A Night of Dragon Wings (6 page)

"Behold the weredragon!" shouted Queen Solina.  "Behold our victory!  We will never fall!"

All around Treale, the people of Tiranor pounded their fists and roared the call.  "We will never fall!"

Treale stared, eyes dampening.  This was no chained animal, no creature.

It was Mori.

Memories floated around Treale:  childhood summers in Nova Vita when she played with Mori in the palace gardens; the royal family visiting Oldnale Manor in winters, and Mori sleeping at Treale's side in the great oak bed upstairs; stargazing with Mori and her brothers on autumn nights, then sneaking away from the boys to whisper of future husbands, wedding gowns, and all the other dreams of youth.  And now… now this:  Treale hidden in a cloak among a crowd of rage, and Mori in chains and rags, her skin sallow and lacerated.

"I will save you, Mori," Treale whispered as the crowd roared.  Her knees shook.  Her belly roiled.  She dug her fingernails into her palms.  "I swear to you, I will save you."

As the phoenixes circled above the square, leaving wakes of flame, Solina cried to the sky.  The queen appeared to be in rapture, head tossed back and arms raised.  Her raiment of gold and platinum shone upon her, reflecting the sun and fire.

"The weredragons burned your homes!" she cried, and the crowds roared.  "They slew your sons and brothers and fathers, brave men of Tiranor who flew to banish their darkness.  But we defeated them!  We toppled their courts and we captured their vile princess.  Tiranor lives, Tiranor grows strong, Tiranor lights the world!"

The crowd chanted, fists pounding the air.  "We will never fall!  Hail the Sun God!  We will never fall!"

"Hail the Sun God!" cried Queen Solina.  "Today is the Day of Sun's Glory.  Today the light of our lord banishes the night."  She turned to her guards.  "Let the reptile taste our glory."

The soldiers raised whips.

Treale winced and her heart wrenched.  "No…"

The whips fell and Mori screamed.

"No!" Treale cried, but nobody heard her; the crowd shouted around her.

The whips fell again, and Treale bit her lip and looked aside.  Her fists trembled.  Tears ran down her cheeks.  She wanted to shift, to turn into a dragon, to fly to Mori and save her.  Yet how could she?  How could she fly with a thousand wyverns around her, with phoenixes covering the sky?

"Please," she whispered, as if Solina could hear her across the crowd.  The whips fell again and again, and Mori finally stopped screaming.  Her chin fell to her chest, and she hung limp in her chains.

The crowd roared as the soldiers dragged the unconscious princess back into the temple.  Treale shook and wanted to turn away, wanted to run, wanted to fly, wanted to race toward the temple and leap in after Mori.  She tried to elbow her way forward, but the crowd was too thick, suffocating her.  She could barely breathe.  Her limbs trembled, and she'd have fallen were the people not pressed against her.

"See how the weredragons suffer for their crimes!" Solina shouted, arms raised.  "See how the cruel scream in pain!  They tried to kill us.  They tried to extinguish the sun itself with their darkness.  We shall beat the creature every Day of Sun's Glory!  We will find their king, who hides like a coward in the wilderness, and flay him for the sun to burn his naked flesh."  As the crowds roared, Solina raised her hand high in salute, and the sun itself seemed to glow within it, a beacon of her might.  "Tiranor is strong, and Requiem's last children will die under our heel!"

Treale panted, belly roiling and eyes stinging, as Solina vanished back into her temple.  The doors of gold and ivory closed, sealing the queen, her men, and Mori within.  As the crowd began to disperse, growling about the evil of the weredragons, Treale stood in place.  She lowered her head, fists clenched at her sides.  She tasted a tear on her lips.

"I'm sorry, Mori," she whispered.  "I'm so sorry I left you, that I flew from battle, that I abandoned you."  She trembled, remembering seeing the fall of Nova Vita… and fleeing it.  "I will never find absolution from my shame, Mori, but I will save you.  I promise you."

She stood in the square until the sun set and all but a few stragglers remained.  Then Treale turned, walked in silence, and entered an alley between shops and taverns.  The sun fell and darkness spread.  Between the roofs of the buildings, Treale saw the Draco constellation, the stars of her home, and they soothed her.  She missed her parents and her brothers so badly; they lay dead.  She missed her king Elethor; she did not know if he too had fallen.  She missed her home, Oldnale Manor; it had burned to the ground.

But Mori still lives.  A last light shines.  I am not alone.

Treale curled up in a shadowy corner, placed her head against her knees, and quietly wept.

 
 
NEMES

As the rain fell and the sun set, Nemes was digging a grave.

He was not a gravedigger; Requiem had employed three, and they had fallen in the war.  Nor was he strong; his arms had always been thin, and others of the camp—surviving soldiers—were better suited for manual labor.  But Nemes had volunteered to bury the tortured spy, for he had always loved three things above all else:  solitude, corpses, and Lady Lyana. 

"I have two here with me," he said softly among the trees, shoveling dirt.  The camp lay far behind, and the dead spy stank beside him.  "And if my Lord Legion wills, I will have the third soon enough."

He tightened his pale, bony fingers around the shovel's shaft.  In the fading light, his flesh seemed gray to him, rubbery and old despite his youth; he was not yet thirty.  Strands of his hair hung over his eyes, prematurely silvered—the hair of an old man.  But Lyana was fair.  Lyana's skin was smooth and pale like the silks Nemes's mother would dream of owning.  Lyana would regret her words to him; Nemes vowed that.  They would all regret how they'd hurt him; he swore that to the rain, to the worms, and to the body rotting beside him.

His arms shook.  He was tired.  He had never been so tired.  He turned away from the grave—it was deep enough—and knelt by the body.  It was a famished, scarred thing, barely better than the worms that crawled across it.  Nemes touched the body's cold cheek, closed his eyes, and thought of Lyana.

"How sweet it would be to touch your cheek," he whispered.  He licked his lips and imagined licking her skin.  "Someday I will bring you here, Lyana, into this forest, and I will tear your clothes so that I can touch all of you, see all the pale flesh of your body, and know you here upon this grave."

Eyes closed and breath fast, Nemes caressed the corpse's hair.  The rain pattered around him.  When a worm crawled across his fingers, he opened his eyes.  The corpse stared up at him, mouth open in a toothless grin, flesh a pasty white—as white as Lyana's.  This dead, decaying thing was not as beautiful as Lyana, but it was close.  It was close.  It could soothe him for this night.

Nemes looked around him, a snarl on his lips.  And why not?  The weaklings were back at their camp—lying down to sleep, or to pray, or to hug and whisper their pathetic, weakling dreams.  But he, Nemes, was strong; not of arm perhaps, but of spirit, of mind, of tooth.  He was a scavenger of the night.  He was a vulture, tall and dark and proud.  He pulled his Iron Claw from his cloak, a curved obsidian blade.  He thrust it into the body's neck and pulled down, gutting the torso.  His nostrils flared, inhaling the sweet smell of death.

The light faded, and Nemes lit his tin lamp.  In the red light, he studied.  He dissected.  He placed organ by organ.  He clutched the heart in his palm and breathed in ecstasy.  This felt almost like that first time, years ago, when he'd been only a boy in the woods.  Back then he would catch only squirrels, crush their heads, skin them, and study their innards.  But squirrels were for boys, and Nemes was a man now, a vulture, a future lord to Lyana.  He craved the
humans
, and he savored this human.  Every piece he removed sent shivers through him.

The others, he knew, would not understand.  King Elethor had always craved the beauty of sculpture.  The Princess Mori had always craved the beauty of music.  Lyana, his eternal love, craved the beauty of marble columns and steel blades.  Their minds were so small, their worlds so dark. 
This
was beauty: a smell of blood, a glimmer on bone, and the secret worlds that pulsed under skin.  Nemes inhaled sharply, imagining the beauty of the organs Lyana hid under her pale skin.  He vowed to someday see them too, to touch them, to study them.

He buried the man and his organs.  He covered the grave in darkness.  He cleaned his hands in a stream.  His work was done.

He wrapped his black cloak around him, clutched his staff, and whispered the words he had learned—the words of Lord Legion.  Shadows rose from the earth like serpents of smoke.  Nemes welcomed them.  He let the wisps caress his legs, then rise and swirl around him, until he inhaled their clammy scent.  Soon the shadows cloaked him and he vanished into the night.

A thin smile twisted his lips.  He had learned the words from the Old Books, the ones buried deep in Requiem's library.  Only the noble house carried the keys to that chamber, filigreed works of art they bore on chains around their necks.  Knowledge was power, Nemes knew, and he craved it—the power in corpses and the power in books.  On many cold nights, he had crept into Princess Mori's chamber, watched her sleep, and gently lifted the key off her breast.  He would spend the night in darkness, surrounded with books, studying the ancient scrolls of Lord Legion, the nephil whose voice still whispered in the night, the child of a demon king and his human bride.

"Now your shadows cloak me, my lord," Nemes whispered.  "Now I slither in darkness, hidden, like you."

Nemes's fists and jaw tightened in anger.  Lord Legion had fallen; he languished in a tomb, sealed from his true glory, and only his whispers crawled across the land.  One day, Nemes swore, Lord Legion would rise again and spread wings in the night.  One day the cruel stars of Requiem would extinguish, and their worshippers would be those crawling.  Then he, Nemes, would be lord over them.  He—who had emptied their chamber pots, served their wine, and swept their floors—would make them bow.

He walked through the forest, robed in shadow, snarling.

In the darkness, the memories rose again.  He saw his grandfather, a bent old man, sweeping the halls of Requiem's kings, then returning home to his bed of straw.  He saw his father, a meek sickly man, toil to wash, to mend, to clean, to finally die of the cough.  And he saw himself, and that memory stung worst of all.  He saw a lanky boy, the child of a long family of servants, a boy raised to sweep floors and wash outhouses and pick fleas from dogs, a boy who dreamed of the power and beauty of those above him.

As he poured wine at feasts, how he had dreamed of sitting at the high table with Princess Mori, with Lord Bayrin and Lady Lyana, with the beautiful and mighty!  At the Nights of Seven, how he had begged to join the nobles in their gardens, to sing with them, to watch the stars… and yet he would always enter the gardens last, to clean the mess those above him had left.  He remembered one night, a night of a black moon, when he dared approach the Lady Lyana, dared ask her to a ball.  How her eyes had pitied him!  He never forgot that look of pity; it still burned him.  He could still feel her hand on his shoulder.  He could still hear her soft voice rejecting him, explaining that Prince Orin had already invited her, and how sweet and lovely Nemes was, and how many girls would someday adore him.

Walking through the forest now, nearly a decade later, rage still flared inside Nemes.  With a growl, he punched a tree so hard his knuckles tore and his blood sprayed.  He snarled and watched the blood drip, imagining tearing Lyana's flesh open too, seeing her blood, ripping out her heart like she had done to his.

"You will regret your words," he swore in the forest as he swore most nights, as he had been swearing for ten years.  "You will scream for me to forgive you.  And I will not, Lyana.  I will not.  Not until you are fully mine—your body, your organs, your very soul."  His fists trembled.  "You will be mine."

He reached into his cloak and grabbed his serpent amulet, the sigil of Lord Legion.  He let his blood cover the talisman.  Lord Legion loved blood, he knew; Nemes was glad to give some of his.

"With your power," he vowed, "they will all bow before you.  I swear it, my lord.  I will make them bow."

The lord's shadows swirled around him with fury, and Nemes kept walking until he reached the camp.  Most slept on the ground, bundled in blankets.  Some had built huts of branches and leaves.  Nemes walked between them, silent and dark.  Some of Requiem's survivors were still awake, huddled together and whispering; they could not see through his cloak of shadow.  Nemes moved between them, a ghost.  As a servant in Requiem's palace, he had always been as an invisible man; Lord Legion let him have the true power, no longer a mere mockery.

And once you are freed, Lord Legion, your true might will bless me.  They will cower before us.

The shadows danced around him, a raiment of demons.  He climbed the mountainside until he reached the cave where King Elethor and Queen Lyana now ruled.  A guard stood there, a young woman with golden hair, a spear and shield in her hands.  Nemes walked past her; she saw nothing.  He entered the cave, walked down a tunnel, and entered the chamber of his beloved.

Lyana lay there upon a bed of fur, naked in candlelight, so pure, so pale, so fragile.  Her skin like marble glimmered orange in the candlelight.  Tiny scars like cobwebs covered her back; others had cut her before, but Nemes would cut her deeper.  Her hair burned red and wild.  Elethor lay beside her, rolled toward her, and touched her cheek.

Nemes stood in the corner, silent and shadowy, and watched the two make love.  His lips peeled back, baring his teeth, as the naked bodies moved together, as Lyana moaned, as the foul King of Requiem invaded her purity.

You will bow before me too, Elethor,
Nemes thought, fingernails digging into his palms. 
My family has served you for too long, but a new power will rise.  You will watch me dissect Lyana, and I will dissect you next.  You will both live through it; that I swear to you.  You will both live to see your shiny, wet organs in my hands and mouth.