The Wyrmling Horde (39 page)

Talon almost charged next, but Daylan warned her back. “Ware! Ware! He has more endowments than we do, and he has the powers of an Earth King besides.” There was fear in Daylan's voice, and regret and horror.

Lord Despair studied the fallen emir, as if dissecting him with his eyes.

“Fourteen long years Areth waited for you,” Despair said. “Fourteen years of torture. Let's see how well you bear up as you suffer his fate.”

Then he turned his cold gaze upon the rest of the company. He glanced at Kirissa, who struggled in the grasp of her wyrmling guards.

“Fools,” Despair said. “Why do you even bother to resist?”

“Ah,” Daylan said, “and that is where you are wrong. We are not fools. The rules I live by are not the rules of this physical world. They are the rules of the invisible world. By abiding by those laws, Despair, we gain power that you never could comprehend, nor control.”

Despair dismissed him with a flick of his eyes. “If you insist,” he said. “But what has all of your power gained you? Yes, you resist me, but your efforts are of no consequence.”

“Until now,” Daylan said. “Your time is coming to an end. The True Tree has been reborn. The Torch-bearer has returned. The Restoration of All Things is at hand.”

“The remains of the True Tree are rotting away at Castle Coorm,” Despair said. “And the Torch-bearer writhes in my dungeon, and shall soon be joining me.”

Without blinking, Despair must have uttered some silent command, for from the corner of her eye Talon caught a movement. She whirled with her weapon in hand just in time to see specters hurtling toward her silently, as insubstantial as a mist. In their shapes, she thought that she saw the remains of their forms—skulls shrunken and meatless, with pits for eyes. A ghostly hand reached out to touch her with fingers of bone.

She cried out and tried to lurch away, but the finger brushed her hand. Instantly it felt as if the blood froze in her veins, racing up her arm, and her entire right side went numb.

The icy sensation swept up her arm, paralyzed her shoulder, and stopped her heart with its piercing cold. She heard Rhianna cry out and a rush of wings as the woman leapt into the air.

“Run!” Rhianna shouted.

But Talon could not stagger a step. The wight had taken her by the hand, and she could not break free. Even with the strength of a dozen warriors of Caer Luciare, her knees suddenly felt too weak to hold her, and she collapsed to the arena floor.

  19  

Thus sayeth the Great Wyrm: I am your god. Above me there is no other. Serve me or perish. The dumb man seeketh to disobey, and the fool seeketh flight.

 

—From the Wyrmling Catechism

With a glimpse of the shadow wights rushing up behind her, Rhianna leapt into the air with a shout of warning, and flapped up into the darkness. The arena was about one hundred and fifty yards across and had a high ceiling, but in the darkness she could not be certain how high.

She glanced below. A wave of wights had rushed in behind Vulgnash. Talon whirled to do battle, but it was in vain, for a wight merely took her hand, and its paralyzing touch drove her to the floor.

Daylan Hammer sprang forward, bringing his war hammer to bear on Lord Despair, raining blows upon him like a human cyclone. But Despair merely danced back, parrying every blow with his great sword, until after a dozen blows from Daylan's weapon a wight leapt into the air and grabbed him from behind, arms locked about his throat in a death grip, and rode him to the ground.

With her companions all either dead or paralyzed, Rhianna had no choice but to seek escape.

She flew up, circling the arena like a bird that had flown into a house through an open door. She flapped higher and butted her head against the ceiling, a blow that nearly sent her reeling to her doom.

In the darkness she could see little, even with her endowments. Glow worms had not been placed up here, and apparently found little to eat upon the stone. She spotted doors at
both ends of the arena, doors for wyrmling spectators to gain ingress, but the misty forms of wraiths streamed into the arena, blocking her escape. She could not get past them. There was no room.

She flapped about, peering down, and the wraiths stared up at her hungrily, eager for her death.

“Take her!” Lord Despair shouted, and Vulgnash leapt into the air, too. The Darkling Glory at Despair's back roared in mirth to see her predicament. There was not enough room for her to elude Vulgnash for long. All that she could do was to fly in desperate circles.

Nor can I fight, she realized. Vulgnash is under the protection of an Earth King, a twisted Earth King, but an Earth King nonetheless.

Her heart pounded with terror, and she was so frightened that she almost missed it. She felt a sudden updraft.

An air vent, she realized. The arena had an air vent at its top.

Vulgnash was hot behind her. Rhianna flapped harder, pressing in her need, and he fell back a few paces.

I'm faster than he is, she realized.

Whether it was because she had taken more endowments of metabolism or because she had taken more strength, she could not be certain, but Vulgnash fell behind.

Rhianna wheeled, then folded her wings and dropped into a dive. She swept low, just over the heads of the wights, and drew steel, as if to whack one with her blade, then rose up in the air.

She peered hard, looking for the air hole, and finally saw it—a thin circle of gray in the stone, where light shone down a long narrow shaft.

She flapped her wings hard and rose. Vulgnash wheeled with a shout, and came screaming toward her, trying to block her escape.

Is the hole wide enough to let me through? she wondered. It will have to be.

Rhianna burst upward, reached the air shaft.

She folded her wings tight, letting her momentum propel
her upward. She found herself in a narrow chimney, no more than two feet wide. Her shoulders were so large that she almost could not fit. Up above, she could see sunlight not sixty feet away.

I'm a Runelord, she told herself. I can make myself fit.

She dropped her blade and contorted her shoulders, bringing them together in a way that no human should. With a dozen endowments of grace, it was not hard. Then she clawed her way up the hole, scrabbling as quickly as possible.

Vulgnash grabbed her heel, and she considered kicking him, trying to knock him back, but some blind instinct drove her upward.

Claws of iron seemed to be wrapped around her foot, and Rhianna kicked, struggling to break free. His claws raked her, drawing slick blood, and suddenly Vulgnash lost his grasp.

Quick as an eel, Rhianna snaked up the hole.

Vulgnash roared in anger, and Rhianna reached sunlight, grabbed the lip of the hole and threw herself out, just as a fiery blast shot through the chimney.

She stood in broad daylight for a second, wondering if Vulgnash would be able to squeeze through the hole, wondering if there was any way to go back down and save her friends.

But she could not think. She heard growls and scrapes in the air shaft. Vulgnash was coming up. He had taken endowments of grace, too, and though he was larger than her, it seemed that he would fit.

In a blind panic, Rhianna realized that whether he made it up the shaft or took some other route, Vulgnash would be after her soon enough.

In a mad rush of wings, she launched herself into the sky. She flew up and up, then peered back to see Vulgnash charging after her, rising up from below, his massive red wings pumping furiously. He was horrifying in his persistence, inhuman. Somehow, he had managed to squeeze through the chimney, and now he peered up at her, blinking in pain at the sunlight, and gave chase.

I'm faster than him, Rhianna told herself. I have to be. She flapped madly, hurtling away from Rugassa as fast as possible.

Vulgnash was on her tail. Like a crow chasing a starling, Rhianna thought. He is larger and more ponderous than me. He cannot hope to follow for long. The sunlight blinds him.

But from the vent below, she saw a second form emerge, black and sinister. The Darkling Glory was joining the chase.

Rhianna pumped her wings furiously, terrified. The creature was an unknown. She could not imagine how it got through that hole.

How fast can it fly? she wondered. How well can it see in the daylight?

Suddenly the sky went dark from horizon to horizon.

Rhianna had only heard of such things in legend, from tales of her mother's time. Only the most powerful of flameweavers could do that. Fallion was able to draw heat from a fire, but he couldn't yet bend the very light to his will.

Is Vulgnash doing that, Rhianna wondered, or the Darkling Glory?

A glance revealed that it was Vulgnash.

Ropes of light began to weave together above her, whirling from the sky in streams of fire, tornadoes of white-hot flame. She veered to avoid one of the tornadoes.

He's catching the light in his hand, she realized. He's going to try to burn me out of the sky. He'll take aim and then hurl a ball of fire. In that instant, I must change course.

The darkness fled, and Rhianna peered down, but could see little. There was a mist of shadow beneath her, impenetrable to the human eye. Within it she could see only parts of the forms of creatures, struggling toward her. A fireball suddenly roared from the mist.

She banked hard to the left and folded her wings, going into a vertical dive. The fireball roared overhead, expanding and slowing. The heat of it gave her a thrill of fear, for it was like standing too close to a forge.

Rhianna unfurled her wings and flattened her trajectory, then flapped all the harder.

She peered back. The mists of darkness followed, but could not match her pace. She veered to the right, lest another ball of fire come at her, and drew farther away. She veered up suddenly, heading toward the sun.

Increasing her speed, Rhianna raced ahead, mile after endless mile.

She had headed south by instinct—toward the horse-sisters, toward help. But she realized the danger in exposing the position of her troops. Better to lead her pursuers away from her allies.

So Rhianna veered to the west, so that the demons would have the sun slanting into their eyes.

She consulted a mental map. There was little in the way of human settlements here for many, many miles.

Vulgnash and the Darkling Glory slowly receded into the distance, becoming nothing more than a dark blur on her trail, miles behind. Soon, the Darkling Glory gave up the chase, and went winging toward the Rugassa.

Yet Vulgnash clung to her trail. Perhaps he feared to displease his master, and it was fear that drove him to mindlessly follow. Or perhaps he thought that he was like a hound, and she was a fox that could be run to the ground.

Rhianna soared over what had once been Mystarria—lush lands with rolling hills, rich with farms and towns along the rivers, and sweeping fields and forests elsewhere.

But all was in ruins. Entire cities had been battered down and laid to waste.

Juxtaposed over this was the landscape of the wyrmlings' shadow world: occasional fabulous ruins, weathered and beaten, what had once been “human” cities; monolithic towers and columns, all white as bone, were covered with obscene scrawls in the wyrmling tongue.

After fifty miles, Rhianna saw more interesting signs. A contingent of Queen Lowicker's troops were on the move, unaware that their queen had been vanquished. Or perhaps they
had heard and just did not care. In any case, a long column of knights was riding east toward Rugassa, as if to do battle, their lances raised to the air. But there was no one nearby for them to fight. The wyrmlings had razed their cities and then faded from the land for the day. They would be hiding in some dark hole where warhorses and lances would do no good.

Rhianna kept flying, winging into the wilderness as the sun continued to slant toward the horizon.

She flew over a desert that should not have been there—a rugged place of rock and sand—and on its borders she saw herds of shaggy elephants being trailed by packs of dire wolves and great hunting cats.