The sword Taran whistled as he spun the blade overhead, warning the trolls. Their hunger exceeded their fear, and they came on. Out of the star-woven darkness, they advanced like clots of cinderous smoke, leaping over one another, naked and tufted with glaucous quills, males and females interchangeable in their bone-shrunk forms.
Drev retreated to the top of an esker. As the trolls swarmed toward him, he shouldered boulders and kicked rocks to slow them. They stumbled onward, slaverous and groaning, scrambling over those who had fallen.
The sword Taran lopped three heads in its first swipe, and the headless bodies would have clawed after him but for the others who pulled them down to get at him themselves.
Charmed steel bit into the surging wave of trolls. Black blood spewed, amputated claws spun away, and groans widened to roars of pain and fury.
The trolls offered no respite. Mindless of their losses, they surged on all sides, and the wizarduke fought fiercely, powered by Charm. He would cut at them all night, no matter the cost in power. Better, he believed, to deplete all his Charm and die of exposure under the Abiding Star than fall prey to these goblins, who would devour him alive.
Whooping trolls closed in. Shielded by hewed carcasses, they pressed forward to smother his slaying sword. Their snarling snouts and bolt-black eyes enclosed him, and as he fought he grunted his death chant to the Abiding Star, to the Beginning that oversees all ends.
Glaring white light erased vision.
In momentary blindness, Drev heard squealing—the high-pitched cry of terrified trolls. Then sight seeped back, and he beheld the monsters around him scrambling away, tumbling down the slip face.
Another bright glare erased starlight and etched the desert in the flung shadows of day.
Firecharms! the wizarduke realized dimly, simultaneously relieved and alarmed.
He clutched at his amulet of theriacal opals, pressed the cool cluster of baubles to his eyes. Vision cleared immediately. The trolls had vanished, scurrying away into darkness, leaving behind throbbing, writhing, creeping shapes of dissevered limbs.
Up the gravel slope scrambled a small squad of Falcon Guard. Soon he stood flanked by a dozen troopers in dun assault gear: raptor hoods, combat vests, and gun bandoliers.
One of the troopers raised the vizard of his hood on red whiskers and a pug-nosed face cruel as a bat's.
"Leboc!" Drev cut away entangling loops of trollish viscera from his legs and staggered toward the marshal of the Falcon Guard. "How did you find me?"
"We never lost you, my duke." The old warrior bowed, and the other troopers followed in tight military precision. "When Arwar Odawl fell to Wrat's cacodemons, I called for volunteers to serve you. These are the twelve who came with me. We have been in your shadow since you departed Ux."
"But—how? I detected no one..."
Leboc’s rusty eyebrows shrugged. "My duke, you have fought too many battles with the Falcon Guard at your side to ask that. We see all and are not seen."
The wizarduke nodded distractedly, scanning the star smoke for movement. One glance at the niello eye charms under his cloak confirmed his fear. Teeming reptilian shadows gathered at the southern horizon.
“They are coming," the wizarduke warned.
"We know," Leboc acknowledged. "The firecharms attract them. Which is why you refused to carry such a weapon."
Drev nodded tersely and cast a searching stare about the bleak terrain, noting crevices in the esker where individuals could burrow. Farther on, the gypsum hills thrived with trolls. And beyond that, volcanic rills breathed infernal red shadows. "We must hide at once, Leboc."
"And yet they will find us." Leboc spoke with calm certainty. "There is only one way." He gave a hand signal. Two troopers swiftly separated themselves from the others, drew firelocks from sheaths slung across their backs, and ran toward the gypsum hills.
"Stop them, Leboc," Drev protested. "The cacodemons will snatch them before they reach the hills."
Leboc gestured for the wizarduke to wait, then signed to the remaining troopers, who dispersed and melted away into night shadows. The marshal took Drev by the elbow and led him hurriedly along the lee of the esker to a covert between two boulders.
From there, they watched the two running troopers fire several rounds toward the gypsum hills. The flash of their firelocks punctured the night with vivid colors and cast shadows in long arcs across the broken plates of the desert.
Drev knew then. The two had volunteered to sacrifice themselves, and his heart churned with urgency to call them back.
Angular silhouettes soared out of the night, cutting sharply against the star fumes. The two troopers stopped running and fired in rapid bursts at the descending predators.
In dazzling radiance, the cacodemons reared wholly into view. They moved with serpentine agility and swiftness. Serrated tails lashed the air for balance as their talons slashed.
Hot blue strokes of energy splashed off their powerful bodies in rainbow sprays of refracted Charm.
A cacodemon pounced upon one of the troopers, knocking his firelock aside. Hooking him with curved talons under the collarbones, it pulled him closer to feed the avid totem of faces in its belly.
The second trooper shot the first in the back, ending his torment. Then, even as another cacodemon seized him from behind, he discharged his weapon directly at his comrade's fallen firelock. The impact shattered the charmbreech, and an explosion of green fire engulfed them both.
Cacodemons danced in the conflagration, and ball lightning bounced and skittered across the cracked desert floor. Shock waves sent rocks sizzling down the slopes of the eskers.
Darkness descended, and the cacodemons roared triumphantly before they flew off.
The agitated wizarduke waited where he had collapsed between the boulders. He did not stir until he witnessed the last of the creatures disappear from range of his eye charms. Then he sobbed a curse. "I swear by the Abiding Star, I will kill Wrat with my own hands!"
Enraged, he glared at Leboc who squatted beside him with hands fisted in the gravel, and the marshal's riven face did not flinch.
"Better you had let me die," Drev declared, gnashing the words. "Two brave souls burned in green fire! No ascension for them. Only ashes now. Only ashes."
"They died for their duke."
Drev pounded his fist against the stones. "I am no duke. I abandoned Dorzen and fled Ux. It is damnation to know me. You should not have followed me out here."
Leboc's cruel face tightened even more cruelly, and he spoke in a steely voice. "We all chose to follow you, my duke. You shall always be our duke. The two who died this night to protect you—they volunteered. Remember their sincerity, and you will not again besmirch their memory by denying that you are our duke. You must accept what I am saying."
Drev heard the compression of reproach in his marshal's voice. He had suffered that tone before—on the field of battle, in those times when the wizarduke had wearied of war. Leboc's cold stare had always before shamed him back into battle.
Drev held his marshal's resolute stare as deeper comprehension opened in him. The blood sacrifice has been paid. If the duke had died in this cinderland, remorse and duty would have died with him. But the ones who perished in his stead had devoured him as wholly as the trolls would have.
Leboc sensed the depth that his harsh words had reached in the wizarduke and knew that the tears in Drev's eyes were not for the dead. He selected his words carefully, to seal the pact between them. "’There is no freedom from our freedom,’ my duke. What will you do with your freedom?"
Drev's stare went dry, and he swallowed. He had been selfish to believe he could simply walk away from his legacy.
“I will wander where fate leads me. Perhaps I will discover how to fight the cacodemons. If you and the others choose to follow..."
"We gladly follow," Leboc assured him, "so long as you do not again forget who you are."
"I will not forget," he promised.
"Very good,
my duke." Leboc pushed himself upright and offered a firm hand. When the wizarduke accepted it and stood, the marshal clasped Drev's shoulder strongly. "We live—and we die—as one people."
Drev nodded and watched coolly as the marshal rallied the troopers from their coverts. Is not Leboc the ultimate warrior? he marveled. Drev remembered that the marshal had first come to serve the Brood of Dorzen as a boy trooper under the One-Eyed Duke, Drev's great-grandfather, who had united the seven dominions.
The order that the One-Eyed Duke had won for Irth, tenuous as it was, provided a semblance of stability for people that Wrat's cacodemons now mocked and threatened.
Leboc looked to him to speak to the squad, but Drev could find no words. Speech seemed to him then like so much bright gutterings against relentless darkness. Silence alone matched the dark limits.
Lord Drev led the Falcon Guard on toward the smoldering calderas. By dawn they found themselves surrounded by cinder cones and sulfurous haze. They marched on, the Abiding Star the color of dull metal. The squad moved as motes in the glare of the alkali desert.
None queried where the wizarduke led. He had determined to cross the Qaf, and he followed his strategem of keeping close to eskers, dunes, and volcanic ridges, within easy reach of hiding if the cacodemons appeared again. They did not.
In his niello eye charms, Drev spotted trolls. They watched from dune ridges and kept well away from the armed wanderers. Heat devils tilted sullenly on the horizon.
Watery distance disclosed a mirage, a steaming mountain afloat on the afternoon. Twisted girders, rubble, and misshapen towers drooled steam. The sight of it ate holes in their hearts.
"Arwar Odawl." Leboc identified the ruins, and dismayed mutters passed through the squad. "Fallen into the jungles of Elvre."
The wizarduke checked his eye charms and found no sign of the destroyed city. “Why does it appear to us here?"
"Atmospheric refraction..." the marshal speculated and sipped from his flagon.
The mirage melted away as they approached. By nightfall, under hanging willows of stars, they crossed the scoured waste where the simulacrum had wavered. Footprints marred the dusty scoria.
"Two, traveling very light," Leboc read the prints. "A woman and a small man or a boy."
"Out here?" Drev asked in disbelief. He searched his niello eye charms again and could not find them.
"They must be cloaked," Leboc reasoned.
"Then they are Peers," Drev knew, for ancient law forbade cloaking amulets to all but the peerage.
"Peers or clever thieves that know how to rig a cloak with a scalp or skull," the marshal said. "Shall I bring them in?"
"No. If they are Peers, they will answer only to me."
Leboc's rusty eyebrows knitted. "And if they are clever thieves?"
"Then they will answer to my sword."
The wizarduke followed the prints across a pan strewn with sand ripples. Leboc and the Falcon Guard watched after him until he vanished among fluted columns of rock. Then the marshal flashed a hand signal that sent three troopers after him.
/ |
Twilight smudged to darkness by the time Drev sighted the two figures. They moved along a horizon slanted against the blanched face of Nemora: two sojourners remote and of vague substance in the nocturnal shine.
Drev purposefully did not activate his own cloaking amulet and approached atop a rock ledge, easily visible in the nacre light. When the two spotted him, they dipped out of sight.
From the provision sack under his cloak, he removed his aviso and rubbed the dark crystal until a blue spark danced within.
"This is the wizarduke Drev of Dorzen," he spoke softly into the aviso. "If you can hear me please reply."
He received only open-air static.
Reading the terrain's mangled shapes of lava rock, Drev predicted the path of the travelers and ran across a bed of alabaster to cut them off. He emerged through a notch in an eroded crater and found himself nearly colliding with the two shadow figures in the ivory light of Nemora.
One of the shadows, the smaller one, fell back in a fluster. The other came straight at him. One glimpse of motion-feathered hair and a firm jaw was all he had before she was upon him. He reflexively spun to his side, narrowing his profile, and crouched to receive her attack.
She slinked as if falling, bounded, and curled in midair with boggling agility. A blow to the back of his head splattered hot colors across his sight before his brain even thought to dodge.
Drev collapsed into the sand.
And she was above him, her knee expertly placed between his scapulae. The cold tip of a blade at the base of his skull fixed his full attention.
"Who are you?" she hissed.
He understood then that her whip-kick could have killed him if she had not restrained herself. She was no clever thief. He had forfeited his life to the mercy of a lethally trained Peer.
"I am Drev of Dorzen." He groaned.
"The regent?" she asked in a gust of awe. The blade tip pulled away, yet she did not remove the pressure lock on his back that bore down so strongly he felt his spine might snap. "How came you here?"
"I am fleeing cacodemons sent to destroy me,” he answered candidly, squeezing words from his pressed lungs. "You would be wise to release your lock now. I am traveling with my Falcon Guard, and they will surely kill you if they find us like this."
The pressure relented, and light as a shadow, the woman slipped into darkness.
"Who are you?" he called after her, his voice charged with wonder. She had displayed physical skills he had only read about, in the annals of the old wars. She attacked without Charm! And yet with exquisite control. He strained to find her. She was gone. He peered into the problematical shadows of starlight and boulders and spotted the smaller figure huddled in a concealing cleft. "You, there. Come out."
The shadow stood and stepped forward with raised arms. Planet shine from Nemora illuminated a young adolescent male with large, frightened eyes. He wore a sportster amulet-frock and the padded slacks and cross-strap boots popular among the affluent young. The gold circuit frock with its expensive blue stone studs and intricate amulet overlay could only belong to a Peer. Stolen? No. The boy had the look of one accustomed to privilege: stylish, feather-cut hair, penciled eyes, delicate hands, and a stance at ease with these opulent garments.
"What is your name, lad?" Drev inquired, trying to steady the skittish boy with a tone of gentle command.
"Sir, I am Poch, Margrave Keon's son, from the Brood of Odawl."
"Lord Keon's son?" Drev echoed in amazement. "At ease, lad. We are allies. Your father was my friend..."
Footfalls turned Drev about, and he sighted one of the Falcon Guards running toward him, eager to assist with the captive. Out of a narrow enfilade among the reef rocks, a shadow violated its oath of stillness and lunged at the trooper.
The Falcon Guard dodged, too late. He tumbled to the ground with the impact, and the two rolled as one. Sand churned around them.
Drev clearly saw in the brash starlight the woman who had stunned him. Lithe as a panther, she clung to the trooper using the momentum of their fall to pull him on top and then over. She followed fluidly in a reverse flip and an abrupt twist turn in midair, pouncing upon his back even as he rebounded to somersault away.
From a ledge on the corroded crater wall, another Falcon Guard dropped and scrambled to help his comrade. But the attack was already over. The woman pulled sharply away, snatching the trooper's firelock from the holster slung across his back.
"Disarm!" she ordered.
Drev noticed she was not even breathing hard. She, too, wore a heavily laden amulet-frock and fashionably padded slacks and cross-strap boots. Dressed for a casual sport outing, she has bested an armored Falcon Guard!
"Do as she commands," Drev told the trooper.
Before he could act, a third Falcon Guard showed himself, moving out of the darkness behind Poch. He had his firelock trained on the boy.
She
fired one dull red burst, and it hit the trooper behind Poch squarely in the chest.
The Falcon Guard collapsed backward with a loud grunt, dropping his weapon. He quickly snatched it again and jerked upright.
"Stand down!" Drev shouted. He turned a calm countenance toward the woman whose firelock aimed at him. Again she had exhibited precise control. The low-impact burst she had fired struck the trooper’s combat vest and knocked the wind out of him, no worse. And the low energy had been too dim to alert cacodemons. "I admire your restraint, woman. Now tell me who you are."
She lowered the firelock and stepped forward, a young woman with a freckled face, hair tied in a knot. "Lord regent, forgive me for striking you. You startled us."
"Not unwarranted. You are forgiven, young lady."
She passed the firelock back to the trooper from whom she had taken it. "I acted against your guard because I feared they would attack us. In the darkness, in this wild place, they might well have misconstrued who we are. Especially after we took you down. You said so yourself."
Drev smiled. "I did indeed. Please, be assured you are in no danger from me or my guard." He gestured to Poch, who edged away anxiously from the Falcon Guard dusting sand from the seat of his pants. "I have met Lord Keon's son, Poch. You must be his sister. I see the resemblance."
"Yes," she acknowledged and went to her brother's side. "I am Jyoti, margravine of Odawl."
"All Irth is grieved at the tragedy of your brood and outraged at the fall of Arwar Odawl." He searched their faces and perceived on deeper inspection the bitter melancholy and fright in the boy and in the young woman. "All the dominions stand united to defeat Wrat and his cacodemons."
Poch lowered his head grievously, and Jyoti smirked. "Forgive me, lord regent, for saying this, but the dominions are united in truckling subserviently before Hu'dre Vra. We fled Elvre on an airship bound for Saxar, and we heard ample news of the Dark Lord's victories. Your own city of Dorzen capitulated without a fight. Romut rules there now. He is Wrat's right hand, recruited from the Bold Ones. They say he has made your brother-in-law Baronet Fakel his personal servant and taken Fakel's witch dancer wife, Lady Von, for his courtesan. As for your dead sister Mevea's children—"
The Dark Shore (The Dominions of Irth Book 1) Page 14
