Gabriel spoke to the gorgon without taking his eyes off Lastleaf. “What is he doing here?”
Dinantra slunk into a lowered seating area and began piling her coils onto a divan. “It has been my privilege to host the Duke during his visit to Grandual. He is an honored guest, as you are.” She extended her arm and a young man wearing nothing but white trousers cinched at the knee hurried forward to place a delicate bowl in her hand. “Come and sit, Gabriel. Have wine.”
Gabe shook his head, retreating a step. “We’ll be back tomorrow,” he said. “Clay, let’s go.”
“If you wish to leave, leave,” said Dinantra. There was a new, impatient edge to her voice that had been previously absent. “But do not return. Ganelon can remain just as he is. In fact, I quite prefer him this way.”
That brought Gabriel up short, and Clay saw Lastleaf’s grin deepen into something decidedly more predatory before it disappeared behind the rim of his own wine bowl.
Clay and the others filtered down among the furniture. Gabriel, without taking his eyes off the druin, perched on the edge of a high-backed chair with the bag of gold at his feet. Matty and Moog squeezed into a small sofa. Matrick was stuck holding a silken, cylinder-shaped pillow that he was forced to wedge between his legs. Clay settled for something like a cushioned footstool that made his back ache the moment he sat down.
“There is room here,” said the gorgon, patting the empty space behind her rump.
Clay offered a tight smile in reply. “I’m good,” he said.
Wine was brought and poured into bowls for each of them. When the servants left, Dinantra made a show of raising hers and taking a sip, a custom among the Narmeeri (whose culture she seemed to have appropriated) to assure guests that the wine had not been poisoned. The snakes on her head seemed to strain forward as she did so.
“You two have a history, I understand.” She glanced between Lastleaf and Gabriel with obvious relish, a blood-hungry spectator watching bitter rivals face off on an arena floor.
“We do,” said Lastleaf.
“He ambushed us in the Heartwyld,” said Gabriel.
“He gave me this.” The druin touched the scar beneath his darkened eye.
“He tried to steal my sword.”
“He killed my father.”
A profoundly uncomfortable silence followed, during which Matrick drained his bowl of wine in several long, loud gulps. When he’d finished he made a show of smacking his lips, stifling a belch, and asking, “Is there … um … more?”
At a gesture from the gorgon, the king’s wine was refilled. As the servant retreated Clay stole a glance at the trio of scabbards slung across the druin’s back. All three swords were of various lengths and sizes. The topmost he’d seen drawn on the Isle at Lindmoor. The blade had been short and wedge shaped, radiating heat and riddled with cracks that glowed like a fire blazing behind a black iron grill. The middle scabbard was long and narrow, very slightly curved. The last was longer still, white as sun-bleached bone. The pommel of the sword it sheathed was wrapped in ragged black cloth.
Clay hoped—though not optimistically—that he’d never have occasion to see the weapon inside.
Gabriel opened his mouth to speak, but the Duke, informed by druin prescience, cut him off.
“I know Vespian asked you to kill him.” Lastleaf’s white-furred ears were flat against the top of his head. “And I know you used Vellichor to do it. My father did not deserve such a mercy.”
Having your own sword pushed through your heart hardly seemed like a mercy to Clay, but he decided to try his wine instead of saying so. It was delicious: a heady blend of pepper, spice, and smoke. Unsurprising, since he’d never met a villain (or villainess, in this case) without impeccable taste in wine. It was a prerequisite, he figured, to being rich and evil.
“Where is it, by the way?” The druin narrowed his mismatched eyes. “Where is the priceless relic my craven father entrusted to a human?”
Clay winced. Lastleaf said the word human the way a human might say pile of shit.
Gabriel straightened. “Vellichor is hidden, beyond your reach.” A lie, of course, but telling the truth—that he’d traded the Archon’s fabled weapon to a crooked booker to pay off debts and satisfy his drug-addled, pacifist wife—wouldn’t have done Gabe any favours. The frontman made a point of transferring his attention from Lastleaf to the gorgon. “I came for Ganelon,” he said to her. “You and I had an agreement. Six hundred courtmarks—”
Moog choked on his wine, coughing a mouthful of it back into his bowl. “Courtmarks?” he sputtered. “You mean that’s gold in there? All of it?” He clasped Matrick’s shoulder. “Have you ever seen that much money in your entire life?”
“I had an actual castle,” Matrick reminded him.
Moog palmed his forehead. “Right, never mind.” He cleared his throat quietly and nodded at Gabriel. “Pardon the interruption.”
Clay, too, was stunned by Gabriel’s declaration. He’d assumed the bag was full of silver crowns, with plenty of copper and the odd courtmark lurking in the mix. But six hundred gold coins was a sizable fortune, especially considering Gabe had shown up at his doorstep with rags for clothes and holes in his boots.
“Six hundred courtmarks,” repeated Gabriel, leaning forward on his chair. “That’s twice what you paid the keepers to have him out of the Quarry, and a hundred more than I promised you. Give us Ganelon, and it’s all yours.”
Dinantra eyed the bag rapturously. “How generous,” she cooed, but then affected a crestfallen pout. “Alas, if you’d come just a few weeks sooner I’d have happily honored the bounds of our little arrangement. The good Duke, however, has suggested an amendment, and has made me an offer more tempting than gold.”
Clay peered over at Lastleaf, who was smugly swirling the bowl of wine in one long-fingered hand.
“And what offer is that?” Gabe asked flatly.
The gorgon’s ample chest swelled, forcing Clay to look at something, anything else, and he found himself examining her tail instead. There was a rattle on the end, each segment painted in fine detail with flowing Narmeeri script. He’d heard it said you could tell how often a snake had molted by the number of those segments, and so Clay found himself counting before the gorgon’s reply startled him out of reverie.
“I’m to be an Exarch of the New Dominion,” she said.
Moog blinked. “New Dominion? You mean the Old Dominion. There isn’t … he doesn’t … you can’t just—” The wizard blinked several more times in rapid succession. “Wait, I’m confused. I’ve confused myself.”
“You can’t be serious,” breathed Gabriel.
Lastleaf bared his teeth. “I can be. And I will soon have need of those used to wielding power.” When he turned his jagged smile on the gorgon it grew a fraction warmer, a glimpse of sunshine on a bleak winter’s day. “My Lady Dinantra, such as she is, will prove most suitable to the task, I think.”
So would Kallorek, Clay found himself thinking. The thug turned booker turned magnate would no doubt leap at the chance to become an Exarch, regardless of the circumstances. Although his ego will need a bigger pond to swim in, Clay mused.
“A New Dominion?” Matrick scoffed. He gestured dramatically with the bowl in his hand, but there was no wine left to spill. “And where do you suppose this magical kingdom of yours will spring up, huh? There isn’t …” He trailed off as the obvious occurred to him.
“Castia!” Moog exclaimed, having shrugged off his self-inflicted bewilderment.
“Castia,” said the druin, and then looked to Gabriel as though expecting him to speak next.
Which he did. “Then why destroy it?”
“For several reasons,” said Lastleaf. He stepped away from the curtains, his footfalls silent on the marble floor. As he crossed behind Dinantra the snakes on her head turned to track him, hissing softly.
When the druin drew near to Clay he felt his blood go hot and every hair on his body rise as if in warning. His nose w
as filled with the scent of crushed autumn leaves, of dry brush burning, and of something less pleasant, more sour, like rancid wine gone to vinegar. The silvered scale beneath Lastleaf’s coat whispered metallically as he passed to stand before a vast painting framed in polished rosewood, which he examined while he spoke.
“As I believe I mentioned at Lindmoor, the Horde is hungry, and that hunger must be sated. They need a victory. I need one, to bind them to me.”
“Didn’t you trounce the Republic army already?” Matrick pointed out.
Lastleaf glanced over, arching a brow. “That was too easy.” He said so without bravado, which Clay found unsettling. “I would hardly call it a battle at all. Oh, the Castians certainly made a show of coming out to face us. They formed up in their neat little squares. They waved their banners and blew their horns, and then they broke the moment the Horde hit them. Your vaunted mercenaries put up a better fight, at least, though they were far too few to matter. If not for them we might have swept the battlefield clean that day, and Castia would already be mine. Which is why, again, those who took refuge in the city cannot be spared.”
Gabriel wrung his hands. He looked as though he was about to be sick—or rather, like he’d already swallowed a mouthful of his own bile and was struggling to keep it down. “So this ‘Duchy of Endland’ you spoke of at the council …”
“Nonsense, obviously.” Lastleaf returned his gaze to the artwork before him, which Clay only now realized depicted the fall of Kaladar, the great and glorious capital of the Old Dominion. The city—a mountain of fine arches and reaching white spires—was on fire, shrouded in smoke, surrounded on all sides by a shadowy sea of clambering beasts. “If the courts suspected I had plans to revive the Dominion, they would have no choice but to unite against me. Instead, they believe I aspire to join them.” He chuckled into his bowl as he raised it, drinking deep.
Matrick sighed and rubbed at his whiskered jowls. “And you don’t think wiping Castia off the map will cast any doubt on your credibility with the courts? If I were—”
“But you’re not,” said Lastleaf, turning on him. “You are no longer a king. You are no one.”
“Well that’s a bit mean,” Moog grumbled beneath a furrowed brow.
“Though you raise a valid point,” the druin admitted. “The courts may decide I am a threat after all, in which case the destruction of Castia can serve my purpose just as well. Those who survive the city’s fall—” he bared his teeth in a mirthless grin “—and I will ensure there are one or two who do survive—will return to Grandual as stricken souls, bearing word of atrocities you could scarcely imagine. If my offer of friendship, or the threats I made to the council, does not lull the courts to inaction, then let the Republic’s fate serve as an example to those who make of me an enemy.”
Matrick bristled, his back rigid with righteous pride. He might even have pulled off “regal” but for the wine stains on his shirt and the vaguely phallic-shaped pillow he’d wedged between his legs. “And just what did the innocent people of Castia do to make of you an enemy?” he asked, mimicking the druin’s archaic manner of speaking. “I assume you just flipped a coin, no? Heads for east, tails for west. Or did you fear the kingdoms of Grandual would prove too worthy a foe, and so decided to pick on the Republic first?”
Lastleaf looked genuinely bewildered. “The innocent people of Castia?” he sneered. “Do you know how the innocent people of Castia went about building their glorious Republic?” He took a threatening step toward Matrick, who involuntarily clenched his legs, which in turn forced the pillow between them to spring upright—incongruous, but easy enough to ignore as the druin went on, incensed.
“Four centuries ago, when your ousted Emperor and the exiled remnants of the Imperial court arrived in Endland, they found it already inhabited by what you humans so broadly refer to as monsters. They fought with the cathiil over lands they wished to settle, and when the cathiil elected to migrate further west the innocent people of Castia hunted them to extinction.”
In his periphery Clay saw Moog just dying to ask what a cathiil was, but the druin’s burgeoning rage stifled even the wizard’s curiosity.
“They traded food and fur with the mountain folk for the ore with which to build their vaunted walls, but before long the innocent people of Castia decided to claim the mines for themselves. Whole clans were enslaved, worked to death in the very mines they’d once called home. The innocent people of Castia bribed urskin chieftains with precious gemstones and then drained the swampland to power their ravenous mills. They massacred ixil villagers who refused to relocate at their whim. They culled the great herds of the Orgone Plain and drove the centaurs from their ancestral lands into the forest. They poisoned the wells of gnoll settlements, and those hearty enough to survive the plague that followed were taken to Castia and made to fight in the Crucible.”
Lastleaf’s long ears quivered. He’d turned his back on the painting now, the death throes of ancient Kaladar providing an eerily suitable backdrop for his mounting anger.
“Or did you think all these grand arenas of yours were a novelty?” he asked. “The Crucible precedes them all, and in the warrens below that place entire generations of fell creatures have been born and bred in darkness, suffered to live only until they are deemed fit to die in sunlight, and shame, while the innocent people of Castia look on and cheer.”
Matrick scowled down at his empty bowl, doubtless wishing it would suddenly, magically, refill itself so he could at least enjoy a drink while he suffered the druin’s tirade.
Clay, meanwhile, shifted uncomfortably on his stool. If Lastleaf despised the Republic for the way they’d treated monsters in the past, then the druin would surely take issue with the decades-long rise to prominence of Grandual’s mercenary bands, who made a living killing creatures of every kind and were celebrated for it. Even Clay found himself wary of the latest trend—arenas springing up in every city, monsters held in captivity, waiting to be killed for nothing more than a crowd’s diversion. He remembered the expression on Gabriel’s face as he’d gazed at the Maxithon after learning that Fender’s wife had been taken there to die—a mix of fearful awe and wary bemusement, like a plainsman stepping out of his yurt to find a sixty-oar galleon stranded on the grass.
There was something about the arenas that didn’t sit well with Clay. He lacked the capacity, even in his own mind, to frame it. Moog could have done so, and probably Matrick after a cup or two of wine (but not after three). It wasn’t as if mercenary tradition was especially wholesome—far from it, in fact. Often you hunted monsters to their lairs and killed everything inside, even the young. If you were lucky, whatever you intended to kill was sound asleep, or eating, or drunk. Hells, Clay had once put a single spear through two rutting trolls. Pressed to describe the difference between slaying a creature in the wild versus doing so on an arena floor, he might have said that the former seemed, to his mind at least, more honest.
Not better, since killing was killing. But yeah … honest.
“For more than seven centuries I skulked and hid in the Heartwyld,” Lastleaf was saying now, “side by side with what your fledgling civilization calls monsters. After my father’s death I was free to roam at will, and so I went myself to Castia, where I hoped to intercede on behalf of those who had suffered for so long beneath the Republic’s heel. And do you know what the ‘noble’ senate did? They called me a monster. They put me in chains and confined me to the dungeon beneath the Crucible. For three years I was held prisoner, forced to fight in the arena, with no choice but to kill at the whim of my captors. Until the day I found Ashatan.”
Ashatan? Clay racked his brain to recollect where he’d heard that name before now, but Moog—clever Moog—beat him to it.
“The wyvern matriarch.”
The druin wet his lips. His odd-coloured eyes narrowed as he continued, as though he were squinting at the now-distant memory of that day. “She was locked in a room so small she could barely spread her wings. S
he was heavily sedated, of course. Her neck was shackled to the floor. They’d been breeding her for years, using her offspring as fodder in the arena above. I could sense the rage in her. I could feel it like heat rolling off a fire, and so I set her free. I set them all free—every wretched thing imprisoned there—and together we drowned the Crucible in the blood of ten thousand Castians.”
“The Red Sands,” Matrick said, shuddering visibly. “I heard about that.”
Clay had heard no such thing, but grim tidings (like modern plumbing and court couriers) had a way of getting lost on the way to Coverdale. Come to think of it, he was surprised word of the Heartwyld Horde had reached him before Gabriel did.
“The Red Sands was just the beginning,” said Lastleaf. His anger had changed, somehow—like a molten blade drawn from the forge, it had cooled into something sharp, dark and deadly. “What happens to Castia when I breach its walls will be far worse. It will be a massacre, the scale of which has not been seen since …”
Lastleaf glanced over his shoulder at the painting of Kaladar besieged, falling, fallen, and for a surreal moment Clay wondered if the druin, this forsaken prince of the Dominion, had long ago stood witness while his city—his entire civilization—was devoured by a monstrous Horde.
Time is a circle, he remembered Lastleaf saying at Lindmoor, in twilight. History a turning wheel.
And here it is, Clay thought wryly, turning and turning, grinding us all to dust.
Chapter Twenty
The Soul in the Stone
“I don’t care about Castia,” lied Gabriel. “I came here for Ganelon.”
Lastleaf’s long ears perked inquisitively.
Moog looked from Lastleaf, to Gabriel, to Dinantra. “I don’t understand. Is he a prisoner still?”
Dinantra’s hair hissed at the wizard. “Not a prisoner,” she clarified. “A possession. By releasing him I risk making an enemy of the Sultana—something I was prepared to do even before … recent developments made doing so inevitable. Nevertheless, I am altering the terms of our agreement, as per My Lord’s request.”
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