Clothes, he realized. Too small for our people.
He peered into the bushes, saw a leather backpack behind the clothes and a sword on the ground.
“Your majesty,” someone shouted. “I found something.”
Alun grabbed the sword, saw a marvelous battle-staff lying nearby. He grabbed it and the pack, and began stuffing it with clothes. Then a couple of other soldiers were there beside him, combing the bushes for more.
Alun raced up onto the platform, and dropped the spoils there on the scorched wood. Others were doing the same. More clothes, some packs, a bow made of reaver horn, and arrows.
The men laid out the goods on the ground, and the Emir of Dalharristan bent to inspect them. “Don’t draw those swords. Don’t touch anything. We don’t know what kind of curses might be laid upon these things.”
He looked first at the bow of ruddy reaver’s bone, using the toe of his boot to flip it over. “There are no glyphs upon it,” he said, “at least not that I can see.”
The Wizard Sisel reached down with his staff, bent so low to the floor that he almost touched it with his head. He sniffed at the bow. “But there are blessings on it,” he said. “It is clean. I can smell the virtue in it.”
The king looked at the wizard doubtfully. “But the power to bless has been lost. That is old magic!”
“Not on the world where these come from.” Sisel peered at the sword as Alun lay it down. “Draw that blade, young man.”
Alun did. The steel was lighter than steel should be, and gleamed like polished silver. “A fine blade,” Sisel said. “Their steel is better than ours.”
Sisel peered up at the soldiers all around him. “No one use that blade, at least not against a common foe. There is a blessing on it. Save it for the Knights Eternal, or better yet, the emperor himself.”
“Who will carry this sword?” High King Urstone asked.
None of the lords dared step forward, and Alun dared not offer to keep it. But the High King smiled at him. “Sir Alun, is it not?” the High King asked as if they had never spoken. “You are our new … Master of the Hounds?”
“Aye, milord.”
The High King looked up to the bloody rag tied around Alun’s head. “You look as if you’ve acquitted yourself admirably in this battle. Were you able to draw any blood?”
Alun fumbled for something to say, his mouth working aimlessly. Some soldier nearby guffawed. “He did more than draw blood. He slew near a dozen.”
There were gulps of astonishment from the gathered lords, and Alun saw Drewish, there at the king’s back, glare at him dangerously.
“Proof once again that it is not just the size of a warrior that determines the battle,” Sisel said, exchanging a look with the king.
He’s talking about the small folk, Alun realized. I wonder what has been said?
“Well then,” High King Urstone said gently, “it looks as if we have a new champion among us. Will you do the honor of bearing this sword until we can return it to its rightful owner?”
Alun gripped the sword experimentally. It was strong and powerful and light in his hand, not like the heavy axes that he had been forced to bear. “Aye, milord. It would be an honor.”
The king smiled. He studied the marvelous staff, with its gems set near the top, and runes carved along its length. He peered up at the Wizard Sisel. “Would you take this?”
Sisel shook his head sadly. “That staff was not meant for me. It fits a man of a smaller stature.” He looked to the Emir. “It would suit you well.”
The Emir picked it up, swung it expertly, and it was his, at least for the time being.
The men went back sorting through the treasure. In one pack, they found a small bag, and within the bag was a golden signet ring. The ring featured an ancient symbol—the face of a man with oak leaves for his head and beard.
“This is a dangerous thing,” the Emir said, shoving it aside with his toe. “One should not lightly bear it, especially among the woods.”
“The glyph of the Wode King?” Urstone asked.
“Spirits are drawn to it,” the Emir said. “No man should carry such a token.”
“Unless—” the wizard Sisel said, his brow furrowed into a frown, “he bears it by right.”
Sisel himself drew his powers from the earth, and his powers were greatest in the forest. He seemed not to fear the strange ring.
“Do you have the right to bear it?” King Urstone asked.
“No,” the Wizard Sisel said after a long moment of thought, “but I will take the risk, until we find the one who does.” He picked it up swiftly, shoved it into a pocket of his robe.
Suddenly, Alun had a strange feeling, as if a cold wind were blowing through him, as if unseen spirits encircled him. He found himself wishing that he were anywhere but here.
The lords pawed through the packs, finding bits of food. There were trinkets scattered among them—a locket with a woman’s face painted upon it, a bracelet made of shells. But nothing seemed to be of import.
A soldier came after a bit, dragging a pair of red wings with him. “We found this in their armory—the wings from a Knight Eternal.”
That was a great treasure indeed, for anyone could wear those wings, and the king knew that his lords would fight over them. “By ancient law,” King Urstone said, “I decree that these wings will belong to the man who slew our enemy.” He nodded to the soldier, “Keep them safe until we find the rightful owner.”
It was moments later that one of the soldiers on the ground shouted, “I found another pack.”
This one had not been opened. Beyond the foodstuffs, a man’s clothes and mementos, this one held a leather bag.
When the king dumped its contents onto the floor, the wizard Sisel whistled in admiration. It held nearly a hundred smooth rods made from some rusty looking metal.
“These are a runelord’s forcibles,” Sisel said, holding the rods up for the king to see. “We must get these to the castle at once.”
The king did not speak openly before the men about the forcibles’ use. Instead, he nodded secretively, then sent a detail of four men to carry them back to the castle.
It was moments later that a captain came and reported, “We’ve searched the city. There are no signs of the prisoners that were taken here last night, or of the Knights Eternal. But there are fresh wagon marks on the road north, and many feet have trod it.”
“So,” Madoc said, “they’ve gone north.”
The morning was half over. Most likely, the wyrmlings were far, far ahead.
“We must follow, then,” King Urstone said. “We must reach them before nightfall.”
26
THE TEMPLE OF DEATH
The fiercest battles we fight in life seldom leave visible scars.
—the Wizard Sisel
Fallion came to, rising up out of dreams of ice and snow. Ice water seemed to be flowing through his veins instead of blood. His hands and feet were frozen solid. He tried to remember how he’d gotten here, when it had gotten so cold.
“Someone left the window open,” he said. That was it. Jaz liked to sleep with the bedroom window open, and often times in the fall, Fallion got too cool in the night. In his distorted dreams, he imagined that Jaz had left the window open all winter, and that was the cause of his current predicament.
He moaned in pain and peered about, but there was no light.
“Fallion,” Rhianna whispered urgently. “Draw heat from me.”
He wondered how she had gotten here. He tried to recall what the weather had been like when he went to sleep last night, but everything was a blank. All that he knew was bitter cold and pain.
“Draw heat from me, Fallion,” Rhianna whispered urgently.
Without thought, Fallion reached out and pulled a little warmth from her. She gasped in pain, and instantly Fallion regretted what he’d done. He lay there trembling from the cold, numb and filled with pain.
Rhianna pressed herself against him. She could feel him trembling all
over. She’d never known anyone to shake so badly. Even as a child, when the strengi-saats had taken her into the forest, wet and nearly naked, she had not suffered so.
Now, Rhianna began to shiver too, and she felt as if she were sinking endlessly into deep, icy water.
She dared not tell Fallion that she was afraid he was killing her. My life is his, she told herself. It always has been, and it always will be.
But something in her ached. She didn’t want to die without really ever having lived. Her childhood had been spent with her mother, running and hiding endlessly from Asgaroth. Then for years, her mind and body were taken captive by Shadoath. For a couple of years she had finally been free, but every minute of her freedom had been a torment, for she had fallen in love with Fallion so deeply that her life was no longer her own.
I don’t want to die without ever having learned to live, she told herself, and lay there with teeth chattering, struggling to give Fallion her warmth.
Slowly, Fallion became aware of his predicament. His legs and arms were bound tightly, cutting off the circulation. It seemed to make the cold keener. He remembered the squeak of wagon wheels, the jostling. The muggy air in the stone box.
But now they were somewhere outside the box. He could feel an open space above, and suddenly heard a wyrmling’s barking growl in another room.
We’re in a building, he realized. Distantly, he heard the chatter of a squirrel, and if he listened hard, he could hear nesting birds up above, cheeping to their mother.
We’re in the woods, he realized. It’s daylight outside.
The night came flooding back to him—the battle at Cantular, his ruthless attackers, the news that Talon was dead. Despair washed through him.
I must get free, he thought. If I don’t do it, no one can. He tried to clear his mind of numbness, of fatigue, of pain.
He reached out with his mind, felt for sources of heat. He touched lightly on Rhianna, Jaz, and Talon. She was still warm, too warm.
Talon’s alive! he realized, tears filling his eyes. But the spell that the Knight Eternal had cast had drained her, leaving her torpid, near death.
“Talon’s alive,” Fallion whispered for the benefit of Jaz and Rhianna, “barely.” Rhianna began to sob in gratitude.
Fallion reached out, quested farther, and found the wyrmlings in another room, off to his right. There were several of them. Their huge bodies were warm.
He wouldn’t need to drain much from them. He touched them, let their warmth flood him.
There was a shout in the other room. “Eckra, Eckra!”
Heavy feet rushed through the door, and Fallion heard the rustle of robes. He knew what was coming. The Knight Eternal would drain him of all heat.
Unless I drain him first, Fallion thought.
In a desperate surge, Fallion reached up to drain the life’s warmth from the Knight Eternal. To do so would require more control than he had ever mastered.
But as he did, he discovered too late that the creature looming above him had no life’s heat. It was as cold as the stone floor beneath them.
“Eckra,” it cursed, and suddenly the cold washed over Fallion again, and he was lost in a vision of winter, where icy winds blew snow over a frozen lake, and somehow Fallion was trapped beneath the ice, peering up from the cold water, longing for air, longing for light, longing for warmth.
High King Urstone sprinted through the early morning, a thousand warriors at his back, as they raced along.
With the great change, dirt and grasses had sprung up over the old road in a single night. It didn’t erase the road so much as leave a light layer of soil over it with clumps of stubble growing here and there. The wyrmling trail was easy to follow.
There was only one set of wagon tracks in the dust, along with the tracks of a dozen wyrmling warriors.
They stopped at a brook that burbled over the road, and several men bellied down to drink. It was the heat of the day, and sweat rolled off them. A few cottonwood trees shaded the brook, making it a welcome spot, and King Urstone shouted out, “Ten minutes. Take ten minutes here to rest.”
He saw a fish leap at a gnat in the shadows, and watched for a moment. There was a pair of fat trout lying in the water.
Warlord Madoc came up at his back, and asked, “Will we catch them today, do you think?” At first the king thought that the warlord was talking about the fish. King Urstone shook his head, trying to rid it of cobwebs and weariness.
“Aye, we’ll catch them,” the king assured him. “We got a late start, but it should be enough. The wyrmlings are forced by their nature to travel at night. But the days are far longer than the nights, this time of year. We should be on them well before dark.”
Madoc nodded and seemed to find no fault with the logic. That was odd. It seemed to the king that Madoc always sought to find fault with his logic nowadays.
“It will be a rough fight,” Madoc said, “with two Knights Eternal in the battle.”
“We have weapons to fight them with,” the king said.
Madoc bore one of those weapons, a dainty sword that was nearly useless in his immense hand. He pulled it from its sheath, showed it to the High King. A patina of rust had formed on the fine steel blade. “Sisel said that these had been blessed, but I say they’re cursed. This rust has been spreading like a fungus since dawn.”
The High King smiled, not in joy, but in admiration for the enemies’ resourcefulness. “I would say that they are both blessed and cursed. We will have to put that sword to good use before it rots away into nothingness.”
“You gave that fool Alun one of these swords to bear,” Madoc said. “Will you let him bear it into battle?”
“You call him a fool? You are the one who made him a warrior, and he acquitted himself well in battle this morning, by all accounts. Do you now regret your choice?”
“Of course not,” Madoc blustered. “But… he has no training with the sword, and it is an enchanted weapon!”
“Your point is well taken,” King Urstone said. Alun had fallen behind the war party. He didn’t have a warrior’s legs, couldn’t hope to keep pace. The king had assigned some men to help him along, even if they had to lug him like a sack of turnips.
The king’s mind turned to worries about his own son, and so he suggested, “Perhaps we should find another to bear it. Your son Connor, he is trained with the sword, is he not? It is said that he’s quite good. Would he like the honor?”
“I, I, uh—” Madoc blustered. He knew his son was clumsy with the sword. He had a strong arm, more fitted to the ax. More importantly, he wasn’t about to send his son charging into battle against the Knights Eternal, enchanted sword or no.
King Urstone fought back the urge to laugh.
Madoc often complains to his friends that I’m a fool, King Urstone realized, but the man has never fared well in a match of wits with me. “Have no worries,” Urstone said at last. “I will bear that sword into battle, and cleave off the head of a Knight Eternal.”
It was altogether fitting that the king do it. Urstone had been trained with the sword from childhood, and there were few men alive who could hope to match him with it. More importantly, it was said in Luciare that “the king bears upon his shoulders the hopes of the nation.” In ancient times, it was believed that the combined hopes of a people could give a warrior strength in battle.
These weapons were enchanted with old magic. Perhaps, Urstone thought, there is old magic in me, too.
Thus, the fight that he was racing to was not just a battle between two individuals. Urstone would be pitting the hopes of Luciare against the powers of Lady Despair.
Madoc grunted, “That would be best, I think. Yes, that would be well.”
Urstone peered hard at him. He doesn’t hope for my success in battle, he realized. He hopes to see me die.
Yes, how convenient would that be, King Urstone slain in a glorious combat, a hero’s death, leaving Madoc to rule the kingdom.
But I have a son still, a s
on who can spoil his plans.
Tonight at dusk the trade is supposed to be made, only a dozen hours from now.
“Wish me luck?” the king asked.
“Most assuredly,” Madoc said. “My hopes rest upon you.”
Nightfall was many hours away when a wyrmling guard came from the watch room, crashing down the stairs three at a time.
“Humans are coming, warrior clan!” he roared. “The road is black with them!”
Vulgnash leapt to his feet. For two hours he had been sitting with nothing to do, listening only to the occasional talk of the small folk in their room, whispering in their strange tongue, as quiet as mice. He had strained his ears. He knew that he would not be able to understand the meanings of their words. He had no context to put them in, but often, he had found, when learning a new language, it was best to begin by familiarizing himself with the sounds. He had been silently cataloguing the vowels and consonants, occasionally trying them out on his tongue.
Now, with a battle coming, there were other matters to attend to.
He raced up to the tower. The sunlight was as bright as a blade there, slanting down from the east. There was no cloud cover.
To the south he could see the human war band, sunlight glancing off their bone helms, as yellow as teeth. The men ran in single file, bloody axes in their hands. In the distance, racing down the winding road, they looked like a huge serpent, snaking toward the horizon for almost a mile.
They would reach the fortress in less than half an hour.
His captain raced up behind Vulgnash. “Master, shall we evacuate, head into the woods?”
There were trees all around. Leaves hung thick upon the oaks and alders. But they would not offer the protection that Vulgnash needed. His wyrmling troops could cope with the light much better than Vulgnash could.
“No, we’ll fight them here.”
The captain tried not to show fear, but he drew back. Vulgnash was condemning him to death.
“I’ll deepen the shadows around the fortress,” Vulgnash said, “and I will place the touch of death upon each of you, give you my blessing. And I have these—” he reached to a pouch at his throat, pulled it hard enough to snap the rawhide band that held it. The bag was heavy with harvester spikes.
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