Ion surged to his feet, his chair falling from the force of it, King Archimago a beat behind him. “You betray our truce!” Ion roared.
King Nat stood also, facing them down the long table. “You attacked our city. Are we not meant to defend ourselves?”
“You are a people without honor,” King Archimago gritted out. “We should never have accepted your surrender.”
“A surrender offered under duress,” Nat snapped back, “by an untried girl with no mask and no authority to commit Bára to any treaty.”
“She is a princess,” Lonen said, before he thought better. He would never live down that decision. “Your sister.”
“You know nothing of us, barbarian.” Nat’s sneer oozed from behind the mask. “And you never will because you’ll all die under Trom fire.”
“We waste time here.” Ion signaled his man, sending quick orders. “Seal them in. No Báran leaves. King Archimago, we must move you to safe quarters. Lonen, Arnon—with me.”
They jogged behind him, leaving a small crew of men to guard the city elders. At least they’d gathered conveniently in one room. The Destrye could ensure they’d remain there. All but the high priestess of their temple. He’d last seen her sitting on that bench by the great chasm, apparently meditating. Where had she gone?
“I’ll stay with you,” King Archimago said, drawing his great sword. “I won’t cower behind my sons.”
None of them argued. The king’s word was law and they could not defy it at that moment any more than they ever could.
“What’s the situation?” Lonen asked.
“Monsters,” Ion replied, terse words shot through puffs of breath. “Attacking from the sky.”
Indeed they were.
At the gut-watering sight, only hard years of training made Lonen continue his headlong rush to battle the impossible. He recognized the creatures, however—giant versions of the dragonlet he’d spied with Oria. He still hadn’t mentioned it to his father and brothers, though their men had seen it also and could corroborate his story. On top of everything, it had seemed…too much.
And not relevant until that moment.
Batwinged and bellowing fire, the dragons roared through the sky, barreling between towers and roasting Destrye and Bárans alike.
“Why would they call upon a savior that kills their own people?” Arnon cried out the question as they skidded to a stop at the edge of the chasm surrounding the palace. The confection of a bridge that Lonen had walked over less than an hour before had disappeared, cutting off the palace from the rest of the city. At whose behest?
“We cornered them,” King Archimago said with weary resignation. “They saw no other way out. Desperate men take desperate measures.”
“We could have come to an agreement,” Arnon protested. “We only wanted to be sure they wouldn’t come after us again.”
“He’s too young to be king.” Their father shook his head. “I should have seen it before this. He’ll sacrifice his people to retain his pride, to keep his grip on a throne he never earned. His people have become my responsibility now—unless we all perish together.”
Helpless to do anything—not that any of the Destrye within the walls could do much to battle the giant monsters—the four of them watched from the brink of the chasm as people ran, some to the safety of the stone buildings, some in flames to collapse in heaps, burning into ash. Much as he wanted to look up to Oria’s tower, Lonen forced himself not to, to bear grim witness to the destruction and terror before him. After a while it became clear that the beasts never crossed the chasm that surrounded the palace, though they could easily have flown over. Nor did they cross outside the walls, save for one section, toward the high mountains, where more streamed in.
If she was in her tower, Oria would be more or less safe. Along with her brothers and the others who’d so thoughtlessly sacrificed their people to destroy their enemy.
Within a short time, nobody remained outside shelter, the city as deserted as that first morning Ion and his men had walked them through. Less so, because no Destrye warriors could be seen. Not alive, at any rate.
A winged beast flew up, hovered, then landed on the far rim of the chasm. It looked like a snake with its unwinking black eyes, but with hind feet and leathery bat wings affixed. Talons the height of a man dug into the edge of the precipice, rocks falling way as they crumbled beneath its grip. Perched on its neck where it narrowed above the wing joints sat a creature that, while human in shape, bore no resemblance to any man or woman Lonen had ever seen.
The dragon creature snaked out its long neck, pointed chin coming at them like a spear. The four of them scrambled back, weapons drawn. Foolishness, in truth, as the dragon could have roasted them where they stood. Instead it laid its triangular snout on the ground, opaque eyes fixed on them. The man-thing on its back stood and walked with preternatural grace along the sinuous neck. As it grew closer, more detail resolved. And yet Lonen still struggled to make sense of what he saw, even as the hair rose on the back of his neck.
It looked like a corpse that had been dried in the sun, skin shrunken over bones. Moving with a strangely articulated movement, almost insectile, it possessed no room in its angular body for the organs of a normal man. Black lidless eyes gazed unseeing out of the sockets of an overlarge, mouthless skull. Lonen had thought nothing could be more of an abomination than the golems. Another lesson learned.
“Arill save us,” Arnon breathed, horror in his tone. “What is that thing?”
“If it lives,” Ion grated out, “it can die, like any living thing.”
It walked precisely, the way the forest cats do, one foot aligned exactly in front of the other, following a straight line between the giant lizard’s eyes and down its snout, onto the rock of the palace promontory. Ion could very well be wrong, as the thing didn’t seem to be living, beyond the fact that it apparently moved on its own initiative. A puppet on strings did the same. No expression showed on its smooth face, unnervingly like the masks the sorcerers and priestesses wore. A deliberate imitation of these monsters? If so, the Bárans were even sicker, more twisted than Lonen had believed.
King Archimago stepped forward, crowned by a wreath of bronzed oak leaves glittering in the sun, sword high, the polished steel bright. An impressive sight, though Lonen preferred the solid wooden haft of his iron-bladed axe. This creature could well be magically animated, like the golems, which meant the coarse iron would do far more than the king’s sword.
“Halt!” King Archimago commanded, in the steel tones that had left more than one hardened warrior leaking into his boots. “This land belongs to the people of Destrye. You trespass uninvited. State your purpose here.”
That was the king and father Lonen had always known—brave, commanding, the sun of his universe. With righteous wrath fueling him, King Archimago no longer looked old or worn. He blazed with glorious purpose. Protecting even the Bárans he found himself reluctantly responsible for. Lonen’s heart swelled with pride. Despite all the terror and despair, the world also held honorable men who stood up for the good and the right.
The desiccated thing continued forward, expressionless and undeterred, easily a head taller than any of them. Nothing more than skin stretched over bone, it walked smoothly up to King Archimago.
Onto the point of his sword.
And kept going.
Somewhere Ion shouted a warning. Lonen sent slow messages to his muscles to raise the axe.
All moved as in a dream. The man-thing continued forward as if the sword didn’t exist, the metal slipping through him like a hot knife through grease, the point emerging out its back. The moment spun out forever, a long, sticky summer’s afternoon. And yet Lonen couldn’t lift his axe in time to stop it.
Like a mother lifting her hand to test the temperature of her child’s brow, like a lover caressing his beloved’s cheek, the thing stroked spidery fingers over King Archimago’s face.
And watched him fall.
King Archima
go crumpled into a boneless pile of empty flesh, the sword and oak leaf wreath clanging down with him. Lonen’s axe arced through the air, but Ion had been moving first.
Always first to defend, to protect, Ion swung his iron broadsword, releasing the battle cry of the Destrye warriors.
It went through the thing as if it didn’t exist. A brush of light fingers and Ion, too, collapsed.
Somehow a sense of self-preservation kicked through Lonen’s wild horror and he checked his swing.
“No!” he shouted, his voice taking up Ion’s still-echoing warrior cry as Arnon lunged past him.
~ 15 ~
Oria flung herself through the doors to the garden terrace and pelted for the balustrade, gripping the stone with shaking fingers as her mind caught up with the sight that greeted her.
Derkesthai filled the skies—only they were hundreds of times Chuffta’s size, and darkly shaded instead of white. When they weren’t silhouetted against the sun, their deep metallic colors gleamed bronze, copper and gold. Their fire, though, blazed the same green as Chuffta’s, and even more lethally, incinerating on a proportionally grander scale.
One swooped below her tower, broad-winged and chasing a squad of city guard who ran for the bridge to the palace. The men nearly made it across before the bellowing fire that chased them—so beautiful, like leaves fluttering in a cooling breeze—immolated them and the bridge, too. They plummeted into Ing’s chasm, becoming floating ash as they fell, their death wails rising up to Oria.
It took her to her knees, the bruising pain of hitting the stones barely registering above the agony of so many lives pouring through her, with all their desires, sorrows and unspent wishes.
Chuffta landed on her shoulder, tail winding over her sleeve to wrap around the bare skin at her wrist, the pain receding. Not gone, but less intense, like the sun’s heat fading behind a rare haze of clouds.
“You can’t save them—at least spare yourself the burden of suffering along with them.”
“Why?” The question sobbed out of her. She laid her palms flat against the softly gritty carved balustrade, peering through the openings, aghast at the scene playing out below, Bárans and Destrye alike running before their attackers, then vanishing into clouds of ash. “If Nat called to them for help, why are they attacking us, too?”
“That’s why calling upon the Trom is a dangerous proposition, why the temple warns against it. They follow their own code. Once invited, they are as a beast released from confinement—killing indiscriminately.”
“So they’ll destroy us all. After everything we’ve suffered to try to make a peace, we’ll simply all die at the hands of your brethren.”
“Only distant brethren and those you see serve the Trom. We are similar, yes, as you are to the Destrye, but even more unlike. There are tales from long ago of a Báran mating and producing children with a Destrye. A derkesthai could no more mate with the Trom steeds than a Báran cat could with its larger, wilder cousins.”
Obscurely that comforted her, that her wise and gentle Familiar wouldn’t someday grow into the monsters that terrorized a city full of defenseless people. Angry as she was at the Destrye for bringing this blight upon Bára, she couldn’t revel in their agonizing deaths. When Lonen dashed out from the palace entrance, recognizable even from her great height by the massive double-headed axe he carried, she cried out an involuntary warning.
A useless one, as he couldn’t possibly hear her. Three other men accompanied him, one wearing some sort of golden crown and carrying a bright silver sword. Like the other Destrye, they’d abandoned their heavy cloaks, likely as a concession to the Báran heat, but still wore their furred vests and leather-strapped boots. They seemed as stunned as she, watching both peoples die in great numbers. Though she looked for them to appear, her brothers did not emerge, nor did any of the rest of the council.
She prayed that they remained under shelter.
The immense derkesthai never crossed Ing’s Chasm that isolated the palace and temple, however, as if an invisible wall prevented them.
“It could be the temple’s magic acts as a barrier, though I’m not sure.”
How could Chuffta remain so calmly speculative?
“I don’t even understand how that would work,” she muttered, mostly to herself, stewing with frustration.
“Probably one of the many secrets they intended to teach you.”
“Information that could be critical to know if we’re not going to be incinerated. But no.” She was as far from attaining hwil as she’d ever been in her life—and never likely to reach it under these conditions. The trials of the past week dragged her emotionally to the opposite pole of where her mind and spirit were meant to be for hwil. Instead of calm detachment, she jangled with death energy and despair. She became aware that her Familiar hadn’t replied and turned her head to look at him. Chuffta also gazed at his giant cousins, soaring through the sky, a pensive look in the quiet green of his eyes. “Chuffta?”
He replied without looking at her. “Maybe it’s a time for rules to be broken. Perhaps also…”
“What? Perhaps also what?”
“I hesitate to say too much, but they might have been wrong about you.” Chuffta’s mind-voice held regret and Oria tried not to let it dig at her. She’d long suspected the same, of course, that she would never don her mother’s mask, take her place among the least of the temple’s priestesses, much less as a power of her own. Small and unimportant problems to have, in the face of such great ones.
With no one left in sight to char, many of the great lizards peeled off to make lazy circles in the sky. One, however, landed at the edge of the chasm, snaking its sinuous neck just as Chuffta would, creating a living bridge across. Something stirred at the wing joints that had blended in before that. A person?
“That is a Trom,” Chuffta said with quiet emphasis.
“How do you know—have you seen one before?”
His trepidation leaked through the long pause. “In dreams,” he finally replied. “Though I didn’t know what it was when I dreamed it.”
Oria suppressed a shudder as the Trom stood, then walked along its steed’s neck bridging the chasm to the palace side. “Why can they cross now?”
“The invitation might have been worded as such, to allow that individual Trom entrance, if no one else.”
“And what will they—” She broke off with a strangled croak as the Destrye king first confronted the Trom, then fell to its touch. Then another man. Lonen aborted an attack he’d launched, dragging the third man to the side. Faint shouts rose up from them, audible in the silence of the empty city.
The Trom seemed to ignore them, walking on and disappearing into the palace.
“We have to go warn my mother, my brothers.” Oria dragged herself to her feet and made for the inside, Chuffta spreading his wings for balance at her abrupt movements.
“How can they not know? Everyone in the city knows what you know.”
“Then I can’t simply stay up here while they all die.” She pushed through the outer doors, rapidly descending through the long spirals.
“What will it profit for you to die with them? Remember what happened last time. And you were at peak strength then. The last collapse weakened you severely.”
“I don’t care. I’m sick to death of being weak. If I die with them, at least I won’t have to suffer the pain of outliving them all.”
Chuffta said nothing more, though his disapproval—and fear for her—wafted through her mind. Or perhaps that was the smoke from the burning bodies carried by the afternoon breeze through the tower windows.
It seemed easier to lift the bar at her tower door this time, though she should have had more trouble, being weak from her days as an invalid. Perhaps having done it once before helped. This time no guards at all remained outside, not even Renzo. Shouts echoed down the hall, from the direction of the council chambers, and she ran towards them.
Then skidded to a stop.
Ren
zo lay in a heap, sword drawn, handsome face crumpled like an overripe fruit. She crouched, reaching out a tentative hand. Not to test for life, as he couldn’t possibly be alive. Even with her inexperience, the lack of any animating force in the abandoned flesh before her was obvious. Rather, she struggled to understand what had happened to him. No evident wound and yet…
“I’ve heard it said that the Trom can dissolve that which makes bone strong.”
“They chew the bones of their enemies,” she whispered, remembering how the Destrye king seemed to simply collapse at the Trom’s touch.
“Apparently more than a metaphor.”
Needing to reassure them both, for Chuffta sounded unsettled, too, she reached up and stroked the silken scales of his breast, where the powerful wing muscles flexed. The shouts from the council chambers had faded, though voices harsh with anger occasionally echoed through, too vague for her to make out words. No clash of weapons.
Feeling her defenselessness, she took up Renzo’s sword, easing it from his pulped fingers with the burn of nausea in her throat. It was heavier than it looked, dragging at her shoulder and elbow.
“It’s not too late to go back. You walk into great danger.”
“I wouldn’t be able to lift the bar into place again. We’d be trapped up there while the great danger came after us.” And she wasn’t sure if she could climb all those stairs. Her body still didn’t feel right, the enervation of her collapse exacerbating the poor condition brought on by her soft existence. Another fruit of Bára to be bruised and discarded. Too sweet and overripe.
Determined to be more than that, she headed to the council chambers, skirting the crumpled bodies—both Destrye and Báran—strewn about like the discarded skin and gristle from one of Chuffta’s carnivorous meals. Nobody guarded the council doors, not even the ceremonial guard who’d remained there day and night all her life. The sucking sensation of crashing loss pulled at her, leaving her as boneless as all those dead.
Time enough to grieve later, if she survived.
She straightened her spine, imagining it lined with steel the Trom could not dissolve, and edged into the room.
Lonen's War Page 11
