The Queen of Wolves (38 page)

Spit dripped from the Lamiades’ yellowed teeth, and one of them already had blood smeared across its snout. I watched the Myrrydanai who rode them—surely one of them was Ghorien, for he would not deign to walk the earth when he could ride such a monster. They were bridled like horses, and saddled, as well. The Myrrydanai seemed to have some trouble controlling their stillness, for the tails of these creatures whipped around as if in frustration, and several of the White Robes tugged at the reins to keep the lizards quiet.

I drew the helm from my head and set it on the pommel. I touched the grip of the Nameless with my left hand and held the staff with my right. Then I slipped my hand into the pouch and drew out the Eclipsis.

The tingling at my fingers began, and I felt the surge of energy shoot into that dark globe. The deathlight came up, seen only by me.

As the dark light crossed over the Myrrydanai, I saw their shadows beneath the skins, but also other shades there, waiting with Enora. These were the spirits the Chymers had helped her call from the Barrow-Depths—the old evil that lay in that ground.

I drew the Eclipsis back, dropping it into its pouch. I scanned the dead faces of the White Robes with the lizard mounts, wondering which was Ghorien, as all their features were indistinct. The White Robes who had no mounts stood with their hands clutching swords, blades to the ground.

“Look at this devil!” Enora shouted, as the winds whipped across the night and a clap of thunder deafened all. Lightning broke the clouds, and, in its flash of daylight, I saw the Morns upon the battlements with the guard, waiting for the fight to begin, waiting for the command from their leaders. “He comes to me in armor that is like these lizard skins—scaly and dirty. Are you—a devil—afraid of the swords of my fighters? Of arrows?”

“I wear the skin of the Serpent,” I said. “And the Raptorius.”

“Where are your lovely wings? Did you lose them on your journey?” She performed for her people, for her soldiers, that they would see her scorn and emulate it and lose their fear. I kept glancing at the sack at her pommel, for I wondered what conjuring she kept at her side. What was this? “You have been long away from us, and many have died because of your absence,” she said. “Where have you gone, devil, that you let the heretics die in your place?” She placed her hand across the sack that had raised my curiosity.

I held the Nahhashim staff before me. “I have been to the red city at the edge of the fire-colored sea,” I said. “I am the Falconer of the Great Serpent. I hunt you. I hunt what owns you, my lady. For your mind is too long held in the grip of Ghorien and his Myrrydanai shadows. You have called up the spirits of the dead through necromancy, and you haunt the nightmares of the mortals of this realm, for your very thoughts take form in flesh and in dream.”

“I am owned by no one, devil! Bow before your queen!” Enora shouted this against the falling snow, more for the show of it for her soldiers and her minions than for my benefit. She pointed the tip of her staff toward me. I felt a push at my ribs as she did this, but held my ground and revealed nothing to her.

“Destroy him,” Corentin said, appearing from behind the White Robes, riding a muscled black horse, and wearing the armor of the baron who had once been his master. His horse was skittish of the great lizards, whose teeth ground and snapped as the animal drew near. I noticed Corentin’s wrist had been fitted with a blade, shackled at the forearm, and thrust where his hand had been.

I shot Corentin a glance, but wasted no words upon him. Enora was my quarry, for the staff in her hand was all I needed to disable her protective sorcery of the city. Looking at her face, I could barely see the maiden I had once known.

“You are a baroness. This is not a kingdom. It is not a country.”

“I am Queen of the Wastelands and of Taranis-Hir and of the Jeweled Sea beyond, and even of these Akkadite heretics! I am the Lady of the Disk, and the earthly form of the Virgin of Shadows. Give me your staff, and surrender, and we will be merciful to the Akkadites.”

“Just end this,” Corentin said to her. He grew impatient, and it was obvious he did not enjoy the back-and-forth between us. He drew his horse away from the Lamiades and the White Robes. His mount was nervous, and moved left and right, and back and forth, uneasy around the wolves and the lizards. “Show him the peace offering,” Corentin muttered, and then drew his horse to the right and trotted back behind the White Robes who stood beyond the soldiers, as if he were terrified of another encounter with me.

She ignored her consort and stroked the sack again as if it were a pet. “We do not wish war,” she said. “For we have had enough blood spilled before your arrival. But you must bow to your queen.”

“If you are a queen, you are a queen of wolves, and in your path I hear the footsteps of an even greater wolf queen than you, who will put her claws upon your skull and crush it. Give me the staff of the gray priests of Nahhash. It was not cut from their bones that you might keep it in your jaws. Wolves cannot carry the shepherd’s staff, but must be hunted from the pen and driven back into the darkness.”

“You—a devil—are not a wolf?”

“I hunt as a wolf, but my greatest prey are other wolves.”

“If you hunt as a wolf, then I am your queen, and you will bow before me.”

“Who has ordained you? These shadow priests?” I asked. “For I recognize you only as a sad maiden I once loved, who has abandoned the good and the pure and the true and turned to bog magick and a dark goddess for her worship.”

She grabbed the Disk at her throat. “I worship the Virgin of Shadows, who saved our lands—and many other countries—from the plagues!”

From the foot soldiers came the shout, “Hail the Virgin of Shadows! Blessed is the Disk and those who dream it!”

“Yes, blessed are they who dream of the Disk,” Enora said, like a cat with a mouse in its jaws.

“This Virgin of Shadows—she brought the plagues, as you well know, Lady White-Horse. She is the Dark Madonna who has transfigured your wolf-women, and released the Myrrydanai hounds that you call White Robes. It is she who made you murder your brother and drink from his heart. It is she who has brought you the alchemist who seeks destruction of mortal life. It is she who has torn love from you and replaced it with the ice of winter. But I wonder why you don’t have your men attack me. For I stand within your circle.”

“We do not wish more bloodshed. The Akkadites are nearly slaughtered, and the woodland heresies are burned,” she said. “I am a peace-loving queen. Call off your demons, and make your oaths of fealty to me, and pass me the staff and the sword you hide, which are sacred to the White Robes, and I will allow you to exist, devil. But if you bring this war to us, I will personally rip your unborn baby from your mistress’s belly with my bare hands. And when I have that bloodied thing in my grasp, I will feed it to my wolves.”

“Your hell will begin if these things come to pass,” I said. I closed my eyes, and called to the Serpent within me:
Come now, through me, through my arm, through this bone of the Nahhashim priests.

I opened my eyes again.

“You have held this stolen staff too long,” I said. “It was broken from the white bone of the Nahhashim, who are the gray priests of Myrryd. Their bones grow as a tree in a garden, guarded by the Akhnetur. It was meant only for one—and that is I. It brings you sorcery, and strength to your shadow-masters, my lady. But to wield it you cannot dig up that sorcery in a bog, nor call it from the dead with your Chymer wolves. You know this—as Artephius knows it. As Ghorien knows it.” As I said the name of the White Robe priest, I quickly sensed that one of them had moved slightly. Not the dozen who stood nearest Enora, but one of the ones farther back.
He is hiding from me. He knows now that I know his name. He knows I have taken the Nameless, and carved my own staff from the Nahhashim. He knows I am dangerous now, where I was merely an annoyance before.
I kept my eyes on Enora, but tried to draw back in my mind and see if Ghorien would move again and reveal himself. “As with all weapons of sorcery, the Nahhashim staff calls out only for the one who is its master.”

“
You
are the wolf come to us from the woods, devil. If you do not surrender to me, your children will die. All of them. In pain,” she said.

I thrust the staff forward and leaned into my mount. The blast of it vibrated through my being as I felt it explode forward—a wave of vibration in the air, a heat magick. A sound like an enormous crashing of rocks boomed from it as Enora raised her staff against this assault. All of the power was invisible, but her staff seemed to catch it in midair. Then it was sent back to me in a blast that knocked me back, and I clutched at my horse to remain upon him.

“Do not use sorcery on me, devil!” she said. “Will you surrender now? Your word is good to us, and your demons will do as you wish. If you allow my guards to take you to our dungeons, we will release your demoness.”

Rather than answer her, I leapt from my horse. My wings erupted from the back of the Raptorius, thrusting at full expanse along my shoulders.

I held up the staff and when I opened my mouth, words in the language of the Great Serpent came forth, undecipherable even by he who spoke.

From my wrist, I felt a snap as if a muscle had torn from bone, and the staff in my hand flew out into the air. I leapt for it, and as I grabbed it, I saw the White Robe priest whose hand had lifted in the air, as if calling some sorcery from it.

Ghorien.

I marked him in my mind—there was little to distinguish him, but upon the hand that had gone up, I saw a stain at the palm, as if the dead whom the shadow priest had robbed of skin held a birthmark that ran from his thumb to the center of his hand.

I crouched on the ground, my wings spread. In another moment, the trap might be sprung and all the fighting would begin.

Enora raised her staff to silence all, and from her pommel she drew the sack of black cloth, and threw it to me.
 

“We did not think you’d surrender to us before the slaughter began,” she said. “But here’s a special offering we’ve made in your honor.”

As the sack rolled at my feet, I saw the small curl of fair hair from beneath its opening.

I took a deep breath, not wishing to see what was within it.

Yet, I could not help looking.

I drew from it the fresh-cut head of my son, Taran.

Enora’s own son.

In a heartbeat, I remembered the words of the Briary Maidens:
“Only one of your children may be saved, though you will not know which until the last battle has been fought.”

Another female spoke from a memory vision, the voice of Datbathani, the Lady of Serpents, speaking of my twins: “One of fire and one of blood, one to tear the Veil and one to mend it.”

Taran had been the child of blood, sacrificed by his own mother and the Myrrydanai to tear the Veil.

“To the Virgin of Shadows, his blood was spilled at birth, and in fulfillment of all she has offered, he has been sent to her in spirit,” Enora said, as if she were talking about sending our son into the next room to retrieve some tunic or cap. “To be her messenger in those shadow lands and tell her that the Maz-Sherah has come to fulfill ancient prophecies written upon the pages of her skin.”

I dropped to my knees before the boy’s head, and anything that was left of mortal feeling passed swiftly from me. “You sacrificed your own child to tear the Veil,” I gasped. “To follow the ritual laid out upon the scrolls of her flesh. To draw her blood from his blood. You have murdered your own son to bring destruction upon yourself!”

I leapt to my horse and rode back swiftly down the line of soldiers, to the army that had followed me to this snowy field. In a quarter hour I stood before them, for my horse had been swift and my spirit true.

“Blow the horn of war!” I shouted, my fangs long and sharpened like daggers. “Take them! Take them all! And leave none standing!”

The Akkadites blew the great horns, and the drums of the towers sounded as they had before our descent.

4

The smell of blood filled the air as our roaring company came down upon them. Swift were the vampyres with dragon wings spread as they met the fearsome Morns in midflight, tossed and bludgeoned by the whirling winds were they. Ophion and the warriors of the skies tore the throats from those eel-skinned creatures. Many of our company were bitten and fell, but many more took down Morns into the burning canals and emerged unscathed—but not so their victims. Upon the white frozen ground, the kings and queens of Myrryd brought razien and sword, spear and claw, tooth and talon, into the horde of Disk knights who had poured forth from the gates of Taranis-Hir at our thunderous approach. No match were the Chymer wolves for our tribe, though Akkadite mortals they brought low. Many horses cried out to the heavens as if they had human voice, as the Lamiades snapped at their flanks and tore their withers and crests, as the White Robes drove swords into the Akkadite riders. Still, the vampyres of the sky fell down in a flock of dark angels upon these robed priests, and tore at the cloth that hid them, and scored their rotting skin with their talons.

Foot soldiers, the fodder of Taranis-Hir, came at us with spear and shield, arrow, and ax, and I joined many in leaping from my mount and bringing a cudgel against those who had felled the Akkadites. I looked to Calyx to see how she fared, for we had no stratagem in this war, but merely the will to slaughter. She had broken her lance into a knight’s visor, tearing him from his steed; and with her sword, she jabbed and cut another who brought his ax against her.

Namtaryn upon her mount, chased down the wolf-women as they scattered to the wintry woods, and in one moment she seemed to be hunting them, and in the next, she carried three pelts in her hand, while swinging her double-headed ax down into a knight’s back as he skewered one of our tribe upon his silver-tipped spear.

Athanat had leapt from his horse, and carried several men in his arms up to whirling winds, and there ripped at their bodies until the earth below was sprayed with their blood. Nekhbet led her warriors against the gatekeepers and their guards, and I saw her slit the throats of many before the guards at the battlements above began pouring molten lead down upon any who drew too near to the gate.