by Jack Conner
He eyed her warily as she approached. “Rolenya ...”
“My love.” She smiled up at him and bowed.
He shriveled. This could not be her, he knew, remembering his father’s intended designs, designs he himself had tried to thwart. Not the real Rolenya. Not if she was here. Unconsciously he clutched a fist so tightly his claws drew blood. Oh, Rolenya.
Forcing calm, he inclined his head. “Welcome to my refuge, Princess. What may I offer for your company?”
“Oh, I don’t know. Perhaps ... a kiss?”
If he’d had any doubt as to her new condition, this dissolved it. “No,” he choked. He looked away.
“No? Isn’t it what you always wanted, for me to love you, to offer you myself willingly?”
“You are not the woman I wanted. Play no games with me. But ... when?”
She raised her eyebrows innocently. “When what, my lord? My heart’s desire?”
He narrowed his eyes. “You play a dangerous game.”
“Do I? Are you then a threat to me? I think not.”
Just how powerful was she? he wondered, leaning back upon his throne. Powerful enough to come to my place of strength alone and without fear.
He sighed. “Speak.”
She eyed him for a time, and he wanted to squirm under her gaze. Finally, she said, quietly, too quietly, “You are a fool, Ungier. I do not know why Master takes such pity on you.”
“Pity? I would dispute that. But how am I a fool?”
“To turn your Borchstogs away from Him and towards you. To set yourself up as a god in His stead.” A coy look came over her. “In fact, dear Ungier, my betrothed, I believe that is why He sent Baleron to you in the first place.”
“How do you mean?”
“He knew that He would destroy whomever He sent Baleron to, and I think it no coincidence that out of all His servants He chose you to be the Spider’s keeper until such time as Celievsti could be weakened.”
Ungier trembled. “Do you mean to say that destroying Gulrothrog was deliberate? That it was all part of His design?” He clenched a shuddering fist. “Why? Why would He do such a thing? Not merely to punish me.”
She did not answer, just stared at him hungrily.
He tried to shrug it off. He would not display weakness before this ... thing. How long had she been like this? The question burned in him.
“Fine,” he said. “Then do accept my apologies on our Master’s behalf, for I see that He is the ruler of us both now.” He took a deep, steadying breath, let it out. Dealing with this imposter pained him more than he would have thought, and he knew this was another way Gilgaroth had chosen to rebuke him.
Where was the real Rolenya? he wondered. Dead and gone, surely—cast into the Inferno of Illistriv. Part of him wept for her, or the loss of her; he would miss her keenly. He had known many elvish maidens in his time, but in his mind and heart she reigned supreme. He shut away these feelings and forced himself to endure her possessor’s presence. He desperately wanted to know what Gilgaroth had in store for him.
“I will think on it,” she said, meaning his apology.
“I did our Lord’s bidding, as always,” he said.
“Not always,” she reminded him gently, and he did not argue. “Now for the real reason I have come. I have news of great import. News and more.”
“What news?”
She smiled, and again it was coy. “Celievsti ... has fallen.”
Ungier’s gasped. “So ... the plan has succeeded! I hardly believe it!” He looked at her oddly. “And you ... you have done this?”
“I have. Can you not smell the bloods of Elethris? Can you not smell the blood of King Felias?”
Ungier felt overcome by awe. He sank back in his throne, shocked into silence. She studied him for a time, measuring his reaction.
“Indeed,” she said, when she saw the depth of his understanding.
“So ... Larenthi is vulnerable.”
“Lord Gilgaroth has already gathered His armies to invade it. The plan has been in motion for years—years and years.”
“And the destruction of Oksil? The loosing of Grudremorq?”
“All part of the Spider’s web.”
His black eyes glimmered as he soaked in her words. Eagerly, but not too eagerly, he asked, “And this army? What of it?”
Rolenya smiled beatifically. “Lord Gilgaroth needs only to choose a commander.”
Ungier waited with baited breath.
At long last, she said, “He chooses Grudremorq.”
She laughed at his disappointment.
Furious, he said, “I am Grudremorq’s Keeper! If anyone should receive the glory, it should be I! He is a brute, not a general!” When she just looked at him, he hung his head in defeat. “But why?”
She stepped toward him, and he pressed his back against the throne. He smelled her, smelled the powerful bloods upon her body. He twisted away from her even as she approached. She seemed to delight in his revulsion.
“Don’t you see, my dear?” she said softly. “The Master forced Grudremorq to destroy his vessel.”
“You have not told me why.”
She reached him and ran a finger up his thigh, and he squirmed. “Why, for several reasons: to punish you, of course, for sending Throgmar to kill Baleron; for hiding Rolenya from Him at Gulrothrog, and for just generally being yourself; to kill the soldiers of the Crescent without wasting his Borchstogs; but also, not least, so that Grudremorq would be free to choose another form. And he has. It is beautiful. I have just come from meeting with him at the head of his army. Oh, it was spectacular! 00 Lord Gilgaroth, swollen from drinking Celievsti’s energies, towering over the God of Fire, himself huge and flaming, and spread out upon the ground the legions of Borchstogs and others ...” A dreamy look crossed her face, then her eyes turned to Ungier once more. “Grudremorq, with his army, marches to the breach even now.”
“So that is why my home was destroyed.” That set Ungier back. He felt a heavy bitterness in his voice as he said, “I was used too cruelly.”
Her beautiful face screwed up in a sneer. “You taught your soldiers to speak another language!” Her voice was livid, as if he had committed the greatest possible blasphemy, and perhaps to her he had.
“Did I err so greatly? I only improved on Oslogon. Slight changes over eons.”
“How can you improve on the Master’s perfection? To think so is your crime, and you have been punished accordingly.”
He leaned back, away from her. “Very well. I accept His judgment.” He felt a melancholy edge creep into his voice. “I was called the Shepherd of the Flame for thousands of years, you know. And now, it seems, the Flame shepherds itself. It feels strange...” She said nothing, and he let the silence stretch, musing on his tenure as the King of Oksilith.
“And Baleron?” he said at last. “Him and his Doom? How do they enter into things?”
“Without Baleron, I would not have been led amongst the hosts of the North, would not have been able to infiltrate Celievsti.”
“Is that not something he would have done anyway?”
“That is the beauty of the Doom, dear Ungier. It binds him to his path, a path that makes sense to him, one that he might have chosen. Otherwise he could tear away from it. But his Doom has just begun. There is much more he has to do. While the Crescent still stands, while the Master still lives, his labor is unfinished.”
“Good. I hope his Doom brings him to me again. I have plans for him.” Again Ungier thought of Gulrothrog, his home that was no more. Suddenly a wicked thought occurred to him, and he looked at her suspiciously. “So ... you don’t need me, after all. Father sent you here to kill me, didn’t He? Well, I will not be—“
He started to rise, but she pushed him back down as though he were a prisoner upon his own throne, and he was amazed at the strength in her lithe arms. “Grudremorq will assault Larenthi,” she told him. “But another army has been massed that will strike a second target, and it too nee
ds a leader.”
“Don’t toy with me,” he warned.
She smiled again. “Oh, I’m not, my dear fiancé—not at all.” She paused. “Well, don’t you want to know who will lead this second army?”
He narrowed his black eyes, did not answer.
She said nothing for a long moment, seeming to enjoy his misery. Then at last she told him simply, “You. The Master chooses you.”
He regarded her skeptically, probing her angelic features for any hint of subterfuge or treachery. Could she be telling the truth? It was too wonderful to believe. Finally, finding no trace of deceit, he asked eagerly, suspiciously, “This is the Final War, the Last Great War, the war to end all resistance to our Master, to engulf the World in His Shadow? And I will be a general leading this war?”
“You and Grudremorq will break the Crescent,” she confirmed. “You will break the stalemate that ensnares our Master and keeps Him pinned behind the Black Shield. You will loose Him upon the World.”
Ungier threw back his head and laughed. Rolenya merely smiled, but somehow that was even worse.
Chapter 5
The Larenth River gurgled through the green hills, though it was lower now, half dammed by the ruin of Celievsti to the south, and without Elethris to purify the waters, they were growing dark with the corruption the Borchstogs polluted it with. Baleron did not know how much longer they would be drinkable.
The hosts passed very near one of the great forest-gardens, and he longed to explore it before it would be no more. As Grudremorq had driven the men and elves north, Baleron had seen country more wondrous than any he’d imagined, dales and fens and rearing mountains, yet as soon as Grudremorq reached it his hosts set it aflame. Forest-gardens withered and blackened. Grassy fields became wastelands. They smoked to the south even now.
Baleron was taking a deep draught from his flask and appreciating the scenery when the Archmage Logran Belefard approached.
“The fight goes ill,” said the mage, not making it a question. Tall and thin, with steely hair and beard, he looked tired and old, but his brown eyes shone with vigor. And sadness. Elethris’s death had had a profound impact on him.
“Aye,” Baleron affirmed. He was one of the captains of the rearguard defenders, protecting the group from Grudremorq’s outriders, who had harried them constantly since leaving the ruins of the White Tower. Serathin and elves from other towers and settlements had joined them and aided them, but it was a losing battle and Baleron knew it. “They are too many.”
“Make them choke on us, boy.” The Archmage gestured to the forest-garden. “Get revenge for the rape of this land. You don’t know how precious this place is, how sacred the ground we walk. Did you know that much of what we see was shaped by Queen Vilana herself? I have seen her do it. She will walk upon a naked hill, singing, and grass and flowers and even trees would grow at her feet.”
“Amazing.”
“Oh, yes. And it is in this wise that she has arranged entire forests to her liking. Can you imagine? Power that comes from song? And many of her bloodline share the same ability.” He said this pointedly, and Baleron frowned. “Other elves share it, too, of course, but none so strongly. It’s staggering to think that she’s now a widow and will have to lead Larenthi alone.”
“We all lost loved ones.”
For a time they walked in silence. There were only the sounds of the hosts, of hooves on grass, the soft gurgle of the Larenth, wooden wheels and carts groaning under their burdens. Men and elves talked grimly, if at all, and their unwashed armor clanked and scraped. Baleron smelled sickness and oil when the wind was not blowing.
He thought of Shelir and Elethris and Felias, all dead, and he wondered, not for the first time, where Rolenya was. If she escaped as people say, where is she?
They were working their way up a green hill when a rider cantered by headed south, shouting, “We’ve reached the Ring of Peace! Clevaris nears!”
Baleron and Logran glanced at each other, ripped out of their musings.
“Clevaris ... “ muttered Baleron.
Logran’s look of woe retreated, and his eyes glimmered. “Shall we go have a look?”
“How fast can those old legs go?”
They ran to the crest of the hill, which was the southernmost hill of what the elves called il Liea-Frin, or the Ring of Peace—the tall green hills than encircled the Plain of Riel, upon which Clevaris lay. There he and Logran paused, and awe fell on Baleron. Below stretched a whitely glittering, walled city of towers and domes and great monuments. Its towers rose higher than any he’d ever seen save Elethris’s, and they were wildly, beautifully shaped. White and rippling, their lines were those of living things, flowers and breasts and lips and trees, all surrounded by greenery. Half the city seemed covered in forest, a part of it. The rippling blue ribbon of the Larenth passed through the hills and cut right through the heart of the city, and the wide blue, branching arms of the Larenth encircled it, serving as moats to the city. The moat was known as the Larenthellan and it was spanned by many graceful bridges under which white gondolas meandered. Elves purified the river in the pass.
“Beautiful,” Baleron breathed.
“Yes,” said Logran, his brown eyes gleaming. “I have lived for two hundred years, but the sight of Clevaris always makes me feel like a boy again.”
Baleron glanced behind him at the distant thunderclouds and veil of smoke, approaching like a wall of despair.
“Come,” he said. “Let’s go down to it.”
The men and those that had become part of their train were met on the Plain of Riel by a host of elves under the leadership of Lord Cesdron; his chief lieutenant was Prince Jered, the young son of Felias and Vilana whom Baleron had heard much of. Baleron saw him from afar, tall and golden-haired, straight of back, with a clean, unlined face, and Baleron felt humbled, for when he looked into the mirror he saw one bowed and broken, his face scarred and lined with worry, his eyes troubled, his dark hair showing streaks of gray.
There beside the banks of the Larenth the elves gave succor to the survivors of Celievsti and the men who had brought them there. The Havensri stayed, awaiting the arrival of Grudremorq, who had been slowed by the army of Erethil, a city that had stood for five thousand years but after this week would likely stand no more.
Prince Jered invited Baleron and Albrech into Clevaris, extending an invitation from the Queen.
“But I’m il Enundian,” Baleron said.
Jered’s open expression did not change. “The Queen would not invite you into Clevaris if she thought you were a danger.”
What she thinks and what is may be two different things.
When Jered withdrew, Baleron took his father aside. “I will not go,” he said.
Albrech looked surprised. “Why? Don’t you know what an honor it is? Mark me, I don’t like the elves, but you cannot throw this offer in the queen’s face.”
“Wherever I go, destruction follows, Father. Clevaris is too beautiful. I would break it.”
“Bah! I was at Oksil, too, or have you forgotten? And I was at Celievsti. I didn’t cause their destruction. And neither did you. So quit this foolishness before I strike you!”
“It was my Doom that did it. I know it.”
Albrech’s hard eyes turned flinty. “I may not know much about Light or Grace, son, but I know one thing, and that’s that no sort of curse felled the White Tower. Only one thing could do that, and that was Elethris’s death, and the deaths of his highest chiefs. Some spy, some assassin, slipped in amid the confusion and brought this about. That’s what did it. Not your Doom. Not some prophecy. A few inches of steel.” He added bitterly, “Or teeth.”
Baleron thought on this. Perhaps his father was right.
“Good,” Albrech said, seeing his stance soften. “Now come.”
Prince Jered escorted them into the city, but Baleron still felt such grief that he could not fully enjoy the spectacles that waited within. And indeed, there were so many wonders, so
many lofty things, that most became a blur to him, great trees and mansions, song drifting from a tower. The palace loomed like a cluster of white towers bestriding the river ahead. Not only did the Larenth pass through the heart of the city, Jered told them, it actually entered the palace to form the bathing pools of the Queen. At last Jered led them to the wide marble steps that led up to it, and they ascended past thick marble columns towards the great open doors. It was said that the doors of the Palace were always open. Jered led them inside into a great hall.
“Welcome,” Jered said.
Albrech seemed to be regarding Jered strangely. Baleron watched his father’s face and wondered what that look might signify, but Jered seemed not to notice.
“We are not here to gawk,” Albrech said. “Take us to the queen.”
Nonplussed at the king’s shortness, Jered’s gaze strayed from Albrech to Baleron.
Baleron shrugged. “He’s always like this.”
Jered laughed. His laugh was easy and good-natured. The light made his blond hair shine. “This way,” he said.
He led them up a winding staircase that cut through an open space so high that Baleron grew dizzy, and down a certain hallway. Servants and soldiers moved about in small groups, tending to business in a grim and efficient manner. It was clear that war had come upon them. Jered led King and Prince Grothgar up another set of stairs and then another. Baleron was panting and out of breath by the time they began rising up a spiral, and he realized they were ascending to one of the ivory spires. Remarkably, though Albrech was sweating and out of breath, it was Baleron who had to call for a breather. Just the same, Albrech did not protest.
When they reached the top, Jered ushered them into an ornate suite and there Baleron received his first glimpse of the queen. He saw only her back, for she stood looking out a window cut in the wall gazing out over her city. Her hair was golden, but it was the only thing bright about her. She wore all gray, the Larenthin color of mourning. Her very posture seemed withdrawn, and she looked very frail. Could this truly be the legend that had summoned much of the forests of her country with just her voice, that had helped build the mighty kingdom of Larenthi alongside Felias?