“Get away from me!” the cloaked man cried as Lady Ymowyn took his head between her hands and brought her red-furred muzzle to his lips.
Garrett watched in mute wonder as the fox woman’s lips parted, and the man’s final scream erupted from his mouth as a brilliant silver mist. Ymowyn’s green eyes went wide as she breathed it in. The man’s cries died away into a rasping death rattle, and still the mist drained from his mouth like a silver cord of light into the fox woman’s open jaws.
She let him fall as his knees gave way beneath him, and the weight of his body dragged Garrett’s arm down with him, still frozen to the man’s sword.
“Bow before the King,” Lady Ymowyn growled, her eyes blazing with silver adoration. She bared her glistening fangs in a broad grin, her hands on the shoulders of the dead man as he slumped to his knees on the grass before Garrett.
Garrett yanked his arm back, and the assassin’s sword shattered, leaving only a small shard of icy steel imbedded in his dented vambrace. The man’s body fell over sideways into the blackened grass, still clutching the hilt of his broken sword, his face frozen in a silent scream of terror, and his eyes glazed over with frost.
Garrett looked down at the shaft of the crossbow bolt protruding from his breastplate and grimaced at the bloody icicle that hung down almost to Ymowyn’s white scarf upon his belt. He wondered how long the arrow had been before it went in. There certainly didn’t seem to be all that much of it sticking out. At least there was no pain.
He looked over to where Ghausse lay, unmoving, and his heart sank. Garrett slowly walked toward his fallen wolf as billows of cold vapors rose from the blighted grass all around him. A dusting of ice particles spread across Ghausse’s black fur as Garrett knelt beside him, reaching out to stroke him with his stiffened right hand.
Ghausse whimpered, struggling to lift his head as his great bushy tail thumped weakly on the dead grass behind him.
“It’s not over, hell-spawn!” Sir Gillian coughed, his voice wet and ragged.
Garrett looked up to see the white-armored knight staggering slowly toward him, his shield arm hanging limp at his side as he stooped to retrieve his fallen sword. Sir Gillian raised his ram-horned helm to face Garrett, and coughed. A few drops of blood dribbled from the vents of his cream-white visor as he closed on Garrett.
“Come my brothers,” Sir Gillian rasped, “Let us take the heads of these maggot-eating worms and bring them with honor before the King!”
“You know nothing of honor, Gillian,” Sir Anders answered, his face darkened with contempt for the white knight.
Sir Gillian stared at his fellow knight for a moment and then staggered again, almost falling.
One by one, the other Astorran knights sheathed their swords and stepped away, some shaking their heads with looks of disgust on their faces as they turned away from their former brother in arms.
“You cowards!” Sir Gillian shouted, “All of you... cowards!”
Garrett stroked Ghausse’s fur once again before rising wearily to his feet with Cenick’s aid.
“Finish this, Garrett,” Cenick whispered.
Garrett nodded his head as he stretched out his frozen right forearm at his side, feeling the chill of the blue flames that once again wreathed his arm.
“We’re with you, Garrett,” Haven said stepping to his right side. Lady Ymowyn moved to his left, her eyes still blazing with silver light.
“I have to finish this alone,” Garrett whispered, his eyes locked on the horn-crested knight in bloodied white armor.
“No... in point of fact, ya don’t,” Shortgrass growled as the little fairy fluttered down to land on the rim of Garrett’s shield. Garrett glanced over to see the tiny gouge in the fairy’s scalp that glowed with the golden light of Shortgrass’s blood as it ran down over his swollen right eyelid and onto his cheek. The tip of his left wing hung at an odd angle as he perched on the black shield with a look of rage on his little face.
“Cower behind your sorcery and your witches, little man,” Sir Gillian coughed, “but I will still take your head!” He raised his sword high, leveling its shaking point at Garrett’s chest.
“If ya were gonna take it, you should’a had it by now, ya great yammerin’ goat!” Shortgrass yelled, “And I think we’ve all had enough of yer nonsense, so be off wit’ ya before I’m farced ta do somethin’ you’ll wish I hadn’t!”
Garrett gave the little fairy a curious look, but Shortgrass was already muttering something in fae under his breath.
Sir Gillian gave an inarticulate howl of rage as he charged forward, sword raised to strike.
“Te vaardre tu coshaana, ne’gedden mac vega!” Shortgrass shouted as he raised his right hand, and a flash of rainbow light dazzled Garrett’s eyes.
Garrett blinked, his eyes still swirling with the afterglow of fairy magic, as the horrible shrieks of some inhuman beast filled the air.
People gasped, and an Astorran lady screamed as the wild shrieking changed slowly into a goat-like bleating sound.
Garrett, able to see clearly at last, blinked again in astonishment at the writhing form of Sir Gillian on the blackened grass before him. At least it had been Sir Gillian.
The white knight’s helmet rolled away to reveal a goat-like face that twisted in agony as two small gray horns sprouted from the knight’s forehead and began to curve back and around as they grew. The man’s sword lay on the ground beside him, his white gauntlet still loosely grasping its grip. The hand that protruded from Sir Gillian’s vambrace had traded fingers for a glossy black hoof.
Garrett looked down in stunned fascination as the former knight thrashed and bleated. Bits of his white armor slipped and fell away as he slowly transformed into a small brown goat. The animal finally managed to squirm free of its gold-trimmed breastplate and kicked off the tangled gambeson beneath.
Shortgrass chuckled to himself as Gillian the goat now bolted from the field in wild panic, his bleats of terror fading into the distance as awe-struck Astorrans gave way before him.
“Such is tha justice o’ tha Amber Court,” Shortgrass shouted, “fer tha crime of assaultin’ it’s duly-appointed officer!”
Garrett stared at the tiny fairy perched on his shield, not quite able to wrap his mind around what he had just seen.
“Well, I did warn him, did I not?” Shortgrass said with a shrug.
Garrett felt light-headed as the blue flames wreathing his frozen right arm flickered and died. Shortgrass fluttered free as Garrett slumped to his knees. He would have fallen over if Haven and Lady Ymowyn had not hastened to bear him up again between them.
Cenick lifted the battered helm from Garrett’s head, and Garrett smiled weakly at his friends. He saw the little wince of discomfort in Haven’s eyes as she supported him with his ice-crusted right arm lying against her bare neck.
“Sorry,” he whispered.
She smiled back at him as she reached down to grasp his belt and took the burden of his armored weight from Lady Ymowyn’s shoulder. “I’ve got him now,” she said.
Ymowyn turned to face an approaching group of Astorrans, her hands flexed into claws as her eyes blazed with stolen light.
“It is finished, Kingslayer!” Sir Anders said as he and a dozen Astorran knights loomed above Garrett.
Garrett returned the knight’s glare as little puffs of mist frosted the air before him with every gasping breath.
“Take your misshapen army and depart these lands tonight,” Sir Anders, said, “The next time we meet, it shall be upon the field of battle, and no courtesy of honor shall stay our hands from exacting the King’s justice!”
“The King’s justice!” Garrett spat. He felt the ice on his lips crack as he sneered at the dun-armored knight. “I have a message for your king,” he hissed, “You tell him I want my knife back... and I’m coming to get it.”
Chapter Four
Marla watched the pink glow of sunrise creeping across the eastern sky. With the help of her enchanted goggles, she
could make out the hazy peaks of the Neshite range on the far side of the Uroic Basin. The great crater itself still lay in the shadow of its mountain ring, a sea of mist obscuring the vast lake that lay somewhere below. Here and there, red flashes of lightning flickered among the clouds. Marla could not hear their thunderous detonations over the constant whistling of the wind that whipped at her long dark hair and chilled her skin even through her black leather riding gear.
A blood-red flash of lightning near the center of the lake caught her eye for a moment, but something else drew her attention as it moved through the mist. For an instant, she thought she glimpsed the shadow of something silhouetted against the clouds by the red flash, something too large to be one of the freakish winged creatures that hunted in the skies above the basin. At least she hoped it wasn’t one of them. If those twisted aberrations could really grow that large, she would understand why the gaunts refused to fly any closer.
She shielded her goggles with her hand as the pink light of dawn threatened to overwhelm her sight. Already her skin had begun to crawl with the unpleasant tingle of indirect sunlight. In another few minutes, she would be risking a nasty burn to her exposed face by remaining in the open.
There it was again. Something moved in the clouds below. She caught a glimpse of a great curving shape, bristling with dorsal spines, and, for an instant, an unimaginably large wing eclipsed the fading glow of a red flash.
Her heart raced as she strained her eyes, trying to catch another glimpse of whatever it was she had seen. What if she were right about the island she had dreamed of so many times before? What if the Queen of Dragons was still alive, somewhere down there in the mist?
She already felt the first twinges of sunlight-induced nausea beginning to twist in her belly, but Marla ignored the discomfort, hoping to catch another glimpse of whatever it was that waited for her down there.
“Come on, Dawnfacer!” Alyss laughed as she tugged at Marla’s sleeve, “It’s time for supper.”
Marla started from her thoughts and gave the Arkadi girl an embarrassed smile. “Sorry,” she said, “I just thought that I saw something.”
“We’ll see plenty of whatever it was tomorrow night,” Alyss said, shielding her cream-colored eyes from the light of approaching dawn.
Marla looked up to see the golden fire of sunlight burning on the tops of the southwestern peaks above them... time to go inside.
Marla followed Alyss back into the fractured dome of draconic architecture that was all that remained of the ancient city of Uroe. The vampires used this last bastion of the sacred birthplace of dragonkind as an outpost, a haven against the hated light of day. They called this place the Shard.
“Any more of you out there?” the Bremmerite caretaker asked as Alyss and Marla stepped through the mouth of the tunnel into the warm shadows of the dome within. The gangly elder vampire wore a scuffed and dusty version of the same leather bodysuit that all the vampires of House Bremmer seemed to favor. It could be quickly buttoned up to cover every surface of their bodies for protection against real sunlight or the false sunlight of the glowing sand they mined from the beaches of the crater lake.
“She’s the last of us,” Alyss said, indicating Marla with a toss of her black braids, “She was just showing off.”
“I was not!” Marla scoffed, slipping her goggles off over her head to give Alyss a fiery glare. She turned to nod her thanks to the caretaker and noticed his surprised look when he saw her sun-gold eyes. She looked away quickly with a nervous smile.
The caretaker rolled a huge stone disk into the shallow trench cut into the alabaster floor in front of the entrance tunnel. It settled into place with a grinding thump, casting the antechamber within into darkness.
“Ah, that’s better,” Alyss sighed.
Marla had to agree, as the darkness embraced her again, washing the crawling sensation of sunlight from her body. After a few moments her eyes adjusted enough to see the passageway before them into the heart of the Shard.
Hundreds of flickering wisp-stones lit the vast inner dome of the vampire outpost. Stacks of crates and barrels lay piled against the walls or heaped in islands between the narrow lanes of walkways, laid out with no discernable order on the cracked alabaster floor. Marla had never met a messy vampire before, but, she reasoned, that must have been because all of them had taken up sand mining as a profession.
Someone had organized a makeshift gaunt pen on the far end of the hall, and Marla could hear the discontented shrieks of her group's flying mounts as they echoed above the raucous din of a hundred miners coming off their nightly shift. Nerrys’s flying serpent had remained outside the dome, having taken shelter in a cavernous cleft of rock. The Haedrian vampire had assured them all that her serpent would need no tending.
Alyss made her way through the maze of clutter, leading Marla by the hand. They emerged at last into a sort of communal dining area where someone had laid out a number of long wooden tables with plank seats along their sides.
Valganna Morst stood nearby, talking to the outpost’s foreman, a stocky vampire who proved a bit difficult to look at, as the seams of his leather coat glowed with the radiance of the tiny flecks of moonsand trapped in the creases. Most of the other miners had already shed their protective gear and settled down to their morning meal at the tables, but the radiance of the sand trapped in the stitching of their boots provided a weird uplighting from beneath the tables where they sat, its glow giving a sinister cast to their fanged grins as they jested and drank with one another.
Marla noticed an elven boy in a dirty smock making his way between the tables with a broom and a pail, trying to sweep up as much of the wayward sand as he could without disturbing the miners at their meal. A pair of girls, an elf and a faun, moved quickly up and down the rows, filling the vampires’ cups from the tarnished silver pitchers they carried.
Marla and Alyss took their place at the cleanest and most dimly lit table where Claude and the two House Bremmer bodyguards sat. Marla greeted the two humorless elder vampires before taking her seat next to Claude, leaning in to kiss him as she did.
“I take it we’re drinking centaur tonight?” she asked, tasting the traces of blood on Claude’s lips.
“Wild-caught,” Claude said, “from the northern range, or so they tell us.”
“I wouldn’t have thought there would be many fae that close to Muldenia,” Marla said, smiling as Claude poured her a cup of blood from a polished silver pitcher.
“Why not?” Alyss asked, as Claude filled her cup as well.
“Well, Muldenia is Chadirian territory now,” Marla said, “and they tend to kill fae creatures without provocation.”
“Have you met many Chadirians?” Alyss asked.
“Only briefly,” Marla laughed, “and it was not on friendly terms. Oh, and when referring to the people themselves, most Gloarans call them Chadiri.”
“Why is that?” Alyss asked.
“I don’t know,” Marla admitted, taking a sip from her cup. The scent of dry grass and mountain air cooled her thirst, and she took another drink.
“It’s good, isn’t it?” Claude laughed through red lips as he lowered his cup.
“Yes, very,” Marla murmured between sips. She hadn’t realized that she was this thirsty.
Alyss drank her own cup in one long swallow, her fingers clasped in a double handhold around the silver chalice. Her eyelids fluttered as she set the cup down, and a dreamy smile parted her dusky lips. “That was... that was very...” she whispered, blinking as though trying to shake herself from a dream.
“I agree,” Marla sighed, grinning as Claude filled their cups again.
Alyss lingered a bit longer over her second cup of centaur blood. “Why is this so much better than regular centaur blood?” she asked at last.
“It is the hunt that makes the flavor, Lady Arkadi,” said Malco, one of the two Bremmerite bodyguards. The lean-jawed vampire pointed a long finger toward the silver pitcher. “Sweet is the blood of
an unbound beast!”
“Especially one taken in the wilds where the prey have little reason to fear our kind,” Vruust, the other bodyguard added.
“So, this centaur was not wyrdbound?” Marla asked.
“No,” Malco said.
“Then how did they get them to sit still long enough to take some of their blood?” Alyss laughed.
Malco and Vruust shared a puzzled look.
“This is the centaur’s lifeblood,” Claude explained.
“What? You mean they...” Alyss said, her face going blank as she suddenly understood his meaning.
Marla stared down at her own cup, understanding at last the true flavor of the blood. She sipped it again, tasting the mortal terror of a free creature, stricken down, mid-flight by creatures like herself who had stolen its very life for their own sustenance. She had never tasted the blood of an unbound fae before. She looked up to see the sullen look on Alyss’s face as the dark-skinned girl regarded her own cup on the table before her.
“Are you all right?” Marla asked.
“Yeah,” Alyss sighed, “It all just seems a little... uncivilized, I guess.”
Malco and Vruust returned to their cups with smirks on their faces.
“You will find our concept of civilization greatly challenged beyond the walls of Thrinaar, Lady Arkadi,” Valganna Morst said as he approached the table, “Wouldn’t you agree, Lady Veranu?”
Marla shrugged. “I suppose that everyone has a slightly different notion of the ideal civilization,” she said, “For the Gloarans, it is perhaps the imposition of order upon the chaos of life... For the Chadiri, similar ideals are taken to an almost xenophobic extreme. The Zhadeen, I’m told, worship beauty and art above other virtues, while the Lethians value the acquisition of new experiences and remembering the stories of their ancestors.”
“Yet you must agree that our people have come the closest to recapturing the lost glory of the original civilization of dragonkind,” Morst chuckled as he took his seat at a chair placed at the head of the table.
Trials of the Twiceborn (The Songreaver's Tale Book 6) Page 6
