He reached down with a foot and kicked the High King, whose brows were still arced in surprise, shoving him into the path of Rhianna’s blow.
The great staff slammed against Urstone’s head with a snapping sound, as if it had hit stone. The king’s helmet shattered and a fine mist of blood sprayed out from the back of his head. Urstone fell. His body slumped over the railing.
Rhianna only stopped, heart pounding in horror at what she’d done.
Vulgnash leapt from the railing, his movements so fast that his speed was blinding.
He’s a runelord, Rhianna realized.
She swung her staff. The Knight Eternal dodged, and the staff struck the ledge with a jolt. He kicked her arm, and the staff tumbled over the parapet.
He smiled down at her, and Rhianna stood gasping. She had no weapon that could touch him. He knew it. Her only hope was to go after the staff.
But in doing so, she would leave Fallion alone, unprotected.
Fallion. All that the Knight Eternal wanted was Fallion.
Rhianna swiftly pulled a dagger, then put it to Fallion’s carotid artery.
“Leave,” she demanded. “Or so help me, I’ll kill him.”
This is what Fallion would want me to do, she thought. Fallion feared that his powers would be turned to evil. He knew what Lady Despair wanted. She wanted Fallion to bind the worlds into one, all under her control.
Vulgnash hesitated, studied her, and Rhianna dug the blade into Fallion’s flesh.
The Knight Eternal spoke, his thoughts whispering into her mind. “You love him more than your own life, yet you would kill him?”
“It’s what he would want.”
“It would please me to see you take his life,” Vulgnash said.
She studied his eyes, and knew that he meant it. Yes, he wanted Fallion, but he also wanted to see Rhianna commit this one foul deed.
He’s testing me, Rhianna realized. My pain amuses him.
Vulgnash did not move forward, and for a long moment he stood waiting. There were shouts from the tunnel behind Rhianna, accompanied by the frenzied yap of a dog.
She dared not turn away from the Knight Eternal.
“Rhianna,” Warlord Madoc cried. “Hold it. Stop.”
Warlord Madoc raced up at her back, keeping his distance from Vulgnash. For a moment he studied the scene, the Knight Eternal held at bay by a woman willing to sacrifice the man that she loved, King Urstone slumped over a railing, the back of his head smeared with blood.
“Get back from him, girl,” Warlord Madoc said. “Let me handle this.” He spoke to Rhianna in her own language.
Then he spoke to Vulgnash in the wyrmling tongue. “You need us,” he told the Knight Eternal. “Your harvesters need humans to prey upon. Leave us in peace, and we will be your vassals.”
“The land is filled with humans now,” Vulgnash said. “Great will be our joy as we hunt them and harvest them. We need you no more.”
“Still,” Madoc said. “I propose a truce: a thousand years. Give me a thousand years, and I will prepare these people to be your servants. We will join you, and Lady Despair whom you serve. If not, we’ll take the life of the Wizard Fallion, and you can go back to her empty-handed.”
Vulgnash knew the will of his master. For decades she had been plotting this, and right now the future balanced upon a precipice. Sometimes he could hear his master’s thoughts, like whispers in his mind.
He glanced off to the north, straining to hear the will of Lady Despair in this matter. At last, he felt her touch.
Tell him what he most wants to hear, she said. Vulgnash smiled.
“Lady Despair agrees to the trade.”
Warlord Madoc took the news hard, felt the breath knocked out of him. It was almost more than he could have hoped. Yet, now that the wyrmlings had agreed, he wasn’t sure that he liked the truce. He wasn’t sure that he could trust the wyrmlings. They might take Fallion and simply raze the city.
And even if the wyrmlings kept to the bargain, what then? Mankind would survive, but they would fall under the shadow of Rugassa, and his children’s children would serve his enemies.
Still, he hoped, in a thousand years, our children might multiply and become strong. The wyrmlings were notoriously hard on their spawn, and the mortality rate for wyrmling children was high. Madoc could only hope that his own descendants might win back their freedom.
Rhianna had her back to him, and she was peering up at the Knight Eternal resolutely, ready to slit Fallion’s throat at a moment’s notice. Warlord Madoc gave her a light kick to the back of the skull, and she went tumbling forward.
Madoc could hear the sounds of running feet and that damned dog barking in the tunnel behind him. His companions were drawing near, but came forward only slowly, unsure what to do.
“Take him,” Madoc told Vulgnash.
“No!” Talon cried at his back, and came lunging out of the tunnel.
The Knight Eternal moved with blinding speed, dropped, and seized Fallion’s sleeping form, like a cat pouncing upon a bird. In an instant he rose up, reeled and dove over the parapet.
Wings flapping madly, Vulgnash carried his prey into the sky.
Warlord Madoc whirled to meet Talon. The girl charged him with her small sword. She did not strike fear into him. She was, after all, only a child, one of the small folk at that, and Madoc had decades of practice to his credit.
She lunged with a well-aimed blow, but he slapped it aside with the flat of his ax, then punched her in the face. He outweighed the girl by nearly a hundred pounds, and Talon flew back and crumpled from the blow.
Siyaddah and Alun were right behind her. Siyaddah dropped the wings that she’d been dragging, and pulled a weapon as she stalked toward him. “Wait!” Madoc cried. “I can explain. I’m buying our lives here, saving the city.”
And it was true. The wyrmling armies had halted outside the city gates. The thunder drums had hushed, and the wyrmlings waited as if in anticipation.
“We heard,” Siyaddah said. “We heard the bargain that you made. But I’d rather die than honor it.”
They leave me no choice, Madoc realized. He could not leave witnesses to his unholy trade.
Madoc glared at her. “Stupid girl. If you’d rather die, then you shall.”
Behind him, he heard a groan and some small movement.
Siyaddah stepped forward to duel, her gleaming shield held clumsily at her side. She wasn’t a tenth the warrior that Talon had been.
Alun only held still at her back, the gawking lad who had been willing to sell his people out for nothing more than a title. Madoc wasn’t worried about him.
But suddenly the boy hissed a command, “Kill,” and unleashed his war dog. The beast leapt at Madoc in a snarling ball of fury, going for Madoc’s throat.
Madoc brought his ax up, hoping to fend the dog off, and stepped backward, just as something sharp rammed into his back.
He peered down and saw a dagger there just below his kidney. Rhianna’s small, pale hand gripped it. With a grunt she twisted the blade and brought it up in an expert maneuver, slicing his kidney in half. White-hot pain blinded Madoc.
He did not have time to cry out before Siyaddah slammed into his chest and sent him tumbling over the parapet.
Rhianna dropped and knelt in shock.
She crawled to the end of the balcony, her arms shaking, her legs and knees feeling frail. She climbed the balcony wall and peered over the parapet, into the starlight, and far in the distance, she saw leathery wings flapping madly. The morning air was beginning to brighten, dulling the stars. The Knight Eternal was carrying Fallion away in a frenzied blur, like some great bat.
He has endowments of strength and speed, Rhianna realized. He’s flying faster than I ever can. Her arms trembled as they tried to bear her weight. Her stomach was turning, and she felt ill, on the verge of collapse.
How fast is he going? she wondered. A hundred miles per hour, two? How far will he get before dawn? Will he reach Ruga
ssa?
She’d barely been able to manage the flight to the parapet a few minutes ago. And in her current condition, she couldn’t manage even that. Even if she had been able catch up with Fallion’s captor, she was no match for him.
He’s gone, she realized. Fallion’s gone. Maybe forever.
Rhianna looked down, her heart breaking. She saw Madoc’s form sprawled on the pavement hundreds of feet below, broken, ringed by wyrmlings who hacked and stabbed at the corpse, making sure of it.
She turned back to her friends. The parapet was a grisly mess. Talon was out cold. Rhianna could see that she was breathing steadily, but though Rhianna crawled to her side and called her name, Talon would not wake.
Siyaddah went to High King Urstone and stood over him for a long moment, seeking signs of life. She studied his face, then leaned over his back, trying to hear his heartbeat through his armor. At last she put her silver buckler to his face to see if he was breathing.
After a moment, she let out a sad cry and tears rolled down her cheek.
“He’s dead,” she moaned in dismay. “He’s dead.”
Rhianna could not speak to Siyaddah or Alun, for she did not know their language.
Down below, the wyrmling hordes still filled the courtyard. The army did not surge forward into the tunnels, nor did they fall back. Instead, they merely waited, as if for some further command.
Rhianna reached up and felt the knot at the base of her skull, smeared with blood. She could hardly think.
Footsteps came echoing up from the tunnel, and Daylan Hammer appeared around a bend, bearing a thumb-lantern.
He rushed up, spoke softly to Alun and Siyaddah for a moment.
“So is it true that they have Fallion?” Daylan asked Rhianna.
“Yes,” she said, looking back. Vulgnash was gone, far from her sight.
Daylan peered into the sky for a long moment, as if he could see what Rhianna could not. He was a Bright One of the netherworld, and as such, his powers of sight were legendary.
“Yes,” Daylan said at last. “He is gone…far beyond our reach-for now.”
He peered down at the armies massed before the gate, and said, “I wonder what they’re waiting for. The sun is coming. Surely they must be eager to take the city before dawn?”
He studied the army for a moment longer, then shouted, “Quickly, we must get down into the tunnels. There is one great battle left to fight!”
“When next you sleep…” Daylan Hammer had said. The words rolled over and over in Fallion’s mind, “When next you sleep…”
What had Daylan commanded?
That I dream, Fallion recalled dimly.
He was lying in the arms of a giant, flying through air both thin and cold. He could hear wings flapping, but he was so far under, he could not even open his eyes to look.
In a stupor, he reached up and grasped his cape pin, and immediately was thrust into another world. Here the skies were bluer than the darkest sapphire, and oak trees rose up like mountains among the hills, as if to bear heaven upon their limbs. Fallion was standing in a field of wheat that rose up to his chest, and an enormous owl came to him with broad wings and spoke an ancient name, Ael.
For the first time, Fallion realized that it was a question.
Yes, Fallion answered, I am Ael.
Fallion climbed its back, and as the great owl flew through a world that was now only a remembered dream, soaring over crystal lakes, swooping up to climb tall mountains whose skirts were covered with evergreens and whose mantles were draped in snow, finally to make his way at the end of the day toward a vast tree whose branches were filled with lights, Fallion began to recall.
I know that tree, Fallion thought. Its limbs and trunk were golden. Its broad leaves were dark green on the top, almost black in the failing light, but brighter underneath. He could hear the voices of women and children singing beneath the One True Tree, singing in a strange tongue that even his spirit had almost forgotten.
And the memories came. He had lived beneath the boughs of that tree once, had lived there for ages, in a city dug beneath its roots. And in its shade he had helped to maintain the great runes.
He remembered standing there, tending the runes hour after hour. His was the Seal of Light, a great circle of golden fire that bound the Seal of Heaven to the Seals of Earth and Water.
He knew its every texture and nuance, for over countless ages he had not only nurtured it, but with the help of the tree had formed it.
Now in his memory he stood above it, tending the multitude of tiny flames within it.
“Careful,” a still voice whispered in his mind. “The passions in that one are too strong. She must be mellowed.” It was the voice of the One True Tree, his companion and mentor, his helper in this great endeavor.
Fallion had turned his attention to the flame in question. It represented a young woman, one whose passions often rose high.
“Light-bringer,” a woman’s voice called. “What are you doing?”
Fallion turned and saw a beautiful young woman with raven hair and sparkling eyes. It was Yaleen, the woman whose passions he needed to soothe.
She strode toward him like a panther, like a huntress, her movements liquid and powerful…
And as Fallion’s body slumbered, and Vulgnash bore him to Rugassa, Fallion’s spirit began to wake.
A BARGAIN MADE TO BE BROKEN
Every man is but half a creature, longing to be whole. It is not until a wyrm fills your soul that you become complete.
— from the Wyrmling Catechism
Inside Mount Luciare, the humans huddled, awaiting the final onslaught. The hand of doom seemed to cover them like a roof. The thunder drums had gone silent. Everything was hushed.
Rhianna and the others came upon the Wizard Sisel down in the lowest depths of the tunnels. His head was wrapped in a bloody bandage. Thumb-lights lit the way, burning like the brightest stars, and the floors were strewn with herbs and seeds, so that the tunnel smelled like a garden. A roof had collapsed, and beyond a knot of warriors, rocks barred the way. The scent of stone and soil only helped to heighten the illusion that this was somehow a garden.
“What is happening?” Daylan Hammer called out.
“The enemy has withdrawn,” the wizard said in exasperation. “I do not know why. They are waiting…for something. My heart tells me that this bodes ill.”
“A Death Lord leads the wyrmling horde,” Daylan said. “He cannot risk the touch of sunlight, yet dawn is not half an hour away. He must enter the city before then.”
“I thought at first that the collapse of the tunnel had slowed them,” Sisel wondered aloud. “But that cannot be it.”
Suddenly, it seemed that his eyes caught the light of one of the thumb-lanterns, and they went wide.
“The wyrmlings will come, they must come. But when they do, we must hold them off until dawn. Unless…Quickly-gather the people. Get them to the eastern end of the city!”
The soldiers all stood for a moment, unsure what to do. Sisel was no warrior lord, with the right to command. No one seemed to be in command.
“Quickly,” Daylan shouted, for he seemed to divine the wizard’s plan, “do as he says!”
Areth Sul Urstone had never been inside a wyrmling temple, where those who hoped to receive wyrms committed foul deeds in order to prepare themselves for immortality. He had never wanted to be in one. He had only heard of the bloody rites performed there in whispered legend.
Areth was too weak from hunger and pain to stand. But he heard the red-robed priests shout in triumph. They stood with their backs to him, on a dais near the front of the temple. They suddenly backed away from an altar. One of the priests gripped a sacrificial knife.
Upon the altar, the wyrmling boy that had given Areth his endowment jerked, his legs pumping uselessly, as if in a dream he ran one final race with death.
Then the boy stopped, his muscles eased, and he lay still, blood dribbling from the open wound at his throat. His eyes
stared uselessly toward the heavens.
With that, a bond was broken. Most of the ache and fatigue that Areth had felt eased away, dissipating slowly, as if it had all been an evil dream.
“Well done,” the emperor whispered. A wyrmling priest stuck his thumb into the blood at the boy’s throat, then pressed the bloody thumb between the child’s eyes, anointing him.
He stepped down from the dais, crossed the stone floor, and pressed his bloody thumb between Areth’s eyes, anointing him with the child’s blood.
Around Areth, on the stone benches beneath the altar, a crowd of wyrmling supplicants made a low moaning noise, a groan of ecstasy.
Areth closed his eyes and waited for the wyrm to take him. He thought that it would be a violent act, that he’d know when it came. He thought that he would feel a sense of entrapment, like a creature being forced into a cage.
Instead he felt a rush of euphoria.
The child’s endowment had been stripped from him, and Areth Sul Urstone, who had endured greater tortures than any man had ever known, was suddenly free of pain.
Over the past fourteen years his body had become so accustomed to torture that the sudden absence was like a balm, sweet and soothing beyond measure.
But it was more than just physical pain that he found himself freed from. There was something more, something that only the presence of a great wyrm could explain. He suddenly felt released of all responsibility, of all guilt.
All of his life, his well-exercised sense of morality had guided his every deed.
Suddenly it was stripped away, and he perceived that he had been living his life in shackles. For the first time he was truly free-free to take whatever he wanted; free to kill or steal or maim.
Areth leaned his head back and laughed at the folly of the world.
“It is done,” the emperor cried, and wyrmling priest’s eyes went wide. It seemed that he could not drop to his knees and prostrate himself fast enough. “The Lady Despair walks among us in the flesh-” the emperor shouted, “let all obey her will.”
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