“Surafel,” Anuit stated. She could make out sails of a great naval fleet to the southeast. She had seen those sails before, when she and Arda had followed Kaldor’s trail to Surafel a year ago. “The sultan’s fleet.”
Arda nodded grimly.
Another loud knock came from their front door. “Ladies?” Attaris called from the entrance. The door had been left open by Yinkle, but he waited outside regardless. “Are you decent?”
“Come in!” Arda called out to him.
Attaris entered and walked across the floor towards the balcony, blushing when he accidentally stepped on the nightgown still lying on the floor. Anuit blushed too and grabbed the garment, bunching it up tightly and stuffing it under her bed pillow.
“Have you seen this?” Arda asked.
“Aye,” he nodded. “That’s not all.”
“There’s more?” Yinkle squeaked.
He rubbed his fingers through his hair, scratching his head with a bemused look on his face. Then he tugged at his beard. Then he scratched his ears. “I never would have thought it possible,” he finally said. “The kelds have mobilized. The dwarves of Farstkeld, my birthland, are marching towards our gates!”
Kristafrost skidded into the room, making no effort to pause or knock. Her right eye—the one not covered by an eyepatch—gleamed excitedly. “That’s not all!” she said. “The high elves are here! Hundreds of blue and red streams of fire burn through the sky even as we speak. It is the sidhe armies of the Fire and Frost Courts!” The sidhe had no navy. Instead of flying ships, the high elven wizards transformed themselves into elemental energy, streaking through the air in transfigured bodies.
Arda turned and left the balcony. She grabbed her duster and slipped her arms into it, tugging it over her shoulders. She fetched her tricorne from the bedpost and fitted it onto her head, nestling it between her horns. She angled it forward and then nodded at them curtly. “I’m going to find King Donogan,” she stated with a crisp, businesslike coolness to her voice. “You all coming?”
* * *
Arda hopped down the stairs two and three at a time. King Donogan stayed in one of the ground-level apartments, and she wanted to catch him before he went out to meet the envoys from these armies. Armies! Three of them, not counting the two that were already in the city. Well, perhaps Cloudmoore wouldn’t be considered an army—it was a whole city—but she didn’t doubt it had military might.
She ran faster than her companions could follow, but it was not a long run down the stairs. She only had to descend two levels from their apartment wing before she came to one of the lifts.
Thank the Light the gnomes got the lifts working, she thought. Otherwise they would have had to scramble down the central stairwell, and they were a quarter-mile above ground level.
“You idiot,” she muttered to herself under her breath. She kept forgetting Anuit’s flying carpet. They could have just sailed to the bottom. Well, she was here now.
The lift was a tube surrounded by an organically shaped copper web. The lift itself was a circular platform without walls or ceiling, supported and moved by extending-rods powered by gears and rotating screw-shafts from the ground. She pressed the button and waited for the lift to arrive.
Her companions caught up with her as the webbed door opened. They crowded onto the seemingly suspended disk, and she hit the button to descend. Minutes later, they all rushed out on ground level to find the king.
Donogan already stood outside on the front tower steps. His military captains were briefing him on the arriving armies. At first, the sidhe had made as if to fly straight into the city, but the gnomes had already deployed battle thopters. The propeller-powered aircraft had fired warning shots from their lightning cannons, not targeting the elves directly but sending a strong message that the gnomes would tolerate no incursion into their city. The elves gathered outside the southwestern wall, streams of fire and ice landing and manifesting as sidhe wizards. Some of the comets were thick, landing to become full phalanxes of wand-bearing soldiers and supporting silk and glass tent-like structures. When they landed, their camp was already established. The zeppelin fleet deliberately took a slow approach and hovered offshore after the initial lightning burst towards the sidhe. The war vessels on the water were still a ways out, as were the dwarves on the peninsula road to Artalon.
“What’s going on?” Arda asked the king.
He looked at her, lips pressed together firmly. “Well, apparently gnomes don’t like sidhe,” he said. “They won’t welcome them like they did us.”
“They didn’t exactly welcome us,” Anuit commented. “Tolerate is more like it.”
Kristafrost shot her a glance. “It’s our city,” she pointed out. “I thought we were rather welcoming. We let you move in and fixed things up for you.”
Anuit looked embarrassed for a moment. “You’re right,” she conceded to the gnome woman.
“Flolum has already dispatched messengers to the armies on their flyers,” King Donogan said, referring to the leader of Cloudmoore. Gnomes didn’t exactly have kings, so Arda wasn’t sure how to think of him. Gnomes didn’t seem fixated on titles, and he just went by Flolum. Donogan continued. “Representatives from each army are to meet on the northern docks in three hours. Hopefully we can sort this out.”
Arda raised an eyebrow. “This doesn’t look good.”
“I doubt they just came for tea,” Yinkle agreed.
“The question is, why now?” the king asked.
“It’s the first time Artalon’s been relatively vulnerable,” Arda surmised. “After the God-King died, people were in shock. Then there were the vampires. Now the entire country is open for the taking. The sidhe ran Aaron’s Empire from this city, and the gnomes built it. As for the others, I don’t know.”
Anuit gasped slightly and her eyes widened. “The gods,” she said.
“What?” the king queried.
“It must be,” Anuit insisted. “We knew we couldn’t keep the secret forever. Athra’s Jewel… Kaldor told us she had become Athra herself. She must know Artalon’s secret. All the gods must know. How else would so many armies come here at the same time?”
Arda’s eyes narrowed. Anuit’s words felt true in the Light. “Almost as if it were coordinated,” she mused.
Anuit stared down accusingly at Kristafrost. “If only you had let us explore more of the towers—”
“It wasn’t me!” Kristafrost protested. “That was Flolum’s decision.”
“So why doesn’t he use Artalon’s power?” Anuit pressed.
“I’ve already told you, many times,” Kristafrost stated with exasperation. “We don’t know how to unlock Artalon any more than you do. It was a long time ago, and we were exiled when the darklings took over. But we’re not giving it up again. It’s ours!”
“I’ll bet you’re working on unlocking it, though,” Anuit muttered under her breath.
“Enough,” Arda said. It did them no good to start bickering. “We have more pressing matters.” Like the armies. And like Klrain being alive. The gnomes hadn’t yet accepted that.
A hideous thought struck the paladin. All they needed was a sixth army, a troglodyte army, to come up out of the ground.
Three hours later, Arda stood beside King Donogan on the docks. Flolum looked as if he expected to see her there. Kaldorite paladins had standing in gnomish eyes, she had found out, though not enough for them to let her delve into Artalon’s mysteries. It was frustrating beyond measure. The gnomes seemed impossible to persuade.
She clenched her fists and said softly to herself, “I abandoned Aradma for this nonsense.” Her thoughts turned to Fernwalker. The poor girl had seen her mother taken away by Athaym and the vampire queen. She remained in Windbowl with her father, Odoune, and with Suleima and Oriand.
“What was that?” Flolum asked. He glanced up at her absently. He wasn’t really interested in what she had said.
“Nothing,” she replied. “Just speaking to myself.”
/> “That’s irrational,” he stated. “Don’t do that. It won’t help negotiations to have you muttering in the background.”
She was used to his sharp tongue by now. Kristafrost said it was just his way. He was old, one of the oldest in Cloudmoore. He didn’t look it, though. Gray hair, not white, circled the sides of his bald head, and his face didn’t have too many wrinkles. His coppery eyes seemed young and sharp. Still, the gnomes were the longest lived race on Ahmbren, sometimes living more than a thousand years. Arda suspected they owed their long lives to the fact their ancestors had been dragons.
She knew why he didn’t let them explore. He was determined to make sure no one, other than his own people, figured out how to unlock Artalon’s secret. It made sense. If the city was indeed a magical amulet as powerful as they all suspected, it needed to be kept from the wrong hands.
Kaldor made me Light’s seal. If I’m not the right hands, who is? Well, if nothing else, her strengthening bond to Light had at least expanded her capacity for patience. Through meditating on the seal, she had deepened her awareness far beyond what her paladin’s training had revealed to her. It seemed that one of the Light’s deepest qualities was patience. It was interesting. She didn’t feel that the seal so much affected her link to the element, her ability to channel, but rather it affected the insights she gained from the element. Faith, hope, and love. Patience binds the rays of Light together.
Flolum’s gaze momentarily went back to Anuit. “What’s she doing here?” he asked. He had little tolerance for the sorceress. Sorcerers had been the ones to take Artalon from the gnomes the first time.
“She’s with me,” Arda reminded him. “Kaldor accepted her as friend too.”
He snorted. She had told him this before, but he always made her repeat it. Her and Anuit’s personal knowledge of Kaldor garnered his respect, however. She wondered if he had ever met Kaldor. The human wizard had been bound outside of time in Taer Iriliandrel for centuries, but she suspected Flolum had been alive before that. That meant his parents could have been alive when the God-King Aaron raised Artalon from ruin out of the depths of the sea to make it the seat of his Empire.
Artalon. It had been called the Eternal City. It had been the gathering place of the first human empire—which later became the Darkling Empire—that was able to challenge and defend humanity against the High Elven Imperium of the sidhe. Its power rose and fell in cycles, falling to darkness, being made whole again, and then falling once more.
Focus, Arda, she reminded herself.
The sidhe were the first to arrive. A man and woman appeared, descending from the sky as two blue streams, and touched the ground. The man stood just over five and a half feet tall, with chestnut-brown hair cut straight and severe a few inches short of touching his shoulders. The woman had short, bowl-cut blond hair. Her ears were somewhat unique in that their tips were rounded, falling instead of rising, like floppy bunny ears. She wore a necklace of smooth, polished sapphires which hung like water drops over a low-cut red gown.
“I am Tindron,” the man addressed them, “and this is my sister, Tallindra.” His eyes narrowed when he saw Arda. “What is this filth doing here? I do not treat with darklings.”
Arda smirked. Most sidhe despised darklings. Long ago, the Darkling Empire had nearly wiped out the High Elven Imperium and destroyed all but two of their cities. Despite the fact that humans had turned to sorcery and become darklings in order to survive the sidhe campaign of human genocide, the high elves had never forgiven them. Moral outrage is usually myopically one-sided. Tallindra seemed different, however. She shot her brother an angry glance.
King Donogan frowned. “She is a Kaldorite paladin, and friend to Kaldor himself. You know the name Kaldor, do you not?”
Tindron’s eyes narrowed. “Indeed. I served Valkrage for many years, and it was I who first greeted Kaldor when Taer Iriliandrel returned to the world. If you are friends of Kaldor, where is he?”
“He is dead,” Arda stated flatly.
Tindron cocked his head. “That is unfortunate.”
“None of this is important,” Flolum broke in impatiently. “Why are you here?”
“Aye,” a gruff dwarven voice broke in. “This I too would like to hear.”
A dwarven man approached, accompanied by a small honor guard. They wore polished plate, thick and strong, over chain mail. The man had jet-black hair and a ruddy face. His beard was short by dwarven standards but still spilled over the top of his chest. Fierce blue eyes stared intently at the high elven contingent.
“Your Majesty,” Attaris bowed. “King Leiham of Farstkeld.”
“Hello, Attaris,” Leiham replied, grinning. “It’s been a while.” Then he put his hands on his hips and glowered down at Flolum. “It’s the height of rudeness to call a council and then begin before everyone arrives!”
Flolum looked surprised for a moment. “You’re right!” he admitted. He slapped his head. “I ask your pardon, King Leiham.”
Tindron folded his arms over his chest and glowered.
“Sorry, elf,” Leiham chuckled. “If you didn’t want to wait for everyone else, you should have been more fashionably late.”
“The others are coming!” Yinkle squeaked. She pointed. Over the water, a landing craft with men rowing approached the dock.
Arda nearly gasped when she saw the three who stood at the bow. A Surafian darkling, dusk skinned like Anuit, accompanied by the largest orc man she had ever seen and a slender light elf woman with turquoise-colored hair in a pixie cut.
“Son of a bitch,” Arda said. The orc moved for a brief moment, revealing Athra’s Jewel standing behind him.
Above them, a zeppelin landing craft descended from the ratling fleet. It landed on the dock, arriving before the Surafian row boat. The small flying vessel contained more than just a ratling crew. With them were three trolls, a woman and two men. The woman had creamy cyan skin, and most of her head was shaved bald except for a mass of knotted red braids which fell down on her left shoulder. She wore little, only a harness of jewels, a cholis top, and a dinosaur-skin loincloth. The men were similarly dressed, with matching leather harnesses and loincloths. One had green fur and bright yellow hair, jetting wildly in all directions. The other was tawny brown, and his bright green hair was trimmed short into a gently tufted mane.
Yinkle ran forward, ignoring everyone around her. “Cory!” she shouted. “Captain Cory Piper!” Arms outstretched, she ran into the embrace of the ratling that stood in front of the trolls. He had a silver-pommeled sword, feathered green cap, and bright green cape. They hugged each other fiercely.
“Yinkle!” he exclaimed. “Yinkle! I never wagered I would see you again!”
She hugged him tight. “Cory Piper!” she squeaked again. “How I missed you!”
The trolls walked around the two reunited ratlings and came to stand with the circle of envoys. “I am the Matriarch of the Vemnai,” the woman stated softly. She refused to look at the sidhe. “These are my two husbands, Tidot and Ghiel.”
“Two husbands?” whispered Anuit.
Arda shrugged.
“We only await the final vessel,” Flolum stated.
The trolls looked back at the approaching row boat and nodded. When the vessel drew up alongside the dock, the three standing leaders stepped out to join them.
“I am Tahim,” the red-eyed darkling man said, “Sultan of Surafel. These are my—”
“I’m Thorkhan, Chief of the Gaimar Tribes,” the orc interrupted in a deep voice. “And the sultan does not speak for me.”
“And you, lady of the seelie?” Arda asked. She was curious about the light elf. She had the body markings—hers were teal leaf patterns over pink skin—of a firstborn seelie, and glowing striations in her irises, blue on green. Her beauty was striking, but there was nothing soft in her expression.
“I am Seonna,” she declared, “Chief of the Gaimar Tribes, and conqueror of Thorkhan.”
Arda blinked. There was something l
ost in translation there. Seonna’s speech was as thick with the orcish accent as Thorkhan’s.
Athra’s Jewel stepped off the boat. She moved more naturally than Arda remembered. Her eyes glowed blue, but there was something else about her. Arda blinked. Coming into focus for the first time, she saw a brilliant crystalline webbing of golden light encrusted around the mechanoid construct.
I’m seeing the Kairantheum! she realized. This is what Aradma saw within the runewardens’ divine magic. Kaldor said when the Seal of Light took root within me I would begin to see it.
She knew the light of the Kairantheum was hidden from everyone else, but as brightly as Athra’s Jewel shone with the golden light, she was amazed she was the only one who saw it. She saw similar golden light—much dimmer than in the construct—in the Matriarch and in Attaris. Both of them were runewardens.
Flolum stared at the copper and bronze woman. “What is the meaning of this?” he finally asked. “I know this construct. I helped Xandelbrot build it. How have you come by this?”
“I am your construct no longer,” the metal woman replied. “I was named Athra’s Jewel by Valkrage, but now I am simply Athra. I am the goddess made manifest through the fruits of civilization.”
Flolum shook his head. “This won’t do at all. Begin shutdown sequence, seven zero five nine two.”
“No,” Athra responded. “You cannot shut down a goddess.”
“She’s right,” Arda confirmed. “She is a construct no longer. I can see the goddess in her.”
Anuit glanced at Arda. Then she turned back to the construct. “Athra, what happened to you?” Anuit asked. “Do you remember us?”
Athra nodded. “Indeed I do. The one you call Aradma brought me to this vessel and opened a pathway for me into this world.”
“Aradma!” the Matriarch exclaimed. Her two husbands traded glances. “Where is she? And is Tiberan with you?”
Arda shook her head. “Aradma—we don’t know. Tiberan died nine years ago. Valkrage’s final act of madness.”
When Dragons Die- The Complete Trilogy Box Set Page 95