  Someone grabbed him and set him on his feet—he did not see who. He managed to stagger after his benefactor across the traitorous ground, when—behind him, loud enough to cut through every other sound—he heard a cracking, a roaring, a thousand times louder than the sound the Angarussa had made when it was turned into its new bed. He stopped and turned back the way he had come. He had to see.

  Daroldan Great Keep teetered and lurched as the cliff beneath it disintegrated. He saw its cellars and deep hiding places opened and exposed, saw the whole granite outcropping upon which the Great Keep was built begin to crumble into the ocean below as if the granite had become gravel. Cracks in the earth became wider, spiderwebbing madly in all directions, and more earth fell into them, until even the burning forest was falling into great gaps in the earth. He stared at the destruction in horror, transfixed.

  I should run, he thought vaguely.

  But it wa
s too late.

  CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

  SWORD MOON TO THUNDER MOON: THE END OF THE WEST

  From the death of the High King will come unending war. And when a new High King is raised, then war beyond imagining will come.

  —The Last Song of Pelashia Celenthodiel

  The early-morning fog lay heavy on the ground, reducing visibility to the length of one’s arm, and making the morning chill bite bone-deep. The Northern Road was a narrow track, and rockslides had destroyed much of it, but it was the only route to safety. The Lightborn cleared what obstacles they could, but the going was slow.

  “We should go back,” Isilla Lightsister said dully as she walked. The last time I was this tired we were on the run from half the Hundred Houses, and weren’t even sure where we were … She did not know how long she’d been walking, or even who was with her. “There must be some of our people still there.”

  “Alive?” Ranger Thorodos asked simply, and shook his head. “Any who live, the Beastlings will have slain by now. All who could escape are with us already.”

  They had marched to the battlefield expecting to conquer, and now all they had left was what they could carry, and the bitter knowledge of their defeat.

  Most of the survivors were Lightborn, for they had been east and north of the fighting. With them were a few Rangers and a handful of Sword Pages. Of the meisne that had survived the destruction of Amrolion, of the array that Daroldan could once have placed upon the field, not one of the Lords Komen had survived.

  If Rondithiel had not been with them, these combatants might have perished as well, for everyone of noble rank had been on the field, and there was no one to give orders. But after the first shaking of the ground, Rondithiel had ridden onto the battleground on his palfrey, ordering everyone who would listen to retreat to the Northern Road. Some listened, some did not, and when the second shaking of the ground came, all the few survivors could do was run.

  They’d followed the Northern Road as the smoke-darkened twilight gave way to true night, and on through the night as well. They had not even dared to make Silverlight, lest someone should see—their only safety was in flight, both from the rage of the Beastlings and from the anger of the earth itself.

  Most of the injured they’d managed to rescue died in the night.

  The dawn winds, in an act of mechanical cruelty, had swept the dust and the smoke from the air. Visibility was good in all directions, but after a few glances, no one looked southward, for to do so was to look across a landscape utterly changed.

  Far to the south, Delfierarathadan still burned. The Shrine was in the part of the forest that was still aflame, and that realization gave Isilla a pang of panicked relief: she did not think she could have borne to look upon the place where it had lain and seen it erased. But nearer to hand, all that was to be seen was churned earth and charred and splintered wood. Nothing remained of the Flower Forest that had once stood.

  When the sun at last rose high enough to burn away the morning mists, Rondithiel called a halt. The survivors dropped to the earth wherever they stood, or walked a few steps more to group themselves near him.

  “What do we do now?” Isilla asked numbly, expecting no answer. Dinias, who had walked beside her, took her hand silently in his.

  “Wait for the Beastlings to come and slaughter us,” Thorodos said bleakly. “I just wish I knew why.”

  That drew a ragged laugh from one of the other Rangers. “Do they need a reason?” Arathorn asked, passing his waterskin to Thorodos.

  “You know as well as I do that the Gryphons rarely come this far west,” Thorodos replied, rubbing his face wearily. He had his bow, but no arrows. None of the Rangers had any arrows left.

  “Yet there they were,” Isilla said, taking the waterskin he passed her and drinking before handing it on to Dinias. The hills here are still covered in wildflowers, as if nothing happened. I don’t know whether that’s wonderful, or horrible.

  “Because Caerthalien called them,” Pantaradet Lightsister—once of Caerthalien—said, with a combination of bitterness and shame.

  “We can rest here for a candlemark or two. No longer,” Rondithiel announced. “And we should eat and drink while we can. Kathan has summoned us up a spring of sweet water, and we do not lack for fire, so there will be tea at least. Isilla, I know you are weary, and I would not ask this of you if our situation were other than it is, but—”

  “—but we must know what lies behind us.” She finished his sentence for him, trying not to snarl. He was their leader, if they had one, not by virtue of being Lightborn, but by virtue of age: he was the oldest of them, and those who were more nobly born than he were too young to take up the task of command. It was not Rondithiel’s fault that the Beastling army—led by the War Prince of Caerthalien!—had butchered their people. “All right. Let me see if there is anything within range of my Gift. I shall come and tell you what I find.”

  “I can ask no more,” Rondithiel said gently.

  Isilla closed her eyes and took a deep breath, reaching for the stillness that would allow her to cast Overshadow. But her mind would not quiet itself. How have we come to this? How? We spent ten Wheelturns waiting for Vieliessar High King’s return—waiting for word of her. She sent us as surety for her sworn pledge! And she did not come, and in a handful of sennights the Western Shore has been erased as surely as Farcarinon ever was …

  At last a lifetime of discipline and training asserted itself, and Isilla’s world was reduced to an empty blankness through which her disembodied will sought for a target for her spell.

  And suddenly it was there. Brightness and shape and sensation returned, and she looked out at the world from the eyes of a gull. Lord Palinoriel always called them wind-rats, saying they were too lazy to hunt their dinners, and not even as useful as ravens at cleaning up a battlefield … She blocked that thought from her mind at once, lest grief distemper her spell before she had seen all she needed to see. The gull and its fellows were feeding along the shoreline, for anything light enough to float had washed up there.

  She turned the gull away from its flock and sent it aloft, soaring over a landscape starkly changed. Eastward lay the dry bed of what once had been the Angarussa. The vast forest that had once bordered the river was gone; all that remained of Delfierarathadan Flower Forest was stones and charred tree trunks mixed in with churned earth, the whole as level as a field readied for spring plowing. To the west, the cliffs upon which Daroldan had built its castel were gone; the land now crumbled down into the sea, as if something larger than a kraken had taken an enormous bite from the coastline. Bodies—Elven, animal, and Beastling—cluttered the churned ground, and a few great gaping fissures in the ground remained. Carrion birds picked their way delicately through the feast.

  Of the great army and the Beastlings it had fought, there was no sign.

  At last Isilla released the gull to its meal, and opened her eyes to find Dinias holding a cup beneath her nose.

  “It’s not much, but it goes further this way,” he said apologetically. “There’s tea, too.”

  She smiled, taking the cup from him. “Dare I ask who fled a rock storm with a kitchen in their pack?”

  Dinias smiled, just a little. “With better than a kitchen,” he said. “With a dozen blank scrolls or more.” Vellum could be easily shaped into a number of useful forms, and then Transmuted for use.

  “Praise the Light for Alasneh Lightsister and her eternal chronicling,” Isilla said, taking a drink. It was a thin gruel, for only a few of them had been carrying food, but it was here and it was hot.

  “And she may eventually forgive Tangisen for telling on her,” Dinias said. He cocked his head, studying her critically. “You don’t look as if you’re going to tell us we need to flee for our lives.”

  “I’m not,” she said, handing him back the empty cup. “Come on. Let’s go find Rondithiel.”

  * * *

  While Isilla had been entranced, the refugees had redistributed t
hemselves to settle naturally around the fire in a ring two and three bodies deep. A cookpot, its angular form bearing witness to its recent existence as part of a scroll, was balanced on a tripod of sticks over the fire pit. The fire pit was dug down into the ground and lined and edged with stones—Isilla recognized Ranger handiwork in that and blessed Sword and Star that at least a few of the Western Shore Rangers were with them. They were as much like the Foresters of the domain in which she’d grown up as a destrier was like a goat, but their woodcraft would be vital if they were all to survive their journey.

  But their journey to where?

  Rondithiel was moving through the group, pausing here and there for a word. Isilla could almost feel the jangled nerves and high-strung emotions of her companions soothing themselves out, though he was not using any Light to calm them. Somehow he reminded her of Lord Vieliessar, who had managed to care for—and care about—every soul in her great army, from her War Princes and Lords Komen to the newest babe born to a family of Landbonds.

  And that care was no lie, for no one can force me to see what isn’t there. And yet … if she cared, she would have come to us. And none of this would have happened.

  Then Rondithiel looked up and saw her. He kept his face schooled to neutrality, but she knew how desperately he must hope her news was good. She forced herself to smile, and picked her way through the folk sitting around the fire, Dinias following, until she reached his side.

  “We are not pursued,” she said quickly.

  Then, in the hearing of all, she told what she had seen: the Western Shore devastated and deserted. Neither their own folk nor the Beastlings were anywhere to be seen.

  “Not alive, anyway,” she said, finishing.

  “Are you sure you saw all there was to see, Lightsister?” Lady Aglahir asked, getting to her feet. It occurred abruptly to Isilla that the young Sword Page—she had flown her kite only a few moonturns ago—was probably now War Prince of Daroldan, for she was the greatchild of one of Damulothir’s elder siblings. “I mean no disrespect,” Aglahir finished anxiously.