DragonThrone02 The Empire of the Stars

by Alison Baird

  But then he had lost the Stone. An old woman had seized it, a witch with the power to summon terrifying winged genii out of the heavens; and one of her companions was a young girl claiming to be the Tryna Lia herself, daughter of the Queen of Night incarnate in human form. After they escaped him Khalazar had retreated to his homeland and fallen into despair, until it occurred to him at length that this too was in the prophecies—the other gods of the pantheon would do all they could to thwart Valdur’s rise to power, and the Tryna Lia was their chosen champion. The avatar of Valdur must expect to confront her—so was her appearance not in fact an affirmation of his identity?

  But if he were the Avatar, a tormenting voice now whispered in the king’s mind, why could he not summon genii at command? Should not the incarnate Valdur also exercise authority over the spirit-world? Was he not Valdur, after all? The thought tortured him throughout every waking hour. He had turned to necromancy, seeking counsel from the spirits of the dead, who as all men knew were party to secrets unknown to the living. For many months he had practiced incantations on a collection of corpses (easily obtained in this violent land), but none could be induced to speak. Now in growing desperation he had turned to this alternative necromantic practice, the summoning of ghosts from beyond the grave. And as he recited the incantation, he thought that he did, in fact, hear a faint rustling sound within the chamber, though he dared not pause in midspell. Only when the incantation was properly concluded did Khalazar lower his hands and open his eyes. The chamber was empty and still as before. With an oath he sprang up, and was about to quit the magic circle when a slight movement in a far corner made him start and whirl.

  A figure stood there at the dark end of the room: a tall man, or the shade of a man, clad in a hooded robe the same hue as the shadows in which he stood. The door was still barred from within; the intruder could not have entered that way. The window was open, but it was fourteen stories above the ground and the tower’s smooth walls offered no purchase to a climber. As Khalazar stood gaping the figure came soundlessly forward. The beardless face within the cowl was white as death, and the eyes of the apparition burned like yellow flames. Beneath their unnatural glare the king shivered from head to toe. A spirit beyond a doubt, but this was not, could not be Gurusha: that was not a Zimbouran face within the hood.

  “Avaunt!” Khalazar screamed, cowering within the circle. “Avaunt—I did not summon you!”

  The specter put back its hood, letting long lion-colored hair tumble about its pale face. “Come, Khalazar,” it said in a deep reverberant voice, “you are in no position to reject any help. Be sensible.”

  “Who are you?” rasped the king, unable to retreat any farther without leaving the protection of the circle.

  “My name is Morlyn,” the specter replied. “I was a prince of great renown in days of old. Surely even you in Zimboura have heard of me?”

  Morlyn: the dark sorcerer-prince of Maurainia, dead now for five hundred years. Even as he sweated and trembled before the strange figure, Khalazar felt a minute flare of elation deep within his mind. He had summoned a spirit! Not the one he had sought, but a real spirit nonetheless—and a great one, the ghost of a warrior and archmage! A thin cackle of triumph escaped his shaking lips.

  “Well?” the apparition said, folding his cloaked arms. “Have you nothing to say, King, now that I am here? What would you have me do?”

  “Destroy—destroy my enemies,” Khalazar croaked.

  “A large task, that. You appear to have quite an abundance of them.” The one who called himself Morlyn walked slowly around the perimeter of the magic circle, his fiery eyes fixed mockingly on Khalazar’s. “Shall I start with the Shurkanese? The Western Commonwealth? Not to mention all those here in Zimboura who have designs on your throne? And then there is that little matter of the Tryna Lia.”

  Khalazar pivoted fearfully, trying to keep his face always toward Morlyn. The spellbook had said that spirits were always obedient to their summoners, yet this one showed little respect or subservience. “How can you help me?” he demanded, trying to give his voice an edge of authority.

  “We can help one another, Khalazar. Unite against our common foe. I bear no love for the Tryna Lia, and would gladly see her and her followers destroyed. Will you accept my offer?”

  Khalazar stared at him in perplexity. With a sigh of impatience the dark figure stepped forward, and very deliberately placed his booted foot within the ring of blood. The king recoiled with a cry, but a long-fingered hand closed like a claw upon his forearm, preventing his escape. He writhed, torn between terror and outrage. This was not possible! No spirit could enter an enchanted circle—and that hand on his arm was surely flesh and blood! Peering up into the dead-white face, Khalazar saw that the “flaming” eyes were in fact reflecting the candlelight, like a cat’s: they were golden in color, with slit pupils, the eyes neither of a genie nor a man, but of a beast.

  “What are you?” he gasped.

  “An ally, Khalazar of Zimboura.”

  For an instant Khalazar thought he must be swooning: the walls seem to reel around him. Then he blinked, dazed and disbelieving. The chamber had vanished, and with it had gone his castle and, it seemed, all of Zimboura. He and his inhuman companion drifted through an unfathomable darkness, pierced only by the silver points of stars. Stars above—and stars beneath!

  “Where are we?” he shouted wildly.

  “Have no fear, Khalazar—you are in your chamber still; at least your body is. We journey now in spirit, through the great void that lies outside the world. Look.”

  A long arm stretched out, and following where it pointed Khalazar saw a great blue globe suspended in the dark, half in shadow.

  “That, King, is the world you know—the world you would have for your own. And now look around you! Here in the great Night, the stars lie thick as dust. They are suns, many of them greater and brighter than the sun you know, and many circled by worlds like your own. How little your ambition is, that you should be content to rule one world only!” The arm pointed again. “Far away, so far you cannot see it, is another, smaller sun that orbits this sun of yours, and circling that sun in turn is a world—Azar, the planet for which you were named. You have wasted your time in seeking to summon little genii of earth and air, when the great spirits, the sovereign lords of the spheres, await your bidding! Elazar, and Elombar ruler of the planet that circles the red star Utara—all the celestial thralls of Valdur dwell here in the heights. But you have foes here too.”

  Again a sweeping gesture of the cloaked arm. “Do you see that planet there, near the sun—the blue-white one that shines so brightly?”

  “I see it, spirit.”

  “That is Arainia, which you of this world call the Morning Star. But it too is a world, and in it your greatest foe dwells.”

  Once again Khalazar felt a sense of vertigo; once again he blinked and stared about him. The stars were gone. He stood in broad daylight in a park, lush with verdure, feathery fronds waving against the sky, trees in light green leaf and slow-unfolding flower all around him. Beyond reared the towers of a city—a city such as Khalazar had never dreamed of: vast and sprawling, yet orderly, encircled by no protecting wall, filled with stately mansions and pleasure-gardens. In the sun fountains leaped, glittering.

  Morlyn led him along a path to the gate of the park, and out into the city. Khalazar followed like a man in a trance; though he seemed to be walking, he felt nothing under his feet, and neither he nor the tall figure before him cast any shadow in the sun. The streets into which they entered thronged with people clad in garments of brilliant hues, tall, graceful men and women, unlike any he had ever seen.

  “What city is this?” he cried as the strange people walked past him unheeding. “I have never seen the like—”

  Morlyn led him to the gateway of a mansion. “Look,” he said softly. “These gates are gold, Khalazar—gold, of which the people in this world have such an abundance that they use it even in their children’
s toys. And on the gateposts, embedded in the marble—do you see the many-colored patterns, the intricate floral designs? Look more closely, and you will find that each leaf and petal is in fact a gemstone: emerald, ruby, lapis lazuli. These gates alone are worth a whole Zimbouran city . . . and this is but the house of a modest merchant.” The Zimbouran king tried in vain to prize a gleaming emerald leaf from its setting, swearing with frustration as his insubstantial fingers passed through it.

  “Look!” Morlyn waved a white long-fingered hand toward the rooftops, and Khalazar lifted his eyes and saw a great palace with towers reaching to the sun, all alabaster and gold. It perched upon the summit of a green hill, like a sailing ship mounting the crest of a wave. “That, O King, is Halmirion, palace of the greatest sorceress in this world: the Tryna Lia. She is not that rather simple young woman whom you encountered in Trynisia: that was, I fear, a case of mistaken identity. The true Princess dwells here: Ailia Elmiria, daughter of Elarainia the Queen of Night.”

  Khalazar fell silent, seized with sudden dread as he gazed up at those towers, so bright and confident beneath the sun. How many times had he reassured himself that his foe was but a woman, weaker in body and mind than he. Should they ever meet face to face in mortal combat, the advantage would surely lie with him. But now his heart sank. Who could defeat a monarch of such power, such inexhaustible wealth? She need never face him at all: she could surely raise a hundred armies to his one, and defeat him utterly upon the field of battle. And she had other allies, like the fearsome genii he had beheld in Trynisia . . .

  “Help me,” he grated, wrenching his gaze from the hateful sight. “If you have the power, then help me defeat this evil sorceress!”

  “You shall have my help,” Morlyn answered. “And that of the Valei, the servants of Valdur in other spheres, who hate this world of Arainia and its people more than you can ever know. But you have power too, Khalazar: in your armies, in the devotion you can inspire in them. Once your armies are joined with those of the Valei we will have a force that Heaven itself may fear, O Avatar of Valdur! This world is as rich and fair as Zimboura is dry and desolate. Only do as I advise, and its gold and jewels, its forests and game, its people—and its Princess—shall all be yours.”

  “Agreed!” the king cried.

  And then the echo of that cry was ringing from the stone walls of his chamber; he had been returned to his palace, to his own corporeal form. He spun around. No dark-cloaked figure was anywhere to be seen in the room, so that he might almost have been tempted to think the visitation a delusion or a dream. But from outside the open window there came again that soft rustling sound, like a bird’s wings beating in the night.

  2

  The Phantom at the Feast

  WHO AM I?

  The girl lay motionless in her bed, staring upward with sleep blurred eyes at the white canopy. During the early days of her stay here in Halmirion, the first thing that she did on waking was always to wonder where she was, and that mental query was then followed by this second, far more unsettling one. The first question was easily answered, once full memory returned, and with time her mind ceased to pose it, but the other continued to trouble her. She was no longer Ailia Shipwright. There was no escaping that fact, though she still clung to the familiar name instead of using her true one, Elmiria. The identity that once had seemed as firm as the contours of her face had been torn away from her all in a moment, leaving her for a time bewildered and bereft. Ailia Shipwright had been raised quite literally in another world, by a family she still could not help thinking of as hers. Her “parents” Nella and Dannor, her “cousins” Jaimon and Jemma—they were all lost to her now. They lay on the far side of a void trackless as any sea and far greater in breadth: vaster than any distance she had ever before known or imagined. But more than that separated her old family from her. No bond of blood united them. All along she had been an alien in their midst.

  Yet she missed them and worried about them still. Ana had told her that the community of sorcerers or Nemerei in the world of Mera would speak with Ailia’s foster family and assure them that she was now safe. But they could never be made to understand where she now was, and they must be anxious about her, too—even though Dannor and Nella had known she was not theirs to keep, and might one day be reunited with her true kin. Ailia sighed. Nella and the others would be first to tell her, as practical Great Islanders, that it would do no good to lie here and fret about it. Wherever she had been fostered, this was the world of her birth, and this was the life that she must now lead. And today was the anniversary of that birth, which meant official festivities she was obliged to take part in.

  She got out of the bed, parting its filmy white curtains, and stood looking around her bedchamber. It was a spacious circular room, following the shape of the tower in which it was set, with windows looking out in three directions. On a marble-topped table next to the bed was a collection of toys from the early childhood that she could not recall: a mechanized bird in a golden cage, a doll’s house built by the city’s craft guilds complete with tiny leaded windows and miniature furnishings. These playthings stood exactly as she had left them when her mother had taken her from the palace over twenty years ago. Ailia had not had the heart to remove them: they were, for her, a link with her lost past. She really ought to have a few faint impressions of those days. It was not extreme youth but distress of mind that had erased her earliest memories, or so the royal physicians told her. For among them there must lie buried one horrific memory of a stormy sea, a holed and sinking ship . . .

  Ailia dressed, then went to one of the deep-set windows and gazed out on her palace. Its roofs filled all her view: a wilderness of towers, turrets, domes, and cupolas, of gold-plated finials and weather vanes and flagpoles from which long banners streamed. Here the sky seemed very near, and at night there were brilliant stars, and the little blue moon Miria, and the Arch of Heaven (actually a system of rings that surrounded the planet) like a pale glimmering bridge spanning the sky from end to end. Ailia had lived in this world for only three of its brief years, but even now it was becoming difficult to recall that time spent beneath another sky empty of such wondrous sights. A sky with dimmer stars and a large white moon and no shining Arch, where the sun looked smaller because it was not so near, and rose not in the west but the east. A world where she had not been the Tryna Lia, prophesied ruler of the Elei, but an ordinary girl of Great Island to whom palaces and royalty were dreams. To this day she sometimes felt like a character in a story she had once read, who as an infant was substituted by villains for the son of a lord, and lived in luxury for years before the true heir returned. “I still half-expect the real Tryna Lia to show up,” she had confessed wryly to her friends, “and turn me out of her palace.” What she did not reveal was that she often wished it could happen.

  Despite her title, she was not really a ruler in the full sense of the word. Her title, like her father’s, was honorary. The High Council that met in the Great Hall in the city, and was made up of representatives from all over Eldimia, the Territories and the Isles, formulated state policy and adjudicated disputes. The religious leaders of Arainia’s numerous faiths attended to spiritual matters. In fact, Ailia realized with humility, there was really very little for her to do, except read the occasional speech (written by someone else), approve each action of the Council (a mere formality), and host receptions for dignitaries. The populace almost never saw her: she was for them a figure remote as the moon, a demi-goddess dwelling in her palace-fane high on its wall-encircled hill, inaccessible and otherworldly. In many ways Ailia and her retainers trod delicate ground: for prior to her mother’s day the people of Eldimia had had no monarchy, and though many noble and royal families still existed, their titles were also honorary and conferred no real power. Though all Arainians had known of the Tryna Lia prophecy, some looked on it as an allegory or a fable. These had frowned when Queen Elarainia had been acclaimed as the goddess after performing some “miracles.” True, her sorce
rous powers had been outstanding, but such powers were not uncommon in this world, as they had been in Mera.

  Those who had been opposed to Elarainia’s coronation and deification had been relieved at her flight and the removal of her equally revered daughter. Ailia’s reappearance and ascension to the throne had upset this faction. Their objections subsided somewhat when it became apparent that Ailia was not going to abuse her position for personal gain. If anything she had been just as frightened of the crowds’ adulation. A document had been hastily drawn up, limiting her influence and ensuring that she remained little more than a figurehead. Not that any of this made a real difference. Those who believed outnumbered those who did not, and the former would have obeyed any edict she chose to issue regardless of any opposition by secular officials. That fact, she reflected with disquiet, must be troubling in certain quarters even though she did nothing to exploit it.

  In the smaller turret next to hers was the guard-room; her friends Jomar and Lorelyn often frequented this room to play dice games with the off-duty guards, and when she glimpsed them in its windows Ailia would lean out of her own high casement and call across to them. But they were not there now. Beyond it was a round tower with a tall peaked window facing her own: that was Damion’s room. At night she could see his lamp glowing softly through the window, and know that he was there. It was a comforting thought. Damion . . . Always she thought of him as she had first seen him in the Chapel of the Paladins, in his white priest’s robe, shining in the golden light as if he and not the sacred fire on the altar were its source—a figure that at first sight had seemed to her more angelic than human. But it was the inner essence of Damion she had come to admire more and more as time passed: his kindness, his courage, his utter dependability. Once she had shyly worshiped him from afar; now he had become a friend, dearer to her than any other. And yet it was not enough.