Bloodstone (16 page)

With one lunge, he scooped it up.

His scream was involuntary, a reaction to the metal’s scorching imprint on his raw flesh.

The Sword clattered to the floor, and the mage laughed again. “You really are amusing, Drakkonwehr, but so pathetically predictable.”

His vision hazed. The pit took on an orange glow as the cords of his neck tightened. His hand burned, and the heat inside the pit seemed to intensify. He could barely breathe, barely think, barely feel anything except heat.

And hate.

He ripped off the right sleeve of his tunic and wound the cloth about his hand. Stooping, he seized the Sword of Drakkonwehr. He straightened while his hand shook with pain at the grip, and the cloth wrapped around it smoked.

Across the pit, the mage stood with arms widespread over the onyx table. He swayed gently, eyes closed, and chanted words never meant to be said aloud, words written only on a scroll stored deep in the bowels of Drakkonwehr, words that should have remained buried forever:

“
Beggeth beggedon tyrannor mott.

Ominoth peurinon cauldor keth.

Beggeth rappanon drakkonnor tor.

Tyrannoth drakkon ominor et!
”

The mage’s voice reverberated from the surrounding stone, its sound low, hypnotic, inviting.

Comforting, he thought with a vague sense of surprise as tendrils of spell wove themselves around his consciousness. Gossamer thin, like spider web, they laid down a layer of...
nothing.
..so quickly, he wondered why he was standing in this pit watching a man with outstretched arms and closed eyes murmur sounds that made no sense.

He wondered, too, why he should be watching an amber-haired woman beside the table until, with graceful movements, she slid the white cloak from her shoulders and let it fall into a shimmering heap about her ankles.

Awareness slammed into him like an axe blow, shattering the mind spell.
Ayliss!
his mind messaged.

Her emerald eyes locked with his.
I’m going to ride the dragon.
The look on her face was hard, determined.
And nothing you can do will stop me because I’ve already given Syryk the Chant.

All around him the Chant echoed, weaving the Dragon Spell, keeping his body in thrall, suspended where he stood.

Ayliss, why?

You’re not the only Drakkonwehr.

I’m the male heir.

And I’m the female heir.
She drew his mind to the necklace she wore, to the glowing black-red stone suspended between her breasts.
You were given the Sword, but that’s not enough now, is it? You need these. And this.
She gestured to the multiple stones decorating her wrists and forehead, and to the crystal column, pulsing with red, black and green.

She raised her chin, holding it high while her eyes flashed green fire.
Koronolan couldn’t ride the Dragon. No Drakkonwehr since has dared to try. But I will. I will!

The Dragon Chant vibrated around him, the volume building, each syllable a physical force that lapped like a rising tide against his body, his mind. He was drowning, suffocating, dying
—
along with the world he knew, the world Koronolan and every son after him had been charged to protect by guarding the one thing that could destroy it, the beast entombed in Drakkonwehr.

—Illusion, remember? Don’t believe everything you see. Or hear—

He started, his mind flying to Ayliss. Her eyes glanced from him to the chanting mage and back again. Something flickered in the emerald depths. Fear? Uncertainty? A moment of doubt?
Don’t believe everything you see!
echoed in his mind.

He wanted to believe she was an illusion, that none of this was true—her thievery, betrayal, greed—but his second sight told him she was flesh and blood this time, and his heart—well, his heart was a fool!

Liar! Traitor!

Her eyes closed as a wave of what seemed like pain contorted her features. When her lids lifted, her face had altered. The look she fixed on him was infinitely sad. And every line of it spoke of parting.

—I still trust you, Durren. Help me...if you can—

Her hand, cradling the stone between her breasts, closed on it. The knuckles whitened and, as he watched, transfixed, blood squirted between her clenched fingers. In unison, the stones about her forehead and wrists melted. Streaks of black-red blood trickled down her face and arms. With a ghost of a smile gracing her lips, her eyelids drifted shut and she slid, as delicately as her cloak had, to the stone floor...

“Ayliss,” the man whispered as the vision faded. Emotions roiled in his chest like waves in a storm, threatening to swamp him. He clenched his eyes shut and held his jaw firm against their surges. Even so, a glimmer of something squeezed between his defenses and nudged at him until, oddly dry-mouthed, he opened his eyes and looked toward the lion.

“Are you—?”

The lichen-covered rock was vacant.

The man spun, raking with wild, frantic glances the ledge, the trees above, the campsite below, the entire rock-studded clearing...but the lion had vanished.

Sweat drenched his tunic. The breeze, active in the lengthening shadows, crawled up his back. Shivers racked his body, long, violent shivers that started with the clack of his teeth and ended with spasms in his thighs. He stumbled to the rock and flung himself down beside it, pawing through the moss, lichen, gravel for some sign the vision had been real, that the lion was only that—a lion.

Near his knee, he spied a bit of cream-colored fuzz. He pounced on it, held it up to the lowering sun and rolled it through his gloved fingers. Tiny kernels within revealed it as the seed cotton of a meadow weed.

Fresh sweat oozed from his pores. Black dots danced on the fringes of his vision while he told himself the lack of fur wasn’t a true sign. The ground was too rocky to leave prints, and a lion didn’t shed every time it cleaned itself. Still, a sense of dread settled like a rock into the pit of his stomach.

If it isn’t a lion, then it’s magic,
said the Voice in his head.

The man closed his eyes.
Not magic. The mages are dead. The last one died at Drakkonwehr.

Errek was dead, too. And Ayliss. This...beast wasn’t Ayliss, no matter how much he might wish she hadn’t died, no matter how much he might wish she hadn’t betrayed her Drakkonwehr heritage. These occurrences were only dreams, the consequences of refusing to sate the needs of his—no, he amended with a deliberate shiver—the needs of Durren Drakkonwehr’s flesh at Ar-Deneth. The last Drakkonwehr was as good as dead, too. Destroyed along with the Stone Dam at Herrok-Eneth.

The man stared at his gloved hands and fabric-covered arms. This body was only Durren’s shell, black-wrapped and hollow. Void of everything that made a man...a man. With a shudder, he curled his hands into fists.
Void of everything—everything but the damned memories!

That was YOUR choice,
the Voice in his head said.

And it’s a choice I’ll make again!
Shaking off another chill, the man strode off the ledge and clambered down the hillside toward Ghost and the pack horses.

That might explain the untimely visit of your lovely fantasy woman, but what about the lion?

The man froze, his hand stretched toward the pack mare’s lame leg. Sweat cooled along his spine, raising the fine hairs there. The beast was far from ordinary, even for the Wehrland where strangeness abounded. What if—what if it were...magic?

No. Too many years had passed. The destruction had been complete. True, he’d survived, but that had been due to—his mouth twisted—Syryk’s foresight. Still, if the mage had ‘saved’ him, couldn’t the mage have saved...something else?

The question impelled the man to turn toward Ghost, to slide his fingers through the stallion’s mane, walk past the gray muzzle that lipped his tunic sleeve, and continue to his saddle where it lay on the ground. Bending, he ripped open a pouch fastened to the back and thrust his hand inside.

A piece of metal presented itself to his palm, and his fingers curled automatically around its scrolled length.
Ah, yes.
Sparks dotted his vision, and he remembered to breathe. Chagrinned by his fear, he waited for the giddiness to pass, then withdrew the object from his saddlebag.

Late afternoon sunlight glowed golden from the curved metal shielding his thumb on one side and his knuckles on the other. Sunshine gleamed like water from a broad, flat pillar rising two hands’ span from curving hand guards, and glinted once from the raw edge of the broken summit.

He sat back on his haunches, marveling at the balance of a sword that, even broken, still fit his hand like an extension of his arm and moved as though mere thought propelled it. It turned now, angling itself so the dull, black-red stone embedded in the crosspiece was fully exposed to his gaze.

As if compelled, he lifted his thumb and rubbed the pad of it across the stone. “
Bluet drakkenoth, ominor ay rhoenon pek,
” slid from his tongue like a long forgotten childhood rhyme.

A chill raised the hairs on his body as he recognized the ancient sounds of Shadowspeech, the tongue of Kiros. Another chill prickled through him as the meaning of the words echoed in his mind:
Drop of dragon’s blood, show me what there is to fear.

He had only seconds to marvel at how the words, so long buried, came so easily to his tongue. Only seconds, before he heard the sounds of...whistling?
He spun to his feet, taking in the whole of the campsite in the motion, observing now with panic what he should have noted before, the vacant space amid the sacks of grain. “Gareth,” he breathed, pivoting once more, this time toward the sound.

He spotted the boy, his sandy head and rust-colored tunic bobbing along a deer path cut through the meadow below. Whistling, the boy tapped the way with his staff, two full water sacks weighing down one bony shoulder.

The man frowned. It wasn’t the boy he had to fear, was it? No, it had to be the lion.

Sweat oozed from his temples and trickled down his face, gluing his hood to it. He licked his upper lip and searched the edge of the rocky clearing for telltale signs of movement.

“
Bluet drakkenoth, ominor ay rhoenon pek,
” he repeated, flexing his fingers on the broken sword’s hilt. A force he hadn’t felt in years drew his gaze inexorably back toward the boy—and fastened it on a patch of briars twenty strides below the path. There, in the center, a branch moved languorously to and fro, its rhythm entirely unrelated to that of the breeze.

“Gareth!” The man hurdled his saddle and charged down the slope.

He was running, sliding, falling when he saw the feline burst from a honeysuckle bush to his left. Ears laid back, body a tawny blur of limbs, the she-cat streaked toward the boy.

“No!” The man flailed out, fell, rolled over broken rock that gouged into his shoulder. The pain bit the edge off his panic. He rolled again, twisting this time so his boot soles rammed into a hummock. He shoved against the impact, catapulting himself upright and forward.

The boy stood where the man had last seen him, a startled look on his face, blind eyes oblivious to the huge cat rushing at him from the side. “Gareth! Get down!”

But the boy only turned away from the cat, his head cocked, as if listening.

To what?
The man could hear nothing but the roar of his own blood, the rasp of his clothing sliding over muscles that pumped and strained to move faster.
Faster!
The cat made no sound, only loomed larger, a blur although everything in his perception had so slowed each footfall shuddered from gravel to boot sole, from heel to ankle, from knee to thigh. He took another stride, and the cat made two, each longer than the last, each a tawny flight of teeth and claws.

He couldn’t possibly reach the boy before the cat launched itself in a bunching of sinew and muscle, mouth agape and paws spread. But, by Koronolan, he could land on the back of the beast and stab it through the heart!

In a moment when time seemed suspended, the boy turned, ever so slowly. His face registered alarm and his mouth opened. If there was sound, the man didn’t hear it. He saw instead the cat’s ears flatten, the eyes slit, and the black lips curl away from pink gums and bare yellow-white teeth. He flung himself forward, but the beast had already sprung.

Gareth, still turning, must have sensed the beast’s shadow, for his arms flew up in a gesture of self-protection. Helplessly, the man watched the airborne feline wrench her body sideways and slam, shoulder first, into Gareth’s upraised arms. Boy and cat—and something else, something large, dark, and looming behind the boy—crashed to the ground.

The Krad smell hit the man first, even as the cat and the beast-man rolled in a tangled blur away from the boy’s crumpled body. A glint of sunlight on a flint blade brought the man lurching to the right, and he threw himself between another beast-man and the fallen boy. The Sword of Drakkonwehr, like an extension of his arm, arced downward, broken blade gleaming, and sliced the second Krad’s flint knife in half. The Sword’s upward arc rammed the hand guard deep against bone and sinew.

And time returned.

The impaled Krad slumped over the man’s hand. Revolted, he braced his boot against the beast-man’s body and jerked the Sword free. The creature sprawled back and lay still.

The man spun, but nothing moved in the meadow, nothing but the she-cat, less than ten strides away, separating herself from a dark, fur-covered, unmoving mass. With bloodied jaws, she stared at the man, her eyes fixed, yellow-green, and mesmerizing.

—I saved you, Durren. Again.—