To the north-west, above the distant mountains, a dark cloud bank was rolling slowly east, its indigo base flashing with lightning. Already the Horsemen had scoured most of the Kerwyn land, stripping everything, leaving a grey, dead waste in their wake. If they were now in the north there was every chance that was where Meg had taken the others. She had spoken a little of her birthplace during their journey out of Shesskar-sharel and across the old Western Shess kingdom, but he couldn’t recall a name. The faint sound of distant thunder reached him.
He pulled the thin amber bracelet from his pocket and held it up to examine it. It appeared fragile and he imagined he could crush it in one hand, but when he tested it with a little pressure from his fingers he felt its resilience and knew that it was stronger than metal. This had been Dylan’s secret, the reason he could wield the sword when others could not. The Tree Keepers, descendants of the Alfyn, had ensured that he could fulfil the prophecies that promised someone would come to slay the Dragonlords. Only Dylan hadn’t slain them. He had smashed the sword in the vain belief that he had trapped Mareg and A Ahmud Ki in Se’Treya. The only one really trapped was A Ahmud Ki, pinned to the black dragon statue for eternity. Mareg used his power to transform his Dammeraag, his Dark Warriors, into immortal beings and he gave them the power to destroy. He gave them the secret to the unmaking spells, A Ahmud Ki realised. So where are you, Mareg Dru’Artha Sutnavanistra?
He tucked the bracelet inside his white suit coat and extracted the amber shard Erin had given him. He held the amber up to inspect it, feeling its magic resonate in his hand and arm as he turned it to catch the feeble daylight. Why would a stranger sacrifice his immortality for me? The answer to the mystery eluded him.
‘You told me I couldn’t stop the Horsemen,’ he said to the air. ‘Why this, then?’
He lowered his hand and bounced the gem in his palm. Meg’s amber was embedded in her chest. What had she told him about her magic?
‘I just think and it happens.’ All the incantations, the spell gestures, they were a charade, a complicated perversion of what the Kis, the magic, Meg’s so-called Blessing, actually were. ‘Imagine it and it will be,’ he murmured. ‘How simple.’
He undid the buttons of his shirt and held the amber against his skin, hesitating as his memory clouded with all the variations of spells that he had learnt as the chancellor of a kingdom destroyed a long time ago. Then he imagined the amber infusing into his chest and gasped as he felt the energy surge along his sinews, deep into his chest cavity, into the very chambers of his heart. He sank to his knees, struggling to stay conscious, caught between shock and pain. A deep, dull ache. And then the pain evaporated, replaced by a familiarity of his past: the knowledge that he was again one of the immortal ones, an inheritor of the Dragonlords’ legacy.
He rose to his feet, magical energy rushing through every fibre, and raised his arms triumphantly. ‘I am A Ahmud Ki!’ he yelled across the landscape.
The dark storm that surrounded the Demon Horsemen was moving up the west coast. For several days, Meg had watched its progress from her vantage point above Summerbrook, and the speed with which the storm swept north, veering regularly east and west like a hunting dog, frightened her. Innocent people were dying, vaporised by the merciless Horsemen, and she could do nothing to save them. When they reached Summerbrook, the best she could do would be to lead her family, friends and villagers through another portal. But to where? Shesskar-sharel? Ashua? Once the Horsemen had so methodically destroyed the Kerwyn kingdom, would they continue their holocaust until every nation, every person, every living thing was dust?
She’d had days to ponder what was happening and why and still she saw no reasoning in the Horsemen’s actions. Was this all that the Dragonlord, Mareg, A Ahmud Ki’s old enemy, had ever wanted—to utterly annihilate everything? Was that the only ultimate consequence of unbridled power? To what end for the Dragonlord himself? The Seers at least had believed that Paradise would follow in the wake of the apocalypse, but what did Mareg hope for?
She looked into the broad valley of her childhood and could imagine, momentarily, that nothing had changed. The stream sparkled as it snaked through the village. Gum trees lined its banks. Sparrows dipped and flitted between roosts and chased insects. Crows flapped across the wider sky, cawing their cynicism at the world. A small group of children and dogs played on an open grassy space near the bridge that arched over the stream. This was the same as her childhood world. But there were changes. Different buildings. Taller trees. Where her farm had been was now a field. Emma’s hut had collapsed and been overgrown by her wild garden, a riot of colour celebrating the triumph of nature over the aspirations of a solitary old woman. Summerbrook was the same place and yet was a different place altogether. Children she had grown up with had got old and died, and their grandchildren, those who had stayed, worked the land, didn’t know her. Strangers, refugees from the wars, had settled here to make new lives. Summerbrook was the home of her childhood in name only.
She climbed down from the granite rock and descended a small stony path running between the mallee bushes in the shadow of the gum trees, until she reached a flat section in the hillside. She glanced at the dark entrance to Samuel’s old cave, almost obscured by the undergrowth, and a host of memories came back. So many mysteries had surrounded her as a child. She wished she had understood their meanings and their implications then. If she had, she could have acted very differently and might have prevented so much of the suffering inflicted on the world by the Seers in the interim. Instead, she had selfishly run from the responsibilities of the legacy of the amber. She snorted with disgust. How could I have known? she silently argued. Who told me the truth? And that only made her feel worse, because, each in their own way, people had told her—like old Emma and Queen Sunset. Just as Erin hid from his inherited responsibilities in the Khvech Daas library, she had avoided her fate, choosing the safety of her family over the future of humanity. But why was I forced to make such a choice? she wondered. Either way, I was fated to lose. She smiled bitterly. And now I lose everything.
She spotted a hawk hovering above an invisible quarry further down the hill. Does that little creature know death hangs overhead? she thought. When do we realise the inevitability of our own death?
And then there was A Ahmud Ki’s fate. What did he think when the portal back to Littlecreek had dissolved? And what had happened that made it impossible for her to recreate a connection from Summerbrook to the library? She doubted distance was the issue. The only impediments to creating a portal were her inability to accurately visualise the place or its non-existence. Had the Demon Horsemen destroyed the library?
The world was rapidly contracting. Looking across the distant hills towards the storm she estimated the Horsemen would reach Summerbrook within two or three days. She had that short time to decide the fate of all the people in the village. She had to create a portal that would take them all to safety, far away from the Kerwyn lands.
He barrelled through the air, thrilling in the rush of the wind across his head, his chest, his falcon feathers. With a twist of his left wing, he executed a sharp turn, stalled, and seconds later pulled out of a stoop only an arm-span from the ground, adrenaline pumping through him wildly. He followed the contours of a shallow valley that rose as it climbed to a low hill and alighted neatly on the ground, instantly shape-shifting into his natural body. Tears streamed from his wind-lashed eyes and he laughed with joy and spread his arms wide as if he wanted to embrace everything. ‘I am alive!’ he yelled and laughed again, turning to survey the landscape of khaki and green bush yet to succumb to the Demon Horsemen.
He pointed a finger at a small mallee bush, whispered the ancient Aelendyell word ‘Byrnan’, and watched with elated satisfaction as the bush ignited, flamed and dissolved to ash. He focussed on a small stone and willed it to fly to his hand, and smiled at the sensation of its rough texture before he dropped it. If there were dragons to call he would call them. With careful reca
ll, he cast another spell and the signs of age vanished from his face and his body. He was young again, his silver hair long and braided in the Aelendyell fashion, his grey eyes shining with health. The transformation was complete. Embedded in his chest, nothing more than a faint discolouration on his skin marking it, the amber gem pulsated with energy.
To the west, the Demon Horsemen were at their work. Thunder rumbled across the hills and plains and lightning flashed periodically in the mass of stormclouds enveloping Mareg’s creations. Now that he was certain his full powers had returned, A Ahmud Ki knew he could control the Horsemen. Erin’s gift of the life-sustaining amber, his astonishing self-sacrifice, made sense when considered within this context. With A Ahmud Ki restored to his powers as a Dragonlord, the sword was no longer needed. The blood of an Elvenaar descendant, A Ahmud Ki’s blood—the only living Aelendyell, even as a half-blood—wasn’t needed. A Dragonlord had created the Demon Horsemen and only a Dragonlord could control them. It all made sense. Meg’s power was great—at least as great as that of a Dragonlord—but in the end she was still a human. Dragonlords were Elvenaar and the blood of the Elvenaar ran in his veins. Only he could manipulate the Horsemen. Only he could stop the destruction of this world.
He smiled at the irony of that last thought. There was a time when he had strived to be the most powerful being, to know and use all five Kis, to be a Dragonlord who commanded absolute respect. To achieve that, he had been willing to manipulate, to lie, to doublecross and kill others. And he had been universally despised, even when he wielded supreme power in the old Andrakian world. Then came the years as the Ranu president, another role with awesome power in another time. He’d had his enemies, but he’d also had hundreds of thousands who respected him and listened to his wisdom. Now here he was—the sole individual who could save the very world he had once sought to control.
A dragon to ride would have made the situation complete. The fates had not conspired to make that possible. Instead, he would have to find a horse and enhance it, so that when he confronted the Demon Horsemen they would know to whom they were subordinate.
He concentrated, assumed the falcon form again, and began his search of the surrounding countryside.
The bright blue light raced towards him across the mountains, thunder chasing lightning as the earth dissolved into grey dust, and he felt the icy breath of fear on his face as the wind reached him. Had he known from where to retrieve it in Se’Treya, he would have worn the golden armour of Mareg’s brother, Andrakis Va’Ristrin Nyavardenet. He had stolen the armour from the Dragonlord, who was trapped in a glyph created by Aian Abreotan’s sword. He even thought of retrieving the golden axe from his former prison to demonstrate his status to the Horsemen, but expediency meant he had to face them now, before they destroyed an irretrievable proportion of the countryside. But at least he was mounted. He’d found a grey mount in a small town and, with his deft touch, transformed the bewildered animal into a steed befitting a Dragonlord. Its fear quelled by the spell he cast over it to make it fly, the horse reared, hooves pawing the sky high above the mountains in direct challenge to the approaching Horsemen. A Ahmud Ki snapped his fingers and he became a shining beacon wrapped in rich amber light.
He was startled by how many Horsemen faced him against the backdrop of the dark cloud bank. In Se’Treya, there had been two. Then, above Port of Joy, there were four. Now there were eight, as if they were multiplying as they spread their destruction. Each wore the familiar jagged and pointed Dammeraag armour; A Ahmud Ki imagined that if not for the light, it would be black. The Horsemen eyed him, their horses shifting impatiently.
‘You know who I am,’ he said, his voice firm and determined.
‘We know what you are,’ a cold, rasping voice replied, like a wintry wind whipping past.
‘Then I order you to return to Se’Treya.’
The lead Horseman sat rigid in his saddle as if he hadn’t heard A Ahmud Ki’s order. Then he looked left and right at his companions, before turning back to A Ahmud Ki to say, ‘You cannot order us to do anything.’
‘I am a Dragonlord,’ A Ahmud Ki snarled. ‘Mareg Dru’Artha Sutnavanistra created you, and I can as easily destroy you.’
The lead Horseman tipped back his visor so that A Ahmud Ki could see his handsome, strong features and his hair flowing loose to his shoulders, blue in the light. He leaned forward with his elbows resting on his saddle pommel. ‘This Dragonlord you speak of, our creator,’ the Horseman said with slow and deliberate bitterness, ‘no longer commands anything, except perhaps the gates to the nine hells.’
The revelation that Mareg was dead made A Ahmud Ki uneasy. Not the news itself—he had half-expected this might be the case given the Dragonlord’s absence—but the manner in which the Horseman spoke it, as if he relished it. Driven by curiosity and dread, A Ahmud Ki asked, ‘How did your master die?’
‘We killed him,’ came the emotionless answer.
‘Impossible,’ A Ahmud Ki challenged.
The Horseman’s arms and hands moved and A Ahmud Ki instinctively leaned hard to his right. A lightning bolt cracked past his left shoulder. He wrenched at his reins but was too late to save his mount from two more bolts that ripped through its chest and side and tore the hapless creature apart. Unhorsed and tumbling through the air, he immediately took falcon form and banked sharply as another lightning shaft flashed past. He stooped, racing for the ground, buffeted by a sudden burst of wind and pounded by deafening thunder. As he flattened out, the ground around him erupted, throwing chunks of rock and earth dangerously in his path. He rolled and banked, using his magical energy to multiply his flying speed, everything becoming a blur as he weaved between a series of deadly lightning bolts. Ahead, briefly, he spotted a gum tree and as he shot madly towards it he imagined a tiny portal appearing between two branches. He flew straight into the light as a massive lightning bolt obliterated the tree.
PART SEVEN
‘For those of faith who sacrifice their lives to serve others there is eternal reward; not for those who make the sacrifice but those for whom the sacrifice is made. This is the irony of faith and why faith is the hardest path to follow.’
FROM THE WORD, AUTHOR UNKNOWN
CHAPTER FORTY-SIX
A Ahmud Ki lowered his cup and gazed from the window of his apartment across the city’s white roofs. Two large dragon eggs drifted in the rich blue sky, their white fabric shining, carrying passengers east and west. Yul Ithrandyr was always beautiful whatever the time of day, but he loved best the dawn colours that temporarily stained the buildings gold and amber. Later, the hot midday sun would make the city sparkle, catching the tiny mica flecks trapped in every building stone and roof tile. At sunset, the city would be washed in purples and blues and more amber, like a romantic painting, light glinting off the ancient spires of the old city where the Ithosen had reigned supreme under the watchful eyes of the Leiksha up until five hundred years ago. The city he had briefly lived in a millennium earlier had quadrupled in size, spilling westward past the once-mighty white wall onto the plains, and had become a city of invention and power beyond anything the Ithosen might have imagined for its future. Back then the city had been a prison for him, even when he received status to study as an Ithosen. Now, a thousand years later, it was again a prison, a place where he could only move in privacy and with care.
A knock at the apartment door brought him back to the moment, and he rose from his cane chair. ‘Who is there?’ he asked in the Ranu tongue.
‘Paper,’ came the reply.
He opened the door to a porter dressed in a white tunic and trousers with the traditional white turban. ‘Thank you,’ he said, taking the newspaper and returning to his chair by the window. He opened it and glanced at the date. A month had already passed since his desperate escape from the Horsemen, but portalling to Yul Ithrandyr had been a mixed blessing. His unanticipated arrival at his former presidential home, coupled with his changed appearance to his younger self, had caused a dan
gerously awkward situation from which he’d been lucky to escape unscathed. The Ranu bodyguards had tried to arrest him so he had resorted to another portal and appeared in a brothel he had visited when he was the president, leaving an astonished young woman and her embarrassed client staring after him as he walked out of their room.
He had conjured money with his magic, enough to buy clothes and rent an apartment, and his altered appearance meant that only the very observant might notice more than a vague resemblance between the young man and the former president of the Ranu People’s Republic. Thereafter, he avoided places he had frequented as the president, places where people who had known him well would go, and he made certain that he only interacted with ordinary citizens for necessities and news of the state.
Several times during the initial days after his escape from the Horsemen he had considered announcing his return to Ranu Ka Shehaala so he could go back to the life that had sustained him for so long. But he knew he would struggle to explain how he had been able to travel from the eastern region so quickly. The army and navy he had commanded during the expansion of the Ranu empire through Kala and finally into the Kerwyn kingdom—if any had survived the rampaging Horsemen—could not yet have returned to Ranu Ka Shehaala. And he suspected the new president, this man of peace, would delight in any opportunity to call him to public trial over his failed expansionist policy.
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