The Wyrmling Horde (33 page)

Some women gazed upon her now and grew sick with envy. They looked upon her lustrous skin, her radiant eyes, and they despaired of ever being loved, while men gaped at her and seemed almost beyond restraint, like men who are dying of thirst and are suddenly confronted with water.

Rhianna took a few more endowments from Lowicker's nobles—sight, hearing, and touch, so that she would better find her way around when she breached the defenses of Rugassa, along with more brawn, grace, wit, and stamina.

Near noon, she went to where the wyrmling Kirissa was hiding from the sun. The wyrmling girl was forced to sit in an enclosed wagon, a crude carriage with windows that could be shuttered against the light.

Inside the wagon, Kirissa applied a salve to her sunburned skin. One of the horse-sisters had given it to her. She had not asked for it, and it seemed a great boon. In Rugassa, a wyrmling was expected to bear her pains stoically, as a sign of strength. No balm like this existed.

If the wyrmlings knew of such medicines, Kirissa thought, they would kill their masters and storm out of Rugassa, never to return.

So she rubbed it on the bridge of her nose and on her ears and cheeks and hands, the places where she'd burned the most. The burn was a raging fire, but the touch of the balm soothed it instantly.

She prepared to hide the balm under her seat, in the wyrmling manner, to save for later.

Yet something about the salve intrigued her. It was a symbol. She had not asked for it. The horse-sister who had given
it to her had done so for no other reason than that she saw that Kirissa was in pain, and the girl desired to help. She asked for no coin in return.

These people bear one another's burdens, Kirissa realized. They do not use others as tools, or seek solely to profit from them.

Kirissa was having a hard time divorcing herself from the wyrmling catechisms. Before the binding, part of herself had lived among the Inkarrans, but that shadow self had never been philosophically inclined.

In Kirissa's mind the whole notion of a society built not upon greed and fear, but upon love and compassion, seemed revolutionary.

Her thoughts began to explode. She could see how simple acts of kindness, multiplied over and over as tens of thousands of people per day made small gifts, might be the foundation for a new world.

She had heard of the horse-sisters, but Kirissa had lived so far away that the horse-sisters were no more than fables. Legends said that these women had the bodies of horses and the heads and breasts of women.

So when the winged woman, Rhianna, came early that afternoon with Sister Gadron to the wagon to speak, Kirissa was eager to get to know her better. Earlier, Kirissa had been able to ask only a few questions.

Rhianna began speaking through the translator and querying Kirissa in detail. “When we reach Rugassa, how can we enter without being seen?” she asked.

“You can't,” Kirissa said. “The wyrmlings watch by day and night. Many eyes will be following you as you approach.”

“How many guards are at each entrance?”

“I don't know,” Kirissa said. “I saw a dozen when I left the fortress, but that was the only time I've ever been through an outer gate.”

“What defenses do the guards employ?”

“There are kill holes above each entrance,” Kirissa said, “and hidden tunnels behind the walls. Once you enter the
labyrinth, you must fear getting lost. There are other defenses. Some of the main tunnels can be flooded with magma if the need is pressing.”

Rhianna went on like this for an hour, grilling Kirissa about troop strengths, about the quarters where the Knights Eternal slept, about the habits of Death Lords—asking questions that Kirissa really could not answer. Rhianna asked about other threats—the emperor himself, the Great Wyrm, and the kezziard pens. She asked about other creatures within the pens—giant graaks and things that were stranger still—but while Kirissa had heard tales of creatures from the shadow worlds, she had never seen such things herself.

At the end of that hour, Rhianna began speaking to Kirissa in Inkarran. Rhianna's vocabulary was limited, childishly so, and in some instances she confused the order of words, but the words were precisely formed and Kirissa could understand her intent.

More interestingly, though Rhianna was human, she spoke to Kirissa in her own voice, in the deep voice of a wyrmling.

She learns faster than any wyrmling, Kirissa realized. She has memorized every word that I have spoken in the past hour.

Kirissa stared at her in awe. Rhianna was of the small folk, and her size was unimpressive. But it had been hundreds of years since a human had slain a Knight Eternal.

This is a mighty lord, Kirissa realized, as dangerous as Emperor Zul-torac himself.

But she had little time to ponder the implications of this observation, for Rhianna immediately began to delve into new topics, having the translator ask, “How do you tell a wyrmling to surrender? How do you say, ‘Throw down your weapons.' ”

“I think that it is unwise to ask them to surrender,” Kirissa said. “They will only arm themselves again later, and come after you in greater numbers.”

Then Rhianna asked her one final question. “If you were to return to Rugassa, what would be done to you?”

Kirissa thought long about that. “They would kill me,” she said. “But they would torture me first, in order to punish me.”

“Will they take you to the dungeons where Fallion is kept?”

“Yes,” Kirissa said, growing worried at her line of questioning.

“If I asked you to do this for me, would you do it? Would you let yourself be captured?”

Kirissa recognized what Rhianna needed. Kirissa would not be able to find her way down to the dungeons. Even if she had known the way, she would slow down a pack of force soldiers intent upon a quick strike.

“How would you know where they take me?” Kirissa asked.

“I'm a Runelord,” she said. “I have a small tincture of perfume, sandalwood oil. I would place it on you and then follow the scent. No matter where they took you, I would be able to find you.”

Kirissa was afraid to volunteer for such a ruse. The Earth King had warned her long ago that the time would come when the small folk of the world would need to stand against the large, but she had always thought that she would meet her enemy with a good blade in hand—an ax or scimitar.

It was only the Earth King's words that gave her the courage to say, “Yes, I will go down with you. But we may need Cullossax's key if we are to breach the dungeons.”

Rhianna gave a meaningful look to Sister Gadron.

“I'll get right on it,” Sister Gadron said.

As it turned out she did not have to go far to get the key. A wyrmling's necklace with an ornate key carved from bone had seemed a fine trophy to one of the horse-sisters.

The summer sun shone down with the intensity of a blast furnace as Rhianna came winging to Caer Luciare, its white granite walls gleaming.

She flew over the market streets, with their cobbled stones and quaint shops. The folk of Caer Luciare had favored
vivid colors—bold peach, avocado, and plum—but now the gay shops clashed with the macabre decor of the new inhabitants. The wyrmlings had already begun marking everything with their crude glyphs—images of Lord Despair as a world wyrm, rising up. Other glyphs showed the image of the Stealer of Souls, a spidery creature, or of various clan markings that she was just beginning to recognize—the dog's head of the Fang Guards, or the three black skulls of the Piled Skulls clan.

Every cottage and market was somehow defiled. Either windows were shattered or doors caved in, or vile drawings covered the walls.

Like dogs, Rhianna realized. The wyrmlings are like dogs peeing on trees and bushes. There is some inner dictum that forces them to mar or destroy the lands that they take.

But it was more than just the paintings that adorned the places. The carnage looked worse than she remembered. It wasn't just the new damage to structures or the sickening graffiti. The wyrmlings had not yet begun to reclaim their dead after the battle, so now their white corpses lay strewn about, stomachs bloating and festering, oozing foul smells that rose up on the thermals. With her endowments of scent, the odors seemed overwhelming.

The dead were not just part of the decor, she realized, they were the centerpiece.

Rhianna dropped to the ledge of a lower wall, near where Jaz had died. She saw bloodstains on the cobblestones that might have been his. His body lay hacked and ruined.

My brother, she thought, look what they've done to him.

She did not care if the wyrmlings saw her there. She suspected that some were watching from Caer Luciare, from the dark corridors. Certainly there were enough spy holes in the place. But none would dare issue forth in this blazing sun to test her prowess in battle. And if they did, she would be happy to show them a thing or two.

So she stood for a long moment, weeping above Jaz's
corpse. “The wyrmlings have a lot to answer for,” she said to him. “And I shall make them pay.”

But first I need a weapon that will kill a Death Lord.

That was what she had come for. She had lost her staff while fighting against Vulgnash, the staff that the Wizard Binnesman had inscribed with runes and magic stones for the Earth King Gaborn Val Orden.

Vulgnash's endowments of metabolism had been too much for Rhianna to overcome. She hadn't been able to even come close to hitting him. And after the folk of Caer Luciare had fled, she'd been afraid to return for the staff.

But now she was ready to meet Vulgnash once again.

She turned and flew to the upper wall, where Fallion had taken his wound, and where she had slain a Knight Eternal. She found the mummified corpse still lying on the ground, its crimson robes draped about it. Rhianna kicked the corpse over. Carrion beetles crawled about underneath it, went blindly scattering this way and that, seeking to escape the sunlight.

Rhianna separated the robe from the corpse.

Odd, she thought, that the wyrmlings haven't scavenged from their own dead.

But then she began to wonder. Perhaps that was the point. Perhaps it wasn't out of laziness that the wyrmlings had left their dead on the battlefield untouched—but more out of respect.

These wyrmlings had died on the field of honor, and now it appeared that they would remain—in some sort of macabre memorial.

Rhianna had heard of people in Indhopal who would not touch their dead for three days, as a token of respect.

It might only be something like that, she thought.

She threw off her own robe and draped herself in the cowled bloody red robes of a Knight Eternal.

Flying fast, she wouldn't be distinguishable from one of them.

She flew to the base of the mountain, beneath the parapet where Warlord Madoc had fallen.

The Earth King's staff should be near here, she thought. But she could not find it. Warlord Madoc lay dead and broken upon a rock, his back arched painfully, arms spread wide, his dead eyes gazing up into the sun.

But Rhianna couldn't see the staff.

She hoped that wyrmlings had not defiled the weapon, as they had the buildings. She knew that the Death Lords had tried to curse the weapon, destroy it that way.

But after several seconds, she could not see it.

There were a number of large rocks here, scree from the tunneling in the mountain up above.

Perhaps, she thought, it has fallen under the rubble. She began to peer around, peeking down under the shadows.

Just then, she heard a noise above. She glanced up to see a large boulder dropping down from a parapet. She leapt aside as it slammed into the ground, then went bouncing away.

Perhaps the sun is not as great a deterrent as I'd imagined, Rhianna thought.

She heard the gruff laugh of a wyrmling coming from somewhere far up the mountain, drifting down. He called out a taunt.

She did not need a translator. The tone said it all: I know what you're looking for. Come and get it if you dare.

Suddenly, she realized how dangerous that might be.

The wyrmlings have had a night to dig up ore from the mountain, and two full days to refine it and take endowments. Surely they have done so by now.

Their taunts are not idle threats.

Rhianna leapt up and flew away.

I will have to go to Rugassa without my staff, she realized.

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