“But if the key is here,” Ishander called, “why did that Mala woman . . . ?”
Drakis turned his gaze to the distant hilltop. “Mala! What have you done?”
She stood at the edge of the cupola. Her green eyes gazed languidly out over the ruined city, down the long avenues beyond the fold plaza to the ruins of the Citadel. Drakis was there, she thought. Mala was sorry that she was going to have to hurt him once more, but she hoped he would understand in time.
“I am here,” she said aloud as she reached up with her hand and touched the amulet that still hung about her neck. “I am waiting for you.”
The enormous figure of a dragon swooped past, suddenly obliterating her view of the city. It was a blur of rust-browns and reds barreling by in a roar of wind. Its shadow felt cold on her shoulders but was gone in an instant.
Pharis is here, Mala thought, with resigned calm.
She reached down and held the amulet in her hand. It was not metal after all, she realized, though part of the charm cast upon it was that it should appear as such. No, this was made of rarer stuff; the carved horn of a dragon and not just any dragon, she knew . . . but the dragon whose spirals were closing about her even now.
“Horn to hand,” she whispered to the amulet she held. “Then bone to bone . . . my bones to yours, is that not true, Pharis?”
“It was the ancient way,” came the words hissing into her mind. “Forgotten to all but my kind. You have done well, Daughter of Humanity.”
“I have done what I must,” Mala answered as she stepped to the edge of the cupola.
The wings of the enormous dragon shifted, catching the wind as it turned toward Mala. Pharis landed with his claws digging into the broken edge of the fallen temple dome, his gigantic head craning toward the red-haired woman standing between the columns. “Where is the key?”
“Hidden,” Mala replied. “Hidden where you—a creature who cared nothing for the help of others could never find it. The humans never betrayed the dragons. The dragons did not betray humanity . . . it was only you.”
“I betrayed no one!” Pharis snarled in her mind.
“You betrayed your own kind,” Mala said quietly.
“The dragons betrayed themselves!” Pharis decreed, his wings flexing open in a show of might. “Hestia and her court! They called her Queen! They were pets—docile and domesticated by the soft cage of human dependency!”
“They were the friends and partners of humanity,” Mala said.
“They were slaves made fat and lazy by the magic humans dredged up from the heart of the world!” Pharis’ words thundered through her mind. “Dragons once hunted the wilds of the Far Steppes! Their wings carried terror and respect across the skies. Their roar shook the earth and froze the hearts of their prey. We were the masters of all below us and above. We had a destiny—stolen from us by a human empire that ruled not by right but by virtue of ease! Without the corruption of magic we would have been a great race—a conquering race dependent on no one!”
“And so you brought down the human empire,” Mala sighed with understanding. “For the good of the dragons.”
“Yes . . . for their good,” Pharis’ words blared through her mind even as the dragon before her roared to the sky. “The magic of the humans had made us weak like cattle! Without it, our kind would be free once more to fulfill our destiny—as I am about to fulfill mine! Give me the key, Mala, and you may yet live through this day!”
“So that all hope for humanity may be buried at last,” Mala smiled. “And the evidence of your own offenses? And tell me, great Pharis, in the centuries since the fall of human magic, what great destiny have the dragons risen to fulfill? Where are your race’s mighty achievements? Show me what the lives of this empire have purchased in the mighty rise of your freed dragonkind?”
Beyond the wings of Pharis, Mala caught a flash of brilliant light from the ruins of the Citadel.
Mala smiled sadly as she turned her back on the dragon and stepped into the cupola.
“Give me the key!” the dragon raged.
“I cannot,” Mala answered stepping slowly across the broken floor toward the open arch on the far side of the cupola.
“You will serve me!” Pharis bellowed in her thoughts.
“But I do not have it,” Mala replied. “It is not here.”
“But you told the others . . .”
“I said that I knew where it was,” Mala continued, not turning back. “And now it is too late for you to stop them from using it.”
She took another step. She thought she saw the shadowy silhouette of a woman, tall and beautiful, standing between the pillars. Her arms were open. It may have been a statue but she thought she saw the arms widen to welcome her.
“Good-bye, Drakis,” Mala said, smiling sadly as she took another step. “I know my own way home.”
Searing flame exploded about her.
“NO!” Drakis screamed.
Fire from the maw of Pharis engulfed the distant hilltop, the red sash vanishing in the flames. The cupola atop the fallen dome shattered with the force of the dragon’s breath, cascading downward over the fallen ruins.
“Stay where you are, you fool!” Jugar shouted. He had run as quickly as his still troublesome leg would allow to where the Key of the Font had come to rest. It had not fallen straight down and into place as the dwarf had hoped but had slid down off the exposed curve of the Font crystal and lay to the side. The dwarf now had the key in hand and was struggling to climb the slippery curve of the Font to its apex.
“Hurry!” Ishander urged. “Look!”
The drakoneti had come into view, their horrible features chattering in anticipation of catching their prey. There looked to be more than a thousand of them charging down the ruins of the roadway leading from the Fold Plaza.
“Even if we activate the Font,” Ethis slurred his words, his figure growing more formless by the moment, though his concentration on his reproduced human hand remained intact. “How will we get past them to get to the folds?”
“And the dragon is coming,” Ishander observed. “He flies directly for us!”
The dwarf continued to carefully crawl his way up the face of the crystal. He was near the apex of the stone. “One desperate act at a time, boy!”
The screech of the dragon cut across the ruins. The drakoneti raised their arms in excitement as they ran toward the ruined Citadel, their howling voices joining in a threatening chorus.
The stones around the Citadel rotunda shook with the force welling up beneath it. The sound was deafening as brilliant, blue light gathered in the Font crystal at their feet.
“Well,” Jugar said loudly as he reached the apex of the Font. He could see the brilliant outlines of the fissure at the top of the stone and aligned the key to match it. “Let’s see what this does!”
The dwarf plunged the shard into the stone.
Aether was the lifeblood of ancient Drakosia. It came from the Citadel of Light and flowed throughout Khorypistan, Tyrania, and Armethia. It was the underlying blessing beneath the united societies of humanity and dragonkind. Its use was ubiquitous and as varied as human thought could devise. There was not a single aspect of human or draconic life that was not directly empowered and improved by the application of Aetheric force. From the improvement of crop yields to transportation folds to dental hygiene or performance art, Aether was found at its foundation.
One of its most important applications, however, was in the strengthening of its cities. It allowed for magnificent architecture that would otherwise have been impossible using normal techniques of stonemasonry or construction and, equally important to the besieged humans of their age, to reinforce those same walls in the event of attack. Thus, each wall and structure of ancient Drakosia was strengthened by the force of Aether magic—an omnipresent, simple, and persistent spell which drew on the Aether to remember where the stones of the entire city were originally placed and to provide force enough to keep them there even when the force
of an enemy was applied to it.
It was the collapse of this most elemental of spells that was the doom of the human empire—for when the Font went dark and the Aether stopped, the spell failed the architecture. A very few impossible structures failed on their own, but it was a trifle compared to the destruction visited on the cities by the invading elves who were bent on obliteration rather than conquest.
So the fallen stones of fortification walls, buildings, and towers lay in ruin and the cities were forgotten.
But the faint tendrils of magic once imbued in the stones remained—and the spell remembered.
Drakis was thrown to the ground.
The flood was rolling beneath him. He tried to get back to his feet, concerned for a moment that he had let go of his statue and somehow caused all this. The stones under him continued to buck, and he fell back down on all fours. The dwarf was sliding down the blazing crystal dome head first, rolling over the edge and onto the rotunda floor nearby. Drakis tried to crawl over toward him, but the stones moving under his hands and knees were making even that difficult.
Drakis looked again at the stone of the Font. It pulsed brilliantly, emitting a blinding column of light skyward.
“Jugar!” Drakis cried out. “What’s happening?”
“It’s working!” Jugar yelled.
“I know it’s working but . . . the stones!”
The broken pieces of masonry scattered about the rotunda floor were rising up from the ground. Slowly, the broken fragments of walls, columns, arches, and ceiling were drifting purposefully upward.
“By Thorgrin’s Beard!” the dwarf shouted over the terrible cacophony of grinding, crashing sound that thundered around them. He pointed toward the hilltop where Mala had given them their signal. “The city! It’s . . . it’s coming back!”
The blackened fragments of the burned-out cupola were rising back into place atop the fallen dome on the distant hill, followed by the slow resurrection of the dome itself, heaving upward, rising to where it had once stood magnificent watch over the city. The temple that had stood beneath and behind it was rising, too, its stones reforming the walls and flying buttresses of the elegant sweeping structure. Beyond the walls rising around him, Drakis could see more towers lifting up from the dust, piercing again into the skies they had once graced.
But not perfectly, Drakis realized.
Many of the stones remained where they lay. Sections of wall were missing, and in some cases entire halves of buildings remained lying on the ground. Several of the towering spires assembled their striking spindly tops to hang in the sky without any visible supporting tower walls beneath their jaggedly re-formed centers. In the rotunda around him, several of the surrounding columns appeared to float in the air, attached neither to the ground nor to any arch above. Only part of the circular wall surrounding the citadel rotunda had rebuilt itself and only a small section of the entrance portico had assembled itself to float solidly toward the northwest. It was a dead city being raised by its own ghostly memories, trying to take on the substance long since passed away.
And the drakoneti could be seen still rushing toward them, although they appeared to be having some difficulty navigating the still shifting terrain underfoot. Weaving between the risen towers, flying with mighty beats of his wings, Pharis drove through the sky directly toward them.
The chimerian lay senseless on the ground on the far side of the Font, his form disturbingly nondescript. Ishander had his arms wrapped around one of the pillars, holding on to it firmly with his eyes closed.
“Quickly, lad,” Jugar shouted. “We’ve got to get the key!”
“I thought we had the key!” Drakis said angrily. “You were the one who put the key in the Font!”
“I put the shard in the Font,” Jugar yelled. “It’s that tool I used to do it with that’s the key. It’s still holding the shard. If your friend Pharis gets a grip on that, he can remove the shard and close the Font. And I’m guessing at the speed he’s coming, we don’t have much time!”
The Font of the Citadel flowed, drawing upon the magic from within the world for the first time in centuries.
But the Aether magic that had protected all of the cities of the human empire awoke to its touch. Stones must be put back, walls reassembled, towers rebuilt, roads smoothed, and statues gathered back to their intended forms. A few such repairs and reinforcements—even in times of battle—would not have demanded much of the Font that supplied them, for such sustaining power would have been localized to the point of conflict.
But as the magic awoke, it called on the Font from everywhere at once. All across the ancient kingdoms of humanity—Khorypistan, Tyrania, Armethia, Pythar; in the Kesh Morain and a thousand other ruins across a continent; from the boundaries of the Siren Coast on the Charos Ocean to the Bay of Ostan off the Lyrac Shores—the magic that had failed to preserve the great cities and towns of humanity awoke and called upon the Font of the Citadel of Light to provide whatever Aether was needed to rebuild the ruins as much as possible.
And the Font answered by drawing as much Aether as was demanded to rebuild an entire empire at once.
CHAPTER 41
Slaughter
SJEI SMILED, baring his sharp, pointed teeth.
The shifts of the figures in the Battlebox promised a complete victory. Three Cohorts were pressing an attack against the enemy units who had been falling back in their positions for the last hour. Now they were neatly boxed in on three sides with their backs to the sea. Casualties among the front line Impress Warriors had been heavy, but they had consistently been pushing the rebel lines back—establishing gate symbols as they moved. The Army of Drakis—as he understood they had fashioned themselves—had learned at last not to press their advantage after the gate symbols had been inscribed but it had cost them ground and, for that matter Sjei thought ruefully, the ability to win. Unable to press any advantage they had merely been able to protract the battle but not, he knew, to change the inevitable outcome.
“Well, Sjei! It seems that the Emperor shall be given another victory this day.” It was the cloying voice of Wejon Rei near his ear. The man had been a problem from the beginning, and now that victory was all but assured his support of the northern campaign would, no doubt, be remembered as one of eternal support. “I am gratified that our Battlebox should be so useful in the support of this campaign. Indeed, it is our own forward sequence of gates that brings the blessed Aether to support this noble campaign.”
“We all strive to fulfill the Imperial Will,” Sjei nodded without commitment. Wejon had arranged the audience for Shebin with the Emperor—one that had brought her to pass dangerously close to the circle of Ch’drei and her Iblisi obsession with truth—not that the Emperor cared one way or the other about the truth except as a tool for his own wants. Wejon was becoming a “loose stone underfoot” as the elf saying went—something small that can cause you to fall. Sjei would have to find a way to rid himself of this loose stone but his voice betrayed no such intention as he spoke. “Each contributes what he can and in his own way to his greater glory.”
Wejon bowed slightly. “Indeed, as is the duty of every citizen to . . .”
The Aether globes lighting the room suddenly dimmed, flickering twice before brightening again.
Everyone in the Battlebox room froze in surprise.
Aether globes never dimmed.
Bang!
Sjei started at the sharp sound, his attention drawn at once toward the source of the sound.
An explosion of red glass flew through the room. Sjei instinctively raised his left arm to protect his face and eyes.
Bang . . . bang, bang, bang . . .
A succession of concussive sounds followed quickly. White glass now shot through the room. Cries of pain and surprise echoed between the columns supporting the ceiling.
Again the Aether globes dimmed, flickered and then died for one long, breathless instant before brightening again.
Then there was silence.
>
Sjei lowered his hand hesitantly.
The sand in the box before them was flat, no longer representing a model of the distant battlefield. The figures remained on the sand but they lay on their sides in their last positions and no longer moved.
Sjei looked up at the brass bar overhead.
The red glass beads were completely missing, blown to dust it seemed. Their only remnant was a slight rosy cast over the sands at one end of the box. Of the thirty-seven white beads that had been on the bar only moments before there now remained, by Sjei’s count, twenty-eight and of those only nineteen remained on the right side of the bar.
Sjei reached down, grasping Wejon’s tunic and hauling the Fifth High Priest of the Myrdin-dai to his feet. “How far are nineteen folds?”
“What . . . what has happened?”
Sjei had no time for dithering. He shook the elf to get his attention. “How far north is fold nineteen?”
Wejon came to himself, trying to break Sjei’s grip on his clothing without success. “How dare you put your hand to the Fifth High Priest of . . .”
Sjei wheeled Wejon around, pointing up toward the remaining beads on the brass rod. “Where is that? Where is fold nineteen?”
Wejon’s eyes were suddenly fixed on the brass rod. His mouth was slack with astonishment.
“How far?” Sjei insisted.
Wejon swallowed. “It’s . . . that fold is somewhere near the Chaenandrian border . . . the southern end of the Northmarch folds, I think.”
“The southern end?” Ch’dak Vaijan, the Minister of Law, had joined them in staring at the remaining beads. “That’s over four hundred leagues south of the battle!”
“Almost our own border,” Arikasi, the Minister of Occupation, sputtered in astonishment.
“No,” Sjei said, his lips curling back from his sharp teeth. “That’s as far as the gateway folds fell but whatever happened reached us here in the Imperial City.”
“Impossible!” Wejon declared.
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