As the last human warrior crumpled to his knees and let out a mewling cry, like a child troubled by nightmares, Crull-maldor told herself: There are millions of humans in the barrens now. Perhaps among them I will find a worthy foe.
Her wyrmling troops feasted upon fresh man-flesh that evening, and then prepared a few captured humans for the arena, stripping them naked lest they have any concealed weapons.
That was when Crull-maldor found the markings upon the humans’ champion. His skin bore scars from a branding iron, and upon the warrior’s flesh she saw ancient glyphs, primal shapes that had formed the world from the beginning.
Crull-maldor studied a glyph—actually four glyphs all bound into a circle. The largest was the rune for might, but attached to it were other smaller glyphs—seize, confer, and bind.
The lich lord had never seen such scars before, but instinctively she knew what they meant. It was a spell of some nature, a type of parasitical magic, which caused attributes from one being to be imbued upon another.
This is a new form of magic, she realized, one with untold potential. She suspected that she could duplicate the spells, even improve upon them, if she knew more. With mounting excitement she pored over the champion’s other scars: speed, dance, resilience. Four types of runes were represented, and Crull-maldor immediately knew that she could devise others that the humans had not anticipated.
Suddenly, the humans and their new magic took on great import in her mind.
She did not know if she should reveal what she had found to the emperor. Perhaps he already knew about this strange magic. Perhaps he would never know—until after Crull-maldor had mastered it.
So far today, she had not heard from the emperor. Certainly he had witnessed the great change wrought upon the world. Other wyrmling fortresses would be reporting the sightings of humans.
But if things were amiss in the capitol at Rugassa, Crull-maldor had not been forewarned.
Probably, she thought, the emperor will not tell me anything. He hopes that I will fail, that I will embarrass myself, so that he will look better in return.
It had always been this way. Their rivalry had lasted for more than four hundred years.
But at the moment, Crull-maldor suspected that she had the upper hand.
I could just tell him that humans have come, she thought, and not warn him of the dangers of confronting them.
She liked that. A half-truth oft served better than a lie.
But she decided to wait. She didn’t need to report the incursion instantly.
Little of import happened that day. One of he wyrmling captains reported a strangeness: some of her subjects claimed to recall life on another world, the world that had fallen from above. They wished to leave the fortress, head south to their own homes.
Crull-maldor ordered that all such people be put to death. There was no escaping the wrymling horde.
So she waited until after sundown, when the long shadows stretched into full darkness and bats began to weave about the citadel in their acrobatic hunt.
Stars glowered overhead, the fiery eyes of heaven, and a cool and salty breeze breathed over the land.
With the coming of night, the spirits of the land rose from their hiding places.
A second human army was gathering for the night, soldiers from far places riding horses to the towers. Crull-maldor did not want to leave her wyrmlings defenseless, yet she needed to gain information.
So while the armies began to surround her fortress, Crull-maldor dropped from the citadel and went floating beneath the starlight, weaving her way between boulders, drifting above the gorse and bracken.
Field mice felt the cold touch of her presence, and went hopping for their burrows.
Hares thumped their feet to warn their kind. Then they would either hold still, hoping that she passed, or race for the shelter of the gorse.
Nothing substantial had lived here—until today. Nothing substantial could have lived here. Crull-maldor had been cheating death for centuries, living as a shade, a creature that was nearly pure spirit. But to hold on to the spark of life, to stay in communion with the world of fleshy creatures, required tremendous power, power that could only be gained by drawing off the life force of others.
Thus, on a normal night, as she wound her way through the bracken, Crull-maldor would have touched a rabbit here, drained a bush there, or cut short the song a cricket as she passed.
She would have left a trail of death and silence in her wake. But tonight she felt sated, for she had fed upon the spirits of men.
Her mind was not upon the hunt for food that evening, but upon the hunt for information. Her eyes could see beyond the physical realm. Indeed, she was so far gone toward death that she could not easily perceive the physical world anymore, unless she happened to be riding in the mind of a crow or a wolf.
Now she passed through the wilds in a daze, as if moving through a dream.
More immediate, more real to her, were the perceptions of her spirit. She could see into the dead world easily, a world that had always been a mystery to mortals.
They lived here in the Northern Wastes, the dead did—in these so-called “barrens.” Most of the time, the dead prefer to isolate themselves from the living, for living men often hold powerful auras that confuse and trouble the dead.
So the dead had built cities that seemed to be sculpted from light and shadow. Great towers rose up all around her in shades that the mortal eye cannot see—the rose colors of dawn, the deepest purples of twilight, and shades of fire that no mortal can imagine.
Soaring arches spanned the streets, with flowering vines cascading from them, while great fountains spurted up in broad plazas that seemed to be paved with a pale mist.
What a living wyrmling imagined was only a barren waste was in fact the home to millions.
But tonight in the spirit world, much had changed. There had been one city here yestereve. Now Crull-maldor saw towers everywhere, rising above the plains. Hosts of human dead had come.
Their women shrieked for joy and children laughed, while minstrels played in far pavilions.
The spirits of the dead celebrated here, the shades of humans and wyrmlings mingling together, oblivious of the living world—just as the living world was oblivious of them.
So the lich lord wafted above streets of mellow haze, into the House of Light, and there came upon a great convocation of elders, mixed with scholars from the human world.
Crull-maldor did not see them with her physical eyes; instead she perceived their spirits, like spiny sea urchins created from light. Each spirit was a small round ball with thousands of white needle-like appendages that issued out in every direction.
Each spirit had the memory of its fleshly form draped over it like a cloak, showing dimly remembered exteriors. Thus, the balls of light hovered about inside the shells of wyrmling lords and men.
Crull-maldor went to the most glorious among them—a human woman who shone with tremendous brilliance, a symbol of her wisdom and power.
Then the lich lord seized the woman. Crull-maldor sent a tendril of light coiling out from her own spirit, and penetrated the woman’s field. The lich took the woman by the umbilicus and twisted, causing the woman untold pain.
Once again, Crull-maldor found the act to be surprisingly easy. A spiritual attack upon such a powerful being should normally have required great concentration. But now it felt like child’s play.
“Tell me what you know!” Crull-maldor demanded.
The woman shrieked, and the color of her spindles of light suddenly changed from bright white to a delicious deep red. She recoiled, and all of the tendrils around her nucleus shrank in on themselves, the way that the arms of sea anemone will do when something brushes against it.
“What would you have of me, great lord of the dead!” the woman cried. Her name was Endemeer, and she had once been a vaunted scholar.
“What has happened to my world?”
“A great sorcerer has come,”
Endemeer said. “He has bound two worlds into one, two worlds that were but shadows of the one true world that existed at the beginning of time.
“He has bound flesh to flesh in those who live; and he has bound spirit to spirit among the dead. . . .”
Immediately Crull-maldor knew that the scholar spoke correctly. This world that she had said once existed, Crull-maldor had heard of it from some of the greater spirits she had tortured.
But until now, Crull-maldor had not believed in it. She had suspected that it was a place found only in one’s imagination.
It explained everything so simply, yet it had tremendous ramifications.
Crull-maldor had not yet revealed to the emperor her news about the humans in her land. She knew now that she could not hide the news. This great change impacted entire continents.
Humans are abroad in the land once again, Crull-maldor thought, and where there is conflict, there is also opportunity.
Crull-maldor immediately sent an alarm, a flash of thought to the emperor Zul-torac. Our wyrmling scouts have found humans in the Northern Wastes. They came with a great change that has twisted the earth.
The emperor sent back a terse reply, and she felt his thoughts crawling through her mind, seeking to infiltrate it. She set a barrier against them, so that he could not read her mind, and he replied. I know, fool! Deal with them.
His thoughts fled, dismissing her.
Crull-maldor grinned. As she had hoped, he had not had the foresight to tell her how to deal with them.
The scholar Endemeer whimpered and tried to escape Crull-maldor’s grasp. The lich lord merely held her, eager to wring more information from her.
“Tell me about the humans’ new magic, the glyph magic.”
Crull-maldor sent her own tendrils of light plunging deep into those of her captive. Each tendril of light was like a strand of human brain. It stored wisdom and memories. As Crull-maldor brushed against Endemeer, she glimpsed the memories stored upon Endemeer’s tendrils.
Grasping the ones that she wanted, Crull-maldor ripped the tendrils free. It was like tearing apart a human brain. The tendrils’ light immediately began to dim, so Crull-maldor shoved them into her own central bundle, transplanting the memories. By doing so she stole the spirit’s knowledge. It was a violation as reprehensible as rape, a type of murder.
So Crull-maldor hunched over her prey, ripping light from Endemeer and in the City of the Dead the lich lord discovered the deepest secrets of the runelords.
6
A CALL TO ARMS
It is only when a man gives up his life in service to a greater cause that he can attain true greatness.
—The Wizard Binnesman
War horns rent the air; Myrrima startled awake, heart pounding.
She cocked an ear, alert for sounds of danger, and heard the screams of horses dying in battle, along with some warlord shouting, “Man the breach! Man the breach, damn you!”
A drum pounded and sent a snarl rolling over the hills like the crack of thunder. Deep voices roared in challenge in some strange tongue, voices unlike any that Myrrima had ever heard.
Blinking the sleep from her eyes, Myrrima climbed from her bed there in the lee of the rocks, the warm ferns crushed from her weight, and peered out in alarm in the cool morning mist, trying to find the source of danger.
But there were no armies clashing in the distance, and as she woke it seemed to her that the sounds faded, as if they could be heard only in dream.
She stood panting, trying to catch her breath, clear her head. She blinked, looking around. Erin’s body still lay there on the grass not a hundred yards off, her face pale, her lips going blue. Sage was sleeping soundly in the ferns.
Nearby, the Walkin clan was still sleeping, too. Myrrima was the only one who had wakened.
Her heart ceased to hammer so hard; she stood for a moment, thinking.
It was only a dream. It was only a dream. All of Borenson’s talk last night stirred up evil memories of battles long past. Or perhaps her vision of Erin that she’d had not more than a couple of hours ago had conjured an evil dream.
Whatever the cause, the sounds of battle had faded. Myrrima sat in a daze, wondering.
“What is it, Mother?” Sage asked, stirring from her sleep.
“Nothing,” Myrrima whispered. She searched about camp. Borenson and Draken were still gone.
Yet as she sat in the early dawn, she heard the sound of water tinkling in the streamlet nearby, the discreet cheeping of small birds in a thicket.
Other than that, the morning was utterly still. The sun was just rising in the far hills, painting the dawn in shades of peach and rose. It was that time of morning when everything is still, even the wind.
Yet there she heard it again—the deep call of a war horn in the distance, and the sound of men clashing in battle.
She strode toward it with a start and cocked her ear. The sound seemed to be coming from the far side of the old river channel.
Straining to hear, she crept over to the cliff, her feet rustling dry grasses, and stood for a moment. The sound had faded again, but she could hear it now—a deep rumbling in the ground, as if horses were charging into battle, the blare of horns. She could almost smell blood in the air.
She peered across the channel. Its waters were dark and muddy, filled with filth and jetsam. Mists rising off of it made the far shore nearly impossible to make out. Could there be a battle over there? But who would be fighting?
Yet as she stood at the edge of the cliff, peering about, there was no sign of troops in the distance, and the sound seemed now to be coming from below her, from the still waters in the channel.
Myrrima clambered carefully down the steep slope a hundred feet, until she stopped at the water’s edge.
The sounds of war came distant now, so distant. She wondered if she was listening to the remnant of a dream.
Suddenly, out in the water a body floated to the surface not forty feet from shore, a woman with wide hips, someone who would have made her home in the village of Sweetgrass. Thankfully, Myrrima could not see her face, only her stringy gray hair.
The corpse bobbed for a moment, and then the sounds of battle suddenly blasted in Myrrima’s ears.
“Internook! Internook!” a barbarian cried. “Hail to the Bearers of the Orb!” Men cheered fiercely all around her, and she heard them running, mail ringing and jangling.
She peered off in the mist, and let her eyes go out of focus, and then she saw it: a castle a hundred miles north of the Courts of Tide, its battlements all lit by fire. It was dark there, and she could not see the enemy—except for a mass of great beasts out beyond the walls, giants with white skin and startling white eyes, wearing armor carved from bone.
“To battle!” some warlord cheered. “To battle!”
And then just as suddenly as it had come, the vision ended, as if a portcullis gate had slammed down, holding the vision at bay.
Is this a vision of the future? Myrrima wondered. But a certainty filled her.
No, it is a battle happening now, far across the ocean. Dawn had come to her home here in Landesfallen, but night still reigned on the far side of the world. As Borenson had warned, the wyrmlings were greeting their new neighbors.
The vision, the sounds, both seemed to be coming from the water, and that is when Myrrima knew.
She had wondered whether to follow Borenson across the ocean into his mad battle.
But water was calling to her, summoning Myrrima to war.
Borenson will find a ship, Myrrima realized. Water will make a way for us to reach that far shore. My powers there will be needed.
A giant green dragonfly common to the river valley came buzzing over the water nearby, a winged emerald with eyes of onyx. It hovered for a moment, as if gauging her.
Myrrima knelt then at the edge of the old river channel and laved dirty brown water over her arms, then tilted her face upward and let it stream, cold and dead, over her forehead and eyes. Thus she a
nointed herself for war.
There had been a time in Myrrima’s life when she’d made a ritual of washing herself first thing each morning. As a child she’d loved water, whether it was the sweet drops of a summer rain clinging to her eyelashes, or the tinkling of a freshet as it darted among the rocks. It was her love of water that gave her power over it. At the same time, water had power over her, too—enough power so that she often felt pulled by it, and she found herself wanting to go lie in a deep river, so that the water could caress her and surround her and someday carry her out to sea.
Six years back, she had purposely given up the ritual, afraid that if she did not, she would lose herself to water.
But this morning was different. Worries wormed their way through her mind, and she had seldom felt so tired.
So when she reached camp, she found Sage and led her to the nearby stream. It was only a trickle at this time of year. A little water roamed down from the red-rock above. In the winters the rain and snow would seep into the porous sandstone, and for centuries it would percolate down through the rock until it hit a layer of harder shale. Then it would slowly flow out, and thus seeped from a cliff face above. Myrrima was so attuned to water that she could taste it and feel in her heart how long ago it had fallen as rain.
Not much water escaped the rocks, barely enough to wet the ground. But there was a boggy spot where the streamlet stole through the moss and grass.
Wild ferrin and rangits often came to drink here, and so had trampled the grass a bit.
So Myrrima took Sage and with stones and moss they dammed the small stream, so that it began to rise over the course of the morning.
Rain came to help them, bringing some clay that she had found nearby. As they padded clay between the stones of the dam, Myrrima told the young women of Borenson’s plan to return to Mystarria.
“It may be a dangerous journey,” Myrrima said. “I can understand why you would not want to go. I hesitate to ask you, Sage. Landesfallen has been your home for so long, I will not force you to come.”
“I don’t remember Mystarria,” Sage said. “Draken sometimes talks about the vast castle we lived in, all white, with its soaring spires and grand hallways.”
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