Gem started to speak again, to try to shake Radiel’s belief that Lian was her enemy. “He would help you if…” she got out, and then the final blow landed square upon her crosspiece, swung hard and at full extension with all of the ogre’s strength. Gem’s blade snapped off at the base of the tang, shattering all of her enchantments at once. The pommel’s emerald light fell instantly dark and the illusion that had covered her intricate designs and gleaming Truesilver blade dispersed, revealing the sundered halves of the beautiful soul-shard weapon.
She was gone.
Chapter Thirty Four
“Greythorn was once home to an ancient people, primitive folk who ghosted through the tall thorned trees like phantoms and who left only the most basic of tools and artifacts behind in their passing. Upon their pottery and the clay disks that we believe were worn as amulets, or perhaps used as a primitive currency, they used a thorn-like symbol as adornment, often the only adornment.
“Though the Vampire King has ever declined to admit to his age, I find this a most curious coincidence, indeed, that the symbol they chose is the same as that found on Kolos’ banner. Curious, because those folk have been extinct for nearly twenty-five hundred years.”
-- “Vampires and their Mistress” by Sage Alionur, c. 1540 PE
The massive lightshow had occurred just over the horizon and Celewyn had marked its bearing well, wondering if it was a beacon sent up by one of Lian’s wizards. If so, it was a risk, but the Avani doubted anyone else—at least, anyone else hunting Lian specifically—was near enough to see it, so it was a reasonable risk. Better some werewolf or goblin tribe see the lights than Wavecrest continue sailing past the prince and his companions.
On the other hand, if it was an indicator of an attack, then perhaps Ammon had confided in someone, or perhaps escaped and was now returning to strike anew at his target. That it was Ammon himself was highly unlikely because someone else had scryed upon him, using the blood he’d lost to the wizard-assassin in Avethiel. He knew the touch of Ammon’s divination magic; this had been someone, or something, else.
Calling upon his training in navigation—the elves did not recognize the Pilot’s Guild and its monopoly on that knowledge, which was often a sticking point between the human guild and the Silei-ruled elven kingdom—Celewyn carefully calculated the distance to the lights. His uncertainty was larger than he liked, but he was reasonably confident he could land within a few miles of its origin.
The caravel made slow progress at night, most of her sails fully reefed and barely making enough headway to keep steerage. Despite Celewyn’s assurance he could see any shoals long before they became a danger, the captain had flatly refused to move at speed after night fell while the ship was this close to shore. Celewyn’s impatience became agony as he spotted smoke rising from inland, near to or at the location of the light flashes the night before. Rising smoke could mean a signal fire, but taken in context with the bright flashing light he’d spotted, it seemed more likely to be the aftermath of battle.
He considered putting ashore and running the distance, but he didn’t know the terrain, and if it was as rocky, as much of the coastline to the east had been, he’d make less progress on shore than he was making aboard ship. “Captain,” the elf said softly from the foot of Bevra’s bed. The gruff man had locked the door to his cabin, but that was little matter to the assassin.
“Hells, elf!” Bevra shouted as he started awake. “What are you doing in here!?!” His shout was loud enough, as he intended, to alert the watch, and someone began running down the stair from the afterdeck to the main, where the companionway to the cabins was located.
“It should be evident to you that I mean you no harm, Haen Bevra,” Celewyn said reprovingly, “for you are still breathing.”
Bevra knew who he was, at least by the title of “the Shadow,” and he blanched despite his bravado. He swallowed hard, and then fear gave way to anger. “Be that as it may,” the big man blurted, “I’m the captain on this ship, and by the Sea God’s beard, you’ll show me respect aboard her!” By this time, the watchman burst into the cabin, and Celewyn had somehow moved to sidestep the door so that both the sailor—Bruge the Red, one of the riggers, nicknamed for how easily he blushed at the slightest provocation—and the captain were before him.
“I mean no disrespect, Captain Bevra,” he said, now using his title before the seaman, who had a belaying pin in hand. Although Bruge was shaking a bit, he looked ready to jump on the elf at his captain’s signal. “The matter has become more urgent, and I must request that you unreef the sails. Time has worn thin.”
“We talked about this!” Bevra said firmly. “We’ll run her aground in the dark if we dare fly more sail!”
Celewyn nodded. “I know your position well, Captain,” he said, producing a gold disk from his pocket, somewhat similar to the marker he’d cashed in while he was in Kavris. This one was a bank claim voucher from the human Moneylender’s Guild, and it guaranteed that any guilded bank would pay the bearer the amount engraved upon its surface. Magically created and magically warded, the disk was impossible to duplicate or counterfeit, and it was only used for large sums. Very large sums, indeed.
“You know what this is?” he said quietly, holding it out so Bevra could see the amount graven upon it. It was marked for two hundred and fifty-seven and 5/24th tolu, which was the unit of measure most often used by moneylenders in the southern continent. It was slightly less than a hundred moneylenders’ ounces of gold, the Dunshor unit, of which there were twelve to the pound, and it was a king’s ransom.
“That’s over three thousand Guilders!” Bevra exclaimed—quietly, Celewyn noted cynically. The captain stared hard at Bruge, who put his finger alongside his nose; he’d keep quiet about the captain’s impending good fortune, provided he saw a fair share of it. The captain then waggled his eyebrows and made a brief nod at Bruge, who went back on deck to head off anyone else who might come close enough to hear. To Celewyn, who was accustomed to the subtle verbal and nonverbal exchanges in Aesidhe, the two men might as well have been shouting their agreement to take the marker and be damned the risk to the ship.
The elf calmly handed the voucher disk to the captain and then gestured that he head on deck. After the captain took another good look at the disk and then put it in his boot—he’d slept fully clothed—he preceded the assassin on deck, where he began bellowing for hands to adjust the sails. So it was, with Celewyn keeping careful lookout on the foremast, balancing on the ship’s lateen yard effortlessly, the beach Lian’s small party had used as a base came into sight just as Rula Golden began to lighten the sky to the east.
The sailors saw little but a thin line of smoke rising from the saltmarsh inland, but to elven eyes the signs of battle were more than evident. Blood stained the beach, and while the aerial scavengers hadn’t begun circling, it was clear death had stalked the sands. “Captain!” Celewyn yelled down. “Cut sail and drop anchor, and have the men ready the longboat!” He slid partway down the mast and dropped agilely to the deck, moving to the ship’s boat to help get it ready.
He’d already explained to Bevra that he would have to go ashore and likely bring back passengers, so this order—there was no mistaking it for a request this time—was not a surprise. The Wavecrest’s crew wasn’t as efficient as Iliuthien’s had been, but the caravel’s forward progress quickly slowed and the longboat made ready while the sailing master tended to anchoring. The captain assigned his mate to lead the shore party along with four of his stronger men to row and watched as the small launch made its way quickly inland through the surf. There were many large black basaltic rocks common to the Vellan coast, but much of the beach was clear and sandy, so they beached without incident.
Celewyn leapt from the boat, searching for Lian’s corpse among the fallen, either under the illusion he’d been using or not, and while he found a number of dead goblins and ogres, some hideously burned from spellsongs, and the crushed and cold bodies of the three sailors, he
didn’t find the prince.
What he did find west of the site was chilling, for embedded in a large stone circle was the protruding broken blade of Gem, her hilt lying nearby in the sand. The blue, carefully wound leather of her grip revealed a number of slashes and damage from repeated blows, and one of the smaller gemstones was cracked clear across. The great blade, the former queen’s Masterwork, had been deliberately bent and then broken by some great force.
He could see a shattered crude sledgehammer beside the stone circle, a weapon far too large to have been used by a human or elf. It appeared that a number of the ogres had carried them, for several of them lay on the sands. The hammers and the odd stone cylinder entrapping the blade bespoke planning and forethought that both stunned and confused Celewyn. Who, beside the Usurpers, would have prepared for and executed Gem’s destruction? And if it had been them, why were the attackers goblins and ogres and not Southmark troops? Celewyn doubted that Rishak would trust Dunshorian regulars to this particular task, but carefully chosen men under General Braega or the Count of Mourning’s command would have done.
Movement to the east in the waves caught the assassin’s attention, and he quickly moved that way, following a trail of dark blood—goblinish, he noted as he moved—that led from a hand-shaped outcrop of basalt to a small gray form laying just above the tideline, one arm outstretched eastward. This goblin’s armor was of exceptionally high quality, and the various small daggers and other weapons about his person were as well. The Avani could only guess that this was the goblin scout in Lian’s service, the one called Snog.
As he approached he could see a tourniquet tied off on the severed left wrist, and the track in the sand down the beach told the tale of serious injuries to his legs and hip. The blood trail, Celewyn saw, was only partly from the amputation, for the goblin had been coughing up blood as he crawled the last twenty yards, and only the elf’s keen eyes allowed him to see that he was still breathing, if only barely. He’d dragged himself by the stump and his good hand more than sixty yards from the outcrop where he’d fallen.
To his surprise, though his approach had been fairly stealthy, the goblin moaned and turned himself over onto his side. “Took your damn sweet time, elf,” he snarled at the assassin, then broke down in painful coughing spasms. “She took Lian alive, gods alone know why,” he continued as soon as he could, but his voice was raspier and he spat blood into the sand.
“And I need that pack.” The mortally wounded goblin pointed feebly with his stump down the beach, where a well-made leather pack was floating away to the east in the shallows. The straps had been torn or cut off, and it was that the goblin had been crawling toward.
Lian was taken, the elf thought. But by whom? The elf nodded and grunted a response to Snog in the goblin tongue, thinking how best to proceed as he jogged down the beach. As soon as he neared the pack however, Celewyn sensed the necromancer’s presence. The assassin was immediately tempted to let the pack be swept out to sea to be lost forever in Tysleth’s cold realm, but he couldn’t do so. If the goblin died before he could tell Celewyn what happened, he’d need the skull, so without any apparent hesitation, picked up the pack and hurried back to the goblin. He knew the reasons why Elowyn had led Prince Lian to the skull, but he had little desire to ally with the black skull-bound Lord Grey himself.
“Lord Grey,” Snog said softly, laying back on the sand. The exertion of a moment ago had sapped most of his strength. “We both know she’ll kill him, if she hasn’t already, and we both know I’m dying. By Saael, necromancer, swear to me!”
“Swear what to you, my good and honored friend?” the skull’s lovely tenor voice asked, conveying a deep grief that both surprised Celewyn and made him immediately suspicious. He knew from Elowyn that the necromancer was a consummate actor.
“Revenge, Lord Grey!” Snog coughed out, spraying more blood. “You need someone to bear you, and I need to be able to go after her… Swear to me, blackskull, that you’ll use me and the other dead to end that poor girl and to avenge our lord!”
“Do you know what you’re asking of me?” the skull asked sadly. It was plain that Snog was demanding that Lord Grey make him into an Undead, and Celewyn fought to hide his instinctive revulsion.
The goblin couldn’t answer for half a minute, but he was nodding through the spasms before he got more words out. “Better than you think,” Snog managed to say in a small froth of blood. “Swear it!” he hissed through his bloody fangs, his breathing labored and his skin almost white from the internal bleeding.
“Celewyn, brother of Elowyn,” the skull said formally but quickly, “will you heed such an oath if I swear it? Or will you silence me and ignore his plea? I’ve no doubt Elowyn conveyed the fact that you can.”
“I’m short of allies, necromancer,” Celewyn said flatly and he nodded his agreement, though his nature recoiled at the idea of cooperating with the creation of Undead. The elves had always stood against the Dark Corruptor and his minions, but he knew he would not only allow it, but assist if needed. If a chance existed that Lian lived, however slim, he would need help.
“Swear it!” Snog’s strangled voice repeated.
“I swear it, Snog,” the skull said, cold fury lighting up his voice this time. “By all the gods, by your Gods of the Inner Darkness, by Saael, and by Lushran and Sina’s very gifts to me, I will make it so!”
“Ar zu,” the goblin whispered, blood trickling from his mouth. It was Govlikel for “so be it.” He coughed once more, feebly, and then the goblin scout breathed no more. The beach was silent for a moment, save for the sound of the waves and wind, and the movements of the human sailors as they huddled near the longboat, ready to jump back aboard at the first sign of the goblins or ogres that had attacked.
The skull said, “If I could, I would sing him to his rest. He’s more than earned it in my eyes.” With a heavy sigh, Lord Grey continued sadly, “But now…but now, that’s not an option, Avani. I’ll need his hand and you’ll need to lay him nearer to the rest of the bodies. And you’ll need to lay me directly on his chest.”
Celewyn nodded. “I agreed to allow this, but first you must tell me what happened here, how Gem was destroyed, where the Key of Firavon is, and what has happened to Lian,” he said intensely in Aesidhe, using tenses and emphasis that let the skull know he wasn’t interested in negotiating these terms. He held the pack up at eye-level while he addressed the necromancer.
Lord Grey replied in the same language, harshly making the words as evocative and descriptive as possible, “The queen made powerful wraiths of Alec, Darwyn, Keven, and Radiel. We fought the four of them at sea, and destroyed all but his twin, poor damned thing, but the ship was too badly spell-damaged to make headway, and we managed to land her in a cove to the west.”
Celewyn dropped the pack, spilling some of its contents, including the black skull, onto the bloody sands. It was very difficult to surprise or shock the elven assassin, but Lord Grey’s announcement had done so. Staring down at the blackened skull on the sand, he thought inanely, Lian kept him in easy reach. He was simply unable to fully process what the necromancer had said.
He knew the new king and queen of Dunshor were both ambitious and amoral, but for Jisa to have done this… He shook it off and knelt before the skull, which had landed right-side up. He didn’t touch the necromancer. “And Radiel attacked you here?” the assassin asked the skull, switching to Dunshorian. He couldn’t bear to hear more of this in his people’s tongue. It was too well suited for vivid description.
“She let us be for almost Lushran’s full cycle,” the necromancer answered in the human nation’s tongue, giving no sign that being dumped on the ground bothered him in the slightest. “While we made our slow way toward land, she spent the time gathering a force against us, and I’ll give you the details about those that survived later.
“The queen twisted his brothers and sisters,” Lord Grey continued coldly. “She made the four of them hate Lian with a passion, though the wra
iths didn’t know until the night of the attack on Indigo Runner that Gem still existed. When we met them at sea, all of them seemed completely driven to destroy him as quickly as possible; certainly Keven’s initial lightning strike on the prince was intended to be instantly lethal.”
Celewyn immediately saw where the necromancer was going with his description. “So why capture him?” he asked. “It is clear from Gem’s destruction that Radiel’s wraith controlled the field, and you were too far from them to be much of a direct threat…”
The necromancer said, his voice thick with emotion, “Yes. The troll hurled me near to here, where my goblin friend lies, while Radiel countered every spell I cast. If we’d had a more defensible position and more time, I might have worn her down. Her singing got more intense toward the end.”
Celewyn blinked at the word “troll” but didn’t interrupt. The intensification, or greater emphasis, of a wizard’s spellsongs usually meant they were reaching the end of their reserve. An experienced wizard knew to hide this, but Radiel had been only fourteen when her life had been taken; her wraith was only a little older, and in practical terms, no more experienced.
“I won’t ask you to trust me, assassin, for I can see by how you move and observe that you share your brother’s trade,” Lord Grey continued with a harsh laugh, “but if you do believe anything I say, know that I will strive for the rest of the Usurpers’ lives to bring them to justice, or at least vengeance, for what they did to Radiel alone.
“She’s slipped the queen’s bonds,” the skull said intensely. “I’ve only seen that happen a dozen times in all of my years for an Undead that well-crafted and powerful. Almost always, it was because of a mistake by the necromancer, and each time, it occurred over the course of decades. These wraiths were too well-made, too capable, for Queen Jisa to have made a mistake in her construction. She broke free in less than month, improvised a new way to attack Lian, and most important of all, she took him alive!” As Lord Grey finished, his voice was thick with emotion. He was—or appeared to be, the assassin noted to himself—deeply angered by what had been done to Princess Radiel.
By Blood Hunted: Kingsblood Chronicles Part Two (The Kingsblood Chronicles Book 2) Page 49
