Upon the Flight of the Queen

by Howard Andrew Jones

  Rylin knew he should ride on. Too many lives depended upon getting through and scouting an escape. But he found himself kicking his horse ahead. He leaned from his saddle and swung his blade out to send the swordman’s thrust off target.

  The Naor swordsman whirled to find Rylin glowering down from his mount.

  The soldier stared up at him. Everyone but the weeping, choking parent and mistreated child had been rendered mute.

  He’d ruined his disguise now. What reason could any Naor have for stopping the murder of an Alantran child? And how much explanation would an officer give troops in any case?

  On closer examination, he recognized the swirling green tattoos along their bared forearms. This was a contingent of the Naor clan Savesh, famed for their assault against The Fragments in N’lahr’s day. They were especially bloodthirsty even for Naor. What to say to the dozen staring soldiers and horsemen?

  He improvised, speaking through gritted teeth. “I want them all.”

  He’d assumed that there would be challenge, and that a bloodbath would then ensue. The simple statement, though, seemed to relax the warriors.

  “Sorry, sir,” the swordsman said. He didn’t release his hold on the bawling child.

  “Give that one back to its mother so they’ll both quiet down. Then gather the prisoners and follow me.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  It was apparently enough for the soldiers that an officer had materialized out of the evening gloom and ordered them to bring prisoners somewhere. They must have assumed he intended the captured for an olech, a blood sacrifice.

  Soon he was leading three dozen frightened Alantran men, women, and children, closely shepherded by a half-dozen Naor warriors.

  He chafed all the while that he wasted time he could ill afford. He had but two semblances, and the power of the one he wore was slowly draining. Not only had he made no progress in how to get his charges safely out of the tunnels, he was trying to put more people inside. Yet he couldn’t abandon them.

  Nobody questioned him as he proceeded through the city, dark except for the areas being torched, for almost a quarter hour. Not the Naor soldiers he led, nor the large column of spearmen that passed them at a jog, nor the officers deploying soldiers through the square near the temple district on the second tier. From the shouted commands, Rylin understood them to be searching for snipers amongst the high roofs of government buildings, and he felt his back tense. As the Naor officer in charge of a prisoner contingent, he presented a tempting target, and it was easy to imagine an Alantran sharpshooter singling him out from on high to plant an arrow.

  He turned down a quieter avenue, hopefully away from the attentions of local archers, and found himself riding under a carefully tended wisteria arch. The Sacred Quarter.

  Cautious of both magic and the anger of deities, the Naor hadn’t touched the unlit temple area. Presumably they’d have their priests correctly desecrate the houses of Gods with Naor blood rituals before indulging in any looting or wanton destruction. And that thought suddenly provided the inspiration he’d lacked.

  Rylin guided his entourage past the fragrant gardens fronting the temple of Vedessa before arriving at the bottom of the seven curving granite steps that led to the sprawling temple, itself topped by three domes, black against a smoke-gray sky. He reined in and swung down from his mount. He bade the guards bring the prisoners up the wide stairs after him, and they did.

  None questioned why he should open the massive open doors and walk under the archway, lettered with proverbs the Naor would never read. He skirted the alabaster-encircled pit where the eternal fire still burned among its coals and walked into the main temple chamber, a cavernous room lit only by the sacred fire near the opening and a pair of braziers hung in alcoves flanking the ceiling-high, robed statue of Vedessa. Human-sized wooden statues of Alantran ancestors looked down in silent disapproval from elevated alcoves as the clack of Rylin’s bootheels echoed on old flagstones. He noted that tapestries, books, and sacred artifacts that should be here, weren’t. Probably the temple tenders had quietly removed them as the first of the walls fell.

  Rylin ordered the soldiers to close the door, then told the prisoners to kneel, their faces turned toward the distant statue of their god. They sank, frightened and resigned, and Rylin noted that the guards moved with some glee. They expected, possibly even looked forward to, the slaughter of these helpless people and cast their eyes covetously around at a few sparkling decorations left adorning the temple. The Savesh tribes didn’t seem inclined to question the authority of an officer putting them first in line to access such treasures.

  “Take a good, long look at the prisoners,” Rylin ordered. He paced behind the six Naor soldiers like a drill instructor. “I want you to see how vulnerable they are.”

  A child began to moan, and an adult frantically tried to shush him. As a Naor moved forward with a growl, sword raised in readiness to still the noise forever, Rylin dropped the semblance. He drove his knife through the neck gap between helmet and armor of the advancing Naor and the man sagged, gasping. The closest warrior turned to see what had happened only to catch Rylin’s second knife with his face. He dropped.

  Two down, four to go. Rylin snarled and stepped to the right.

  He came to grips with the third before the remainder could engage, beating his blade aside and driving his palm hard into the warrior’s nose. He heard a satisfying crunch and knew he’d broken it. The man shouted, clutched his face, and tripped over prisoners, who fell desperately upon him. Three down.

  The next two rushed at the same moment. Rylin veered left to put the first attacker between him and the second, parried, had his thrust turned by the soldier’s ring mail.

  The final soldier crept in from the left.

  Rylin drove the closest Naor sideways with a flurry of slashes, then swatted his sword away and drove his blade deep through the man’s scale mail. As the Naor staggered with a bubbling scream, he got in the way of his companion’s attack.

  If the third man had pressed on, Rylin would have been done for, but the Naor warrior’s hesitation gave Rylin time to wrench his sword free with a spray of blood. Two left, and he not only saw the fear in their eyes, he all but smelled it on them.

  The hesitant one tried to give orders to his thin-faced companion. “Attack left, Henzhar! Come—”

  Rylin’s next swipe separated Henzhar’s hand from wrist, and the Naor’s mouth opened in a silent scream as blood spurted after the plop of the hand onto the temple floor. The prisoners pulled him down and quickly silenced him.

  The last Naor backed from him, eyes wide in horror. He thrust madly once, twice, and Rylin beat both attacks aside before driving his blade through his neck. The Naor toppled sideways.

  Rylin turned to see what had transpired.

  Most of the Alantrans were standing, staring, as Rylin panted. One of the children sniffed, and a few muttered among themselves in disbelief, but the sound was subdued enough that Rylin heard the drip of blood from his sword runnels to the floor.

  The hoarseness of his voice surprised him. “I need to look outside.” He wasn’t sure why he said anything to them; perhaps it was the way they seemed to be waiting for him to speak. He paused to wipe his blade on Henzhar’s pant leg, then jogged to the front door and peered out onto the temple grounds. His gelding, Rurudan, stood obediently where he’d left him. Firelight outlined the buildings to the west. He smelled smoke, and heard the awful screams of the injured and dying. Likely the screams of these Naor hadn’t been noticed at all.

  Once he returned to the temple, the former prisoners greeted him with thanks, and praise, although they were strangely subdued. A young woman gave him a cloth torn from her head scarf and blotted it at his face; it wasn’t until she came away with blood that he realized the Naor had splattered him. He quieted the calls of what they were to do now, and what he planned, and posted a young man by the door to keep watch. Then he searched for the proper alcove.

  Finding th
e trigger for the hidden door was harder than his combat against the Naor. His nerves were stretched tight and he was becoming increasingly frantic. It wasn’t until he stepped back to swig from the dead commander’s wine that he realized he’d miscounted stones, owing to a small triangular one lower along the rim.

  Shortly thereafter he had pushed in and revealed a narrow doorway low enough that an adult would have to hunch. The light from the hanging lanterns outside showed him a ladder.

  These people had no supplies apart from those carried by the Naor themselves, and so he raided the temple stores both for food and lanterns, then sent them down the dusty passage with vague instructions to keep quiet and to await his return. He wondered what it was like down there and hoped eventually to find out for himself.

  It was still in the temple after he shut the door, leaving him with nothing but the memory of their muted, tearfully renewed thanks, and the dead men.

  Before washing up in a back room, a macabre idea came to him. He hesitated only a moment before dipping two fingers into a pool of blood and writing N’lahr’s name across the temple floor. The dead general was one of the few things the Naor seemed to fear. What might they think when they came upon these men here, with the name of the long dead Altenerai commander spelled out in their blood? He suppressed a grin.

  Cleaned up once more, he shut the temple, like any good worshiper who hadn’t just left six dead men behind him, and walked for Rurudan, who greeted him with a wicker of pleasure.

  “Glad to see me, boy?” he asked. “You probably don’t like this place any more than I do. I’m afraid there’s worse to come.”

  He wished he had an apple for him, then shook his head. He wished he had apples for the refugees. He had to find a way to get them out of the city. They wouldn’t store like produce in a root cellar.

  Rylin resumed his semblance, glad to note it hid the gore splattering his clothing as he rode from the temple district. Soon he met long lines of Alantran prisoners shuffling past with hunched shoulders, under the eyes of not just a few guards, but whole marching troop columns. Maybe a band of Altenerai could have helped them, but not him, not by himself. He discovered that he clutched the reins in a death grip and forced himself to relax. He thought he’d longed for things in the past, but he’d never known such wanting as the fierce desire to save these people, too, and it was a deep cut to know that he was powerless to free them.

  His hands tightened again as he turned a corner, for a contingent of the spiral tattooed Savesh Naor were systematically lining up dead Alantrans and hewing heads from their trunks. They were already well on their way toward a sizable pyramid of skulls.

  How was he going to get anyone alive out of a city in the grips of such intense barbarism? Two of the soldiers were even mocking the contorted expression upon one of the heads as one grinning soldier lifted it by the hair.

  Ride on, he told himself. Killing them would gain him nothing. Rurudan snorted as if in disgust.

  He was still bereft of ideas for getting his people away as he saw a wyrm circling down for a landing just inside the city walls. It beat its huge wings ponderously against the dusky orange-streaked sky. Further information about them was certainly worth seeking out, and he paused to eye the men who rode on the creature’s immense scaled back. The beast seemed crafted for nightmare, studded with boney spikes that jutted dangerously from random areas of its skull and spine and great leathery wings bearing sparse, vestigial plumage. Its four clawed feet spread as it dropped, readying for impact.

  Its descent was nothing like Lelanc’s graceful drops, for there was no sense that the creature thought about what it did. The eyes in its large horned head stared dully forward, and its jaw hung slackly, foolishly. Rylin remembered how one of the beasts had dropped from the sky when he had slain its pilot, a serious design flaw so long as you had ko’aye to carry the battle to them.

  Once more Rylin fought a surge of anger at Cerai for stealing Lelanc and abandoning the city.

  Flying against all of those wyrms would have been long odds, he knew, but he would have liked to have tried. If Cerai had backed him with her magic, it might even have worked. Instead she had ensorcelled brave Lelanc and fled. As she doomed them all she’d shouted that she hadn’t the time for this nonsense, as though she were late for some vital appointment.

  She would have to pay.

  The wyrm landed like a meat slab thrown onto a table, shaking the ground as Rylin shook himself from his broodings. The creature had been guided into a field just within the outer wall.

  The city of Alantris was once more populous than today, its numbers thinned by the last war with the Naor, so they’d turned a lot of the ground in the outer ring over to crops, the better to withstand more Naor incursions. Had Rylin held off those wyrms, the field before him would have helped bring vegetables to the tables of the city’s defenders. Now it served as a landing field for abominations, scorched clean of any neat green rows. Five massive and variously colored lizards with thick bodies and necks and long tapering tails rested a few hundred feet apart from one another, and Naor workmen were pitchforking food in front of them from hay carts. Rylin saw animal carcasses and even what looked like some human arms and legs in their feed, although between the distance and the poor lighting on the ground it was hard to know for certain.

  On the other side of the field lay a long intact portion of the outer wall. A dark banner, topped with a ko’aye skull, fluttered at the height of the gate tower. That was almost certainly where the Naor general had set up headquarters. At least until the citadel was cleared.

  Rurudan disliked both the sight and smell of the wyrms, and Rylin had to urge him into obedience as he continued into the shadow of buildings at the north end of the landing field. The handful of Naor sentries saluted and let him pass. Rylin was soon riding west along the lane separating dark, silent houses from the fields where the wyrms had landed.

  The monsters must not have been completely devoid of self-volition, for he saw no weavers, and the things were eating the food without having to be forced to do so. But he noticed that they looked neither to right nor to left, nor evidenced any curiosity about their surroundings. He wondered if they would simply consume whatever was placed in front of them. That, he thought, might be a very simple and effective way to damage or kill the things. Except that such large bodies would undoubtedly require a lot of material before they’d sicken. And right now he’d be hard pressed to find an apothecary or herbalist to obtain something poisonous.

  “What are you doing here?”

  The speaker had walked out from beside one of the wyrms with two other men. His companions retreated across the field toward the distant gatehouse, but this man planted himself in the midst of the roadway. His flowing fur cloak draped slim shoulders and his head was topped with a thick wool hat decorated with two upright feathers.

  As if he weren’t already ridiculous, the challenger’s voice proved comically shrill. “Get down from that horse this instant. You know you’re not allowed near the dragons! Who are you?”

  Dragons? That was a new word. Rylin climbed calmly down. “I’m Commander Elchin,” he said, noting with some relief that while there were numerous Naor beyond the road and field, none except those manning the food cart for the wyrms were closer than a hundred paces.

  “You are to address me as warlord,” the man screeched. “You approach the dragons, you do not give me deference—”

  Rylin interrupted as he dismounted. It would do him no good if this warlord called down more attention upon him. “Your pardon, Warlord. I was sent to speak with the general. I have important news.”

  That brought the warlord up short. He peered at him. “There’s a weird dweomer all around you, Elchin.”

  Damn. He’d run into a sorcerer. Could he have been the man who’d been controlling the wyrms? “I encountered an Altenerai sorcerer, up in the tower.”

  The warlord started. “The one who was flying on the wyvern?”

 
“I don’t know, Warlord. But that’s not all. I was sent to speak to the general about it.” He feigned a sudden twinge and bent, putting hand to chest.

  The warlord looked at him in alarm. “What’s wrong with you, man?”

  Rylin looked up at him, his lips moving soundlessly. “Important.”

  The warlord drew closer. Rylin lolled his head, carefully taking in the men and area around them. The food cart was rolling away; apparently the warlord’s screeching was common enough to be of little interest. The back of the cart blocked the drivers from view. The outer walls were as yet empty of sentinels, and while Rylin still heard shouts, screams, and the occasional clash of arms, he and the warlord seemed very much alone in the growing darkness.

  He pushed off his right leg and grabbed the warlord’s throat.

  The man’s eyes bulged in anger and alarm. Rylin smashed him in the stomach to lower the fists that rose to counter him, and then he dragged his groaning victim into the shadow of the nearest abandoned house, through its doorway and over a dead Alantran woman lying with an arrow in her chest.

  Rylin felt the warlord trying to reach his thoughts with a weaving. He dropped the semblance and, there, alone in the shuttered house, he allowed his ring to shine.

  The warlord gurgled in horror.

  Rylin grinned vindictively. “I’m the one who took down your wyrm, ‘warlord.’ I bet there’s a lot you can tell me, isn’t there?”

  He turned his leg so that he took the warlord’s knee to his thigh rather than his groin, than shook the lighter man. Normally Rylin didn’t feel so powerful. But then the warlord was on the thin, reedy side, rare for a Naor. His weaker frame was probably only tolerated because of his magical skill.