He looked for one of the Magistri, but none of them were with his guard at the moment. “Find one of the senior Magistri and get them over here. We need to figure out what this light is. The Frostborn have to be behind it.”
One of the men-at-arms ran back to the northern forum, seeking a Magistrius. Arandar turned his attention to the glowing river. Something about the sight seemed familiar, stirring something in his memory. He certainly had never seen a glowing river before. Yet the pattern of light was familiar, and…
With a horrifying jolt, the memory came to him.
The memory, and the realization of the trap.
It had been on the walls of Dun Licinia a year ago, on the first night of the return of the Frostborn. The woods outside of the town had been lit with an eerie blue glow, a blue glow that had been revealed to be the ghostly fires dancing in the eyes and upon the limbs of the dead Mhorite orcs and the dead dvargir warriors. The light had come from the thousands of revenants marching towards the walls of Dun Licinia.
Revenants were undead.
Revenants didn’t need to trouble themselves with things like breathing.
Which meant that the revenants could march quite comfortably along the bottom of the River Moradel, hidden from the scouts.
The first of the revenants emerged from the river’s waters as he looked, nearly a thousand of them marching in a broad line. Some were the Mhorite orcs and the dead dvargir he had seen at Dun Licinia, their frozen flesh preserved by the icy magic of the Frostborn. Others were Anathgrimm warriors, no doubt killed during Ridmark’s raids across the Northerland. There were quite a few medvarth and khaldjari. The Frostborn would collect their own dead for reanimation into revenants.
The sea of revenants emerged from the Moradel, striding with a slow, steady pace towards the western walls of Dun Calpurnia, their eyes glowing with eerie blue light. In a few minutes, they would reach the wall, and most of the army of Andomhaim was engaged at the northern wall.
In that horrible instant, Arandar saw the trap of the Frostborn closing around the town.
“God and the saints,” said Gareth.
“There must be thousands of them,” said Sebastian as the river kept vomiting forth undead.
“Tens of thousands,” said Leogrance.
“Sound the alarm,” said Arandar. “Get all the reserves to the western wall, now!”
“Will they even be able to climb the wall?” said Sebastian. “I don’t see any ladders.”
“The blue fire on their hands,” said Arandar. “The Keeper’s magic protects us from their touch, but it won’t ward the walls. They’ll be able to climb up the walls and attack the town.”
Several of the Swordbearers in his guard produced horns and began sounding them. Arandar looked to the east and the north, saw the men struggling on the northern ramparts. They still had enough reserves to man all the western ramparts, and the engines atop the walls of the castra could be brought to bear, raining fire down on both the medvarth and the revenants. Despite the additional of tens of thousands of additional revenants, they could still hold Dun Calpurnia until help arrived.
Then the Frostborn finished casting their great spell.
###
Gavin yanked Truthseeker from a dead medvarth, his breath rasping in his throat, his shoulder and arms and back aching from the effort of fighting. They must have killed thousands of medvarth warriors, but the sea of them never seemed to end.
And now the revenants were assaulting the western wall, rising from the waters of the river like the spirits of the unquiet dead.
He lifted Truthseeker, drawing on the sword for strength and power, and as he did, he saw Antenora go rigid, her yellow gaze turned to the north.
“What is it?” said Gavin.
“The spell is finished,” said Antenora.
There was a brilliant flash of blue light, almost as bright as the sun. Gavin squinted and looked away, and the blue light faded. He looked around, half expecting a rain of razor-edged ice to fall upon the town, but nothing happened. As far as he could tell, the spell hadn’t done anything.
“The river,” said Antenora.
He looked at the River Moradel and blinked in astonishment.
The spell had frozen it solid.
Already the khaldjari were pulling their siege engines onto the frozen river. Because of the curve of the river, they would be able to assemble their trebuchets and rain missiles onto the town with ease.
###
Arandar cut down a revenant, and then another, and still another.
He ought to have retreated to safety, but there had been no time, and while he might have been the High King, he was still a Swordbearer. Excalibur sliced through the undead without any resistance, even as the white fire of the sword destroyed the cold magic animating the undead.
The revenants crawled up the wall like roaches, their undead flesh freezing to the stone until they pulled it away. More men-at-arms rushed to the ramparts, fighting to hold back the tide of undead
Arandar cut down another revenant and glimpsed the frozen river.
The khaldjari had assembled a line of twenty massive trebuchets, and even as he looked, the engines released their missiles. Twenty burning fireballs soared through the air, leaving a trail of thick black smoke, and landed in the town.
The shock wave of the explosions almost knocked Arandar from the wall. The stones the trebuchets had thrown had been hollow, and they must have been filled with some sort of alchemical concoction that exploded on contact with the air.
The screams of burning men filled his ears.
The Frostborn were masters of ice, but it seemed they could also wield fire in battle as well.
Chapter 17: Destruction
The white mist swirled around his boots as Ridmark strode deeper into the Tomb of the Dragon Knight.
There were many turns and side passages, but the heartbeat in his head drew him deeper into the gloom below the earth. In places the white stone of the walls gave off its own pale radiance. In other places the walls did not glow, but instead crystals had been set into the ceiling at regular intervals, giving off a dim blue light. The place was a vast maze, and Ridmark was relieved that time was flowing faster for him than it was for anyone outside the Tomb. The sooner he retrieved the sword and returned to Calliande, the sooner they could return to Andomhaim and aid the others against the Frostborn.
Assuming he could return with the sword, and that he wasn’t killed in the process.
Or that he was killed before he even found the sword, because from time to time things emerged from the white mist to attack him.
The first time was a band of kobolds. Ridmark was walking through a wide corridor, staff in hand, his eyes scanning the walls as he listened to the heartbeat in his head. He had maybe a second of warning as the mist rippled, and then a half-dozen kobolds erupted from the floor, appearing out of nothingness. Like all the kobolds he had fought, they were about the size of human children, lean and spindly with gray scales covering their bodies, long tails coiling behind them for balance and crimson crests rising from their necks and the tops of their lizard-like skulls. These kobolds had blue hands painted onto their chests, marking them as members of the tribe of the Blue Hand, a group of kobolds that Ridmark had fought near Dun Licinia soon after he had found Calliande on Black Mountain.
But that was impossible. Shadowbearer had killed them all, raised their corpses as undead, and sent them to kill Calliande.
Impossible or not, the kobolds of the Blue Hand were here, and he just had time to raise his staff in guard before they rushed him.
Ridmark parried a short sword with his staff, dodged, and struck back. His staff hit the kobold on the side of the head with a crack, and the creature went down. The remaining kobolds tried to swarm him, and Ridmark retreated, whipping his staff in wide arcs to keep them at bay. He dodged the thrusts of their spears, shifting his staff to his left hand to use as a shield and drawing his axe with his right hand. He sw
ung the axe, the heavy blade shearing through kobold skulls and necks, and one by one he killed the creatures.
They collapsed motionless at his feet, the mist crawling over them like a shroud.
Ridmark stepped back, breathing hard, watching for more enemies. The kobolds had to be an illusion of some kind. Tymandain Shadowbearer had killed them all, and even if he hadn’t, there was no way the survivors could have found their way to the Tomb of the Dragon Knight.
A thought occurred to him, and he tightened his grip on his weapons.
If these were illusionary duplicates of the kobolds of the Blue Hand…then would they rise as undead as the real kobolds had?
The dead kobolds vanished.
Ridmark blinked. One moment they had been sprawled on the floor, their blood leaking across the white stones. The next they had simply vanished without a trace. Even the blood had disappeared. Ridmark scraped the end of his staff over the floor, wondering if they had somehow turned invisible, but he felt nothing.
The kobolds had vanished.
Or maybe they had never been there at all. Perhaps the creatures had only been illusions, constructions of magical force, or maybe he had only seen them in his own mind. That was a disturbing thought.
It also seemed likely. Ridmark had just had a conversation with his long-dead mother where she had suggested that it would have been better if he had never been born, and then she had shifted into the form of an urdhracos and tried to kill him.
That definitely suggested that not everything he saw in the Tomb was real.
He wished Calliande was here. Her Sight would have been able to pierce any illusions. Or Mara – she had the Sight as well, and she could handle herself in a fight. He wondered how Mara and Jager and Qhazulak and Zhorlacht and the rest of the Anathgrimm fared. There had been no word from the Anathgrimm or the Northerland since he had left Nightmane Forest with Calliande. Were they still fighting the Frostborn? Had they retreated into Nightmane Forest?
Or had the Frostborn killed them all?
Ridmark shook his head and kept walking. Brooding would solve nothing. The only way to help Calliande and his friends was to find the sword of the Dragon Knight and use its power against the Frostborn. That was the only way forward. Perhaps that was the only way to make up for some of the harm he had done …
He pushed aside the grim thought and kept walking.
More attacks came as he followed the heartbeat. Another group of kobolds surged out of the mist and charged, brandishing short swords. These kobolds had elaborate blue tattoos in the shape of grinning skulls upon their faces. They were the Blue Skulls, a tribe of kobolds sworn to the service of the Traveler, and Ridmark had killed hundreds of them when he had collapsed their rockfall trap on their heads.
Again, he fought them, killing them all, and again their corpses vanished a few moments later.
What was the point? The illusionary enemies would not turn him aside from his goal. Perhaps their blows would kill him if they landed home, making this part of the trial to claim the sword.
He survived a half-dozen more fights in the next hour. Once he fought a group of Mhorite orcs, their faces adorned with the red tattoo skull of the blood god Mhor. Later he dueled a pair of masked assassins of the Red Family, their swords flickering and dancing with deadly skill and speed. After that, he fought deep orcs led by a pair of dvargir warriors, and then a group of the Warden’s Devout orcs, their veins glowing with the blue light of the Warden’s dark magic.
The enemies might have been illusionary, but their weapons dealt real wounds. Ridmark took two minor cuts in the fight with the assassins of the Red Family, and a dvargir mace clipped his shoulder. He bound up the cuts as best as he could to stop the bleeding and continued.
Another reason he missed Calliande. She could have healed the cuts in a moment.
The fights forced his mind back to the past, to all the enemies he had fought and defeated. Ridmark had been in a lot of fights, and he had won most of them. He had left a lot of dead kobolds and orcs and dvargir and humans in his wake.
He had killed a lot of people.
Maybe the specter of Tomia Arban had been right. Maybe those people would be alive if he had never been born.
Ridmark dismissed the thought. He had killed a lot of people, yes, but he had never started a fight. A lot of his opponents had deserved their end at his hands. For that matter, he could not think of a time he had regretted a fight. No, his regrets were different. His regrets were his failures, the times he had not been strong enough, not been smart enough, not been quick enough.
The people he had failed to save, that was what he had regretted. The catastrophes he had failed to prevent.
Morigna’s spirit had said that the sword would try to use his regret against him and that it would play upon the death wish buried in his nature. So far, his time in the Tomb of the Dragon Knight had been unpleasant, but Ridmark still had no wish to kill himself.
Maybe the ghost of his mother was right. Maybe it would have been better if Ridmark had never been born, but killing himself would not retroactively undo the harm his life had caused, and it would do nothing to help Calliande and his friends.
Nevertheless, his thoughts turned over the past again and again as he moved through the silent corridors and halls of the Tomb.
He was not entirely surprised when he saw a second woman standing in the center of another hall.
Her back was to him, her black hair bound in a braid that hung to her hips, and Ridmark’s eyes noted the familiar and the pleasing shape of those hips. She wore a green gown with golden trim beneath a green mantle, the color the exact shade of her father’s banners. Ridmark took a step forward, his mouth tightening into a frown, and the woman turned to face him.
“Ridmark,” said Aelia Licinius Arban with a faint smile.
He let out a long breath, part angry, part annoyed, and part sad. Aelia looked just as he remembered, just as she had on the day he had failed to save her. She had the same green eyes shared by her father and brother and sister, and something of the same facial features, with a proud beak of a nose. Yet she was beautiful, with a vital energy that seemed to infuse her. He had been besotted with Aelia ever since he had been old enough to understand the desire for a woman, and he had gone to Urd Morlemoch to win her hand from her father.
After that, they had been married, and the only flaw in their happiness had been their inexplicable inability to have children.
Then Mhalek had come, and Ridmark had failed to save her.
Aelia’s life had ended, but the path he had started at Urd Morlemoch had continued until he stood in the Tomb of the Dragon Knight looking at a phantasm constructed from his memories of his dead wife.
“No,” said Ridmark.
Aelia blinked. “You will not greet your wife?”
“You’re not my wife,” said Ridmark. “My wife died eight years ago. You’re not her spirit, either.” Like Tomia, Aelia’s form was solid, without the translucent shimmer that had marked Morigna’s spirit. “You’re…I don’t know what you are.”
Her gentle smile did not waver. “Then what I am, Ridmark?”
“A test, a trial, a trap, I don’t know,” said Ridmark. “The sword of the Dragon Knight or the magic on the Tomb thinks to test me by throwing my own memories at me.” He kept his eyes on Aelia, waiting to see if she would transform into an urdhracos or some other horror. “I don’t know what you are, but you’re not Aelia.”
“If I am your memory of Aelia Licinius Arban,” said Aelia, “then I am indeed your wife, Ridmark. I might have died, but I am always in your memory, am I not?”
Ridmark stared at her.
“Yes,” he said at last. The grief of Aelia’s death had almost driven him to destruction. That urge had passed, but that grief would always be a part of him, even if he had learned to move past it.
He waited for her to speak. No doubt this illusion of Aelia would berate him for failing to save her, turn into an urdhracos, and then
try to kill him. Once he had dispatched the creature, he would continue on his way.
“Oh, my husband,” said Aelia. She lifted a hand to her mouth for a moment, and to his surprise, Ridmark saw that she was blinking away tears. On pure reflex, he almost reached for her to comfort her. He had never liked to see her cry. “Oh, I am sorry. I am so sorry.”
“For what?” said Ridmark, baffled.
Her green eyes met his. “For how much you have suffered.”
He said nothing.
“For you have suffered, have you not?” said Aelia. “Over and over again.”
“I’m still alive,” said Ridmark, his voice rougher than he would have liked. “I’m not maimed or crippled. I cannot complain.”
“There are different kinds of suffering,” she said. “You blamed yourself for my death. You felt so guilty when you fell in love with Morigna, and when my sister murdered the poor woman…oh, Ridmark. One loss like that was bad enough. But two? No one should have to endure that.”
“People have endured lots of things they shouldn’t have, but they did,” said Ridmark. He hesitated. “And…I am sorry.”
He knew she wasn’t really there. He knew that he was talking to himself, or to the magic of the sword and the Tomb. But he couldn’t have stopped himself from saying it.
“For what?” said Aelia.
“For…moving on,” said Ridmark. “For falling in love after you. For there being other women after you. Twice.”
“Ridmark,” said Aelia with a smile. “You promised to be faithful to me so long as we both lived. And you were. I would not wish you alone for the rest of your days.” Her smile faded. “I would not wish you to suffer as you have. Haven’t you earned a rest?”
“What do you mean?” said Ridmark.
“Haven’t you earned the right to die?” said Aelia. “To rest from your labors?”
“For God’s sake,” said Ridmark. “This again? I didn’t believe it when the phantasm of my dead mother said it, and I don’t believe it from the phantasm of my dead wife.”
Frostborn: The Dragon Knight (Frostborn #14) Page 22