Blood of the Emperor

by Tracy Hickman

  Most, Jugar noted, but not all.

  Jugar raised both of his hands above his head in acknowledgment of their welcome but his thoughts were troubled.

  Twenty-five Thanes under the mountain. That’s five by five. Nine Kings…seven peaks…five Thanes by five…the rhythm of the dragon’s song resounding beneath the mountain. A warning from the gods…

  Jugar shook his head and smiled brightly at the Thanes.

  It was no gods that made Drakis, he told himself. Only a fool believes a myth of his own creation.

  Jugar stood in the middle of the hall, turning around as he faced the Thanes who were seated in two rows around the room. At last he faced the empty throne that had been set in the hall by enthusiastic guardsmen. It was not as grand as the one he had last occupied in the Stoneheart but in many ways far more important. It sat on a platform just three steps above the rough-hewn floor. He climbed those short steps, turned and sat.

  The platform itself had been hastily erected and its surface was also uneven. The throne wobbled slightly as he sat on it.

  Thrones, Jugar reflected, can be particularly precarious perches to maintain.

  Jugar waited until the Thanes had all stopped their display of welcome and, no longer stamping their feet, had all taken their seats. Only then did Jugar address them. “Thanes of the Seven Peaks, I have returned from the lands beneath the sky but I cannot stay. I must return and finish what I have started—for your sakes and for the sake of all dwarvenkind.”

  “And what has our remaining king started?” asked Gorfend, Thane of Bekra, standing abruptly from the second row.

  “I have started a war,” Jugar answered simply.

  “A war?” Gorfend tilted his head, the three braids of his long beard quivering. “Must I remind King Aerkan that we just went through a war—a war that cost us the thrones of each of our Nine Kingdoms and thrust the refugees from those kingdoms upon the outlying Thanes?”

  “Does Thane Gorfend seek to educate me regarding the battle,” Jugar said. “I was there and do not recall his presence.”

  “I may not have been at the battle,” Gorfend rejoined, “but I have born the burden of its results daily since. And now the Last King returns to us so that having lost our last war he may start another?”

  “We will be victorious,” Jugar stated. “We have the advantage.”

  “Advantage?” Evon, Thane of Osath scoffed as he stood up to join in the argument. Evon was a stocky, fat dwarf with a red, wide beard that he preferred to leave splayed out rather than braided. His region lay deep under Mount Heparion and had been largely untouched by the battles to the south. “What advantage? Our armies are but a fraction of their former strength, most of them filled with new and untrained warriors and the elven Cohorts continue to occupy and sack our lost cities. We are a nation in exile and you talk of advantage?”

  “Yes, I say advantage,” Jugar asserted. He reached inside his leather coat and pulled out an ugly, multifaceted stone that looked like onyx but seemed to absorb even the dim light of the subterranean room. Several of the Thanes cried out, holding their arms up as though to shield themselves from the stone.

  “It is an abomination!” Evon cried out.

  “It is our salvation!” Jugar rejoined.

  “The Aer Crafters have whispered about the Heart of Aer,” Thane Baldron of D’ras said in awe as he, too, stood to address the gathering, his luxuriously long, black beard separated into two braids that he had draped back through epaulets over his shoulders. D’ras was beneath Devon Fel far to the north, and it was where most of the dwarven Aer masters had congregated after the fall of the last city. “They spoke of how the kings had demanded their mages mimic the Aether magic, to channel the natural Aer of earth and sky as the elves now did and the humans did before them. It was in their sight a corruption of the natural power of Aer but they forged the Heart in a desperate hope to keep the elves beyond the dwarven gates. Now the wizards all believed the Heart to be cursed and to have caused the fall of the kings, dooming them for creating it in the first place! They said it had been lost but it…it exists still?”

  “It more than exists,” Jugar said, holding the stone high above his head. “It is the key to bringing the elves to their knees before us. I have used the power of this device, channeled its energies and seen its wonders. The Aether Wells of the enemy cannot stand against it. It shatters them utterly, robbing the Rhonas of the very Aether by which their entire Empire is ruled.”

  “It is an atrocity against the very nature of Aer,” Evon asserted. “It should be destroyed.”

  “When the towers of the Imperial City lie in ruins!” Jugar shouted, his face suddenly filled with rage. “When the last elf takes his final breath! When the souls of our dead can join their ancestors with their heads held high because their sacrifice has been avenged! Then…THEN you may do what you will. I am KING…and with the Heart of Aer we will bring down our enemies with a fall so great that its sound will echo to the very end of the world!”

  “How?” Thane Evod demanded. “You would bring down the might of Rhonas with one magic stone and a decimated army of dwarves?”

  “No, not with our army but with a gift,” Jugar said, regaining his composure. “I have these last few months been busy in the world above. In this the gods have smiled upon us for they have brought us a human legend.”

  “Drakis?” Baldron scoffed.

  Jugar raised his eyebrows in surprise. “You’ve heard of this?”

  “We trade with the Hak’kaarin from time to time,” Baldron said. “They have been full of tales of this Drakis-human coming back from the dead to free the world from the elves. We thought they had made it up.”

  “Not them, I made him up,” Jugar’s voice boomed proudly. “He was a slave—an Impress Warrior of a backwater elven household—nothing to anyone. But I started a small stone rolling down that most fortunate hill and it has grown into an avalanche. Most of the northern continent seems convinced that he is the fulfillment of their foolish prophecy. Now there is an army being raised in his name that is bent on doing exactly what we wish: to march on Rhonas and destroy the Empire.”

  “Then to vengeance and war!” Wadex shouted. “If the King commands it, we shall march with this Drakis and his army.”

  “No,” Jugar said, shaking his head with a smile. “I most certainly do not command it.”

  “Then why have we been summoned here?” Thane Gorfend asked in astonishment. “You say you start a war and now you do not want us to join it?”

  “That is correct, my good Thanes,” Jugar stated calmly as he sat back down on his wobbling throne. “I will be leaving you again tomorrow. I will return to this Drakis and make sure that his devoted and fanatic army will march against the Rhonas Empire. I will help them destroy the Aether Wells as they advance, robbing the Empire of its magic. Without its magic…Rhonas cannot stand.”

  “And are our warriors to stand still and our blades to remain clean while war is waged?” Marshal Wadex sputtered.

  “That is precisely why, my good Thanes, you will support me in this war,” Jugar said, holding his head up with pride. “Because the manticores, goblins, gnomes, chimerians, and humans…all those who have come together against our common enemy, will fight our war for us. They will bleed in our stead. They will die for our cause. And when at last they have thrown themselves against the gates of Rhonas and both the Empire and this army of rebels are spent and wasted…only then shall our armies march from beneath the mountain and none shall remain to stand in our way.”

  Silence fell among the Thanes.

  “All you have to do is prepare the army for war and await my word,” Jugar said through a gap-toothed grin, “while others do our dying for us.”

  “And what will you be doing?” Thane Evod asked.

  “Insuring our triumph,” Jugar replied, “By destroying Aether magic…wherever it is found.”

  CHAPTER 13

  Conjuration

  WITH HIS CLOAK
PULLED AROUND HIM, Drakis stood next to Braun on a windswept hilltop two leagues to the east of what the residents had started calling Pyris Camp. Before them stood a ragged formation of pilgrims, almost entirely human with a smattering of elves, three goblins, and a gnome mixed in.

  “These are all there are?” Drakis whispered to Braun in dismay.

  “Yes, Drakis,” Braun answered with a soft smile in the morning light. The sun had drifted only a hand’s width above the horizon, burning away a hazy low fog and leaving them all under a bright, if chill sky. “Sixty-nine that have the ability to command the magic.”

  “Sixty-nine?” Drakis said, shaking his head. “I count only fifty-three.”

  “There have been a few—incidents—during the training,” Braun said, his thick brows lowering as he spoke.

  “Incidents?”

  “There were some initial problems with fire and lightning that we’re still working on and then there are the fold spells,” Braun shrugged. “They can be a bit difficult when you first learn them. They require a lot of control even over short distances. Some of our acolytes have more talent than patience and decided on their own to attempt longer distance folds for themselves.”

  “Did they survive?” Drakis asked.

  “If we ever find them, we’ll know,” Braun said then coughed.

  Drakis turned to mask his frustration. He gazed at the vast encampment in the distance, spread as it was almost three leagues on a side spilling out of Willow Vale with columns of smoke rising into the bright sky from innumerable cook fires. An elven Legion would have to be blind not to spot that smoke from more than a hundred leagues in any direction.

  And Soen—the elf Inquisitor who has hunted me since the day I woke to this living nightmare—advises me to move that secretly into Vestasia? Drakis gritted his teeth at the thought.

  It was insane. He had barely managed to get the quarrelsome pilgrims under some form of order. The enormous and still increasing number of pilgrims that comprised the assembly had created a growing problem of segregation within the encampment. Manticores preferred to associate with their own by virtue of their common customs. Chimerians were recognized by every other race as reclusive even in the best of relationships. Humans were distrustful of other races and had begun to develop their own group called the “Brothers of Drakis.” The elves that had joined the cause of Drakis felt shunned and marginalized. The presence of the goblins in the camp, ostensibly as a constabulary force operating side by side with the Grahn Aur Guard, had become a source of constant friction for everyone. Coercion, extortion, and intimidation were just a part of their job as far as the goblins were concerned, and they could not fathom why none of the other races in the encampment could grasp those simple facts.

  Drakis spent most of the first day upon returning to the camp dealing with this mess. He first decided it would be better for him to proclaim a division of the encampment himself before other, more partisan divisions formed on their own. It was the Lyric who suggested that the pantheon of Drakosia would provide names for ten smaller camps. The names of ancient and largely forgotten gods were beyond the scope of any existing partisan disagreements. She even provided the names of the gods who now, it seemed, were remembered only by her: Abratias, Heritsania, Aremthis, Aegrain, Khorithan, Tyra, Pythus, Jurusta, Quabet, and Elucia. Drakis divided the Encampment into those ten individual camps and then appointed a council chosen from as best a balance of the different races as possible for each. Each camp council would appoint a representative to the Council of the Grahn Aur to convey their problems to the central council as well as the directives of the council to each of the ten camps. It had taken three days to accomplish this; much longer than he had hoped.

  He managed to return to the column of his army that night on the back of the dragon Marush. He kept flying into the night farther and farther up the coast until he discovered them encamped just north of Markrethold. Their advance had not been as fast as Drakis had hoped and his meetings with the unit commanders lasted well into the night. He managed a few fitful hours of sleep before awakening again and, back on the harness fixed around Marush’s neck, returned again to the southwest.

  On the fourth day, Drakis had met with the Pajak of the goblins and convinced the goblin ruler—through his winning smile and the presence of an enormous, impressive, and hungry-looking dragon at his back—to have the Pajak’s units on wyvernback conduct their so-called “security patrols” only outside of the encampment and leave the interior enforcement of the camp’s law to the Grahn Aur Guards. It had still cost the coffers of the encampment dearly to purchase that agreement even with the threat of Marush eating the Pajak’s entire court but thereafter the incidence of theft and extortion within the encampment plummeted.

  But as Drakis stood on the hilltop next to Braun and inspected the group standing before him, he was not sure how long the unity of the pilgrims would last.

  “So your folds can’t help us, then?” Drakis asked Braun.

  “Oh, of course they can help!” Braun grinned. “We lost a few at first but we’ve gotten rather good at the folds since then. It’s largely a question of the potency of the Aether as we draw on it. The more potency the Aether exerts, the farther we can open the fold. Unfortunately that potency falls off over distance. The farther we get from the inverted Aether Well in Port Glorious and, for that matter, the Wells you inverted across the ocean in Drakosia, the less potent the Aether we have to draw upon. The Rhonas enchanters surmounted this problem through the use of portable altars for their Devotions. They would gather the weak force from distant Aether Wells over a lengthy period of time and then discharge it in a powerful burst of Aether in a short period of time.

  “Could such a device help us?” Drakis wondered.

  “Absolutely,” Braun affirmed. “As as soon as I can determine just how such a device can be built, we will make use of it at once. What would be most helpful would be an elven enchanter who could tell us how such a thing might be accomplished. Still, the Aether should be sufficient to help us reach the Shadow Coast. Once we are there we could invert one of their local Wells and that would solve many of our problems for us.”

  “So you believe this group of wizards can move the entire population of the encampment, their wagons, equipment, and the army as well?”

  “Undoubtedly!” Braun beamed. “We can with almost perfect certainty project a transport fold corridor a distance of ten leagues if we can see the destination—twice that distance if we have another mage at the other end. You remember the gatefold runes I used to inscribe as a Proxi? In this case, the mage acts as a living rune, anchoring the far fold and doubling the distance traveled.”

  Drakis turned his skeptical gaze back on the assembly before them. “And these are all the enchanters you could find?”

  “Mages,” Braun corrected.

  “Mages and enchanters…what’s the difference?” Drakis sighed.

  “Mage is the latest appellation for the users of our Aether magic,” Braun said with a smile. “A mage is traditionally someone who uses or channels magic. It’s found in the old Drakosian language, or so the Lyric tells me. Those who use the elven method of Aether would more properly be called “enchanters” as their technique requires that the magic be channeled through a prepared physical object…”

  “Such as a Matei staff,” said a voice from the huddled group before them.

  Drakis looked sharply toward the high-pitched, elven voice.

  Soen stepped out from the gathered mages and approached Drakis and Braun as he continued speaking, his unpowered staff still in his hand. “The Aether requires a physical property or conduit through which its power may be channeled. But the elven enchantments, as you call them, and your own sorcery, as you may more reasonably call it, are basically the same. Rhonas magic is channeled through exterior physical objects like staves, crystals, wands, amulets, and the like. Braun magic—and if it needs a name, why not your own?—also requires a physical resonant connection w
ith the source of Aether but in your case the connection appears to be in your internal bones rather than external objects. Elven magical items resonate and are bound with the Aether with which they are charged which is why they retain the power over time. Your bones do the same—but it seems that only a very particular combination will work, is this not so?”

  “Why are you here?” Drakis asked with thinly-veiled suspicion.

  “Perhaps a better question to ask would be how I am here,” Soen responded.

  “You were with the Army of the Prophet when I saw you last,” Drakis said, his eyes narrowing as they fixed on the Iblisi’s Matei staff. “You should be more than a week’s travel away.”

  Soen followed Drakis’ gaze then shook his head, smiling. “No, Lord Drakis, my magic has not returned. My staff is still dead and my powers spent. In truth, you were the magician who conjured me here.”

  “He was selected,” Braun groaned. “He’s right, Drakis. You asked that we quietly find as many among the encampment as had a gift for the restored Aether magic and gather them for training. Whenever we found an acolyte—a novice mage—the first thing we taught them was how to use the Aether to detect others who had the gift and bring them here. Once the folds were more reliable, we sent several mages to search the army.”

  “And to bring them back here through your folds,” Drakis sighed then glared at Soen.

  Soen shrugged, smiling as he showed his sharp teeth slightly. “It seems I have an aptitude for this sort of thing.”

  “Get him out of here,” Drakis said quietly to Braun. “He’s done enough already.”

  Drakis turned his back to walk away.

  “On the contrary, Drakis, I’ve done too much to stop now,” Soen called out. “Rhonas Magic and Drakosian Magic—it’s two sides of the same Aether coin. There are important, fundamental differences between them but there are significant areas that they have in common—and I know them better than any man here, including Braun.”