Seven Princes bots-1

by John R. Fultz

  “Look for yourself…”

  Sharadza sent her mind into those faraway waters, gliding like a silver fish through the depths. A great ravine in the sea bed called out to her, glowing with a weird phosphorescence. She floated over the edge and saw the spires of a splendid city carved from coral. In shades of amber, scarlet, saffron, and azure it rose from the depths, and glistening sea-things darted about its towers like birds. It was not so unlike a city of the dry world, with its ramparts, gardens, bridges, colonnades, and domes. Amid the winding streets swam crowds of glittering mer-folk, busy as the citizens of Uurz or Udurum, yet wrapped in the bubbling peace of the marine world.

  A great palace stood amid the city, and she knew it must belong to the Mer-Queen. A black-skinned leviathan circled it like a sentinel, and fishy guards with trident and spear manned its battlements. The scene wavered in the aqueous light, and her gaze could not penetrate those high walls; the palace was guarded somehow against her vision. Neither could she feel her father’s presence, there or anywhere in the sea.

  She opened her eyes and was back atop the hill with the crone. The sun had gone and stars gleamed above the roof of the forest. Winter winds blew from the north.

  “The Mer-Queen is of the Old Breed,” Sharadza said.

  The crone nodded. “She is.”

  “I cannot see into her palace.”

  “Nor can I. It is her will.”

  “My father could be dead.”

  “Yes,” said the crone.

  “Then teach me about the World of the Dead,” she said.

  “This can be easily done,” said the crone. “If you are sure.”

  “I am,” said Sharadza. She turned to meet the old one’s eyes. “Teach me when I return.”

  The crone narrowed her old eyes. “Return? You are leaving?”

  “Yes,” said Sharadza. “I will take what I have learned and go seek my father, living or dead.”

  “But you have learned almost nothing,” said the crone.

  Sharadza’s eyes caught the moonlight, and suddenly she was a bear… a wolf… a stone… an eagle… then herself again.

  “I have remembered everything,” she said.

  The crone smiled. turn sm herself aYes, you are descended of the Old Breed. But that is not enough… A child learns to walk before she can run.”

  “Enough, Fellow,” she said, looking away from him, into the depths of the forest night.

  Now it was the old storyteller who stood next to her on the hilltop. The crone was gone, if she ever had been there. The night wind whipped through Fellow’s gaudy robes.

  “You know?” he asked, shocked yet amused.

  “How could I not? Is that even your real name?”

  “It is one of my many names. Most call me Iardu the Shaper.”

  “Tell me, Iardu,” she said. “How long have I been here, learning from you how to remember?”

  “Not long, Princess,” he said. “Not nearly long enough.”

  “Then I will return. When I have done what I set out to do.”

  “The Mer-Queen is no fool,” said the Shaper. “Stay a while longer and learn all you can.”

  “If I stay, I may never go,” she said.

  He nodded. “Your father did the same thing. He learned the smallest thing from me and hurried on his way. The rest he discovered through trial, pain, and strife. As you will do.”

  “The part is the whole,” she reminded him.

  “It is,” he agreed. “But I would spare you that pain. There are easy lessons, and hard.”

  “Yet these things are the same,” she said.

  He smiled.

  “I will return,” she said. “What I have not learned by then, you may teach me.”

  “Look for me in the cit y,” he said.

  “Come with me!” She turned to grab his shoulders. “Together we can-”

  His hands waved her away. “I cannot, or I would have gone already.”

  She crossed her arms. “You fear the Mer-Queen?”

  “No,” he said. “I love her. I betrayed her.”

  She was silent for a moment. Then it burst from her like tears: “And my father? Did you betray him too?”

  Iardu said nothing. He became the wrinkled crone again and stared up at the stars.

  Now Sharadza was a black owl, and she flew into the westward night.

  Already she had wasted too much time.

  13

  Flame and Fang

  The Grim Mountains were well named. Four days riding up Vod’s Pass and the sun had broken the gloom only once. Each day there was rain, and as the cohort rose higher into the range, rain turned to sleet. The deep ravines and twisting gorges shared a roof of leaden clouds. At times it seemed the company traveled through some gray, subterranean realm. Small, hardy trees stood along slopes every now and then, and often green valleys stretched away to east or west like hidden oases. Ripe fruits plucked from highland glades enhanced the company’s rations. Hawks and eagles soared above the ranks of cavalry, arcing from peak to peak in search of prey. The roars of prowling tigers were common, but the predators never showed themselves. D’zan was glad of his well-armed escort, but the shadows of the great peaks weighed on his heart like chains of iron.

  The pass had followed the Uduru River into the uplands until it reached the Great Falls. There a torrent of whitewater roared over a precipice, feeding the river from its source somewhere beneath the mountains. Clouds of mist cast tiny diamonds across the cloaks, armor, and helms of the Uurzian legionnaires. D’zan had found it refreshing, standing near to that raging cataract, the mist cool on his skin. The stop at the falls was a brief one, for they had lost too much time already. The company had lingered for two days at the foot of the mountains, waiting until D’zan’s bruised ribs could stand the bucking and swaying of a horse. Each night he clutched the Stone’s blade to his chest as he slept, fearing the return of the beast, or something worse. He knew Elhathym had set the demon to watch for him at the edge of the mountains, so could he not set more watchers along those heights? But no more evil spirits came. Perhaps they lay waiting for him somewhere along the pass.

  The bandages tight around his midsection helped, but still he rode in discomfort. He claimed to be free of pain, but Lyrilan could tell by his eternal grimace that D’zan lied. Tyro, riding at the head of the gold-and-green column, took D’zan at his word. D’zan decided to bear the pain – he could not lie beneath those dark peaks any longer. Now, after four days of crawling up the pass, the cold numbed his pain. Despite his heavy cloak of fur and gloves of scaled lizardskin, he could barely feel his fingers and toes. The complaint of his aching ribs was a distant thing, hidden under the frigid air like grass beneath snow. He had been raised in the heated southlands, where cold came only at night and never with such violence. He marveled at the frozen peaks with their ice-clad summits, shivering in the white gleam of their glory. The wind tore at his face and cloak, a wailing ghost of winter.

  Lyrilan drew his mount closer. “Yonder obelisk marks the summit of Vod’s Pass,” he told D’zan. “We should see the towers of Steephold rising directly ahead, as I remember.”

  “How long?” D’zan said into a gust of wind.

  “What’s that?” yelled Lyrilan.

  “How long since you’ve traveled this way?”

  “Three years… Tyro and I visited Udurum to represent our father at the Feast of Summer.”

  D’zan grunted. “Does summer ever come to the north?”

  Lyrilan grinned. “Not the summer of your native shore, Prince! But it does get far warmer once we’re down from between these dreadful peaks. We can look forward to a warm fire and dry bedding at Steephold.”

  Some grumbling came back to them from the head of the column, some message passed from soldier to soldier, a swirling rumor among the ranks. D’zan could barely see Tyro topping the slope ahead, reining his steed beneath the whipping sun banner.

  “Something is wrong,” Lyrilan said. He spoke with a
sergeant, who leaned from his saddle to talk over the moaning wind. When the scholar turned back to D’zan, his face was worried. “Steephold has fallen.”

  D’zan blinked against the words, not the wind. “Fallen?”

  “Come, let us join my brother,” said Lyrilan, spurring his mount forward through the ranks. D’zan followed, a hollow sensation rising in his stomach. Their horses climbed the rocky incline until they reached the level ground. Tyro’s stallion stood alongside those of his captain and two lieutenants.

  A wide bowl of flat terrain spread before them, hemmed on all sides by soaring white pinnacles. The pass proper continued along the bowl’s edge, dropping into a downward grade at its northern edge. In the bowl’s middle lay a heaped pile of ruined stone, massive blocks of basalt and granite scattered like childrens’ toys. A few walls of the toppled fortress still stood in awkward fragments. The husk of the inner keep that was the heart of Steephold lay beneath a million tons of rock – the remains of mighty towers that had crushed roof and walls. The stones were slick with mud and the purple-brown stains of dried blood. The ruins were fresh – only days old.

  Tyro and his captain rode through the gaping hole where the main gate had been, horses picking their way among the rubble-strewn courtyard. The mighty gates themselves lay splintered into fragments. Lyrilan and D’zan followed, mesmerized by the heaped mounds of devastation. If there were bodies, they had been hauled away somewhere. They found no bones until Tyro dismounted and turned over a block leaning against a pillar. In the space between lay the corpse of a human soldier in the black-and-silver livery of New Udurum. The collapsing pillar had smashed his skull to pulp, but his body bore the deep marks of claws. Whoever dragged the dead from this spot had missed this fellow.

  “An officer of the Udurum legions,” Tyro said. “Dead now four, maybe five days.”

  Lyrilan looked about at the silent mountainsides, as if the very stones might rise up and continue the assault. “Fifty Uduru guarded this place,” he said. “Fifty Giants, seasoned warriors… What could have done this?”

  D’zan’s mind raced back to the demon in his tent, squeezing the life from him, breathing death into his face. He reached behind his shoulder and grasped the hilt of the Stone’s blade. The Sun God’s ward had saved him from death, there could be no doubt. Lyrilan had agreed, when D’zan told him the whole story. The Giants of Steephold – and the Men who were also here – they had no wards.

  “Something terrible,” said Tyro, remounting his horse. “We’d best not camp near these ruins. Bad luck… and s luighcavengers probably roam here after dark. The scent of blood is still strong.”

  “There must be more bodies beneath these walls,” said Lyrilan.

  “The castle has fallen before,” said the Uurzian captain. “The Uduru rebuilt it at Vod’s command. They’ll rebuild it again.”

  “Not soon enough to do us any good,” said Tyro. He raised his arm to signal the standard-bearer.

  The quake struck before he uttered a word. The horses reared and screeched in panic as the ground trembled. The mountains breathed an awful sigh of agony, and the earth beneath the crumbled fortress moaned. Men fell from their horses, and D’zan would have tumbled if Lyrilan had not reached out to grab his hand, their mounts swirling in a dance of fear. Rocks and gravel jumped, and the great stones shook, the rubble shifting and sliding as if something beneath were tearing its way through toward daylight.

  “Below the fortress!” yelled Lyrilan in the roar of earth and wind. “The Giants had sealed a cavern leading to-”

  Fragments of towers and walls erupted toward the ashen clouds with the sound of a splitting continent. A black whirlwind rose from the wreckage, taller than any Uduru, shedding a blanket of rock and dust from its scaly back. Clouds of dust and pulped stone rolled across the legionnaires, filling nostrils, mouths, and eyes. A bememoth pulled its body free of some deep cavern, crawling through the ruins in a blast of heat and smoke. Now its ear-splitting roar filled earth and sky. Somewhere beneath that ultimate sound, the cries of terrified men and horses rang as well. An appalling reek filled the air – burning feces, rotted flesh. The ancient stench of Serpents.

  D’zan lost hold of Lyrilan’s arm and fell from his saddle. His back met the stony ground, and consciousness fled for a moment. Then he blinked in the dust and saw the vast creature crawling spans away from him, spitting a gout of flame into a mass of howling soldiers. A massive wall of scales like black iron. He caught a glimpse of its eyes, flame-red orbs of primeval hate. One of its dozen legs, six on each side, came down upon a fleeing horse. Ebony claws sank like spear blades into the steed’s round belly.

  D’zan scrambled to his knees. Where was Lyrilan? Tyro? The captain? He pulled the greatsword from its scabbard and ran for cover. The beast – it was a Serpent, an Old Wyrm, he knew that – seemed intent on the mass of Uurzians. It had lain beneath the ruins, waiting for them. No… waiting for me. Could it sense him now, crouching like a coward behind a pile of broken stones?

  Brave Uurzians rushed past their charred and screaming comrades, a forest of eager spears. The beast bellowed again, and avalanches of snow fell from nearby peaks. Men died squirming between its gnashing teeth, or pulped beneath its stamping claws. The front of its body rose high, six front-legs hanging in the air, dripping with bones and blood. It vomited burning pitch among the Uurzians, who ran or ducked behind oval shields. Most were caught in the flame and burned to death in an instant.

  A thicket of spears protruded from the Wyrm’s pale underbelly as it dropped back to the ground, snapping with its terrible jaws. Some men scrambled toward its back end, where its tail lashed likeil d a massive whip, sending men through the air, braining them against piles of jagged masonry. D’zan saw a beefy Uurzian hacking at its rearmost leg with an axe. The man severed a single claw before the great head turned around and snapped him up.

  Lyrilan lay senseless where his fear-stricken horse had bucked him. Any second now the Serpent’s legs would trample the unconscious Prince to death. Dragging the great blade behind him, D’zan ran with head down toward Lyrilan’s body. As the Serpent reared up again, spewing another gout of flame into a fresh rank of screaming Uurzians, he wondered if Lyrilan was already dead. If so, he might die trying to rescue a corpse. The heat from the sides of the beast’s blast-furnace mouth swelled over him, the biting chill of winter vanished. This warmth gave him a strange courage. He grabbed Lyrilan with his free arm, dragging him back along a cloven wall to the shadow of the fallen stones. Now the beast moved forward into the ranks that assailed it, legs tromping the burned carcasses of men and horses. It ignored the spears and the bites of tiny blades as it gnashed, tore, and ripped through the legionnaires.

  Lyrilan was breathing. Thank you, Gods of Earth and Sky. Some blood in his hair – his head must have struck a stone. Where had his horse gone? Was it burned to a crisp with all the gentle Prince’s papers and quills? Enough time for that later… if they survived. D’zan peeked over the pile of stones, looking for Tyro.

  The Serpent’s thrashing limbs knocked down the remains of an outer wall. It writhed and roared its hot thunder, and more men threw themselves into the death of its claws and teeth. Tyro’s commanding voice, a tiny sound, rang across the fray. The beast raised up its head and forelegs again, and the Prince called, “Run! Run!”

  D’zan saw the pattern of its breathing now, the rearing that was a precursor to flaming breath, and the soldiers scattered before the rush of its flame. When the last of the gout spilled from its tongue, a volley of arrows peppered its snout. A unit of archers had fallen into place along the pass. Now the cavalrymen ran back toward the beast, stabbing at its exposed belly, Tyro at the vanguard. D’zan knew himself a coward then. How could Tyro face such a monstrosity? How could any man? They must have already given themselves over to death. Why be afraid if you welcomed death?

  D’zan raised the big blade. I, too, will die like a man. He could not wield the weapon with much skill, but his
target was so huge it would not matter. This great length of iron would sink deep into that thing’s belly. He left Lyrilan lying hidden behind the rubble and crept forward toward the Serpent’s right flank. He forced himself not to look away when its claws and fangs tore the guts from men, red and streaming across the ground.

  Soon it would lift its head again, and D’zan would charge, strike for its damned heart.

  Tyro ran from its snapping fangs, having left his spear embedded between two scales along its neck. So far it had ignored every single wound inflicted upon it. They might have been buzzing gnats against a stampeding ox. But they were Men, and they knew how to die with honor.

  D’zan crouched, ready to spring and run when the serpentine head came up. Closer to it now, he heard the clang and clatter of blades against its scales. It must be the belly… There was no other way to pierce its ao phen the sncient hide. Now the steaming snout drew back. It would raise up. D’zan would run. Any second now…

  The earth trembled again, and he feared a second Wyrm might rise from the ruins. A chorus of war-cries rose above the howls of dying men. From behind the mound of ruins a cloud of dust rose, and the shouts rang from its direction. Booming shadows rushed across the rubble, raising mighty axes, hammers, and blades. A troop of Uduru warriors swarmed across the ruins toward the Wyrm.

  Giants! Never had D’zan seen them in the flesh until now. He could not imagine a sweeter sight than those twenty-three Giants leaping upon the tail, hindquarters, and backbone of the Serpent. The Uurzians saw their rescuers and howled at the sky. The Serpent’s head turned toward its rear quarters. A Giant hacked off its tail, and black gore spurted from the stump to steam like oil upon the rocks. Another Giant took a leg from the beast’s body easily as chopping firewood – one, two strokes of his axe and the limb was a jerking, lifeless thing. The axeman kicked it away.

  The Giants wore the purple and black of Udurum, their mail and cloaks torn and crudely patched. They had survived some recent battle, probably the one that brought down their fortress. They must have hidden in the mountains nearby waiting for… what? For the Uurzians? For the Wyrm? For D’zan?