She wheeled about at the sound of their war shrieks, wide-eyed and spread-winged, then leapt and began to belch death from above.
As the vanguard burned and the sand melted, I looked back through the gate at Aiden, whose condition remained unchanged. “Let them finish their sweep,” I said to the others, raising my voice over the cries of the dying. “That’s not drawing on magic. Pick off the survivors when they finish.” A few of the guards had the bright last-ditch idea to throw their swords at Georgie, but Joey kept her out of range, even as she continued to insist that the food was getting cold. “We’ve got to stay close to the gate to make this work, so no one wander off, yes?” I continued. “Like we practiced.”
Val and Toula nodded, and Meggy reluctantly stepped nearer to our pack.
The brightest of the guards had now turned tail and were running for the doors, and Val charged in their direction with a bronze sword in his hand, skirting their smoldering comrades. The rest of us followed ahead of the gate, and Toula and I took shots at our left and right flanks, keeping Meggy safely between us whether she liked it or not. We passed Joey, who yelled over the snapping and snuffling of Georgie’s feast, “We’ll be right there! She’s tanking up!” Spotting a survivor, he leapt off her back, unsheathed his sword, and started stabbing the dying—whether as an act of mercy or to hasten the cleanup process, I couldn’t say, though he seemed unmoved by the carnage around him.
It doesn’t take an expert in draconic behavior to understand that one does not come between a hungry dragon and her food, and so we pressed on through the unmanned doors without our flamethrower.
The best approximation I can give for Geheret’s stronghold is a domed stadium. Mind you, that’s a rough visual at best; the place was several times wider than the largest stadium I’d ever seen, and the walls were composed of solid black rock, broken only by occasional view slits. It appeared rather like Geheret had simply smoothed and hollowed out a mountain instead of taking the time to design his own fortress from scratch, but whatever process he had employed, the end result was impressively forbidding. The Gray Lands were overcast to begin with, but the light inside the wide, high-ceilinged hallway we found beyond the doors was dim and torch-made—or at least it was until Helen parked the gate behind us like a spotlight, giving me a clear view of the bodies strewn in Val’s wake. He was still engaged with a pair of guards, pitting reinforced bronze against steel, and I dispatched both with a pair of fireballs to save him the exertion.
Seeing them burn and drop to the stone floor, Val turned to me with a look of mild annoyance and wiped his sword clean on his pants. “I had them, Coileán.”
“And if there’s a prize for body count,” Toula snapped, “I’m pretty sure the lizard’s going to win it. Shall we?”
With the immediate threat neutralized, I took stock of our situation. The hallway curved to either side—a ring giving passage around the fortress, I surmised. Perhaps this was only the first of a series of concentric halls. If Geheret placed his quarters at the center—logically, the safest place—then surely he would have staggered the doors leading inside from the hallways, thereby preventing an invading enemy from running through the main gates and straight to him.
Toula, who had taken the compass from Helen, pointed it toward the rock wall ahead of us and snorted. “She’s straight through there,” she said, “so who has a preference as to left or right?”
“Why bother?” Meggy interjected. “Just blast a hole through! It can’t be that hard,” she muttered, then screwed up her face as she began to conjure a fireball between her hands.
Val pressed his palm against the inner wall, barely flinching when Meggy’s fireball bounced harmlessly off the stone. “Warded,” he said after a moment’s examination. “Difficult to see it, but there is a system in place. I don’t know how strong the enchantment is.”
“And I can’t access it,” Toula added, touching her fingertips to the rock. “If we were dealing with magic, I could pull up the architecture and see how it’s assembled, but with dark magic…” She shrugged and turned away from the wall. “Best I can tell you is that it’s warded. I don’t know what it would take to bust a hole in that.”
I met Meggy’s glare, then looked behind me at Helen and Aiden, both of whom were straining to maintain the status quo. “Left it is,” I said, turning around as Joey and Georgie lumbered into the building. “Cleanup complete?”
Georgie stifled a burp, and a plume of gray smoke shot out her nostrils. Better.
“Great. Can you take the lead? I’ll shield you,” I offered, seeing Joey’s uncertainty. “But if you see something moving up ahead…char it.”
The dragon’s mouth opened slightly, revealing interlocking rows of dagger teeth, and I realized with mild trepidation that she was smiling.
I can say now from experience that in a low-magic situation, you could do far worse than leading with a flamethrower. While the rest of us hung back, using as little magic as we could to take the pressure off of Aiden, Georgie happily flambéed anything that crossed her path as we progressed around the outer ring of the fortress. Her fire seemed unlimited, as did her appetite—our progress was slowed not so much by the security forces as by Georgie’s insistence that she be allowed to eat her kills. Joey and Val did their best to speed things along, running out once her initial blast was over to dispatch anything left standing, but Meggy tensed impatiently every time we stopped for a snack.
As slow as our progress was, at least Moyna wasn’t moving. Toula continued to take compass readings, and the needle, without fail, pointed toward the center of the complex. “Maybe she’s imprisoned,” she postulated during a pit stop. “Or maybe that’s where Geheret keeps his official space. Or both—we don’t know how deep this thing goes.” She pivoted the compass up and down the wall, but the reading remained unchanged. “Moyna could be ten levels down, for all we know.”
“Olive.”
Toula sighed and turned to face Meggy, who lurked against the outer wall with her arms folded. “Moyna. Calling the sky green isn’t going to make it so.” Meggy began to protest, but Toula held up her hand and shook her head. “You know I love you, Megs,” she said, “but if you think this is going to end in happily ever after for you two, you’re deluding yourself.”
“We just need time,” she countered. “A fresh start, a clean slate, whatever you want to call it. I’m going to make this work.”
Toula began to respond, but her mouth snapped closed, and she shook her head. “We’re not having this discussion right now. I’m only warning you not to get your hopes up, that’s all.” She glanced back through the gate at Helen’s taut face, then pointed to the path ahead. “Let’s find the door and get through this damn thing.”
“And hope no one sends out anything capable of enchantment—”
“Damn it, don’t jinx us!” she cried, socking me in the arm. “You keep that bad juju to yourself, you hear me?”
“Hey, guys,” Joey called from the front, “I think we’ve got something!”
Toula gave me a last warning glare before jogging up to inspect his find. “Door,” she confirmed, then called up a preemptive fireball and kicked it open. “Another hall. I think it’s empty, but…”
Before she could finish, Georgie gently nosed her out of the way, then torched the inner corridor in both directions. When the fire died, she paused, sniffed deeply, then reported, Nothing. It’s empty.
“Don’t sound so disappointed,” Toula muttered, opening the other half of the double door to give the dragon entrance. “How many have you eaten today, anyway?”
I didn’t know I was supposed to be counting, she replied, pushing past Toula. And this is hungry work. If you’d rather do it, you’re welcome to take a turn.
“Easy,” said Joey, patting Georgie’s flank until her thoughts grew less sharp. “We’re all a little stressed, sweetie, you aren’t doing anything wrong—”
Before he could finish, she turned sharply at the sound of footf
alls on the stone and roasted a trio of newcomers. “Wait, don’t eat them,” I ordered, closing my eyes until the afterimage of the fire faded, then skirted Georgie to take stock of her newest kills. The corpses were smaller than the others and binocular, but what had caught my eye was the flash of armor in the firelight—bronze armor, I saw on closer inspection, heavily decorated and unscratched where it hadn’t melted.
“Ceremonial,” said Val, confirming my suspicion as he squatted beside me. “They weren’t warriors, not wearing that.” He stood and peered at the bodies, then stiffened and beckoned to Joey. “Sword, please.”
Frowning, Joey flipped his blade and offered Val the handle, but Val pointed to the relatively unburned—and seemingly human—face of the farthest corpse. “See if he’s sensitive,” he said, stepping away from Joey’s sword, and watched as Joey pressed the flat of the blade against the corpse’s cheek. It began to blister on contact, and Val nodded. “I thought that face was familiar,” he muttered, turning back to me. “One of Mab’s favorites.”
“All right, go on,” I said, patting Georgie’s neck, and she bent to the task of prying the meat from its armor. “Fae guards are useless without magic,” I said to Val, “so what do you think he’s doing, sending cannon fodder? Something to stall us while he prepares his real defenses?”
“Maybe more.” Val waited until Toula slid past Georgie’s thrashing tail, then said, “That wasn’t just a favorite of hers—that was a favorite son. I can’t identify the other two,” he added, cutting his eyes to the half-eaten remains, “but I wouldn’t be surprised if they were more of the same.”
“Eliminating the competition,” Toula mumbled, looking away as Georgie noisily finished her meal. “But if he’s Mab’s son…Val, you didn’t know Geheret before the court was expelled, did you?”
“No, and that troubles me.” He folded his arms and looked around our little circle. “Assuming Geheret spoke the truth when he said he was Mab’s, he’s not her eldest. He was older,” he said, cocking his head toward the ruined armor. “So why is Geheret leading the court? What does he have that his siblings don’t?”
“He’s native,” I said. “Has to be. We know he can use dark magic, so Mab…”
I left the thought unfinished, and Val grimaced. “Perhaps, but…I’ve taken interesting partners,” he said, looking mildly embarrassed, “but there are limits.”
Joey patted his shoulder. “Merrow club. I feel you, man.”
“This is all charming,” said Meggy, storming down the corridor, “but you can relive your conquests together once Olive’s safe. Get a move on.”
Startled, Georgie trotted after her, and Toula rolled her eyes. “She’s going to get herself killed,” she said, following the dragon’s twitching tail.
I ran ahead and joined Meggy, but she ignored me until I pulled her back. “Let Georgie take point,” I said before she could protest, then released her. Meggy’s lips tightened, but she fell into step behind Georgie, saying nothing and tapping her foot every time the dragon stopped to clean up after herself. I let her stew in silence, but I kept looking back through the gate, wondering how much Aiden had left to give.
It took us another half hour of slow progress to make the second door, which opened into a nearly emptied armory. No one paused to remark on the scene; Meggy was almost beside herself with the goal so close, and the rest of us knew too well that an armory without armor wasn’t a good sign. Joey snagged a helmet in passing, a battered steel bucket with an eye slit, but discarded it when he found it far too massive for his head. I didn’t want think about the dimensions of the creature that would require such equipment, and Joey, to his credit, didn’t speculate.
Walking in the gate’s glow, we passed through a long string of curved storerooms, one filled with black barrels, another with unlabeled sacks, a third with rolled bedding and piles of boots. The ceilings remained high enough to allow Georgie passage, and I assumed we were still on the ground level of the complex, but where, precisely, we were, I couldn’t say. We had turned left at each door—had we yet rounded the fortress? Had we made it halfway? Without windows or landmarks, our only guides were Joey’s watch and the damned compass, which continued to direct our steps inward.
And we hadn’t seen a soul in several rooms, which gave me pause. Georgie had killed perhaps a score—all fae—in the second ring, but this section seemed abandoned, and the only sounds around us were our own. A glance at Val’s thoughts affirmed my strengthening conclusion that the mass of Geheret’s forces would be waiting with their lord—and if they were wise, in a room too small for Georgie’s bulk.
At least the absence of guards allowed us to pick up our pace. Meggy surely would have been running if not for our light limitations, but we managed a respectable speed and ran into the third door after a twenty-minute march. The next ring, largely communal living quarters for several thousand men, took us a quarter of an hour to escape, while the next, consisting of at least an abandoned kitchen and infirmary, ate another ten minutes. There was no protest from the gate, but Helen was red-faced and sweating, and Aiden knelt behind her with his forehead in the grass, silently shaking. I wanted to call it off—I should have called it off—but Meggy continued her charge through the empty tunnels, and I knew she would never voluntarily return without her daughter.
Our daughter, I reminded myself more than once, but as uncomfortable as it was to admit the truth to myself, Moyna’s safety worried me far less than Aiden’s. She had run willingly back into the Gray Lands with the rest of our idiotic kin—Aiden was just trying to be useful, and I’d put him on the front lines of a battle he had no business fighting. Helen didn’t have to remind me of the precariousness of the situation—her face spoke volumes every time I looked back into Faerie.
Not until we breached the sixth ring did the scenery truly change. The place was still as atmospherically lit as a high-end haunted house, but the stone floor gave way to tile, a continual mosaic of blacks and reds and golds like swirling fire. The walls were decorated with long hangings of a similar theme, abstract tapestries that padded the rock between torch sconces. This ring was narrower, too, wide enough for four of us or one juvenile dragon to pass, and the omnipresent smell of dark magic seemed disproportionally concentrated.
“Antechamber?” Toula whispered, looking left and right at the empty corridor.
“Possibly.” I pressed my ear to the inner wall, but pulled away before I could hear anything when the power driving the wards sent me into a coughing fit. “We’re approaching something,” I said between hacking breaths. “The ward system—”
Before I could finish, a gate opened to either side of us, vomiting Geheret’s soldiers into the hallway and cutting off our escape through any door but back into Faerie. Georgie hissed and bared her teeth, but Joey, who had climbed into his saddle when the rifts appeared, managed to hold her before she could loose her fire. I looked at the well-armed soldiers to my left and right, whose steel armor gleamed in the torches’ glow, and lowered my hands. “I’ve come for a word with your lord,” I said, raising my voice above the clatter of shifting plate and maille. “And I will not be denied. Tell him to show himself.”
One of the soldiers, who sported a golden breastplate and helm—another of Mab’s refugees, I assumed—stepped out of the pack and stood with his hand on his sword’s hilt. “My lord awaits within,” he said in perfect Fae. “If you’ve tired of your fun, boy, he will deign to speak with you.”
I surveyed the amassed troops, unsure of the common tongue of the realm or how many faeries were among their number, then opted for the only choice with a chance of privacy. “Joey, come down here,” I said, forcing myself to think in English. When he’d dismounted and edged his way past the guards to my side, I muttered, “If this goes south, Val may not leave me—I don’t know his mind that well. Toula can fend for herself. But I expect you to get Meggy out of here by any means necessary, is that understood? By the hair, kicking and screaming, I don’t care—just
keep her safe if something happens to me.”
He nodded, but replied in kind, “If something happens to you, won’t the court go to Moyna?”
“That’s my fear.”
“Even if she’s on this side of the gate?”
“Your point?”
“Well,” he said, folding his arms, “assuming she’s over here at the time, she’s not going to get the boost you did until she’s in a realm with actual magic in it, right? So if she’s technically the queen but she’s hanging out with all of her aunts and uncles over here, and none of them has anything to enchant with, what’s to stop them from whacking her, too?”
I considered the picture he was painting, then looked at Meggy, who stared at the troops in silent defiance.
“If I fall,” I said, “get Meggy out of here and close the gate. Save Toula and Val if you can. Whichever of Mother’s spawn makes it back to Faerie can have the damn throne.”
Joey nodded again. “And if, I don’t know, this is one big trap to wipe all of you out at once?”
“You think I haven’t thought of that, kid?”
“Just putting it out there.”
I sighed quietly and glanced at the nearest soldiers, but saw no sign that our conversation had been overheard or understood. “Playing at hypotheticals, the throne should descend to Aiden. And if that should happen—”
“He wouldn’t be safe anywhere.”
I gripped his arm and bent close to his face. “Joey, if you bear me any friendship at all, save Meggy. And if you would grant my last request, protect my brother while you can.”
“You got it, boss.”
I released him and waited until he was mounted once more, then turned to Geheret’s messenger. “Take me to him,” I said, returning to Fae. “And if you get any creative ideas, my associate will ask his draconic associate to roast you alive, which she will do gladly. So for your continued safety, I’d suggest you be quick and try not to look delicious.”
The Faerie King Page 41
