by Jack Conner
His tone brooked no argument, and Baleron held his tongue, chastened. He noticed that Prince Rilurn wore a satisfied smirk.
“Sorcerer,” the king was saying. “I’m most concerned about aerial threats such as glarumri. We haven’t had to repel an all-out attack from the skies since before the reign of King Grothgar the First. I don’t care what sort of resources you expend in the doing, but I need the city protected from above if at all possible. Can it be done?”
Logran wore a small smile. “I think I have just the tool,” he said.
“Good.” Albrech breathed a sigh of relief. “Now—for military matters.”
The meeting moved on. When the day’s business was concluded, the king dismissed the gathering, then gestured for Baleron to remain behind. When the others were gone, Albrech looked soberly at his youngest son. “Be careful what you say, Baleron. People will listen to you and weigh your words more heavily than someone else because of who you are. What you are. Think before you speak. You appeared foolish and rash today.”
“Maybe you’re right, Father. But when I think of the elves being butchered and enslaved by Grudremorq ... their souls snared and taken to his master to be devoured and cast into the Second Hell ... And remember, I’ve seen sacrifices being given to him, time and again. I lived within him, if you can believe it, for three years, with his stink in my nose, his fire making the air so hot it burned the lungs, slew the old and weak—”
“I know, my son. But these are dark times, and dark decisions are called for. There’s nothing we can do for Clevaris save coach the other states in how to aid it. I need you to understand that, and understand my decision. Do you?”
Slowly, Baleron nodded.
“And there’s something else,” Albrech said slowly.
Baleron felt a tug of apprehension. “What?”
“Only I and Logran know of your ... Doom. I don’t know how much sway it has over you—I haven’t seen you behave in any way other than that which you would not have behaved before—yet I know you ... well, not as well as a father should. Logran knows you better, and he is watchful.” He paused. “Both of us are wary.”
The prince understood. “You think the Doom may have prompted me to advise aiding Larenthi.”
Albrech rocked his head, just slightly, in a pondering gesture, and pursed his lips. “Maybe,” he said. “Maybe.”
“Then why let me on the Council if my advice is to be ignored?” When Albrech just looked at him steadily, not blinking, Baleron thought he understood that, too. He almost laughed. “You want to see what I say, to hear what the Enemy wants. You think ... you think that will help you act against him!”
Baleron rose to his feet. Suddenly his limbs shook, and he felt a heat burn his face. His fists clenched and unclenched at his side.
Suddenly a look of nervousness crossed Albrech’s features.
Baleron took a step back, forcing himself to breathe deeply. “If you will not listen to me, I will not come to these meetings.”
“No, Baleron. You must come. Don’t you see? You can aid us. If your instincts are influenced by this ... thing ... then we merely need do that which is opposite to your leanings. Or at least weigh it carefully.”
“If that’s true, then you shouldn’t have told me this. Now my Doom knows.”
Albrech’s lips curled up. “It can know, can it? Can it juggle and do tricks, too?” But there was something chastened, even frightened, in his voice. “Now off with you.” He began to rise.
“Wait,” said Baleron. “Will this affect your giving me a command of my own? It must. How can you give me a command if you think I’m an agent of the enemy? That’s why ... Not because men wouldn’t follow me. Because my Doom would.”
Albrech took a ragged breath. “Partly, perhaps. But, as I said, I’ve seen no sign of this so-called Doom, unless this thought of yours to aid Larenthi is it. But of your infamy I have seen and heard much, and I have not forgotten Haben. That is why I deny you a command. Though, I admit, the other is worrisome.”
That night Baleron went carousing, or tried to. He entered the Fighting Stag, a tavern he’d often frequented with Salthrick, and sat himself at the bar. Drinking a glass of mulled wine, he gazed about at the revelers lifting their mugs and shouting rude jests. A harpist strummed his instrument in a corner. Smoke haze hung against the ceiling. All was wood and fur and noise.
Before the doomed caravan set out, Baleron and Salthrick would come here (among other like places) to clink mugs and sing bawdy ballads. Other men would join in, and the eligible women would flock to them. Baleron had been well liked among the regular townspeople, if not the nobility, and he always enjoyed himself amongst them. He had his pick of girls.
But now he just gazed dully about the room, nursing his drink. His father was right, but that didn’t ease his mind. Without aid, Clevaris, the City of Light, would fall. And he had to sit here and wait for it! He ground his teeth.
He tried to search for some sign of his Doom, as he had on many occasions before, to find it within himself. Sometimes he thought he felt a coldness, an icy shadow in his breast, but that was all. It was veiled from him, he supposed; his groping mind couldn’t penetrate it, to the point where he wasn’t altogether sure he wasn’t imagining it entirely.
He drank, and drank some more. At last he tried to turn his mind outward, not inward. Tried to let himself become one with the patrons of the tavern, as he used to, to lose himself in old comforts.
Try as he might, he did not feel one with the crowd as he ought to. The happy din was an alien sound, one he was not part of. He was separate. Other.
At last some of his old mates recognized him and approached him, smiling and hailing him. “The Black Prince returns!” they laughed, clapping him on the back. “We’d heard you’d come back an’ wondered if y’might stop in on us. But we hardly recognized ya.” “What’s this, gray in your hair? And your face! You look ten years older,” said another. “Nay, twenty!” said the third.
“I feel it, lads,” Baleron said.
“Ya look as though y’ve stared into th’Eye of the Beast ‘imself!”
“That he does!”
Baleron did not reply. He remembered the shadow that had leapt out at him from those horrible, fiery eyes—the shadow that was even now wound about his soul and helping to orchestrate the overthrow of everything good left in the world.
The first speaker lowered his voice. “Is’t true y’were a slave o’Ungier all this time?”
Baleron remembered white-hot whips searing his back, remembered the stench of death and the howls of tortured slaves. Somehow to speak of it, here, now, to these young men, would trivialize it. He said nothing.
His old friends looked at him strangely, and then at each other.
“It’s a tragedy what happened,” one said in sober tones. “Oksil and all. Hard to imagine. Y’hear those names all your life, Ungier and Oksilith and Celievsti, and y’think o’em like mountains, ya ken. Never changin’. Then all o’a’sudden they’re moving, things are happening, an’ y’realize they’re not jus’ names. An’ somewhere out there, b’yon’ those mountains, those real mountains, there’s Oslog, an’ it’s real. An’ out in’t summere there’s ... him.” His voice was a hush now. “Him ... an’ he’s hungry.”
The others looked grim. “But he won’t come this way,” one said. “His fight’s with the Elves, right? With th’Light. We’re safe. We’re not Light, we’re not Dark.”
“Yeah, but we’re on this side o’ the mountains. An’ that’s the wrong side, know it.”
“Ha! I’d like t’see him come after us. We’ve got the best troops in all the land. Isn’t that right, Bal? You were there. You musta seen them do plenty o’fighting. I bet you even got in a few licks yerself, knowin’ you.”
“Maybe,” Baleron said. “Maybe.”
At something in his tone, or maybe his face, the others took a half step back, looking at him as if in fear.
Shortly they left him, shoot
ing him odd looks and muttering to themselves. He ordered another glass. Sipping on it, he reflected that his old life was gone.
He remembered how the demise of the wedding caravan came about largely because of his poor reputation, and his poor reputation had come about largely because of his carousing. That must end, he thought, if men were to follow him.
He left the noise and the smoke and returned to his quiet room at the castle, where he had many bottles of liquor. As he sampled them, he thought of Rolenya, and tears burned his eyes. He pounded a wall and his fist came away bloody. Was she truly dead? He couldn’t bear the thought. He felt guilty for not grieving over Shelir and Elethris and Felias as much as for Rolenya, but there it was.
He drank.
In the morning he awoke with a terrible headache. He breakfasted with the royal family, and it was good to see his brothers and sisters again, even though they peppered him with questions. He was in no mood to talk, and his answers were short and sullen. Afterwards he went to the stables and took Lunir for a ride through the skies. The fresh wind against his face helped clear his mind, though his stomach did not appreciate the tilting, heaving land below.
Later he attended the meeting in the War Room. The councilors listened to him little more than they had the day before, but whether they actively acted against his leanings he could not say.
And so it went. During the next days, he got to see more of that room than he had ever wanted, and every day the news turned grimmer. Larenthi’s southern half was now a ruin. Spies and assassins had sprung up among the other Crescent nations. They were all werewolves that had been posing as Men or Dwarves or Elves, some for prolonged periods. All had “escaped” from various strongholds of the Shadow within the last three years—an interesting coincidence. Perhaps they’d all been made into werewolves at once? If so, it suggested a well-laid plan, one difficult to evade, and that was not good.
Diplomats began to arrive from the other Crescent states. Those from the farthest nations already had ambassadors here, and they communicated with their leaders via seeing stones and mirrors and pigeons and the like. Shortly all would be here, and then the Great Council could be held. Hopefully then the Crescent states could reach a consensus on what action to take.
Each day after his session in the War Room Baleron would return to his suite, but he would not drink himself into a stupor. Those days were behind him, he resolved. He would not be seen drunk or rowdy. He must project the image of a worthy leader, a man who deserved to be followed.
This did not mean that he abstained from all pleasures. Far from it. During that time he acquainted himself with a courtesan named Amrelain. Young and lovely, she filled his bed and furs with her heat, and she took the doubts and despair from his mind. He would no longer allow himself to brood. He would enjoy his life—well, as much as he could—but privately. He would do his duty and let the rest be swallowed in lust. It seemed healthier than the alternative, and he found himself responding to his siblings with more friendliness. He even began to smile and laugh, though not long and not often.
After two weeks spent with days of war and nights of flesh, he returned one evening from the War Room to find his rooms transformed. Incense burned from stalks on his mantle and scented candles filled the air with honey and vanilla. A fire blazed in the fireplace, and a naked and beautiful Amrelain lounged drowsily on the thick bear rug before it.
The firelight reflected on her oddly shiny skin. Anointed with heady oils, her body shone enticingly.
Hearing his arrival, she sat up slowly, languidly. A gold collar made her elegant neck look even more so. Her murky brown eyes burned into his, and her dark hair hung in silky waves down her back and framed her ripe buds of breasts. She was young, long and lean and narrow-hipped, and his for the taking.
“Good evening,” she said. Cat-like, she smiled, almost purring.
He loosened his collar. “It wasn’t good until now.”
“Bad news today?” She looked at him carefully, sensitive to events in the outer world. She knew as well as he that these were ominous times and like everyone else was fearful. Yet she seemed glad to be able to aid the effort in the only way she could, by relaxing one of the members of the King’s Council, and a prince at that.
He shook his head, approaching her. “No worse than usual.”
She had two glasses of cinnamon-spiced liquor on the rug beside her, and he plopped down and took a healthy drink after she kissed him.
“Clevaris still stands?” she asked.
“For now.”
She just looked at him with her large, dark eyes. Her lashes were long, her lips full. Her tawny body shone with oils. Her nipples were erect. The shaven area between her legs smelled of vanilla. She ran a hand up her thigh, tracing the side of her hip, then up to a breast. Her finger circled the nipple once, twice, thrice, then squeezed it. She let out a little moan.
“Let me ease your mind,” she whispered. “Let us forget the world for now. Tonight, right now, it’s just the two of us, and what can we do but offer each other pleasure?” She kissed his chest, his neck, gently bit the lobe of his ear.
“Excellent points all,” he agreed. He downed the drink and lay himself beside her. Her skin was hot. He enveloped her in his arms and met her lips with his, and, just as she had promised, the world fell away.
Afterward, as he lay drowsily by the fire, her next to him, she fingered the many marks on his body.
“So many scars,” she marveled, tracing her fingers over his chest. The light reflected off of her soft brown eyes, and she wore a tender expression. One of her breasts, warmed by the fire, pressed against his arm. Sweat beaded her forehead and cheeks, and her beautiful face was flushed.
He took her hand and brought it to his mouth. He kissed her fingers, one by one.
“What did you think about, when you were a slave?” she asked solemnly.
He sighed and leaned back, gazing up at the elk-horn chandelier. He decided that, in her presence, talking of the experience was somehow more appropriate than with his old mates. “I thought about what Ungier would look like with my hands around his neck.”
One of her silky legs caressed him. She began tracing his scars again with her fingers.
“Are all of these from whips?”
“Most of the ones on my front I got in the torture pits.”
Her fingers played lightly over a big knot of scar tissue. “How did you get this one?”
“Pliers.”
“And these?” She indicated some shiny spots where his flesh had been seared.
“White-hot pokers.”
“And these small ones?”
“Needles. They would put needles in certain places—nerve centers—and the pain would ... well, they were masters at the Art.”
“The art?”
He took the last sip of his liquor. A pleasant burning slid down his throat and warmed his belly. “Oh, yes, the Borchstogs very much consider it an art. Ungier even more so. When he would direct my sessions ... ”
“Is it true you were a slave there for three whole years?”
He ran a hand through her long, dark hair. “Why don’t you make us more drinks?”
She rose obediently and sauntered off, naked and glistening. With a smile, he watched her go. Soon she returned with two more glasses of cinnamon-spiced liquor and sank next to him.
“To freedom,” she said, and they clinked glasses and drank it all down in one swallow. It burned his throat and fired his belly, and a pleasant fuzzy sensation swept his mind.
He pulled her down and kissed her, and she wrapped her legs about him. The fire was hot on his backside, and she was hot to his fore, and the drink was swimming in his head. He felt good. He felt alive. He almost felt—
Someone knocked on his door. He tried to ignore it, but whoever it was would not be denied, and at last Baleron barked for whoever it was to enter.
Logran did, grim and worried. Amrelain let out a little squeak and threw the bear rug abou
t her, hiding her nakedness from the sorcerer.
“What is it?” Baleron demanded. “Have you purified Rondthril?”
“Glorifel is under attack. It’s Ungier. He has an army, and it’s already broken through the border outposts. He’s almost here.”
Chapter 8
Hastily Baleron dressed, kissed Amrelain, and descended to the royal armory to be armed and armored. There the other princes had already gathered and were with some assistance preparing for battle. The princes talked little among themselves, but all were tense. Baleron joined them and soon was properly outfitted.
He left with them to meet their father in the courtyard before the Castle. The king was mustering mounted troops, and he was already wearing his spiked armor and death’s-head helm. Chill wind howled all around. To the south, a tide of dark clouds, flickering with lightning, swept this way.
A troop of knights assembled in King’s Courtyard. Grooms led out horses, and knights donned last pieces of armor or weaponry.
Onnng sounded the endless bells beyond. Onnng. Onnng.
A groom brought out Baleron’s black mount (also armored) and the prince heaved himself into the saddle. Once mounted, he exchanged grim looks with the other princes, who were likewise swinging astride their steeds.
“We’ll show that damned vampire,” said Larik. He sounded especially young, even though he was older than Baleron. “Ungier and his ‘stogs won’t get past our wall!”
“We’ll send him packing, all right,” promised Kenbrig, the oldest after Rilurn.
Rilurn, whose face looked especially tight, said, “Maybe he’s come for Baleron.” To Baleron, he added, “Maybe he missed you.”
Kenbrig chuckled.
Baleron said nothing, only met Rilurn’s gaze unblinking.
“We don’t have time for this,” the king said. “Save your anger for Ungier.”
At the head of the procession, King Grothgar led them all down King’s Road toward the South Gate, and Baleron and his brothers followed behind him. Alarm bells continued to toll ominously throughout the city, and the thunder of horse hooves echoed off the tiled roads. Teams of oxen pulled catapults and ballistae. The air tasted of storm.