by Alison Baird
IN HIS FORTRESS FAR BELOW Mandrake observed the undersea battle. He had banished the dragon lanterns back to the Ether from whence they came, so that the adamantine castle should give no betraying glimmer to the enemy above, and it lay now in an oppressive gloom. The deeps above the transparent roof were filled with spinning shadows: dragons locked in mortal combat, some seeking to destroy him and some to protect his life with theirs. It was a battle of Loänan only, for firedrakes shunned water, fearing the element that quenched their flames; and the cherubim with their feathered wings could not dive to these depths. And so the balance here was tipped, for the Loänan that were loyal to Ailia vastly outnumbered his own rebels. He had erred in fleeing to the sea-bastion, and was caught now in a trap of his own making.
Two voices spoke within the Dragon Prince’s mind as he stood there watching his fate draw ever nearer. They offered him power, and the chance for escape. He would perish here, they said, only if he did not accept their aid. One of these voices he recognized as the same entity that had spoken to him through Syndra. Elnemorah had truly possessed the woman, and now she was seeking to take his mind as well. The other was the old shadow-voice that had always been within him.
Only touch your mind to mine, Elnemorah promised, and I can give you strength to drive forth your foes from my world.
Hear her, the shadow said. Power I give as well: power from the stars, greater than any earth-sorcery.
It was true that the Archons had returned: not in full embodied might as in days of old, but as incorporeal influences that persuaded and seduced. The dragon paced about and tossed his horned head, like a horse tormented by stinging flies. He could deny them and perish in this prison, or he could submit and save himself, together with those few who remained loyal to him. His eyes turned to the glassy floor. In its center lay what seemed a round pool, but the water in it was seawater: it was, in fact, the main entrance to his keep, opening onto the depths. Being underwater, the castle could be entered only from beneath. If he fled now, he realized, his foes would pursue him and abandon their siege of the castle, leaving his followers here in peace. But for him there could be no escape without help. He stood still, shuddering, and eased the barriers about his mind. The earthly power of Elnemorah he accepted, and felt it enter into him. Energies seemed to flow toward him from the sea around and the earth beneath. But remembering Syndra, he did not surrender himself wholly: he guarded his innermost thoughts, the core of his being, from the Archon’s grasp. As for the other, the dark one, he did not answer it at all. He would call on it, he decided, only at the direst need.
Now! I must leave now!
Mandrake plunged down through the opening and into the sea. As he swam beneath the castle and then rose up past its walls, he saw the other dragons battling in the green deeps, appearing to fly as their wings beat like fins in the water. Higher up, cherubim dived through the surface like seabirds after their prey. The Dragon King swam with great strokes of his tail and limbs, his Loänan clearing the way for him. But his hurts still weakened him and slowed his progress. He called out to the Power of the deep.
AS AILIA WATCHED FAR ABOVE, several of the Loänan who were fighting the winds overhead drew in their wings, and dived into the murky green depths. She saw other shadowy shapes surging to and fro, farther down. A great battle was being waged there. Dragons’ auras glowed in the water’s depths like sailor’s-fire. Then her point of view was above the surface once more.
As Erron had said, the ship served a dual purpose, providing a platform for the winged beings to land on when they tired; particularly the cherubim, who unlike the Loänan were not at home in both elements. Time after time they paused on the decks to rest, and then dived again. The ship had come at last within the storm’s eye, passing its inner wall, and the waves were no longer so high or violent. A wide space of clear sky was above them, with cloud showing around the rim of the sea, which had turned from the sullen gray of dull steel to gleaming emerald. Ailia stood once more above the waves, looking down on them. Presently the water on the starboard side began to boil: it turned white, leaped and heaved. A dozen red-scaled dragons burst through in a shower of spray, like breaching whales: but when they reached the apex of their leaps, where the whales would begin to fall back into the sea, the dragons’ wings snapped open and carried them higher. They sought the sky even as other dragons surfaced in pursuit.
“Enemy Loänan,” said Taleera, moving to stand next to her. “But where is he?”
As if in answer the ship rocked. They had struck something, some submerged object, and a shiver went through the ship from bow to stern. Ailia started, and the firebird flew up off the floor. “What was that? Did we hit a reef, perhaps?” the Princess exclaimed.
Paladins and soldiers ran down into the lower chambers of the ship, which lay beneath the water, and Ailia and Damion followed them. “There is something there—” a man called out.
And then the ship was struck again, amidships this time, almost turning over. Yells broke out. And those who had gone below saw what had happened.
The fleet was under attack. It appeared that Mandrake had used his power as Dragon King to summon forth the largest and most perilous creatures of this world’s sea. They were attacking the Loänan underwater, and several were heading directly toward the ship. Up through the deeps swam a many-armed kraken, larger than the most monstrous of giant squids. Its saucerlike eyes bulged from its bulbous mottled head, and its tentacles trailed after it. From another direction there came a pair of ship-sized scolopendrae, rowing themselves forward with their many-jointed legs, the green subaqueous light glancing along their lobsterlike carapaces. And there were orcs and great sea serpents undulating their sinuous coils as a water snake might, and last of all a veritable fleet of aspidochelones, piscine in shape but armored like sea turtles, and larger than the largest whale. It was hard to grasp the true size of these beasts, with nothing in the green deeps to give any sense of scale. As they drew nearer they seemed to expand, growing terrifyingly, impossibly huge. The largest of the aspidochelones was the size of a small island. Ailia called on her powers to halt their advance. Once before she had linked her mind to an aspidochelone’s and bent it to her whim, albeit unconsciously; but when she reached out now, all she felt was the same dark driving will that she had sensed with the basilisk. It resisted her, barring her from the animals’ minds. They were possessed.
They strove to smash the adamantine hull, and failed; but the gigantic beasts did not retreat when they found their efforts fruitless. They butted their heads against the ship’s sides instead, and drove up against its keel with their armored backs. The kraken meanwhile spread wide its tentacles and wrapped them around the bow, while a colossal serpent flung a scaly coil over the stern. Nemerei ran up to the decks, striving to keep their balance on the slippery wet adamant, and the Overseer’s personal guard also ran up with spears and bows. The arrows could not penetrate the lapping scales of the serpent’s coil, but with repeated blows from blade and spear they succeeded in severing two or three of the kraken’s tentacles. The monster pulled back its remaining arms and withdrew. At last a bolt of fiery quintessence from one of the Nemerei sent the creature recoiling into the sea.
The serpent meanwhile menaced its attackers with its jaws, which were lined with rows of wicked inward-curving teeth. Quintessence only angered it, and caused it to snap and lunge at the source of its pain. The men drew back in fear. Then two cherubim alighted on the pitching deck, beating their huge pinions for balance. One had aquiline foreparts and leonine hindquarters, and the scaly tail of a serpent; the other resembled a lioness, but for her eagle’s wings and the great horns upon her head. They attacked the serpent, striking at its eyes with claws and beak and horns, until at last it too retreated with a bellow. Its place was taken at once, however, by an aspidochelone and a scolopendra. They rushed the ship from opposite sides and rammed it by turns, sending it rolling now one way and now the other.
Beneath the water Ailia
and Damion saw it all: the attacks of the monstrous creatures, the Loänan still fighting savagely below, the shapes of enemy dragons rising up from the towers of the sea-fortress, whose shape they could now dimly discern. It was as if they rode in a flying ship above a castle of the land—a castle obscured by a thick green fog, through which they could not see the enemy distinctly until he was almost upon them. So it was that they did not at first notice the color of the Loänan that came up right underneath their ship, wings and limbs folded to its sides, swimming with powerful strokes of its tail. Only as it approached the light of the lamps aboard the ship did they see that it was red with a tawny mane. Its slitted yellow eyes looked full into theirs, and then it swam past.
As Ailia and Damion rushed back up the crystal stair that led to the decks, the red form breached off the starboard bow. It did not fly, but swam through the surf like the sea serpent, menacing the ship. Then the Dragon King submerged and they saw him glide below the keel. The vessel shook and quivered. The Overseer, overcoming his fear, seized a spear from one of his men and hefted it like a harpoon, watching the luminous churning wake of the dragon circling them. The red back with its knife-sharp dorsal scales reemerged, and he threw, cursing wildly as the spear hissed into the water wide of its mark. He drew his steel sword and waved it about impotently. The Dragon King dived, reversed, and lunged upward, and such was the force of the sorcery that assisted his leap that the seawater heaved up in a white fountain as if to follow him.
He opened his wings and flew skyward. To Ombar! his Loänan cried. But Mandrake sheared away from them and flew toward the distant coast, disregarding the wounds his foes inflicted on him, not fighting back against the cherubim who hunted him like hounds across the remnants of his dissipating storm. Out of the lowering clouds long ragged streamers hung, looking to those below almost low enough to touch. As the red dragon’s upward flight pierced the tattered clouds Ailia and her companions perceived that they roiled, and then began to rotate. And then there was a long cloudy tentacle reaching down, down, to the sea, touching the spire of white water and making a column. More dragons rocketed out of the deeps, and wherever one passed from sea to cloud, another whirling pillar was formed.
Duron and his men went rigid. “Waterspouts!”
Only now, perhaps, had they truly realized the tremendous power against which they had pitted themselves. Their craft rolled helpless on the waves and the occupants were flung from one side to the other. Two men fell screaming into the sea, and did not rise again. The waterspouts surrounded them now: ghostly columns in a vast hall floored with water, roofed with cloud. The funnels began to twist this way and that, as their Loänan creators directed them. Waves crashed over the bows of the crystal ship, and water began to leak down from the deck hatches.
Ailia spread out her arms. In her right hand the Star Stone shone, white and blinding, as she called on the power that stills the gale. None of the enemy dragons dared approach her, so great was their fear of the shining Stone. With no need to defend herself from them, she sent her calming thoughts up into the roiling clouds, and down into the depths of the sea. And there, even in the eye-wall of the spinning storm, the force of the winds was lessened, and the wild white crests of the waves bowed. The waterspouts writhed and broke asunder, wisping away into air.
“Retreat!” Erron Komora bawled at his Loänei captain. “Go back to land! The Dragon King has fled—we can do no more here. Let us pursue him!”
The Wingwatch were already doing so—in long clamorous lines, like migrating geese, they were hunting the fugitive dragons across the sky. The Dragon King was still leading his Loänan westward, toward the land. Mandrake had enveloped himself in cloud-vapor, so as not to present a clear target to his foes, and appeared now as a vast, gray-white, misty mass speeding through the heavens. With a great effort of will the Nemerei and Loänei, working as one, turned the adamantine ship about and sent it plowing back through the gray chaos of the storm, following pursuers and pursued. Ailia and Damion had already been taken up by Auron and Falaar, and together with Taleera they joined in the airy chase.
16
The City of Dragons
THE PATHS OF MANDRAKE AND his allies, the Overseer with his rebels, Jomar’s army, and Ailia’s Wingwatch were now converging, with Loänanmar their common point—as if some ruling destiny led them there. Even as the Dragon King winged his way toward the abandoned castle on the volcanic hill—his last refuge in this world—and the Tryna Lia pursued him, the two joined armies of Jomar and Brannion Duron were at the same time drawing nearer to the city. Lorelyn had gone apart from the camp for a time, so as to avoid the influence of the iron weapons while she spoke through the Ether with the Wingwatch. She returned with the news that Mandrake had fled from his undersea bastion and was heading for the Forbidden Palace. The Nemoran rebels clutched at their weapons and shifted their feet, now that they knew they would have to confront their foe at last. Jomar noticed their unease. “You’ve come this far,” he told them. “You might as well keep going. You can’t get back on his good side now: you’ve joined with us, for good or bad. So let’s be on our way.”
Their task was not, after all, to give battle to him—that would fall to Ailia and her dragons and cherubim. Their part was to liberate the city, and that should be no great hardship, as there were no defenders at its gates and no land army of any kind to meet them in combat. In the past, Mandrake and his Loänei had relied overmuch on sorcery to protect themselves, and the new iron weapons would put an end to all such defenses. In worlds across Talmirennia worse battles than this were being fought, Lorelyn reflected. They had but to succeed in this campaign, and all other worlds would be safe.
Yet battle awaited them all the same, and not from any foe they had anticipated. As they approached the place where jungle gave way to plowed fields, there was a hissing as of many arrows in flight from the bushes around them. Men in the front ranks cried out and fell, while the rest flung themselves down or retreated in confusion and fear. In mere moments the attack was over. Many of the men lay dead, their chests blazoned with blood. Those who had not been struck down fled the scene.
“What is it? What happened?” shouted Jomar as the survivors pelted toward him.
“We don’t know. The enemy attacked us, but we saw no one: men were stricken down where they stood, and died at once.”
“Sorcery?” asked one of the Nemoran soldiers.
“No, it couldn’t be,” returned Lorelyn. “Not with all this iron. I am a Nemerei, and kin to the Archons: trust me, I know these things.”
The rebels were not seasoned fighting men, but farmers and hunters who had killed only beasts, and men of the city who had never done either. Superstition was strong in them, despite the Overseer’s teachings. They all had weapons, but most had no proper armor. They feared now to go forward, and only when Jomar and Lorelyn and the Paladins led the way would they follow, keeping always at a safe distance.
They came upon the glade where the stricken soldiers lay lifeless. Stooping to examine the dead, Jomar and the knights found that the bodies had been pierced not by arrows but by darts of a strange design: green, needlelike, tipped with no feathers at the end. The men had died even if only an arm or leg was struck, and none of their wounds was deep. It was clear that the darts were poisoned.
“As I thought,” said Lorelyn at last, her voice trembling a little. “It wasn’t sorcery. But why did the attack stop? Did they run out of darts?”
Jomar advanced slowly, sword and shield at the ready. “There is no one here now. Let’s keep moving forward.”
“We can’t just leave them here,” said Lorelyn, looking at the fallen men. “It’s a jungle—there are animals—” She shuddered. “We ought to bury them.”
“Later, perhaps,” said Jomar. “We can leave guards here, with torches. All animals are afraid of fire.”
There were many among the Nemoran men who were more than willing to remain behind with their fallen comrades, so great had their
terror become. It was, Jomar thought, just as well: though he did not name them cowards, aloud or in his thoughts, he knew that these were the men who would not be able to stand firm in battle. City dwellers, no doubt, softer and more easily frightened than the others. It was not their fault, but they would be of small use in the fight to free Loänanmar. They might as well remain behind. He would take the less fearful with him to the siege.
Then even as the armies advanced, the foliage to either side of them stirred again, and more darts came whistling through the air in deadly showers.
“Get down! Throw yourselves down!” the Paladins shouted at the soldiers. They obeyed as the green needles rained down upon them, glancing off the armor of the knights. In the tangled groves beyond, shapes were moving: not men, but beasts.
They were being attacked by peludas. Most of the Nemorans had heard of these strange and terrible creatures from the deep jungle, but none of them had ever seen one. Ailia, who had read the old bestiaries in which forgotten lore of otherworldly animals was preserved, could have told her friends that the huge reptiles could shoot the quills right out of their spiny green hides: these were the strange darts that had slain the soldiers. They carried a venom in their tips, deadly and swift to act. The first wave of the creatures had exhausted their quills, hence the brief lull in the assault; now they had been replaced by others whose hides still bore thick arsenals of the natural weapons. Nor were the peludas alone in the charge. The jungle had come alive with terrible forms. One was so huge that it might have been a little hill, had it not been in motion: a hill from which a long serpentine neck thrust forth. Lorelyn gasped at the sight of it, recognizing the gigantic saurian from Ailia’s description: the “tree-eaters” that came from the Original World. Their enemy, it seemed, had learned from Ailia’s defense of Arainia. An animal army like that which had assailed her foes in the Eldimian forests was now attacking the Princess’s own soldiers. In front of the giant Tanathon came many-necked hydras, and hideous two-legged lindworms with gigantic jaws opened wide. Behind them came six-legged tarasques with domed tortoiselike shells, studded with great spikes, impervious to spears and swords. And iron did not distress any of these creatures in the least.