by Alison Baird
The figure spoke. She saw the face now, and it was not comely but hideous, with cruel tusks protruding from its lips. A face shaped like a mask, with deliberate malice by its wearer, in order to strike fear into mortal hearts. What think you, little sister, of my world? it said.
“Elombar,” she whispered.
The figure faded, until it was only a shadow on the pavement. I will be great again, it said.
“No,” Ailia said. “Your sphere is dying.”
I will be great again! the shadow roared at her silently.
Ailia’s body trembled as her mortal flesh was overwhelmed, but deep within her the core of white flame burned unwavering. Out of that blazing light came her answer: “Your time is over. There will never again be a day when Ombar rules the Empire.” She spoke with compassion now.
Hatred seethed in the shadow. I will make the Empire serve me yet! it hissed at her. The Dragon Prince thinks that he can prevent it. But he is the very instrument through which we shall work our will. It is Valdur he obeys, and not himself.
And it was gone, together with the images it had imposed upon her mind. The city was a broken, haunted shell once more. But she shook as she gazed on it, as if she had caught a deadly chill.
19
The Perilous Citadel
TIRON SAT IN HIS DAUGHTER’S apartments, his head in his hands. At his feet Bezni the mimic dog lay, her graying muzzle pointing toward the door. The aging animal spent most of her days now in this attitude, in which both hope and listless pining were mingled. She waits for her mistress to return, he thought. As do we all. But will she? Even if Ailia defeats the odds that weigh against her and wins the battle, saving the Empire from destruction—will she survive the contest, or will she purchase our freedom with her life? Victory may yet be as bitter for me as defeat: all I desire is to have my daughter back again, Archon though she be. He stooped and stroked Bezni’s head, then straightened as a knock came at the door. “Enter,” he called, and wished for the visitor to leave as quickly as possible. He had no desire for company.
The door opened, and a young woman entered, her brown eyes solemn. “Your Majesty,” she murmured.
“Jemma, isn’t it?” he asked, rising and composing himself with an effort. “How can I help you?”
She stood twisting her work-coarsened hands together. “My family and I were just wondering if anything had been heard of Ailia.”
“No, my dear. There has been no word. But I have been selfish, I see: I forgot that I am not alone in my fears.”
“It is dreadful to be alone at such times, sire. My family thought perhaps you might like to join us in our quarters, since there is nothing any of us can do but wait. We might at least wait together.”
Tiron was moved by this forthright Island girl, with her simple kindness, and her emotions that showed clearly in face and voice. “Of course—you love her too. You lived with her longer than I did.” It was some small consolation to remember that if he mourned, it would not be in solitude: that Ailia’s life had touched many. And these Meran folk had many tales to tell of that life, of her girlhood and all that she had done and been before the burden of the prophecy fell on her.
“But perhaps you would rather be alone,” Jemma said. “I am sorry I interrupted you. I’ll leave now, Majesty.” She made as if to go.
“No, I am glad that you came.” He hesitated, and then he held out his hand. “And I will join your family. It is as you say: we can all comfort one another at least.”
AURON AND HIS RIDERS BURST out of the Ether into the sky of Ombar through a rift that hung invisible in the air. Below them stretched the ocher-red deserts. He flew lower, skimming over cliffs, buttes, mesas, dried-up riverbeds, companioned by his own black shadow. It was like the Muandabi in its time of drought, Jomar thought as he looked downward—only worse, for the whole of this world was one great desert, its drought perpetual. Moharas had many tales of the final destination of the damned: he had never before thought of it as a real place, but now he believed he looked upon its inspiration. Ombar had only one oasis, it was said: the slender zone that ringed it with dreary mires under endless twilight. And it was no refuge, but a haunt of monsters.
Presently they saw ahead of them, red against the band of dusk in the east, the towering shapes of stone arising from the desert floor. These were not natural features such as they had seen in the desert below, but old crumbling pyramids and steeples erected by human or other hands, and the canyons that lay between were old streets filled with rubble and shadows.
“Ailia! Ailia!” Lorelyn cried, sending her thoughts into the Ether as they flew over the silent city. Auron and Taleera also called out. There was no reply.
“She is not here,” said Taleera at length. “I am sure of it. Mandrake must have taken her into the Nightlands, for that is where the throne of Valdur is. He would not come here merely for the Valei’s protection: that places him too much in their power. It is why he feared to go to Ombar before. His only choice now is to claim his realm and be their ruler.”
“Then we too must go into the night,” Auron replied, thrusting aside his own fears in his anxiety for Ailia. Was she dead? Had the fatal contest already been held? He beat his wings harder, increasing his speed.
They passed on over leagues upon leagues of desolate ruins, seeking the country of the night.
AILIA AND MANDRAKE MADE THEIR way slowly through the deepening dusk. They had flown as far as they could in their draconic forms, following the line of the ruinous road, but even a dragon must rest, and they had come down at last in the lands of twilight.
For a time they had walked on in human form, meaning to go as far as they could before they slept. But Ombar’s gravity was heavy: it made each and every step a weariness, and now they had lost what remained of the road. The sun was not visible from here, its great orb now concealed by the horizon, and its red light did not touch the sky, which showed a dull blue-black above the mists of the mire through which they walked. They had to tread carefully. All around them the rank swamps and quagmires sprawled and steamed, adding their own wispy breaths to the dank air. The pale twisted shapes Ailia had taken at first for trees were fungal growths, she found, slimy to the feel and more pliant than wood. She shuddered, for they felt like soft clammy hands touching her. There were whole forests of these fungi, grown to huge and nightmarish shapes: colossal toadstools, round white globes like skulls half-buried in earth, bulbous forms glowing with their own sickly green light. And there were many dangers in these lands, Mandrake warned her. Barguests prowled the swamps, their eyes glowing like living coals, and there were great shaggy bugbears, and the hideous nuckelavees with their translucent hides. The nightmare creatures of Meran hearth-tales here were living, breathing beasts. Boobrie birds larger than moas stalked the shallows on stiltlike legs, questing for food with their cruel hooked beaks, while the scaly afancs lurked in deeper pools with wide, waiting jaws. The beasts preyed on one another, and occasionally on the Morugei who scratched a meager living from the marshy soil. Ailia and Mandrake toiled on, skirting the mires. They saw none of the larger beasts, but there were things like huge and hideous toads, with leathery wings and serpents’ tails and fangs, that came leaping and flapping out of the slimy pools, and had to be fended off with steel weapons because neither of the sorcerers had any strength left for conjuring. There were eerie pale lights glimmering in the murk that might be marsh gas, and might not. Occasionally they saw another traveler, but in the feeble light it was hard to tell if it were a goblin or some other creature. Everyone in these twilight lands was a walking shade, and all of them avoided one another out of fear. Not only beasts preyed on the people here.
They came upon a small islet, damp and cold, and rested there in the unchanging dusk, building a fire and taking turns to sleep and stand guard. Ailia took the first watch. Gazing at the prince as he fell asleep, she felt a new wave of compassion for him. With his dragon’s eyes covered by their dark-lashed lids, Mandrake’s face looked fu
lly human. He also looked more vulnerable—there were lines that one did not notice when the strange fierce eyes were open: the marks of stress and suffering. Even in sleep his face was unquiet. The muscles of it twitched and trembled, like the surface of a pool disturbed by its lurking denizens. Sometimes he would start, and seem to be on the verge of waking; but then he would fall back into deep dreaming again. At times his hands were raised, to fend off she knew not what horror.
She let him sleep for many hours before she woke him. Her own sleep was light and dream-troubled, and she was roused too soon from it by a noise that made her sit bolt upright with her heart beating hard. Mandrake was nowhere to be seen, and the fire had died down to a red-eyed smolder. At the edge of its sullen light crouched a creature: a thing with the batlike wings of a dragon, opening and closing as if in spasms of agony, and a dragon’s scales and twitching tail. But its form was like that of a man, and it was draped from the waist down in some dark material. Ailia started at the sight of this hell-fiend, wondering in terror how it had come so near, and what had become of her companion. As the horned head lifted, she saw it had a man’s face crusted with scales, and two blazing eyes weeping tears, which, in the reflected fire-glow, seemed to leave trails of flame. The monster moaned and thrashed about as if in pain; but its burning eyes did not seem to see her. And in the next moment she realized what this creature was.
Mandrake, she thought, sickened. In mid-transformation! It was a hideous sight. Was he turning from man to dragon? He was neither one nor the other, but a horrifying blend of the two, a thing utterly unnatural. “Mandrake?” she whispered.
“Help me,” he said, and— “Stay away!” He drew back into the shadows, moving on all fours, his face growing more dragonish. And then he moved forward, crawling on limbs that were still human in shape, despite their scales. What made it so horrible was that there was just enough of Mandrake remaining to recognize. The scales covered his face and neck like some scabrous disease of the skin; his mouth was lipless as a lizard’s and seemed to be trying to fuse together with his nose into a muzzle. But the voice was his, and the mane of red-gold hair, and the body in the half-removed robe was a man’s still.
“Mandrake,” said Ailia, “it’s Valdur! He is ensorceling you!”
The creature groaned and writhed. “I hear his thoughts! He is within me!” The voice came slurred through lengthening tusks. “Power—he promises me power—”
“The power enslaves you! Free yourself of it!” She made herself sit still, even when the scaly face came within a finger’s length of hers, and the dilated eyes glowered into her own, perhaps seeing their hideous reflection there as well as her expression of alarm.
“Free,” gasped Mandrake, seizing the word as a drowning man might seize a spar. “Free.” And the monster withdrew again; his face and form were a man’s once more. He collapsed at her feet, panting, and then sank into a swoon. She stoked the fire, and drew his head into her lap, watching over him until he revived.
THEY SET OUT AGAIN IN the morningless gloom, flying above the mires for as long as their borrowed wings could carry them. To fly in this world required a great deal of sorcery, and it exhausted them. Worse than weariness for Ailia was her awareness of Elombar’s ceaseless malice. The Archon of this world could not destroy her, but his enmity beat against her mind like a fierce buffeting wind, so it was all that she could do to hold her dragon’s shape. The air grew ever colder as they flew, and the sky darker, for it was covered now in clouds. Even had the sky been clear it would have been hard to see, for there was no moon to light the lands below. The forests of mushroom-trees thinned, and there were but a few fungi that glowed up through the dark. Some of the pale ghostly lights seemed to move. Mandrake told Ailia that certain animals in this place carried their own luminous markings, like fishes that dwell in the black sunless depths of oceans.
After many hours they found the road again, for here in the Nightlands it was marked by waystones of white venudor at regular intervals. These served only to mark the edges of the pavement, for venudor illuminated only itself: it could cast no light on its surroundings as a lantern would. After following the track of cheerless lights for many leagues, they descended to rest once more.
The clouds parted as they lay together by the roadside, and the stars came out. And now they saw Lotara low on the horizon, but it was still too distant to dispel the darkness, a pallid corposant. For the first time Ailia saw it, not in a vision or illusion nor in a spyglass, but with her own unaided eyes. From one side extended the vast prominence that was at its extreme end shaped, by invisible yet violent forces, into a fiery circle with a black void at its vortex. But something within was blacker still, a thing less substantial than a shadow—a Nothingness. There lay the Worm’s Mouth, the black star that devoured light instead of giving it forth. Into that pit, it seemed, she and this planet and its sun and all the surrounding stars were falling. She reeled where she lay, and put out her hands as if to save herself from that dreadful fall. But no: the fear was baseless. Auron had told her that Vartara could not consume the cosmos. The black star trapped only those things that came within its grasp. To be devoured by it, one had to approach its very sphere.
When at last they were rested, they prepared to continue their journey. But Ailia could no longer summon the strength to take a dragon’s form. Instead she disguised herself with a glaumerie that gave her the likeness of a goblin-hag; and Mandrake shifted into the shape of a great black firedrake, the better to approach Valdur’s stronghold undetected. Then he took Ailia on his back and sprang into the air.
As he flew on, Lotara gave a cold blue illumination to the lands beneath, though it could do little more than limn the edges of the more prominent features. There were mountains looming ahead, capped with pale ice and snow, and the forests and mires had gone. Flocks of black creatures flapped slowly through the skies on membranous wings. Each bore a glowing red carbuncle on its forehead, which was used as a lure to attract its prey. As they flew, the creatures gave piercing shrieks that woke desolate echoes among the dark hills and valleys below.
Mandrake had been silent through much of the journey, speaking only when she asked him a question. These are called vouivres, he said in answer to her query. They live in the farthest reaches of the Nightlands. Vouivres fly in the dark like bats, uttering cries and listening for the echoes. As they flew close to a group of the creatures, Ailia saw that they resembled wyverns, with long necks and two taloned legs. But to her horror they had no eyes. The scaly skin stretched over their long skulls had only shallow dints to show where the eyes might once have been.
Of course, the same thing happens to fish that live in caves, she said. Without any light, they have no need for eyes and they lose them. But still the creatures’ gaunt eyeless faces made her shudder. They had achieved what the followers of Modrian-Valdur had once desired: they no longer beheld the universe in which they dwelled.
And even as she thought this, Mandrake flew over the high mountains, and they both saw in an enclosed valley beneath the fortress of Modrian-Valdur.
THERE WAS A VAST CIRCULAR wall, mountain-high and sheer, quarried from a black volcanic stone, with ten towers spaced along it that tapered at the top like great spikes. The curtain wall was pierced in one place by a gaping gateway that could have swallowed a lesser fortress. It had been carved in the likeness of a dragon’s head with upper jaw raised to devour all who entered in. The Hell Mouth, Ailia thought, recognizing it from the old illuminations in the books of Meran scriptures. The inner bastion was a single tower of glass-smooth adamant that could be neither breached nor scaled. Gray as a ghost, it rose from a rounded plinth to a dizzying height, more than a thousand feet above the plain, like a challenge to Heaven. At the top it had the shape of a crown, a circle of ten sharp tines, and beneath this was an opening, tall and arched at the top, like a great window. It was utterly dark within, black as the sky beyond. In front of the keep’s hemispherical base the ground opened up into the wi
de ragged mouth of an immense pit. As the keep’s tower seemed to reach in arrogant majesty for the sky, so the pit seemed to plumb the deepest bowels of the earth. Ailia, looking down as they passed above it, could see no bottom. Firedrakes dwelled within its depths, clustering upon rocky ledges like bats and flying up now and again to hover about the towers of the fortress, warmed from within by their furnacelike bellies: they were among the few creatures that could long endure the cold in this place. Fumes rose from the hot heart of the world far below.
Here, circled by his demesne of ice and fire, the lord of the black star had reigned for thousands upon thousands of years whose passage was marked, not by the turn of seasons or days, but only by the alteration of the stars as Ombar pursued its tight orbit. That time of the year when Lotara was visible in the black sky above was a festival in elder days, though not one celebrated with any joy by the mortal creatures: many were sacrificed then as offerings to the unseen star that came with it. Slaves had been brought here by the millions, to work the mines in the pit, so there was always a plentiful supply for the altars. Far below, in the deeps of the pit, lay a realm where Elombar had once reigned in material form: a subterranean kingdom, hard and barren underlands where nothing ever grew, beneath a starless sky of arching stone. There the only light came from the molten fires of the earth, forever rolling about the rocky shores, and there multitudes had moiled in the stifling heat, until the lands above where stars glimmered and forests grew seemed no more to them than a tale or a dream.
Over the dragon-jawed gate in the outer curtain-wall ran in Archonic runes the inscription: Who enters here comes not forth again. When Mandrake translated it for her, Ailia remembered her dream on the Island. This place, this perilous citadel, was the foundation of all her oldest fears. It was the reason she had been afraid of darkness all her life long: this shrine to the Black Star of Modrian-Valdur.