The Puppet King

by Doug Niles

  He had been reading bits and pieces of the book over the last few days, perhaps to remind himself that there had really been a time—and not very long ago!—when the elves had fought for a just cause, battling with courage and heroism against the hordes of the Dark Queen, who sought to subjugate the world underneath a realm of violence, slavery, and savage conquest. At times, he was numbed by a sense of real grief as he thought about how far his people had fallen.

  During other passages, he was staggered by a sense of bitter irony. The Emperor of Ansalon, the Highlord Ariakas, had fought for five years, slowly expanding the swath of his conquest across Krynn until, under the leadership of generals such as Gilthas’s mother Laurana, the dragonarmies had been swept backward, finally scattered when their queen had deserted them and their foul temple. Now it was Ariakas’s son, the Lord Ariakan, who led the Knights of Takhisis on a fast and efficient campaign. In a matter of weeks, he had conquered territories that his father had never been able to reach, and now held such firm sway on Ansalon that it was difficult to conceive of any kind of organized resistance.

  And then there were times where Gilthas was simply lost in a story of high adventure, when he marveled at the exploits of dragons of gold and silver, of brave warriors—including not only his mother, but also his uncle, Gilthanas, and legendary heroes such as Flint Fireforge—and of the desperate battles that culminated in the magnificent victory at Margaard Ford, a key crossing of the Vingaard River. In the end, he admitted that this was the reason he enjoyed reading the book, for it carried him away with its epic sweep and its dazzling rendition of people, dragons, places, and events.

  He wondered if his mother had received his invitation, if she planned to come here. He missed her, longed for her presence and her guidance. It was better for her safety, he told himself, though he realized that her presence would do more to ease his own loneliness than it would for Laurana’s security.

  An hour later Kerian knocked, and it was with a rush of pleasure that he closed the leather covers and called for her to enter.

  “Hello,” he said, rising and stretching his arms over his head. “I was reading … got lost in the past for a little while.”

  “I am glad,” the Kagonesti woman said. “I came to see if you would like some wine before dinner.”

  “Yes, that would be splendid.” He noticed that she had brought a pitcher, and she advanced into the room at his answer. “Would you care to have a glass with me?”

  “Yes … I would.”

  He waited while she poured them each a mug of the pale liquid. When she brought his glass over to his chair, he took it, then followed her to sit beside her on the couch.

  “I have had word from my … from the forest,” Kerianseray said. “It arrived just this afternoon.”

  “Word from the wild elves? How?” Gilthas asked. He wasn’t aware of any messengers coming to the house.

  “I am sorry, my lord, but I am not permitted to discuss that part of my duties.”

  Gilthas was surprised by her refusal. Only then did he stop to consider the extraordinary trust she had placed in him merely by revealing the fact that she was able to maintain some sort of surreptitious contact with her tribe.

  “Of course. Forgive me for asking,” he said, though a part of him was desperately curious and thought that, if she really did trust him, she should be willing to reveal the details he sought. Still, he decided to let the matter rest for now. “What did you learn?”

  “Porthios Solostaran has agreed to meet with you, provided you come to the meeting alone.”

  “Yes, of course! That’s wonderful!” he cried, elated.

  “I’m glad you’re pleased,” Kerian said, looking happy herself.

  Impulsively he put his hands on her shoulders, and this time pulled her close before she could lower her face. His lips found hers, and their kiss was like a bond sealed in fire. Her mouth was slightly open, and Gilthas felt a whirlwind of emotions, new experiences assaulting him, tantalizing him, reaching deep into his soul.

  As if he were mired in a dream—a fantastic, wondrously arousing dream—he felt her arms reach around his shoulders, and then she was pulling him closer. She welcomed his kiss, reciprocated with warmth and fire.

  And then that fire was everywhere, pouring through Gilthas’s veins, clouding his thoughts, pounding a savage drumbeat in his heart. He drew a breath, the sweetest air he had ever tasted, and pressed harder against her, feeling her falling back as his weight bore her down upon the couch.

  Their surroundings disappeared, and he was only aware of the two of them, each wrapped in the other, in bliss and warmth and desire. And for a time, too short a time, Gilthas forgot his throne, forgot the Thalas-Enthia, and was one with the woman he loved.

  “Finally the blues did come again for me, three of them. They threatened to kill me if I did not leave.”

  “Did you have to fight them?” asked Silvanoshei.

  Aeren puffed out his chest. “I was prepared to, as I told you. But they were too many, and they promised to kill me—a promise I knew they would keep.

  “So instead, I claimed that I needed time to gather my hoard, that I would leave in a few days and let them have my cave.”

  “What happened then?”

  “I emerged at the appointed time and flew high and wide, seeking the new tenants of my lair. The air was hot and thick by then, but I looked for a long time.”

  “But you didn’t find them?”

  “No. I searched, expecting to see them … but it seemed that the blues were gone.”

  Speakers of Past and Present

  Chapter Sixteen

  They left the Speaker’s house in the predawn hours, when the night was at its darkest and activity in the city had almost completely ceased. There were a few patrols of Dark Knights wandering the streets, but by elven standards, these humans made so much noise and their night vision was so feeble that Gilthas and Kerianseray had no difficulty evading the sentries in the vicinity of the Tower of the Sun.

  Of course, the magical lights that danced through the city during the night hours were still in evidence, but it seemed to Gilthas that their brilliance had somehow been muted since the coming of the conquerors. Whereas in the past the entire city had seemed to sparkle with brightness, now each lantern existed in a small island of illumination, but the contrast only served to heighten the shadows in the majority of the city that remained unlighted.

  Once they had passed into the darkened reaches of elven homes, the pair hid in the shadows for several minutes while a party of armored men marched past. The young Speaker was acutely conscious of the woman’s presence beside him. He placed a protective arm around her shoulders and relished the warmth as she seemed to melt into his side. Even so, she seemed considerably less frightened than he did, and he found himself wondering how many times she had left the house in the dark of the night to wander Qualinost on some mysterious purpose.

  But those thoughts vanished as the guards turned a corner. Instantly she was up, pulling him by the hand, leading him in a sprint down a lane shaded by thick borders of overhanging aspen trees.

  He tried to keep up, but he was embarrassed to realize that he was gasping for breath after a short run. Tugging on her hand, he tried to slow her headlong pace, but instead she pulled him along urgently, all but dragging him as he stumbled the last two dozen paces to the end of the lane. Here again she pushed him into the shelter of roadside shrubbery, still holding his hand as she knelt beside him and studied the wide roadway before them.

  Gilthas sensed affection in the touch of her dry fingers on his moist hand, but he also felt the competence, the confidence of this woman he knew so little about. Though he strained to control his rasping breaths, she pressed a finger to his lips, and he forced himself to be utterly silent. Here, too, there were Dark Knights. Indeed, he was startled to find out how fully Qualinost was garrisoned by its new conquerors. His guess would have been that there were only a few dozen of the human warriors
in the city, but if that were the case, they had seen half of them in the past few blocks—and that at the darkest hours of night!

  Finally they were running again, around corners, through curving little streets that were barely wide enough for the two of them to pass side by side. Still they avoided the occasional patches of illumination, always choosing the darkest route when a pair of alternating paths presented themselves. They were going uphill, Gilthas noticed, and then suddenly the trees were finished and the dazzling night sky yawned overhead. He stumbled, shaken by the vast sense of openness after all the winding, narrow byways. His feet scuffed over flat tiles, and only then did he realize that she had brought him to the great Hall of Audience, the hilltop clearing with its mosaic map and broad clearing.

  The great constellations sparkled overhead, gleaming from the moonless sky. He gaped at Paladine and Takhisis, as always in opposition, facing each other across the sky. Many times as a youth he had whiled away the nighttime hours by staring upward at the fabulous array of stars, but never had he seen them so perfectly, never had they seemed so close. He had to resist the childish notion that he could reach out and pluck them from the sky like sparkling cherries. Vaguely he noticed that even now, in the depths of the night, the air was as hot and stifling as normal for a midsummer day.

  “Over here,” she whispered, tugging him along the edge of the trees that fringed the clearing. They stayed low, moved like furtive creatures of the forest, though it seemed that here, at least, the Dark Knights had left the city of the elves to itself.

  Then he gasped audibly as he saw white wings shimmering in the deep shadows. Two large creatures waited there, and even before he saw the eaglelike heads upraised, yellow eyes staring at the pair of elves, he knew these were griffons.

  Only once had he ridden one of the magnificent creatures. That had been upon his first meeting with Rashas. How blind he had been then, how fooled by the venerable senator’s gracious words, his elegant veneer. Gilthas had mounted the steed and ridden double with Rashas, his mind awhirl with nothing more than his first glimpse of Qualinesti. It had never occurred to him then that he was coming here to serve the senator’s purposes, that indeed Rashas had lured him with the perfect bait: the chance for a stifled youngster to get out from beneath his parents’ wings, to have a taste of freedom.

  Freedom! The very notion left a bitter feeling in his memory as he thought of how fully he had been tricked. Within a matter of hours, he had learned he was virtually the prisoner of Rashas, and within days he had been installed as a figurehead on the throne of his mother’s people.

  “They will carry us,” Kerianseray was saying, gesturing to the creatures. Both, Gilthas now saw, were saddled and apparently eager to fly.

  Once again he had a feeling of his own wrongness, of the guilt and culpability that lay on his shoulders because he had unwittingly stepped into his crown. As a result of that conspiracy, which had included the holding of Alhana Starbreeze hostage, the griffons had stopped serving the Qualinesti. Yet obviously they still served Porthios.

  He stepped up to one of the creatures, which regarded him with a glare that he thought was exceptionally cold and aloof. Gilthas bowed stiffly, not wanting to appear weak or indecisive in front of this proud creature. Yet he was embarrassed as he tried to slip his boot into the stirrup and found the silver bracket always dancing just beyond the reach of his toes. Finally Kerian stepped to his side, helped him plant his foot, then aided him to swing his other leg across the creature’s leonine haunches.

  Once he was astride the griffon, Gilthas noticed that the saddle felt very natural, almost as though it conformed to his body. The back was high and pressed close to his spine, which was good, because the griffon pounced forward with a sudden beat of its wings, and without that brace, the elf would certainly have slid right over the rump to sprawl gracelessly on the ground that was already receding beneath him.

  He saw the treetops of Qualinost whirl past below, felt the creature bank as it followed a course over the densest of the city’s vegetation. Like the two elves on foot, the griffons avoided those parts of the city where the magical lights danced. Soon they soared beneath one of the lofty arched bridges, and though Gilthas could clearly see the Dark Knights pacing their monotonous duty overhead, the twin fliers whisked through the shadows undetected.

  Kerian, on the other griffon, was nearby. Somehow she looked relaxed as she leaned forward in the saddle, the reins held loosely in her left hand, golden hair trailing in a plume behind her. As they passed over the deep gorge that yawned to the west of the city, Gilthas was clutching the horn that rose from the forepart of his own saddle. Only after he glanced again at Kerian did he belatedly remembered the reins. Picking up the leather straps, he held them lightly, certain that the griffon did not need—and would not welcome—his steering or guidance.

  The night air was surprisingly cool once they rose above the trees, but after the numbing heat of the last weeks, Gilthas relished the chill, enjoyed the sensation of his sweat drying from the force of the wind. He looked back, seeing the illumination of the city’s lights fading through the woods. Within a few minutes, Qualinost had faded into the distance behind them, and the forest sprawled strangely dark to all the horizons below.

  They were flying west, he knew from the position of the stars, though Gilthas found it impossible to calculate how far they had traveled. Strangely, he didn’t feel any need to sleep. Instead, he absorbed the view of the starlit landscape, watched the occasional clouds wisp across the heavens, or stole surreptitious looks at Kerian, riding in silence just twenty or thirty feet off to the side.

  A glance over his shoulder showed that dawn had begun to pink the horizon, but there was no distinguishing characteristic in all the vast forest to give him a clear idea of where he was. Slowly daylight filtered across the sky, and with the increasing illumination, the two griffons dived until they were flying just above the tops of the trees. He suspected that this was to avoid discovery by dragons, and the suspicion gave him a little thrill of adventure that soon translated into an acid churning of his stomach.

  Finally the sun rose into the cloudless sky, and the heat of the direct rays on his back brought back awareness of this scorching summer. They coursed through dry air, and in the harsh light, he saw that many of the trees were withered, their leaves tinged with a brown that was utterly unnatural for the eternally lush forests of Qualinesti. They crossed over a small stream, and in the glimpses he got between the leaves, he saw that the water was still and muddy, more a series of stagnant pools around bone-dry rocks than any kind of fresh water flowage.

  And then, at last, something broke the monotonous blanket of treetops. A bluff jutted before them, a conelike promontory formed by some ancient geological convulsion, or perhaps the work of some ultrapowerful wizard with a taste for altered landscapes. The sides of the elevation were thickly blanketed by trees, but the face was bare rock, a cliff worn ragged by weather, reduced to a series of tapered spires rising upward from the jagged summit. At the base of the cliff was a small lake, where the waters somehow remained clear and blue in the midst of the drought.

  Here the griffons descended, gliding just above the lake’s surface. Gilthas was enthralled by the sight of huge trout darting away from their swift shadows.

  Finally he looked up and saw that they were angling toward the shore. And there, in the shadows beneath the lofty oaks and vallenwoods, he saw a number of people gathered, arrayed in a semicircle, clearly awaiting their arrival.

  The griffons swept closer, and Gilthas could see that these were elves. In the woods beyond them, more griffons were at rest, though some of the creatures lifted their heads or made sharp squawks to acknowledge the arrival of their two fellows.

  With a suddenness that almost pitched him from the saddle, Gilthas’s steed swooped down and skidded to a halt on the dry ground at the edge of the lake. Immediately hard-faced elves raced forward, flanking him with swords drawn.

  “Get d
own!” one of them barked. “Quickly!”

  Gilthas did so, scrambling from the saddle, kicking out of the stirrups, and somehow coming to rest on his feet. He noticed that Kerianseray had dismounted smoothly and was welcoming the embrace of a tall, fierce Kagonesti. That warrior, whose face, chest, and limbs were covered with the whorls and leaves of black tattoos, stared over Kerian’s head at Gilthas, his expression cold and unreadable.

  Trying to summon what he could of his dignity, Gilthas straightened up and looked stiffly over the assembled elves.

  These were a mix of wild elves and crudely dressed Qualinesti, the latter wearing leather leggings and cloth tunics to set them apart from the Kagonesti, who wore loincloths. One of the Qualinesti, a golden-haired male with stern features, his mouth locked in a harsh frown, stepped forward from the throng.

  Gilthas was certain this was Porthios.

  “Greetings, Uncle,” began the young Speaker. “I am grateful that you have agreed to see me.”

  “You should be,” Porthios snapped. “For by many accounts, you are the one who has stolen my medallion and my throne, who purports to lead my people but is really the tame lackey of the Thalas-Enthia!”

  Gilthas felt the sting of the words, used all his willpower not to recoil. “I had no part in seeking this throne,” he retorted, his eyes searching through the elves beyond Porthios, seeking one particular face. “Instead, it was thrust upon me—after it had already been taken from you!—and I donned the medallion to avoid an even darker alternative.”

  “What alternative is darker than betrayal? Than exile?” growled the former Speaker of the Sun.