There were caves in the hills here where the warriors could hide for the night, and get some sleep—or fight, if they were backed into a corner.
But when he got to camp, lit only by starlight and a scythe of a moon, it was abuzz with excitement.
“They found little people—” someone was saying, “tiny folk that don’t know how to talk. They live in huts made out of stones, with roofs made from sticks and straw. There’s a whole village of them, just beyond the hill.”
Alun would never have believed such nonsense under normal circumstances, but in the last day, the world had turned upside down. Forests had sprung up where there should be none. Mountains had collapsed and rivers changed their courses. Anything seemed possible.
“Little people,” a soldier laughed, “what good are they? Can’t eat ’em, can you?”
For effect, he tore off a huge piece of bread with his teeth, as if he were rending a little person.
“Maybe we’ll find some use for their women,” another jested, and he was joined by gruff laughter.
Alun wondered. He wanted to see these little folk, but his legs were so sore that he didn’t think that he could walk up the hill. Still, he grabbed a loaf of dry bread from a basket, along with a flagon of ale, and slowly crept up the steep hill, past soldiers who were feeding and laughing.
He caught bits of conversation as he went. “River’s flooded up ahead, they say. We’ll have a rough swim of it.”
“I can’t swim,” a heavy warrior said.
“Don’t worry,” the first said. “You just float, and I’ll drag you along.”
“That’s the problem,” the heavy one said. “I can’t float. Bones are too heavy. I sink like an anvil. Always have. I just hope the king lets us take the bridge.”
Atop the hill, High King Urstone, Warlord Madoc, the Emir of Dalharristan, the Wizard Sisel, and other notables all stood beneath a stand of sprawling oaks, peering down at a strange little village.
As the soldiers had said, there were houses made of small stones, and other houses made of mud-and-wattle, all with roofs formed from thick layers of grass, tied in bundles and woven together. There were small gardens around the houses, all separated from one another with rock walls.
There were folks outside of the houses, worried little folk, men with spears and torches, women with clubs. They weren’t as small as Alun had hoped they would be. He wouldn’t be able to pick one up in his hand. But they were short, more like children than adults, that was certain.
King Urstone was admiring their village. “They’re tidy things, aren’t they,” he said. “Clever little houses, lush little gardens. Perhaps we could learn from them.”
“I suppose,” one of the warlords said. “Though I don’t see much good that will come of it.”
“What will we do?” King Urstone asked the lords around him. “They’re obviously frightened of us, but we can’t just leave them here, unprotected, with the wyrmlings about. The harvesters would have them in a week. For their own sake, we have to get them back to Caer Luciare, even if we must drag them.”
“We could try leading them,” the Emir said in his thick accent. “Perhaps if we offer them bread and ale, they will think well of us?”
“I think … I can talk to them,” Warlord Madoc said, his voice sounding dreamy, lost in thought. Then he took off, striding downhill.
The small folk began shouting, waving their weapons, and Madoc unstrapped the great ax from his back, gently set it on the ground, and called out something in a strange tongue.
Alun had never heard such words before, and he wondered where Madoc could have learned them.
Suddenly, on the northern horizon, a white light blazed so brightly that it looked as if a shard of the sun had fallen to earth.
Everyone turned to see what was going on. Several people gasped in wonder.
“It’s coming from Cantular,” the Emir said.
Indeed, even with the naked eye, Alun could see that the bright light issued from Cantular. The sandstone buildings glowed gold in its brilliance, and long shadows were cast everywhere. The city itself was still a good four miles distant, though, and Alun could see little else.
The Emir pulled out an ocular—a pair of lenses made from ground crystal, held together by a long tube. He aimed the ocular toward the city, touched a glyph on the side of the tube, and spoke the name of the glyph.
Suddenly, an image appeared shimmering in the air, a dozen feet behind the rod.
It was an enlarged replica of the city, far away.
Alun could see clearly that a man stood atop a building, a man so white-hot that he glowed like the sun. He waved a sword, while above him three wyrmling Seccaths in crimson robes hovered in the air like hawks.
“Sweet mercy,” the Wizard Sisel cried, “the Knights Eternal have been loosed!”
But Alun’s fear quickly turned to wonder. There were people fighting the Knights Eternal, four small humans like those in the village below. A bowman loosed an arrow, and one of the Fell Three plummeted from the sky.
The bright one blazed even brighter, and light flooded the sky across the horizon.
Then the horizon abruptly went dim.
The ocular showed the scene, ropes of fire twirling between the bright one and a Knight Eternal, and then the lights went out, the humans dropped in a faint, and a pair of wyrmlings plummeted from the sky, like falcons stooping for the kill.
What happened next all took place in shadows. The ocular could not reveal much in so little light.
The warlords stood staring in dumb amazement.
“You saw that?” one of them cried. “Their archer slew a Knight Eternal! He killed one of the Three!”
Another warlord asked, “Are all of these small folk such warriors? If so, they would be grand allies! We had better make them allies, before they slaughter us all.”
High King Urstone glanced down the hill at the poor farmers with their torches and clubs. The whole village together didn’t look as if it could fend off a single wyrmling beggar. The king said thoughtfully, “I think that those four were folks of some import. They would have to be for the wyrmlings to send the Three after them.” There were grunts of agreement.
The Emir said thoughtfully, “Daylan Hammer said that it was a wizard who bound our worlds together. One of those small folk is obviously a wizard. Could it be that he is the one who bound our worlds?”
“Look,” one of the lords said, “the Knights Eternal are dragging them away. I think they’ve taken your wizard captive.”
Madoc, who had been down in the valley, came huffing up the hill, his breathing ragged with excitement. He was looking to the north, where the lights had been.
“Then we will have to free the hostages,” King Urstone said. “Perhaps that is why we are here. The Powers conspired to draw us here, lest some greater doom fall upon us.”
“You would fight the Knights Eternal,” Madoc grumbled, “in the dark, in a fortified position? That’s madness. You’ll foil our mission!”
The High King bit his lower lip. “Those small folk slew one of the Three. If we learn how they did it, we may be able to win this war once and for all.” He gave Warlord Madoc a stern look. “The world has changed. We have more than just our own people, our own vain ambitions to think about. We will attack an hour after dawn, in the full light of day, and hunt the wyrmlings down. If any of the Knights Eternal are still abroad, we’ll take off their heads. If done by the light of day, it might take weeks before they can rise again. No word of what happens here must reach Rugassa.”
22
HIDDEN TREASURE
One cannot be perfect in all things, but one can become perfect in some things.
—Vulgnash
Thul ransacked the prisoners’ packs, pulling out spare garments, studying trinkets and mementos, then casting everything aside as if it was excrement. The Knight Eternal’s cowl and robes hid his face, but his disgust showed in every angry move.
The prisoner
s lay frozen upon what was left of the floor of the house, scorched as it was from the battle. The touch of the grave was upon them, and they lay paralyzed, like mice that have been filled with scorpion’s venom.
The spell would wear off by dawn.
“I see only three packs here,” Vulgnash said. “Where is the fourth?”
Thul glanced around, looking for sign of a fourth pack. “Perhaps it fell when we pulled the walls off,” Thul answered.
“Find it,” Vulgnash said.
Thul growled in resentment, and then walked around, carefully studying the ground. “I don’t see one. I think … the wizard is their leader. He would not carry a pack. He would make the others carry.”
Vulgnash could not argue with that. No wyrmling lord would stoop to such menial chores. He climbed down to the ground level and grabbed some withered vines, long tendrils of morning glory that had been burned by the sun. When he had several feet of them, he leapt in the air, flapped up to the prisoners, and threw the vines upon Fallion in a twisted heap.
“Bind them firmly,” he commanded.
The vines began to slither, twisting around the hands and feet of each prisoner, clamping legs together, cinching the arms tight against the chest.
When the prisoners were firmly bound, Vulgnash knelt and studied their weapons. He touched the fine reaverbone bow that Jaz had held, and recoiled in horror. There was life in that bow, the blessing of a powerful undine.
He kicked it over the edge of the house with his boot, studied the other weapons. They were similarly accursed. He kicked them all into the bushes behind the little shop. “Rust upon you, and rot,” he hissed, casting a spell. In a month the fine steel would be nothing but mounds of corrosion, the bow turned to dust, and the wooden staff would be food for worms.
Thul turned away from the packs, went and hunched over one of the small humans, the smallest of the women. Vulgnash glanced at him, saw Thul reaching down to place a finger over each eye.
“Do not feed on her!” Vulgnash hissed.
“But she is sweet!” Thul said. “Besides, we only need the wizard.”
“We need them all,” Vulgnash countered. “We must get the wizard to accept a wyrm. Sometimes, a man cannot be tortured into it, but he will break if another is tortured in his place.”
Thul growled deep in his throat, whirled, and went back to the packs, began hurling things around in his rage.
There was a clanking, the sound of some bits of metal, copper perhaps, banging against one another. Thul dumped a bag of rods upon the floor, sniffing at them. “What are these?” he asked. “I smell wizardry.”
Vulgnash strode to him, knelt and peered at the rods, thinking that perhaps they had stumbled upon a human harvester, and that these were his harvesting spikes. But the rods were not made of iron. They were made of corpuscite. Each rod was about the length of a child’s hand, from the bottom of the palm to the tip of the middle finger. Each was about the diameter of a small willow frond.
And at the tip of each was a rune, one of the primal shapes that had formed the world from the beginning.
Vulgnash picked one up, studied the rune. It was easy to decipher for those who were wise enough to see: swiftness. Attached to the rune were others—seize, confer, and bind.
He had never seen such a device, but instinctively Vulgnash knew what it was. The rod had been created to transfer attributes from one being to another.
“This is a weapon,” he told Thul in rising exhilaration, “a marvelous weapon.”
With mounting excitement he poured out the other branding irons, studied each one in turn: resilience, memory, strength, beauty, sight, hearing, smell, song. A dozen types of runes were represented, and Vulgnash immediately recognized that he could make others that the creators had not anticipated—greed, cruelty, stubbornness—the list was endless.
“But can you make them work?” Thul demanded.
Vulgnash could not wait to try. But first he had to get the prisoners back to Rugassa. His wings could not carry so much weight. He’d have to take the prisoners overland.
“Take these rods to Zul-torac,” Vulgnash commanded. “He’ll know what to do. I’ll bring the prisoners to Rugassa in three days.”
“Yes, Master,” Thul said. He grabbed up the small branding irons, raced to the edge of the platform, and his crimson wings unfolded and caught the air. In a moment he was gone, rising up into the starlight.
Fallion lay petrified, a bone-numbing cold coursing through his body, his legs and arms unable to move, bound tightly. He was so cold, he could hardly think. He could do little in the way of making plans. He acted only on instinct.
He sent his senses out, questing for a source of heat. The sun had gone down long ago. There was no heat left in the stones around him, nor in the Knight Eternal.
Even his friends were perilously cold. He could not draw from them, not without killing them.
Wyrmlings came from the fort then, filling his field of vision. They were like men in some ways, monstrous men as pale white as bone, with misshapen skulls, huge and powerful.
One of them heaved Fallion over his back like a carcass, then carried him down the ladder and out along the stone street until they reached a wagon. Upon it lay a huge stone box. There were no horses or oxen to draw the thing. Instead it had handles on the front. The cruel contraption was a handcart, powered by the sweat of brutish wyrmlings.
The wyrmling shoved the stone lid off the box with one hand, a feat that should have required several strong men, then tossed Fallion in without ceremony. Moments later, Talon, Jaz, and Rhianna each tumbled in beside him, and the lid scraped closed.
Fallion could feel the cold begin to wear off. The numbness in his hands was fading; he clenched and unclenched his hands, trying to get the blood to flow.
He reached out with his mind. He could feel heat from the wyrmlings. A dozen of them surrounded the little carriage. He tried to use his flameweaving skills to siphon off their body heat.
He did not need much, just enough to burn the cords that bound his hands.
Instantly it felt as if a wall crashed down between him and the wyrmlings. The little heat that he had in his body drained off, and Fallion was left reeling in pain from the cold.
For only an instant, Fallion tasted blinding agony, and then passed out.
It seemed like long hours before his thoughts returned. He had to fight his way through a seeming tunnel of pain. His teeth chattered and he shivered all over.
He didn’t have the strength to fight his captor. He didn’t even dare try.
Next time, he feared, the Knight Eternal would drain him of heat completely.
The wagon tilted as one of the wyrmlings lifted the front end, and then the wheels began to creak as it jolted down the uneven road.
North, Fallion realized dully as he felt the wagon turn. They are taking us north. But what lay that direction, he did not know.
He thought he’d try his tongue, even though it felt swollen and foreign in his mouth, as if some slab of meat were caught in his throat. “Talon? Talon? Where are they taking us?”
There was a long silence.
At last Jaz answered, “I think … our sister is dead. I can’t feel her breathing.”
It was blackest night in the box. Fallion turned and peered toward Talon.
In his memory, they were all back in their little home on the Sweetgrass. It was the night before they set out, and all of the neighbors had come. Lanterns hung from the peach trees in the front yard, shedding light upon the bounteous feast that had been set before them—piles of strawberries and fresh peas from the garden, succulent greens and wild mushrooms, mounds of spiced chicken, steaming muffins.
There had been music and celebration with a band that had come all of the way from Rye.
And there had been worry. Fallion had seen it in Myrrima’s eyes, and in Borenson’s, for Fallion was setting sail to the far side of the earth and heading into the underworld, where the reavers dwelt.
Fallion had felt so cocksure of himself.
“Take good care of my baby,” Myrrima had begged. She loved Fallion as if he were her own son, he knew. She had never treated him with any less kindness or devotion, even though he was only hers by adoption. But Talon was her first-born, and a girl, and Myrrima had always doted on her when she was young.
“I’ll take care of her,” Fallion had promised.
“Bring her back alive, and whole,” Myrrima begged, fighting back tears. Fallion could see that she wanted to run into the house, to hide herself and cry.
“When we come back,” Fallion had said, “it will be in a more perfect world, and Talon will be whole and beautiful, more beautiful than you can imagine.”
Myrrima had smiled faintly then, wanting to believe.
Fallion reached out with his senses, could find almost no warmth in Talon’s body. The Knights Eternal had drained it all from her.
What have I done? Fallion wondered. He’d brought a change upon the world, but Talon had become a monster, huge and grotesque, nearly as bad as the wyrmlings.
And now she lay at the verge of death.
Rhianna began to weep. Fallion could hear her sniffling.
“Are you all right?” she asked.
“So cold,” Fallion said through chattering teeth. He’d never felt anything like it, not even in the coldest arctic storm.
Rhianna rolled over to him, showing more strength than he possessed. She leaned against him, draping her body over him like a blanket. “Here,” she whispered. “Take the heat of my body.”
He continued to tremble, hoping that her warmth might keep him alive. No words of gratitude seemed sufficient. “Thank you,” he managed weakly. And then he realized that he felt so close to death, he might never get a chance to speak to her again. “I love you.”
All through the long night, the wyrmlings toiled down the road, the wagon shuddering as if it would burst each time it slammed into a rut, the wheels of the wagon creaking.
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