A Kingdom Rises

by J. D. Rinehart

  It doesn’t matter. They’ll go through you like a newly sharpened sword.

  Vicerin had revealed his own tombstone teeth in a wild grin. He loosened Tarlan’s cloak from where it was tied around his neck and tossed it into the wind, revealing Tarlan and Elodie’s jewels hanging against his chest. The movement also revealed someone sitting behind Vicerin on the manticore’s back: a slender woman with red-gold hair. She was completely encircled by sand-colored chains.

  “Mother!” Gulph shouted, running forward. “Let her go!”

  “No, Gulph!” Kalia screamed. “Get back!”

  Lord Vicerin jabbed the Sandspear in Gulph’s direction. The weapon stretched out, growing longer. Before Gulph could react, it struck him in the chest, knocking him to the ground.

  “Gulph!” Tarlan sprang toward him.

  The end of the spear burst open, growing dozens of tentacles that proceeded to crawl up Gulph’s chest. He cried out in revulsion and tried to bat them away. The tentacles settled on his throat, tightened, then retreated at blinding speed. The elongated Sandspear shrank back into itself until it was balanced once more in Lord Vicerin’s hands.

  Dangling from its end was Gulph’s green jewel.

  “Three jewels for three realms!” Vicerin crowed.

  He plucked the jewel from the Sandspear and added it to the others hanging around his neck.

  “Three realms,” he repeated, with an expression that was as much a snarl as it was a smile. “But only one king.”

  Tarlan lifted Gulph to his feet, then drew his sword.

  “Come on, brother!” he hissed. “If we rush him together . . .”

  But Vicerin had turned the Sandspear on Kalia. The manticore swayed beneath them, its bat-wings flapping idly, the tip of its undoubtedly poisonous tail twitching in the twilight.

  “If you want your mother to live, I suggest you stay where you are, boys,” Vicerin crooned. “You too, my dear Elodie.”

  “If you do anything to hurt her, I’ll kill you!” Elodie shouted.

  “Well, yes, but you tried to do that once before, did you not?”

  “What do you want?” Gulph cast a frantic eye east across the darkening battlefield, but The Hammer had already led his army out of sight. Elodie’s ghosts had vanished on their mission to escort the Galadronians out of Toronia. And Tarlan’s pack had retreated to the sanctuary of the woods.

  We’re on our own.

  “I want answers,” said Vicerin in answer to Gulph’s question. With his free hand, he fingered the three jewels. “Possessing these trinkets is one thing. Knowing what to do with them is quite another. They have power—mmm, yes, oh I can feel it throbbing through them. But power must be directed, yes?”

  “You won’t get anything from us!” shouted Tarlan furiously.

  “Even if we did know, we wouldn’t tell you,” added Elodie.

  Vicerin’s face grew stiff. More tentacles sprouted from the end of the Sandspear. They clamped themselves onto Kalia’s head, smothering her face completely. Her body squirmed against the chains, and her head tossed from side to side.

  “If you want your beloved mother to breathe again, you will tell me now,” Lord Vicerin intoned.

  “But we don’t know what—” Elodie began.

  “The old throne room,” Gulph blurted. “Underneath Idilliam, there’s a kind of cave. That’s where the thrones are.”

  Vicerin’s eyes were barely visible in the gathering dusk, but Gulph could see that they’d narrowed. “And the jewels?”

  “All over the walls. Green gems, just like those. I think . . . I think that’s where they’re supposed to go.”

  “You think? You don’t know?”

  Behind Vicerin, Kalia’s heels were drumming weakly against the manticore’s back. Her face was completely covered by the sand tentacles.

  “You heard him!” Tarlan yelled. Gulph could feel his brother’s body quivering with rage. “That’s all we know! Now let our mother go!”

  A loose lock of hair had fallen across Vicerin’s brow. Delicately he patted it back into place, then smoothed his hand over the top of his head. After a moment’s pause, he gave the Sandspear a slight twist. The tentacles detached themselves from Kalia’s face with a dreadful sucking sound and retracted back into the magical weapon.

  Kalia fell forward, gasping for breath.

  “Mother!” cried Elodie.

  “It’s all right,” said Gulph, putting his arm round her. “She’s all right.”

  “Your mother is alive,” Vicerin agreed. “I believe I will keep her that way, for a while at least. She may prove useful. As for you three brats”—he lifted the Sandspear over his head—“now that the prophecy is dead, it is only fitting that you should die too. How nice that you will have a chance to do so together.”

  Laughing, Lord Vicerin stabbed the Sandspear at the ground and swept it in a wide circle. The fractured soil began to heave.

  Another earthquake! Gulph thought frantically.

  But it wasn’t an earthquake. Wherever the Sandspear pointed, golden figures began to rear up out of the ground. Sand-warriors. Each one was twice the height of a man.

  Leaving his newly summoned army to claw its way into the twilight, Lord Vicerin tugged at the mane of the manticore, turning it north and urging it on with an excited shout. The great sand-beast galloped across the battlefield and into the darkness, carrying with it Kalia, the three green jewels, and the last shred of Gulph’s hope.

  “If it’s a fight you want . . . ,” Tarlan began, drawing his sword as the army of sand-giants surrounded them.

  “. . . it’s a fight you’ll get!” cried Elodie, completing her brother’s words and brandishing her own blade.

  But Gulph could only mourn.

  We won the battle but lost the war, he thought in despair. Which means we’ve lost everything.

  The circle of sand-giants closed in. The triplets stood with their backs together, swords at the ready. Above them, a purple blanket of cloud rolled across the heavens, extinguishing even the prophecy stars.

  Darkness fell.

  ACT THREE

  CHAPTER 21

  Watch your left!”

  Elodie whirled at the sound of Tarlan’s voice and slashed her sword into the darkness. She felt the blade quiver as it sliced through the body of a sand-giant. The creature rocked backward, barely visible in the gloom.

  “Get back!” shouted Gulph, stabbing blindly at the oncoming enemy horde.

  Elodie could feel every movement her brothers made, so closely were their backs pressed together. She felt Gulph’s shoulders flex as he thrust out his blade. She sensed Tarlan’s legs stretching as he swept his sword upward in a high arc. Every time one of them struck a blow, the air filled with spraying sand.

  The night seemed to thicken around them. Elodie fought on, willing the battle rage to fill her vision with the familiar red mist. But there was no mist, only darkness.

  Footsteps on my right! She swung her sword and more sand flew.

  Something whistling—there! She ducked beneath a hissing blade and cut the legs from beneath her invisible foe.

  A rattle of stones! She parried a heavy blow from a sand sword, somehow managing to turn her body and deflecting the enemy back away into the night.

  The clouds parted, spilling starlight across the battlefield and revealing the towering figures of the sand-giants looming all around them. The sand they were made from was red—the same red as the stones of Castle Vicerin. Their faces had mouths but no eyes. Each of them had two pairs of arms.

  At the sight of such formidable foes, Elodie wished the darkness would return.

  “Theeta!” Tarlan roared, pushing back yet another of the huge rust-colored warriors. “Bring Brock! Bring Greythorn! Bring them all!”

  Vicerin’s sand-warriors recoiled a little at the sound of his voice, and a spark of hope kindled in Elodie’s heart. Gold feathers flashed in the starlight as Theeta led Nasheen and Kitheen into view, their beating wings ju
st visible over the heads of the enemy.

  Elodie’s excitement died as a flock of sand-eagles swooped down to surround the thorrods.

  “Fight through!” Tarlan commanded.

  The beaks of the thorrods snapped, and their huge talons clawed, ripping the sand-eagles apart. But for every bird they brought down, two more took its place. Wings of sand swarmed around the thorrods, dragging them down toward the ground.

  “Theeta!” Tarlan wailed.

  How long can the sand creature keep re-forming now that Vicerin’s gone? Elodie wondered.

  Long enough for them all to die?

  She glimpsed sudden movement in the corner of her eye.

  “Tarlan!” she shouted. “Behind you!”

  Distracted by the thorrods, Tarlan hadn’t seen a sand-warrior driving a spear down toward his chest. He jumped aside, and the barbed weapon thudded harmlessly into the ground. Yet, in saving himself, he’d left Gulph’s back exposed.

  Elodie brought up her sword just in time to block a sand ax aimed at Gulph’s neck. Gulph tripped, but managed to turn his stumble into a forward flip that carried him over the slashing blade of yet another of the four-armed enemy. Recovering, he rejoined his brother and sister, and the clouds closed in once more.

  Blind again, thought Elodie in despair, listening to the hideous, voiceless crackling sounds of millions of grains of sand grinding against one another. Any moment now we’ll be dead too. Just three more bodies lying on this . . .

  She froze.

  “What is it?” snapped Tarlan. “Elodie! Are you—”

  “Bodies!” she cried. “Of course!”

  “What are you talking about?” Gulph grunted as he parried two colossal blows in rapid succession.

  No time to explain!

  All around Elodie, the air was full of sand. Sand like tiny insects. Sand like grains of light, shining even in the dark.

  Elodie let herself ride on the sand. Its heat carried her out over the battlefield, the blood-soaked grassy plain where hundreds now lay dead. Perhaps thousands. Except . . .

  I am not going to them. I am bringing them to me!

  The sand came from the desert. The desert brought heat. The heat flowed into her, drawing with it all the sleeping power of the dead, gathering it up, waking it up.

  “Wake up!” Elodie yelled. “Wake up and rise! We need your help! Rise up and fight!”

  Wind gusted, not merely parting the clouds but driving them back. A wave of starlight crashed over the battlefield. As the light came down, phantoms began to rise like shadows in the mist.

  As the ghost soldiers closed in around the enemy, five enormous creatures reared up nearby. The ghosts of bears. Standing on their hind legs, the enormous phantom animals were even taller than the sand-giants.

  Tarlan gasped. “They were in my pack!”

  The ghost soldiers fell upon the sand-warriors, their wailing battle cries sending a chill down Elodie’s spine. The roars of the bears were even eerier—thick and watery, as if their throats were clogged with the mud in which their bodies had been lying.

  “Come to me!” she yelled, opening her arms and using all the force she could muster to draw the dead toward her. “Come to us!”

  More ghost soldiers surged out of the night. More animal spirits heaved themselves up from the ground—foxes, wolves, big cats, and a pair of huge, hissing snakes. Ghostly claws and phantom swords ripped into the bodies of the sand-giants, reducing them to clouds of red dust swirling in the night air. Every time a cloud tried to re-form into a soldier, another ghost was there to tear it apart.

  Something screamed across the sky. Elodie glanced up to see a flock of ghost hawks racing to the aid of the thorrods. The sand-eagles were no match for their scything claws, and within a few breaths the entire enemy flock was nothing more than a rain of red sand scattering over the ground.

  The wind gusted, stronger now. It gathered up the fallen sand and blew it high into the sky. The sand spread, thinned, disappeared. The clouds vanished too. The stars shone down, three blazing brightest of all.

  Elodie doubled over, suddenly exhausted. She gasped in one breath after another. The night air tasted cool and clear.

  “Are you all right?” said Gulph. She nodded, unable to speak.

  “That was incredible!” cried Tarlan. “Theeta! Are you all okay?”

  The thorrod squawked something in return. Then she turned to Elodie and cawed again. Elodie had no idea what the bird had said, but she fancied it might have been “Thank you.”

  “I’m okay,” she said, straightening up. “But we’re not.”

  “What do you mean?” said Tarlan.

  “I mean that for every breath we waste here, Lord Vicerin gets another step closer to Idilliam.”

  “More like twenty steps,” Tarlan suggested, “given how fast that manticore was going.”

  “Twenty more steps between us and our mother,” Gulph pointed out.

  “If he hurts her . . . !” snarled Tarlan.

  “We’ve got to catch him,” said Elodie. “There’s no time to waste.”

  “Then we’ll fly!” Tarlan pursed his lips and whistled.

  At once, the three thorrods swooped down. They landed in a line, shaking the last few grains of sand from their feathers. Elodie’s new ghost army pressed close behind them, grim-faced soldiers and panting beasts all eyeing the triplets with keen interest.

  “Follow us,” Elodie told a man dressed in the uniform of a Vicerin guard. Death had turned the blue of his sash to a watery gray. “All of you, follow us as fast as you can. Bring the ghost animals too, if they will come.”

  The phantom soldier nodded. Around him, a sea of ghost faces mouthed agreement, their combined voices the faintest whisper on the night air.

  Elodie ran to Nasheen. The white-breasted thorrod had already dipped her neck to receive her. As she grabbed the giant bird’s ruff, Elodie saw Gulph springing lightly onto Kitheen’s back. Tarlan and Theeta had already taken to the air.

  “Move fast!” she shouted to her ghost army as Nasheen carried her into the sky. “We cannot afford to delay!”

  The thorrods flew low over the battlefield, heading for the woods to the northeast. A corridor of broken trees clearly marked the route taken by Lord Vicerin as he had carried Kalia toward Idilliam on the back of his lion-headed steed.

  As the group approached the forest, a huge pack of living beasts and birds spilled out from among the trees. Leading them were three animals she recognized at once: Greythorn, Brock, and Filos.

  “Follow us!” Tarlan ordered his pack, echoing Elodie’s own command to the ghosts. “Come as fast as you can and don’t stop for anything!”

  An unearthly chorus of roars, howls, barks, and screeches rose up from the trees. Elodie supposed Tarlan could understand everything that they were saying. The thought made her feel strong.

  “Follow! Follow fast!” Now it was Gulph who was shouting, not to an army of ghosts or a pack of animals, but to a column of human soldiers trooping slowly along a forest track—the remains of his army making their way back to Castle Darrand.

  “Where do you go so fast?” boomed a voice from the ground. Elodie saw a flash of red hair and realized it belonged to the man known as The Hammer.

  “Idilliam!” Gulph replied. “After Vicerin. He has our mother. We’ll meet you there!”

  “Yes, my king!” The Hammer’s mighty voice dwindled as they sped past.

  The thorrods flew fast through the night. The stars revolved, and the darkness between them grew deeper. The steady rhythm of Nasheen’s beating wings lulled Elodie toward sleep, but each time she felt her chin lolling against her chest, she forced herself awake. She didn’t want to miss a single moment of this.

  Time blurred. The landscape slid past, and before Elodie knew it, the battle-scarred fields of Ritherlee had melted into the rich green forests of Isur, while ahead . . .

  . . . ahead, the sky was on fire!

  “It can’t be morning yet,” s
aid Gulph.

  Nor was it. The three prophecy stars hung over Idilliam, their light filling the seemingly endless night with a peculiar, shifting glow. A light that was green and gold and red, all at the same time. A light of all colors, focused in a single place.

  “It’s beautiful,” gasped Elodie. “And terrible.”

  “Like a storm,” muttered Tarlan.

  On they sped, into a sky that flashed and raged, as if it knew that the moment Toronia’s fate would be decided was at hand.

  CHAPTER 22

  It hurt Tarlan’s eyes to look at the colors in the sky. He could see that Elodie, sitting alert and upright on Nasheen’s back, was entranced. Gulph too seemed gripped by the sight. But Tarlan was more interested in what was happening on the ground.

  “There!” he shouted, pointing toward a smoking trail of destruction leading through the Isurian forest, which was thinning now as they neared the rocky terrain surrounding Idilliam.

  He tugged at Theeta’s feathers, steering the thorrod down toward the scar in the trees. There at the head of the trail, still riding on the hideous manticore, was Lord Vicerin. In his right hand he held the Sandspear. Kalia was seated behind him, her body almost completely wrapped in chains.

  The manticore was moving with incredible speed, now running, now flying. Its lion’s jaws tore down any trees that stood in its way. Its great bat-wings carried it up and over any obstacles too big to destroy. Its scorpion tail pointed triumphantly toward the sky.

  Following Vicerin, in a long line that stretched all the way back to the dark horizon, was an army of red, four-armed sand-warriors. Each time the manticore leaped, Vicerin jabbed the Sandspear toward an outcrop of rock, which exploded into dust. As the dust settled, more warriors rose up to join his growing attack force.

  “Is there no stopping him?” cried Gulph, bringing Kitheen in to fly close on Tarlan’s left.

  “One thing at a time,” Tarlan replied through gritted teeth. “First we need to beat him to the throne room. Come on, Theeta!”

  Digging in his heels, he urged her over the heads of Vicerin and his sand-borne soldiers and on toward Idilliam. Vicerin’s face was turned up toward them. The flashing colors of the prophecy stars painted his pale cheeks with weird streaks of color. Vicerin’s mouth opened as he shouted something, but he was too far away, and his words were lost.