“Where you’re concerned, always.”
“You always hold back?”
“You’re alive.”
“And you’re too arrogant by half.”
“You’re the one who knows about arrogance, that’s certes.”
Elora bristled visibly. She didn’t like being reminded of the girl she’d become before Thorn rescued her from Angwyn. Spoiled and mulish, without the slightest regard for anything or anyone around her, everyone’s worst perception of a Princess, good for absolutely nothing. She’d started life with a band of stalwart friends to stand beside her and then, in a flash that turned her dreams to nightmares, lost them all. She found herself cast from one side of the world to the other, into a land of strangers who cared not a whit for the girl herself but whose goal was to use the Sacred Princess Elora Danan to advance their own political ends. The Deceiver displayed much the same ambition, to supplant her spirit and soul with his own and exercise her power himself.
Since the only people who ever had faith in Elora had been taken from her life when it had barely begun, it was small wonder she grew into an adolescent who had precious little faith in herself. Especially since she’d never been able to banish the nagging fear that somehow their deaths, the destruction of Tir Asleen, the Cataclysm that rocked all the Great Realms a decade before, were somehow her fault.
“Stop,” Thorn said again, more quietly this time, yet somehow his words rang out with far more compelling force. “We’re in this together now, as we’ve never been before; we just made that free choice. Stand or fall, win or lose, it’s together, or not at all. We can’t accept that, and the trust that comes with it, we’re done before we start. Better off staying where we are and play the victim.”
“Harsh judgment, Drumheller,” Elora said.
“It’s what the moment calls for, lass. Khory needed to take your measure, and her own, although”—and here he fixed his gaze on the warrior—“a tad more tact and possibly common sense would have been appreciated by all concerned.”
“You’ve shown us the way we have to bend, mage,” Khory told him. “Howzabout yourself?”
“Perhaps it comes of the realization I truly can’t do this alone. Not escape this trap successfully, nor defeat the Deceiver. Staying where we are, we’ll never know.”
“How do we go, Thorn?” Elora asked. “Where do we go?”
“The Chengwei speak of journeys to the end of time as beginning with a single step.” He rose to his feet, which placed his gaze on a level with his companions’ waists. “Shall we take ours together and see what happens?”
“Bare steel?” suggested Khory, but the Nelwyn sorcerer shook his head.
“Not to start.”
“You expect the Malevoiy to abide by any rules of hospitality?”
He grinned and for that instant a surprisingly carefree, almost wild, spirit flashed from his eyes.
“You’ve both demonstrated how quick you are on the draw. We’ll let them make the first move.”
He reached up toward the glowing globe of energy he’d cast, but Elora’s hand intercepted his. She stepped right beneath the orb and opened her palms to it, caressing its surface as it descended in answer to her invitation much as she had the shell of the dragon’s egg. She took a deep breath, streamers of radiance erupting from the globe to her nostrils, and it appeared as though she was inhaling its very substance. Once again, her silver skin gave off a soft glow, lit from within by the energies running rampant within her. There was a faint, contented smile on her lips, the kind of pleasure folk find in stroking cats. She exhaled through her mouth, a puff of scintillation that faintly echoed the fiery outrush of a dragon’s breath, and released Thorn’s globe.
It shone no more brightly than before, yet both of Elora’s companions recognized the lasting endurance of its radiance.
“Leaving a candle in the window, are you,” Thorn wondered aloud in a gentle voice, “to show us the way back?”
“Something like that,” she replied. “But also to remind the darkness that it isn’t alone.”
“You think it’s afraid?”
“More, lonely.” Inspiration touched her, tardy companion to the impulse that compelled her to energize Thorn’s globe, and she reached into her traveling pouch to draw forth a stuffed bear that had clearly seen better days. It had been repaired more than once, by a seamstress who hadn’t always known what she was doing, but those tears and gashes were the least of its injuries. The bear had been scorched all the way up one side, as though by some terrible fire, and one of its crystal eyes was gone. It had never been a handsome creature, its strength—like its creator’s—lay in its character. There was a solidity to its features, a sense that here was a trusted friend and boon companion. The eye that was left sparkled beneath the radiance of Thorn’s globe and brought a proper smile to Elora’s lips now as it had the first time she saw it, because it somehow made the animal seem alive to her.
“He’s seen better days,” Thorn marveled.
“I wouldn’t know” was Elora’s reply. “This is the best he’s ever been for me.”
“You were asleep when I brought him to you.”
“Carried from your farm in Nelwyn Vale to Tir Asleen on the back of a dragon,” she recalled aloud, but kept silent the other part of the tale he’d told her years ago, that the dragon in question had been Calan Dineer. “That must have been an adventure.”
“I thought it was a dream.”
“Sometimes I wish it had been. And that I’d wake snug-abed and on my birthday. I remember screaming; I think that’s when I broke my voice.” Elora had what was called a whiskey voice, husky, almost a little hoarse, deeper and more resonant than you’d expect from a girl her age. “One moment,” she continued, “I was in my bed, safe asleep; the next I was naked in the waryard of the King’s Keep in Angwyn, with the whole world shaking around me. The bear was in my arms.” She made a sudden, wryly humorous quirk of the lips, quickly there, as quickly gone. “No one could pry him loose. Not without breaking my arms and fingers. He was my protector.”
“As I charged him to be.” In memory, Thorn recalled how he’d held the gift before him and looked square into its crystal eyes, talking to it as he would a stalwart comrade in arms. His words then were “All that I would be, were I here, let him represent.”
To his surprise, he heard Elora repeat them now.
“All that I would be, were I here,” she told the bear, as Thorn himself had a decade and a half before, “let you represent. Keep this place safe, as you did me, till I return. Or in my stead, the rightful inheritors.”
And as one of Thorn’s brownie companions had said to him then, so did he now to Elora. “Do you know what you’re doing, child?”
“I’m caretaker of the dragon’s egg, Thorn.”
“Then shouldn’t the bear stay with it?”
“What is hope but the essence of a dream? Khory’s called me the Hope of the World, that’s how my name translates in the old Dracic tongues, the language of the dragons. I feel like this is my home, as much as the physical world of the Daikini. I can’t leave it empty. I’m taking away its heart and soul for safekeeping, it seems only fair and fitting and right for me to leave a bit of my own behind. Isn’t that why you left the bear with me, back in Tir Asleen? To stand surrogate because you couldn’t be with me in person.”
“I should have.”
“Most likely then you’d have died, along with Sorsha and Madmartigan and all the rest, and maybe me as well in the bargain.”
“Time to go then?” Khory asked.
Thorn nodded and Elora started to. Then, on a final impulse, she pulled her scabbarded sword from her belt and thrust it into her traveling pouch.
“Elora,” Thorn protested, “you’ll need that weapon!”
“A weapon, yes,” she agreed, and the reverse of her gesture brought for
th a length of polished wood that was longer than she stood tall, “but not that one. The time isn’t right.”
“You know how to use that?”
Elora flashed an evil grin to Khory, who chuckled in response. “Your Sacred Princess, mage,” she said, “she’s chock-full of surprises.”
Together, forming a rough triangle with Khory in the lead, Elora flanking her behind and to her left to cover her blind side, while Thorn brought up the rear a little off to Khory’s right, they stepped from the light…
…and the darkness that surrounded them abruptly vanished, as if it had never been.
* * *
—
They found themselves atop a jumbled mound of rocks, as though someone had taken the whole of the Stairs to Heaven, the greatest mountain range on the world of the Daikini, and smashed it with a sledgehammer, leaving only the detritus you’d find at the bottom of a quarry, the castoff bits of stone that were of no use to anyone.
The vista should have been breathtaking, for they stood as high as the summit of many of the peaks they knew. In the Dragon’s Realm, form was minimal, but substance piercing. Every sense was heightened to a fever pitch, bombarding the consciousness with more information than it could process, so that the body was engaged in a constant struggle to keep from being overwhelmed by this magnificent delirium. Adding to those sensations was an even more glorious passion, a fierce hunger more keen than any infant’s for life in all its wondrous variety.
The Realm of the Malevoiy, by contrast, was nothing but form. In surface impressions, it very much resembled the Daikini world Elora had known her whole life, although the overall landscape was far more barren. What struck her most, however, was the lack of substance, the sense that all the physical aspects of this realm had forgotten their purpose, in the way that people of a certain age tend to misplace the details of their lives. There was a great and fundamental weariness to this domain, as if the very act of physical existence was growing to be more trouble than it was worth. And from that descended a primal desolation because the elements that drove this Realm at its zenith were blood and cruelty and an insatiable hunger for violence. Glory here was found in savagery and destruction—not the mad chaos of the demons but something far more wicked. Conquest was the order of the day, whether it be a single soul or an empire. It was a place, and a people, utterly without mercy.
Now, there were no more fields of conquest. The Malevoiy had seen and done too much, and they’d become bored. Their land simply took its cue from them.
Illumination of a sort came from a ghostly radiance that most resembled dusk, where objects were defined as much by shadow as light. By that same process, everything was leached of color; even the dramatic hues of Elora’s gown registered to her eyes merely as gradations of gray-washed carmine. As for her argent skin, Elora thought that if she stripped herself naked and leaned against any wall of stone, she would disappear, her flesh indistinguishable from the landscape around her. She wondered then if that “disappearance” applied to more than the purely physical. This was a place where a person could easily lose herself, and while the predators who ruled here might claim to be as old as time itself, she felt certain they had not forgotten how to hunt. Or the heady taste of a prey they’d successfully run to ground.
“You’ve been here before,” Thorn said, the timbre of his voice, its lack of resonance, reminding her that sound traveled as weakly through this ancient atmosphere as light. “Which way?”
She angled her chin toward a circular stand of ruins in the middle distance, just beyond the base of the broad, shallow slope that stretched down and away from the summit where they stood.
“So far? Take us an age to reach there.”
“Distances deceive in this place,” she told him. “It won’t be quite so long.”
“You don’t much like this Realm.”
I will die here, she thought suddenly. I will kill here. It will be good. She gave her head a quick and violent shake, to banish the cruel and brutal images of fangs and blood and laughter, then ran her tongue across her teeth, upper and lower jaw both, to make sure they were still flat. When she was there last, en route to the Dragon’s Realm, the Malevoiy had made plain that they wanted her for their own. What she hadn’t expected, what truly terrified her, now as then, was that she found herself tempted by their offer.
The best way to travel was over the fallen rocks; they could spend a score of lifetimes in a vain attempt to navigate a passage on the ground through the cracks and hollows between. That meant the occasional scramble up or down a vertical face, or a heart-tugging leap from one boulder to the next; more than once, Elora and Khory were forced to improvise a means to carry Thorn with them, for this blasted landscape was far more suited for Daikini limbs than Nelwyns’.
“No welcoming committee,” Thorn noted, when they paused for a rest.
“Be thankful for small favors.”
“What are they like, the Malevoiy?”
“Creatures of dust,” she said quickly, “for a Realm crumbling about them. Less than ghosts, Drumheller.” Yet, she thought, they remain the sum and substance of our every nightmare. And rightly so.
“ ‘Twelve rings affixed on three,’ ” she continued, mainly to herself, remembering the words spoken to her by the Malevoiy, “ ‘to be bound entire by one, that is the scheme and riddle of things.’ ”
“Twelve Great Realms,” Thorn said, making the connection. “Making up the three Greater Circles of Being—the World, the Flesh, the Spirit—anchored and bound by the Thirteenth Realm—you,” he finished.
“ ‘How can the pieces hold fast,’ the Malevoiy asked me, Thorn, ‘without a center to anchor them?’ ”
“That’s the challenge.”
“They’d have me walk their road to accomplish it, in fire and blood, to make the world their private boneyard once more.”
“You ask me, child, you’re proving remarkably adept at finding your own path, in defiance of logic, advice, entreaty”—he paused a beat for emphasis—“or compulsion.”
A skibble of grit along the surface of the huge slab on which they sat heralded the return of Khory from a scout ahead. Both Thorn and Elora were a trifle startled to see her, since neither had noticed her departure. She came to them in a fast crab-crawl, as low to the ground as she could manage and still remain on her feet. She held her body angled a little away from them, the better to keep sight of the ground behind her.
Neither Thorn nor Elora had to ask if there was trouble; Khory’s manner made that plain as midday.
“Ambush” was what she told them as she slid herself flat by their side.
“Whereaway?” Thorn asked of her.
“Fair-sized cadre, Maizan Black Rose, close about the World Gate.” This was not good. The Black Rose were the most formidable arm of one of the most formidable fighting forces the world had ever seen, infiltrators and commandos, whose specialties were assassination and terror and whose martial skills beggared description. Their courage needed no further hallmark than the fact that they were there, and neither did their ability—both for the trackers who followed their trail and for the sorcerers who obtained them entry to this Realm. Their loyalty was absolute, to Castellan Mohdri, who led the Maizan. And that meant to the Deceiver, who wore Mohdri’s flesh like a tailor-made suit.
“Layered deployment,” Khory finished, “staggered too thick for us to sneak past or fight our way through.”
“The Malevoiy allow this?” Even as she spoke the words, Elora found them hard to believe.
“The Black Rose are here, girl, it must be so,” Khory replied.
“I guess we didn’t hurt the Deceiver as badly as we’d hoped,” Elora said, “when we drove him from the Dragon’s Realm.”
“A prudent commander always has a backup.”
“Since that World Gate’s closed to us, Elora,” Drumheller asked
, “can you sense another? Hopefully, close by?”
Elora pursed her lips, furrowed her brow. The air was flat and still, not even their hardest breaths were able to stir it. She found herself licking her lips often, in a futile attempt to detect the slightest hint of taste, thankful for the least residue on her own skin.
In any other Realm, she’d be able to spot the natural lines of arcane energy as easily as a good scout does a trail. Here, she felt like she was sleepwalking.
“That way?” she hazarded, though she wasn’t really sure.
Khory didn’t care, she took Elora’s words as gospel.
“Then we go,” she said, and hustled both companions to their feet.
“Why the rush?” Thorn asked.
“Too big a cadre for simply an ambush,” Khory told them. “Even for us,” she added, forestalling a smart comment from Elora. “They’ve numbers enough to cover the Gate and send out rovers to keep us from trying another.”
Without asking permission, the tall woman scooped Thorn off his feet and onto her back, wrapping his arms around her shoulders, his legs her waist. Elora had grown so much the past couple of years, she was giving Khory serious competition in the height department, yet she found herself hard-pressed to keep up with the warrior’s furious pace. There was no hesitation to Khory’s moves—she scrambled over every obstacle with the uncanny agility of a mountain goat. When she didn’t think of what she was doing, when she let her body define its own rhythm, Elora was equally surefooted. But her trust in herself wasn’t quite as absolute as her companion’s; every so often, she couldn’t help but think about what she was doing. That was when she made mistakes. A slip of the sole, a stumble, a stubbed toe, some shredded nails and barked skin. Each slowed their pace, each proved a delay they could ill afford.
They came to a fair-sized gap, too deep and sheer a drop for climbing, bridged by a line of disturbingly dainty pillars. Without a word being spoken, Elora knew what was coming. The problem was, the tops of the pillars themselves barely presented sufficient room to stand. If a successful crossing was to be made, they’d have to hop from one to the next in a single, continuous sequence and hope that enough momentum was generated by a running start to carry each of them all the way to the far side. They couldn’t go together, either, one would have to lead the way.
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