by William King
It was strange – he was more at home now in the land of his enemies than he was in his ancestral home. He wondered what it would be like to go back to his estates finally and forever. Never to have to look upon this place again.
He knew he should be filled with nothing but contempt for the high elves, but he was not. He had found a great deal to respect in Ulthuan and over the long years, a great deal he would miss. Still his life was not his own. It never really had been since he entered Malekith’s service. The Witch King had taken a pit fighter from an impoverished ancient line and made him into the deadliest assassin in the world. He really ought to be grateful for that, but he wasn’t any more.
He leaned forward to pour more wine. As he did so, he allowed the powder he had palmed to drop from his hand. It was dragonspike, a poison inevitably fatal to mages, its effects stronger the more magical power they possessed, and the Everqueen had a very great deal indeed. He would soon find out if the poison were potent enough to kill an avatar of godhead. According to legend it was, but legends were notoriously unreliable.
It would slow her breathing and destroy her nerves and stop her heart. It could be found only in the forbidden jungles of the lost continent of Lustria, and it had no effect whatsoever on those not possessed of magical power. Urian sipped his own wine. The taste was not in the slightest impaired.
The Everqueen’s hand hovered over her own goblet. He wondered for a moment whether she had seen him, whether she suspected what was happening here. Part of him rather hoped that she did. He was surprised by that. He was not usually sympathetic to his victims. He kept the smile pinned to his face and waited to see what she would do.
She raised her glass to him, and then put it to her lips. ‘Your health, Prince Iltharis. May you live a thousand years.’
‘And you, your serenity.’ The queen drank. Her eyes widened. The glass dropped from her hands.
Urian rose from the cushions on which he rested and shouted with genuine concern. ‘Come quickly. Her serenity has been taken ill.’
Urian was possessed by a sudden sense that a war that would shatter the world had just begun and that he had played a vital part in starting it.
Chapter One
Tyrion sprang to one side as the stegadon erupted from the undergrowth. It was reptilian, far bigger than an elephant, with a parrot-like beak large enough to snap an elf in two. Horns long as lances protruded from the huge shield-like crest protecting its head. The thing was massive, even by the overgrown standards of wildlife in the sweltering Lustrian jungles.
It felt like facing an angry dragon. He heard bones snap and flesh pulp as one of the human porters was crushed under the stegadon’s foreleg. The rest of the expedition scattered in panic, hoping to find safety in flight.
Tyrion knew he was very close to death. The hot, humid air carried the acrid, lizard stench of the beast. The ground vibrated beneath its monstrous tread. It bellowed deafeningly and it felt as if the wave of sound alone might knock him off his feet.
He drew his sword, feeling faintly ridiculous. Trying to tackle this huge creature with such a weapon was like trying to fight a bull with a pin. He could not win this battle on his own. He needed help.
‘Hold your ground, men!’ Tyrion shouted to the humans. ‘Stand steady! Don’t flee! If you get lost in the jungle, you will die!’
There was something about his voice that commanded obedience even in the most fearful. There always had been. Over the past century he had bestrode hundreds of battlefields and always inspired courage and respect in those around him. It was no different now.
Most of the warriors, the majority of them Norsemen from Skeggi, paused in their flight and drew their weapons. They considered cowardice a great shame. All it had taken was Tyrion standing his ground to remind them of their own honour. The huge blond warriors would not flee when a lone elf refused to.
The porters were less brave, being only thralls to the Norse. They were not looking for a heroic death. Even they wavered though.
Only Leiber, their guide, a shipwrecked sailor from the Old World, looked calm, and he was seeking cover in the trees above. Sensible man, Tyrion thought.
Tyrion’s shout drew the attention of the beast. Its head swivelled to inspect the small creature that had the temerity to defy it. Its beady eyes glared at him with ferocious hatred. Its huge razor-edged beak snapped open and it lunged towards him with a speed that was utterly unexpected in a creature so huge.
Tyrion threw himself forward, rolling under the creature’s front legs, passing through their mighty arch and coming out on the creature’s side.
As soon as he did it he knew that he had made a mistake. His twin brother Teclis had been standing behind him. He now became the focus of the creature’s attention, the target of its attack.
Although he was no longer a sickly cripple, Teclis did not share Tyrion’s speed and strength. He could not get himself out of the way of the charging beast before it closed the distance between them. Instead he spread his arms wide, chanting ancient words and making mystical gestures. He was trying to cast a spell, but there would not be enough time for him to work his magic before the creature was upon him. Tyrion needed to get the stegadon’s attention now if his brother was going to live.
He lashed out with his sword, aiming for the weak point where the leg joined the torso. The skin there was soft, not covered in armoured scales like the rest of the beast’s body. Flesh parted and muscle gave way slightly. The beast let out a deafening pain-filled roar. Tyrion barely managed to get himself out of the way as the columnar leg swung his way.
The Norsemen had taken up their spears and axes and joined the fray. Hagar, a large maniac with a bristling red beard, threw himself at the monster, chanting the names of the old gods of the Norse. His axe smashed into the creature’s beak, chipping part of it and drawing blood.
The stegadon turned on Hagar, jaws snapping shut around his torso, beak cleaving through his flesh. His shield buckled under the pressure. Bones cracked as Hagar’s ribcage gave way. The man gave a final defiant roar that was transformed into an agonised death scream as his body was snapped in two.
Watching their friend die gave the rest of the Norsemen pause. The beast raced towards them, a loud hiss escaping from its nostrils. Its beak was painted red with Hagar’s blood but its lust for death was not slaked. In an instant, many more of the Norsemen died beneath its clawed feet. Tyrion winced. They had lost more men and they were no closer to their goal. It seemed like this expedition was doomed.
A sweep of the stegadon’s gigantic head tossed another Norseman high into the air. He crashed through the branches above him and returned to earth, falling face-down in the mulch of the jungle floor. His body writhed for a few seconds, his bones broken by the impact, and then turned to jelly as the beast trampled him.
That was too much for the thralls. They raced off into the surrounding forest. At least one of them encountered some other terror, for an agonised scream rang out. Tyrion had no idea what might have killed him – the jungle was so full of perils that it could have been almost anything: some giant man-eating plant, a huge vampire bat, a sabretooth jaguar as large as a horse. He had seen all of these things on his recent travels.
One or two of the humans had taken refuge in the branches of the trees. This gave Tyrion an idea. He clambered into the bole of one monstrous plant, reached up and grabbed a vine, then swung himself out over the monster, dropping onto its back. So enraged was the giant brute that it barely noticed this presence. He ran along its spine, thinking that he would cut the vertebrae in the neck.
As he reached the bone shield, he caught sight of Teclis out of the corner of his eye. An aura of flame surrounded his brother. He made a gesture and a jet of fire blasted towards the creature. The pyrotechnic wave expanded to fill Tyrion’s field of vision.
The stegadon let out a screech of fear and pain. Tyrion ducked do
wn behind the bone shield to get out of the way of the fiery blast. Even so he felt its scorching heat. The vines dangling from the trees above withered and died. The monstrous brute reared on its hind legs. The bone shield swung backwards and it seemed like it might come down and crush him against the flesh of the monster’s back.
Tyrion let go, dropping to the ground. He tried to scramble clear but his booted foot slipped in the bloody mess of one of the human corpses. He fell sprawling as the maddened dinosaur reared and roared and whirled around, threatening to trample him underfoot.
Tyrion half-crawled, half-sprang out of harm’s way. The beast crashed into a nearby tree, sending some of the hiding humans tumbling to the ground and to death beneath its paws. The tree broke in the middle and fell into the inferno that Teclis had conjured. Sap bubbled and burst into flames as its moist interior was exposed to the fire. The explosive firecracker sounds panicked the giant reptile even more.
The monster turned and glared at Tyrion. He was directly in the path of the creature’s escape. For a moment he met its gaze and he saw the fury there. The creature pawed the ground like an angry bull preparing to charge. There was no way he could get out of its path in time. He had seen how fast the creature moved. The stegadon lowered its head and raced straight at him, an enormous engine of living death.
Tyrion smiled and stood unmoving, making himself the easiest target possible. The creature came straight at him, covering the ground with appalling speed. At the last possible moment Tyrion sprang, vaulting onto its long snout, stabbing it in the left eye with his sword, before leaping over the great bone shield that protected its neck, landing on its back, slashing the vertebrae and then rolling clear.
It did not fall to the ground as he had expected. It kept moving as if unaware that the connection between its brain and its body had been severed. He recalled something that Teclis had once told him – that according to natural philosophers these monstrous creatures had several brains, and they did not die easily.
This creature certainly seemed to be living proof of that. It kept moving, and he thought that for one horrible moment all he had succeeded in doing was attracting its attention and providing a focus for its anger. But this was not the case. Bleeding heavily from its wounds, its flesh scorched by Teclis’s magic, the great beast blundered off into the woods, trying to escape the flames and the source of its agony, bellowing its rage and pain to the heavens.
Tyrion stood up, half expecting the creature to return. Teclis moved over to where he stood. ‘Are you all right?’ his brother asked.
‘Never better,’ Tyrion responded. ‘But I don’t think some of the people with us feel quite so good.’
Tyrion looked around: a score of the humans lay dead on the ground, some of them reduced to a bloody pulp, many of them whimpering in agony as they died. He was not sure it was a good idea to shout out to draw the attention of any of the survivors because it might also draw the attention of the great beast back to them.
On the other hand, he could not see what else to do; if he waited too long then all of the people with them would get lost in the woods and separated forever. They still had need of their porters and guides if they were to achieve the goal they had set out with when they started this expedition into the green hell of the Lustrian jungle.
In the end they only managed to find a few humans alive and capable of following them. Fortunately one of those was their guide, Leiber, the one man who claimed to know where the lost city of Zultec lay. They divided the remains of their supplies between them and then wearily trudged on, deeper into the deadly jungle.
Giant plants blocked out the light. The air stank of perfume and rot. Brightly coloured birds shrieked amid the boles of the huge trees. Small scuttling things moved through the carpet of mulched plant life on the forest floor. The heat was sweltering. In the distance something huge and reptilian crashed through the undergrowth. Tyrion thought of the stegadon and slowed his pace accordingly. Reduced in numbers as their party was, it would be better to go around than encounter another of those great bad-tempered beasts.
He pushed an enormous cloying leaf to one side. It stuck to his skin. When he pulled his hand away from its sticky surface faint drops of red clung to his fingers. They were already disappearing from the surface of the leaf. He knew then that if he took his blade to the plant, blood would mingle with the gushing sap. Even the plants here were vampiric. Everything seemed to live to eat anything else that came within its grasp.
He glanced enviously at his twin. A faint aura of silvery light surrounded Teclis. He looked as cool as if he were out for a stroll along a windswept beach in Cothique during a day in early spring. His spells protected him from the heat and the jungle’s claws.
Despite all the hardships they had encountered, Teclis looked confident and at ease. Over the past century, magic had filled out his scrawny form and removed the worst effects of the wasting ailments that had crippled him in childhood. The potions he mixed for himself kept him healthy and active. He would never be as tall or as muscular as Tyrion, but now he could go for leagues through the tropical heat and endure hardships that would have killed him only a century ago. The only sign of his many debilitating childhood illnesses was the faint limp with which he now walked and which no amount of alchemy seemed able to get rid of.
At this moment Tyrion very much envied his brother’s mage-craft. He was sweating heavily even though he had stripped off everything except the undergarments he needed to keep his light mail armour from chafing. His face and clothes were dirty and torn although not as much so as their human guide’s.
Leiber looked like a lunatic: tall, emaciated, with madness glittering in his bright blue eyes. His long hair was thinning on top and drawn back in a dirty blond ponytail at the back. A moustache that reminded Tyrion of a rat’s whiskers drooped down past his chin and gave his whole face a mournful air of defeat.
Leiber was originally from the Old World, a shipwrecked sailor from the human city of Marienburg, but he had spent much of his life looking for gold and treasure amid the ruins of the slann cities of the Lustrian continent. He claimed to know these jungles better than any man alive, although Tyrion was starting to think that perhaps this was not so great a feat as Leiber made out.
Very few humans lived long in Lustrian jungles. They came here seeking fortunes but what they mostly found was death. Already most of the company of men the twins had hired as porters or guards had died or vanished, some from mysterious fevers that not even Teclis’s medicines could cure, some from the attacks of the giant jaguars common in this part of the jungle. This had only been the latest of the misfortunes to bedevil their expedition.
One man had died screaming when the larvae of a bloodwasp emerged from where he had been stung a few days before. The foul little maggots had eaten their way out through his entrails. Two thralls had been devoured when a skittering cloud of piranha lizards dropped from the branches above them. The flesh had been stripped from their bones in the seconds it had taken Teclis to cast the fiery spell that had turned their killers into shrivelled exploding corpses.
Others had simply deserted, vanishing in the night, never to return. Tyrion did not blame them for that under the circumstances.
Leiber had not vanished. He was just as obsessed with finding the city of Zultec as the twins were. Of course, he had his own reasons. For Tyrion and his brother, Zultec was the last known possible resting place of Sunfang, the mystical blade forged for their ancestor Aenarion by the archmage Caledor Dragontamer during the wars at the dawn ages of the world.
For Leiber, it represented a trove of gold and mystical secrets that he hoped would let him reclaim the ancestral lands he had lost back across the wide ocean. He claimed to have penetrated to the very heart of the city once and to have spent the past few years trying to find a way back.
Tyrion was not sure how much he trusted the man or the remainder of his companions.
They were desperate rogues even by the standards of the rough crew you met in the makeshift human camps of the Lustrian coast. They had the look of casual killers. Most of them were descended from the same Norse folk that had raided the coasts of Ulthuan for centuries: big, wild-looking, blond men with braided hair and beards. Their eyes were the blue of painted Cathayan ceramics. Their manner was bluff and fierce. They swore by the names of strange Kurgan and Hung gods. These ominous deities reminded Tyrion of the Ruinous Powers of Chaos, and he would not have been surprised to find out that they were related.
All of the humans except Leiber glanced at the two elves as if considering murdering them for their gold and scampering back to the old, decaying port of Skeggi, the only real permanent settlement along the whole coast. No one there would ask them how they came by the money, or what had happened to those who had went off into the jungle with them. Skeggi was a city of pirates and robbers and mad dreamers.
Tyrion was not troubled. There were only five of the humans now and he could handle them himself even without the aid of Teclis’s magic. Providing, of course, they did not cut his throat while he was sleeping. He smiled nonchalantly.
‘You find something funny, sir elf,’ said Leiber. His voice was a harsh croak well suited to his guttural native speech, so unlike the liquid tongue of the elves.
‘No, Leiber, I am merely happy,’ said Tyrion in Reikspiel, the common language the humans used. It was true too. There was something about this desperate venture that gladdened his heart. He was rarely happier than when off on some quest in the company of his wizard twin.
‘You find all of these deaths cause for happiness? I had heard elves were cruel, my friend, but I had not thought to find you to be an example of that.’
‘You are confusing us with our kinfolk, the druchii, whom you call dark elves. The deaths give me no happiness. It is the adventure I enjoy.’