He looked down. He lifted a hand to his temple. He felt dizzy, slightly sick. It had to be the news of his friends’ deaths. What else would make him so rude to a lovely lady?
She’s not what she seems to …
And the vague thought was gone, replaced with chagrin at his discourtesy. “I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to snap at you. I’m just … shocked. And saddened.”
She seemed to be thinking. “One moment, please,” she said, and rose with a soft rustle of clothing. She went to one of the doors in the wall and knocked. Another guard the king did not recognize appeared, nodded, and withdrew. The Empress returned. “We have not yet honored the boy. You may see his body if you wish. As for the others, it seems my guards did retrieve some of their personal items. Shall I have these brought in?”
No, he wanted to shout, I don’t want to see Shan. I don’t want to see proof that my friends died because of me. Instead, he somehow managed to say, “Yes.”
A few moments later, the door opened again. Several guards, looking solemn and respectful, entered. Two of them carried a stretcher covered with a white linen cloth. Another carried a crate, which he put on the ground and proceeded to open.
Slowly, with jerky movements, the king made it over to the stretcher. Steeling himself, he pulled the covering off.
Shan’s face was pale. He had died from a single, well-aimed shot, right to the heart. At least death had come swiftly for him. “I’m sorry,” he whispered to the still figure. “I’m so sorry. Garth was supposed to take care of you. You deserved so much better than this.” He turned to look at the crate, and his heart ached even more.
“Vanessa,” he murmured. Ben would never let his beloved rifle be taken from him, not while he was still—
“Who?” The Empress stepped beside him, offering comfort.
“The gun,” the king said. “Ben named his gun Vanessa.” He forced himself to continue looking through the items and grew still when he found one of Kalin’s distinctive bracers. Gone. All of them, gone. And Percy, apparently released from his duty, had fled to freedom; and Garth, to return to the peace of his monastery.
His shoulders suddenly bowed from the weight of it all. “This was a fool’s errand,” he said. “I never should have come.”
“Leave us be,” the Empress said to the guards. They obeyed, silently bearing Shan and the crate back through the door in the wall, vanishing as if they had never been present. The Empress slipped the king’s arm through hers and guided him back to the lounge. He sat heavily, guilt threatening to crush him.
Gentle fingers touched his chin as the Empress turned his face to hers. He felt a quick, inappropriate jolt of pleasure at the touch. She was so beautiful …
“I grieve for all that you have lost,” she said, “but … perhaps some good may yet come of it. Now that I have met you”—and she smiled softly—“I see that we were not truly ever meant to be enemies. Let us then be allies—Samarkand and Albion.”
He couldn’t look away. He was falling into the pool of leaf brown that were her eyes, breathing in her scent, hearing her voice become huskier.
“Perhaps … more than allies, if you would like,” she whispered. Slowly, her face drew closer to his, her breath sweet. “We can rule together. No one will be able to stand against us. All will be ours, to enjoy and share …”
She was so beautiful, and the king found himself enraptured by her red lips as she spoke. He leaned forward, his heart pounding, and bent to kiss—
—Laylah—
He didn’t love this woman. He loved Laylah—wise, gentle, strong, brave Laylah. He didn’t want to surrender his kingdom—he wanted to rule it well, keep his subjects safe …
His eyes, half-closed, snapped fully open, and he drew back. He felt as though cold water had been thrown on him, but he welcomed the refreshing, purifying shock of it. Suddenly, the rich scents, so pleasant before, seemed cloying; the luxury over the top when so many in Samarkand were dying terrible deaths from the darkness.
“My, my,” he said, anger sharp and cold in his voice. “You are quite the little temptress, aren’t you?”
Her eyes fluttered open and her soft expression, all warmth and surrender, grew cunning.
“I am,” she said, “and all you need to do to satisfy that temptation is to yield. All will be given unto you, Your Majesty. I find you pleasant to look upon, and the power we can wield together will please him as well.”
He felt like he was awakening from a deep sleep. “Him?” he said, seizing on the word. Was she merely a tool of some larger, darker power? “Of whom do you speak? Is the darkness not yours to command?”
Now even the cunning playfulness vanished. “I tire of the game,” the Empress said abruptly. “You had your chance. Years from now, when you are old and your joints scream in agony, when the only sight left to you is the inside of your prison cell, you will remember this day and weep for all you could have had.”
“Somehow I doubt that.”
“Well, lucky you, you’ll get to find out.” Her mask of superiority cracked, and he knew that he had judged correctly. She was offended she had not been able to seduce him and bend him to her will. So this was how she had tamed the Emperor, once a good man and adored by his people. She would not claim a second monarch.
“You’re not in charge, are you? You’re just a puppet. Someone else is controlling the darkness, aren’t they? Isn’t he, I should say?” Anything he could get from her right now would be useful, and he knew he had precious few moments to goad her into slipping.
“You think you’re so clever,” she snarled, “marching in here with your sand castle of a dragon, a Hero of yore, your loyal troops. You haven’t the slightest idea what you’re up against. The only reason I don’t kill you now is—”
Her jaw closed with an audible click. So, the king realized, he was still valuable. But before he could hound her with more questions, the Empress was on her feet.
“Guards!” she cried, and they hastened in. “Take him back to rot in his cell.”
There was no pretense of courtesy this time as the guards roughly grabbed his arms, removed his gauntlets, and started to haul him away. “Do what you will with me,” he said over his shoulder. “You can’t have killed us all. And even if you did, there will be others to take my place. There are still Heroes in Albion!”
She laughed, with what appeared to be genuine amusement. “Are there? Are you sure? You have no child, Your Majesty. Nor does your brother Logan. And as you are in prison now, it is unlikely there will ever be an heir. The royal bloodline is dead. Albion is his now! Think on that, alone in your cell!”
He was stunned. She was right. Could it be true? What would happen to the Hero lineage in Albion if there was none with the royal bloodline anymore? So shaken was he by this thought that he didn’t even struggle as he was brought back in and thrown, bodily, into his cell, landing hard on the stone floor. The cell door creaked as it was slammed shut, and he heard the key turning in the lock.
No more Heroes of Albion. No one knew what had happened to him, if he were even still alive. And if they did believe that he was, how would they find him? He was in the center of the walled city, in the depths of the very palace itself. The Empress was right. He would rot here, growing old, with not even hope to sustain him through the long years. While she and her mysterious commander would continue to release the darkness upon innocents.
Upon Albion.
His heart ached within him, and he could almost physically feel his spirit break. Unable to bear it, he fell into the sleep of the wounded and exhausted.
Chapter Twenty-three
“All right, sharpshooters, to me!” Percy bellowed. Ben raced toward the sand dragon with Vanessa, an ammunition bag, and a powder horn draped across his body. He and seven others who had been selected for the honor scrambled aboard the dragon’s broad back. “Careful, don’t scrape me to pieces,” Percy scolded as a bit of sand crumbled from his side when an uneasy rider dug his heels in t
oo deeply. “Now hang on!”
He crouched, gathering himself, and sprang skyward. Ben was unable to stifle a whoop of excitement. The king had tried to describe the ecstasy of flight, but the description had fallen far short of the reality. His stomach seemed to need a second or two to catch up to the rest of him, and the wind on his face—
“Wind,” he shouted over his shoulder. “We’ll all have to calculate for the wind from Percy’s wings!”
Delight in the experience would have to take second place to the reason they were all here: To fire on the enemy below.
Percival flew over the first wall while the battering rams and cannons continued to pound at it. “Lower,” Ben shouted, and the dragon obliged, dropping smoothly. He picked his targets— the ones who looked like they were in charge—and began firing.
Kalin had dropped her sword and was fighting with one of the monk’s staffs. Four soldiers surrounded her. She was fighting well, beautifully in fact, considering how little practice she had with the weapon, but it was clear to Ben that she would be downed in a few seconds.
“Percy, Kalin—to your right!” Ben shouted.
“I see her,” Percy said grimly. He folded his wings and dove into the fray. One of the soldiers saw him approaching and screamed, no doubt thinking his demise was upon him. His cry alerted the others, whose eyes went enormous as they froze in sheer terror.
They seemed flabbergasted as the dragon reached for Kalin instead of them. Emboldened, one of them broke his paralysis and grabbed Kalin’s arm as Percy lifted her up.
Ben tried to line up a good shot, but it wasn’t possible. He was afraid he’d hit Percy, which wouldn’t matter all that much, or Kalin, which would. “Dammit, let go of her, you son of a cur!” Ben yelled in frustration. Kalin’s face was contorted in pain, and Ben imagined her arm felt like it was being yanked from its socket.
The Samarkandian soldier snarled at her, and, impossibly, drew a knife from his belt and tried to stab at Kalin. But the Auroran leader was doing something Ben couldn’t see, and to his delight, the man’s face turned from an evil leer to an expression of horror as he suddenly fell, Kalin’s bracer still clutched in one hand.
Shan stuck close to Garth, as per their agreement. It was likely the safest place to be. Garth was making a trail of destruction, hurling bodies left and right, calling lightning down and directing massive fireballs. Shan followed in the great Hero’s wake, taking his time aiming his shots, making them count, as Ben had instructed him. He felt almost giddy, invincible. He fired, reloaded, fired a few more shots, reloaded while his dark eyes scanned for the next target. Out of the corner of his eye, he saw several men, unarmed, racing toward him and Garth. The old Hero, intent on directing whirling magical swords at another cluster of attackers, did not see them.
“Garth!” he called. “On your right!”
Garth whirled, incinerating most of the men. Two of them, though, veered directly toward Shan. Even in the thick of battle, Shan realized there was something strange about how they ran, and when he saw that their eyes were completely black, his sudden fear was confirmed.
We ssspared you once. We shall not ssspare you again.
He froze in terror. The Shadows—the darkness—it was inside these men, as surely as it had been inside the statues in the Cave of a Thousand Guardians. His mind flashed back to the confrontation on the Queen Laylah.
We’ve heard the stories … how you claim to have been “released” by the Shadows to come warn us. Well, maybe you are one of them …!
“No!” Shan shrieked. He lifted his rifle, tried to take aim with shaking arms, but the thing—it was no longer a man, not really—slapped it out of the way. The weapon flew out of Shan’s grasp, and the twisted creature grabbed Shan’s shirt and spat a thick, gooey black glob at his face.
Shan wailed, feeling the darkness devouring him, not physically, but deeper inside; chewing at his soul. Sound went away as he fell in slow motion to the sand. The only thing Shan could hear was his own heartbeat thudding in his ears. He lay on his back, feeling the darkness seep inside him, eating away at him like cancer. Tears streamed from his eyes. He stared up at the sky, and a dark shadow passed over him. Percy. The dragon dropped lower, and Shan realized that Percy was reaching out with his foreclaw. The great beast was trying to save him. Ben’s face peered over the dragon’s side, concern on his face.
Shan forced his lungs to work, to speak while he still could, while his mind was still his own. He reached up a hand as if he were swimming through mud, thumped his chest, and cried a single word:
“Darkness!”
It sealed his lips, now, the darkness; it would never let him utter anything but what it wanted him to. But that was all right. He’d seen understanding and sorrow on Ben Finn’s face as the blond soldier lifted Vanessa and aimed her at the Samarkandian boy he had called friend.
Garth had turned just in time to see Shan’s body collapse, blood blossoming in his chest. There was no time to mourn the boy, for even as Garth realized what had happened the two “men” who had truly been the ones to slay Shan attacked. He blasted them with fire and both stumbled backwards, limned in orange-and-red crackling flame.
Where had they—or more accurately, the darkness that had inhabited them—come from? Garth reached out, his senses heightened, trying to figure out the source. Up until this moment, the Albion army had been closing in on victory, even if the king hadn’t been able to find the Empress. But if she had summoned the darkness—
The river rolled past, enemies locked in combat struggling on the banks. Sunlight glinted on its surface, but something seemed—off. More of the corrupted soldiers rushed at him, more like animated dolls then men. Garth summoned the vortex spell and a whirlwind appeared, keeping them at bay while he studied the river.
The sunlight was no longer glinting on its flowing surface. It was being absorbed by it.
Even as Garth watched, inky tendrils, like a stain, merged with the once-pure water, and within another heartbeat, the life-giving river had been turned to poison.
Globules of foulness extracted themselves from the flood of darkness, splashing unerringly on those who served a king, not an empress. Other tendrils, snakelike, oozed up the banks and undulated their way to their victims, twining up their bodies. And Garth realized with a sick anger that victory, so close a few moments ago, had been snatched from them.
There was no choice. “Retreat!” he cried. “Retreat!”
There was utter pandemonium. The darkness wasn’t targeting the citizens of Zahadar, but they were too frightened to realize it. Even the Empress’s own soldiers were turning tail. People were screaming and rushing forward, trampling one another underfoot in their mad dash for escape. There was a tide of humanity from both sides racing for the exit, racing to flee the city that had suddenly become a nightmare. Garth did what he could to help the king’s army retreat, using his Will to force aside soldiers and civilians alike.
The darkness kept coming. The globules shifted, re-formed, became shadows. Instead of tendrils, they now took on an even more alarming shape. Giant hands, the fingers long and spidery, slammed down on screaming soldiers. They swept away clusters of living humanity as if they were nothing more than insects, unworthy of notice.
Garth turned. It would be his last stand; on foot he couldn’t hope to outrun these evil, shadowy hands. He calmly summoned his Will, mind and heart at peace, and extended his hands to Force back the shadows.
A shadow fell over Garth. But it was a natural, welcome one, and he found himself borne aloft in Percival’s foreclaw. Like a sentient being angry that something had escaped its grasp, the hands reached skyward. Again Garth concentrated, and his Will exploded in a Force so strong that the shadowy claws actually dissipated.
For the moment.
A few flaps of the great wings and they were clear of the city. Percy landed where they had camped the previous night, and Ben and Kalin, along with several of the marksmen the dragon had been carrying, clim
bed off him.
Ben’s face was pale and he clutched his right arm. Blood was seeping out from under his fingers. “Sit down,” Kalin ordered, “I can at least bandage it quickly.”
Percival turned to Garth. “I can carry more out,” he said.
“Do so,” Garth said. “Bring them here.” Percival inclined his golden head and leaped skyward again. The army was arriving by ones and twos. There was no fear of pursuit; those lucky enough to have escaped the darkness in Zahadar would not be interested in hunting down their enemy and continuing the fight. They would be fleeing as fast as their legs could carry them.
“We should have expected this,” Garth said, clenching his fists in anger. “How did we fail to expect it? We played right into her hands!” He paused in his pacing and eyed Ben. “You going to be all right?”
“I think so,” Ben said. “Dropped Vanessa, though. Dammit.” He seemed to Garth to be more upset at losing the rifle than getting shot. Unduly upset, in fact, and Garth realized Ben was, in his own way, mourning Shan, not the lost weapon at all.
Percival returned, carrying more survivors. He placed them down gently.
“Ben!” cried Shalia, hurrying toward the blond soldier and dropping down beside him. Ben grinned, relief spreading across his face as he and Shalia exchanged a fierce kiss. Garth recognized his friend Sohar among the others, and felt a chill as he saw how gravely wounded the monk was.
“Garth,” Percival said in a grim voice, “you need to hear this.”
Garth knelt beside Sohar, making a quick, sorrowful assessment. Sohar was too badly injured for any healing Garth could offer to save him. The monk clutched Garth’s hand with his bloody one.
“The—the king,” Sohar whispered. “She has him. It was—a trap—”
He struggled to continue, blood bubbling out of his mouth. But no words came. Gently Garth placed a hand on Sohar’s cheek. “Rest, my friend. Rest peacefully, and forever.”
Fable: Edge of the World Page 21
