The Sheening Of The Blades (Book 1) (89 page)

The black dragon swiveled slowly to glare at the other, but Androssan, hoping ardently for an intra-monster fight, was disappointed to see only that one irritated look.  The dragon stamped a huge, clawed foot with no warning, which seemed odd to Androssan, expert as he was on draconic habits.  But, scanning, he made out the bright figures of gryphons zooming under the low belly.  They were tearing at it with their beaks, drawing blood.  The dragon roared as apparently one of them hit home, and paused, lowering his head and throwing flame in a big semi-circle to his side and rear.  When he began to move again, he was favoring one of his forelegs.

“He’s limping!” Khrieg cried, possibly the most optimistic thing he’d said in years.

“We
’re running out of time,” Androssan remarked so that only Traive could hear.  “Can we send any kind of reinforcements?”

“It
’s madness to send ground troops against them,” he was answered, just as low.  “We’ve put together harpoons, based loosely on the fire-launchers, but they tend to get scorched before they ever get in range.”

Despair scrabbled desperately at the back of Androssan
’s mind.  He hated just sitting and watching, hoping things would turn out.  “How about sending up crossbows—”

“Ah,” Traive interrupted him in a hiss of delight, and Androssan turned swiftly back to the field of battle.  The black dragon had come to a complete stop and was holding that forefoot up off the ground.  In the elbow, looking like squabbling carrion birds, several gryphons were ripping the soft flesh.  Meanwhile, the angry head was almost buried in the rest of them, as they darted in heart-stopping courage right at the tooth-filled snout, at the eyes, at the lightly scaled throat.  He was far from dead, but the black dragon was definitely distracted, and hurt.

The red dragon, however, seemed almost to have picked up speed and was now moving with marked purpose right for the Daroe and the Imperial troops scattering in front of it.  Androssan felt sick to his stomach.  He was no expert on such things, but he suspected one dragon would be perfectly sufficient to destroy the Empire.  What could they do?
  What could they do????

Tumult suddenly exploded overhead, raging, trumpeting noise and the sonic boom of intense, frenetic action.  Again the world seemed consumed by incomprehensible uproar; the stags bolted away from either side of him, and his stallion rose on his hind legs to fight.  Panting with the surging adrenaline, Androssan looked wildly around, then up, his eyes focusing on…another talon!?

Staring, absently patting the plunging stallion, who, if he was not mistaken, was trying to pull him
towards
all the action, Androssan gaped at the confusing sight winging away towards the dragons.  Where had they come from?  Traive had said there were only four talons.  When the Lord Regent came up beside him in a few moments, his face, livid with disbelief, confirmed his ignorance.

They were black, these new gryphons, the one flying point as black as a raven, its wings darkly iridescent and winking like black opals in the overcast sky.

“Black,” Traive whispered beside him.  His eyes were intense, trying to cipher out the origin of the relief with much more interest than Androssan, who quite honestly could care less what color they were.

The dark gryphons were fast, turning so quickly in the air once they reached the red dragon that Androssan grabbed his glass again just to see them better.  Their riders were in black leather, too, so tight and low to the swinging, arcing lion bodies that they could hardly be seen with the naked eye.  Their beasts
’ trumpeting screech seemed to shatter the sky as they dove at the surly head, and when the dragon lifted it, searing the air with one big half-circle of jetting flames, they folded their wings and literally rolled across the sky out of the way.  Androssan’s jaw gaped in amazement.  He had thought the other gryphons fast and fearless! 

The pure black gryphon in the lead was the swiftest of them all, and he came back now out of his roll like a bolt shot from a crossbow.  He did a flyby, the dragon ducking and rumbling an angry complaint, and then something happened in the busy air over the Empire that Androssan would never have believed if he hadn
’t seen it himself.  Those darting, quicksilver, utterly fearless creatures got into formation.  So fast that the dragon had barely gotten his head raised from the flyby, they were zooming right at him, shrieking like bloodhawks on the kill, wicked talons extended and beaks wide in screaming challenge.  Even Androssan, admittedly an amateur in air warfare, could see they were actually in the form of a giant talon, four spread out in an arc coming in from above, and one, that smallest, nimblest black one, shooting  in silent and smooth underneath.  The four above dive-bombed, shrieking in fury and rolling out of the way just as the dragon vomited flame at them.

And the swift, soundless black shot in under its view, dipping under the sheet of fire and coming up fast, somehow contorting itself at the last minute so that it was flying talons-first—right into that snarling yellow eye.

A screaming bellow of agony and rage rent the air, the sound waves making Androssan want to clamp his hands over his ears.  The red was throwing his head around, the empty eye-socket pumping torrents of dragon blood, the huge clawed feet stamping in pain and frustration.  The unrelenting gryphons, like black harbingers of death, took full advantage of that visionless side.  Soon that whole side of the dragon’s neck and jaw were a lacerated mass, but only when they finally got through to the life-giving neck arteries did the dragon start to slow its wild, infuriated flailing.  It still took several moments to sink to its knees, flames gushing out of its helpless snout, roars still trembling on the air. 

Androssan was laughing.  “They did it!!” he cried with fierce joy.  Traive was grinning beside him, but his eyes were still narrowed, focused on those dark, triumphant figures swooping over the vanquished red.

Khrieg’s voice was warm as he said, “I didn’t know we had a Black Talon.”  His creased face was in a rare smile.  Androssan was somehow quite sure that the Lord Regent, head of the largest intelligence gathering force in the world, hadn’t known it either.

The b
igger, lead dragon was not as surely dead, but it, too, had sunk to its belly, the flames coming weaker and more infrequent from between its wavering jaws.  Most of the gaily colored gryphons that had brought it down were circling above it, jewel bright butterflies at this distance, making sure it went no further and helpfully trying to speed its passage on to the next world.

Androssan thought that the sun should come out, pour its rays on this scene, it was such a glorious moment.  They had literally been saved at the last minute…and there, flying right toward them, was one of the black gryphons that had done it.  They all watched it come in, that
smallest, most agile one, watched in wonder and a touch of respectful awe as the sleek creature, black as night and enormous up close, landed a couple dozen yards away.

Khrieg and Traive both quickly dismounted, so Androssan did, too, and they all crossed over to meet the Talon rider that had slipped off the gryphon
’s back.  He walked, athletic and bold, towards them, loosening his black leather helmet as he came.

And out from under its revealing cover, to their collective shock, spilled a long, silken waterfall of hair the color of platinum.  It fell in fine waves around a fine-boned, blood-spattered face from which hard, challenging, pale green eyes stared. 

“Kindri,” Khrieg said in shock.  Androssan looked from one to the other.  Wasn’t that the Skyprincess?  Her face was mutinous, angry, flushed with open rebellion as she came to a taut halt in front of them.  Androssan, lost, looked surreptitiously at Traive for some clue as to what was going on here.  The Regent’s face was inscrutable, eyes riveted on the belligerent little creature in front of him.

“How did you..?” the Skylord said weakly.  He seemed to shrink in on himself before all that vibrating anger.   

“How?” she snapped.  “By force of WILL, that’s how.  By refusing to give up!  That’s how!  By not sitting around moaning about the end of the world without taking a step to stop it, THAT’S HOW!”  She was furious, pupils tiny black dots in eyes as flat and pale as the jaguar’s that had run in that morning.  A crowd of awed Cyrrhideans were gathering, careful to keep away from the great black beast panting a short distance away.

Suddenly she leaned closer, vengeful and graceful as a serpent.  “Give me the Crown,” she hissed.  Androssan
’s eyes widened in his military face and he felt more than saw the sudden, complete stillness of their little windblown tableau.  Khrieg’s face had gone white under the lined brown tan, sorrow temporarily displaced by true, deep shock.

“No woman can lead Cyrrh!” he objected.

“No man leads it now!” she shot back, vituperative, seething.  “You forfeited the right to the Throne of Trees when you lost Mother, when you gave up on life, gave up on me, gave up on your Realm!”  She leaned closer, pearly teeth showing in a cat-like snarl.  “Now,
give me the Crown!”

Fox were gathering close, silent as grass puffs caught on the wind.  Unlike Imperial troops, who would have been wondering which side they were going to have to support, whose allegiance they would have to proclaim, and whose wrath they might have to risk if they picked the wrong side, the Fox stood impassively, faces showing only that quiet readiness common to the Cyrrhidean ground forces.  Khrieg was frowning doubtfully.  “You are barely of age,” he mumbled in procrastination, “even if you were a man and suitable—”

“You do not have the right to proclaim suitability!” she almost screamed at him, eyes flashing lightning as pent-up energy found release.  Her slender frame was tense with malignance.  “For decades you have sat, unsuitable, in the Skypalace, ignoring the needs of your people, ignoring the surety of what was rising from the Sheel!  Ignoring the preparations which could have made this day unnecessary!  It is not for you to deny me the right of my blood because I am
unsuitable!!!
”  Pure fury twisted her face, and Androssan had the overwhelming urge of most men in the face of uncontrolled feminine emotion…to be somewhere else.  The last thing he wanted was to turn the attention of all that savage, arresting beauty on himself, though, so he stood still.

Tension mounted unbearably.  Khrieg looked torn, sad and horrified and beaten all at once.  But tradition was obviously bolstering him somewhat; whenever he looked around at the gathering people, his chin came up a little as if he knew what he should say.

Kindri didn’t seem to be the patient sort, though that had not been Androssan’s impression of her from the brief glimpse he’d had at the ’Meet.  She didn’t wait more than a few moments before she leaned forward again, lithe as a crouching panther, and said, low and intense, “Give it to me…or on Mother’s grave I tell you I will
take it.
”

He gulped, paling, and then, to Androssan
’s disbelief, slowly lifted trembling hands and removed the delicate crown of wrought gold off his head.  For a second he stared at it, looking rather bewildered, then very slowly offered it to his daughter.

Face flaming into sudden, victorious, terrible beauty, she took it, unhesitatingly placing it on her silvery hair and staring at the old king with tears sparkling in her angry eyes.  “If it had meant anything to you,” she whispered, “you never would have given it up.”

Androssan felt like he’d aged a hundred years.  He couldn’t remember the last time his heart hadn’t been pounding.  But this charming little drama wasn’t done yet.  Nobody had said a word and Kindri just stood there, waiting, chin tilted proudly in the air, satiny hair tossing fitfully in the cold breeze.  With a sudden realization, it came to Androssan that she was waiting on recognition.  And he knew, without any deeper understanding of Cyrrhidean politics needed, that that meant Traive…the outcome of this family schism, the fate of the sovereignty, and the future of the Realm, were resting on the square shoulders of the Lord Regent of Cyrrh.

He didn
’t know what kind of rules Cyrrh had about succession, but if there was anything in there about abdication under duress, they were doomed.  Traive was rumored to be unswervingly loyal to the Skylord; and maybe just the fact that she was a woman was enough to disqualify her claim.  The Border Realms were still deeply traditional…though it seemed her recent performance on gryphon-back should have been enough to allay any fears about being able to lead in battle.

No one moved.  No one seemed hardly to breathe.  Traive still had that clenched, unreadable expression on his face.  The General thought the suspense was getting a little unbearable—Northerners preferred a faster pace to their dramas.  Then, finally, something happened.

Traive, so gracefully that Androssan thought he was fainting, sank into a bow over his arm, and for the first time in the history of the Realms paid obeisance to his monarch with the word, “Skylady.”

CHAPTER
44

He came to slowly, not sure where he was or if he was even alive.  The absence of light was so complete it was utterly disorienting.  But then he became aware of the gentle pressure on his chest, the faint movement, and in a rush it all came back:  the catastrophic collapse of the passageways, the end of the gods, the fight in the Hall of Sacrifices, everything.  Slowly, Ari moved his arms closer around the life nestled against him.  She had survived.  The world might have ended, but Selah was still alive. 

He had known, from the moment Rheine had revealed who he was and the role he was to play, that he was probably not going to survive this whole plot to
‘destabilize’ Zkag, as she’d so quaintly put it.  But he had prayed with every ounce of his being that his friends might…and Selah.  (What an, er, surprise to find out she was the Empress and could take care of herself rather well without him.)  And now, for a few seconds out of his most ardent dreams, she lay quietly in his arms, their hearts inches from each other, their bodies curled protectively together.

It couldn
’t last, of course, and in a very short time, she had murmured something and drew away from him, leaving a cold spot where her body had lain.

“Are you all right?” he asked thickly.

“Yes.” 

He coughed, throat closing with the dust hanging in the air.  It was still thick with it; maybe there hadn
’t been that much time that had passed.

She moved completely away from him and he could hear her scrabbling amongst the rocks—it was very strange having no visual input at all.  And then, wonder of wonders, she plucked just the right rock and a faint ray of light shot across the ruined passageway.  They looked at each other in delight, faces blurry with the dimness and the heavy, clogged air.  He rose to join her on the big pile of rubble and was brought up short in agony.  His calf!  Pain like the worst Charlie horse in the world shot up his leg.  He bent quickly to rub it out and found a goose egg the size of an orange rising off the back of his leg. 

She was at work, moving rocks with deft haste away from the roof, letting more and more light in, and he hobbled awkwardly to help.

“Where
’s the light coming from?” he panted after a few minutes.  They almost had enough rocks out of the way to push their bodies through. 

“There,” she said laconically, pointing through the hole they
’d made.  He had to lean his head down to get the right angle.  On the other side of the cave-in, the passage ceiling had been fissured and was letting in light from the outside as if from another, dimly remembered world.  In a few short minutes, after scrabbling their way through the hole, they were looking at it from the other side.  It was far too narrow to allow passage, and the light filtering weakly down to them seemed to come from a long way away.  The crack stretched away from them down the passageway’s roof, more a teasing glimpse of freedom than path of escape, but at least it was a source of light.  They were still attached to their food and water, but the torches were buried under piles of rock.  They had no way to light them anyway.

It didn
’t even occur to them to not continue.  The cave-in kept them from going back the way they’d come even if they wanted to, and there was certainly nothing in the immediate vicinity to make them want to settle down and starve to death.  Food and water would run out before long, but hope is a funny, impractical thing. 

When the light faded hours later, they rested, munching on distinctly dust-flavored buns and gritty raisins.  Once past the cave-in, the passageway had continued almost indistinguishable from the one they
’d been in, only the split in the ceiling overhead a reminder that things were definitely different on this side of the chamber of the gods.

“They
’re really gone?” Ari asked, stewing over it.  That had been a very revealing few minutes, in that chamber.  Some of the things he’d heard defied belief.  Some weren’t even decipherable.  When she mumbled an affirmative, he said, “They’ve been just men…all along.  All these centuries.  Pulling the wool over everyone’s eyes.”  It was inexplicable to him, men with such power, and then men with such power that had used it the way they had.  All those Ages of War…

“Why hasn
’t Il done something about this before now?” he asked suddenly.  “How many centuries has it been clear that the gods weren’t going to play fair?  How could He just let this go on?”

“He is much farther-sighted than we, Ari.  It
’s pretty ludicrous for us to try and condense even a couple days into a nice, pat little chunk of time we feel we understand, never mind millennia.  In the end,” she said, “the ultimate answer to why He doesn’t destroy evil is because He wishes so desperately for everyone to come to know Him.  Even the gods He bears no ill will, and had they repented and turned to Him even in their last moments…He would have welcomed them.”  Her voice was sad, but he didn’t feel any sorrow at all.  The Whiteblades were gone because of the gods.

“So He just lets evil go on and on and on…” Ari said.  He couldn
’t really believe that—the God that he had come to know, that was so full of love and forgiveness…how could it be the same One that let misery just drag on continuously?

“Well,” she said, “let us consider those beings that DO just get rid of people that aren
’t perfect or don’t fit their idea of it.  Hm.  That would be humans.  The gods, for instance.”  Silence fell.  He was still feeling rebellious.  “Ari,” she said, low, persuasive, and well aware of his mood, “He is not a God that we can understand.  He doesn’t fit into any of our preconceived notions like a nice, neat little story.  His whole essence is about shocking us with His love, upending our lives with His glory, giving us more than we can possibly imagine or wish for…and taking away, and allowing pain and sorrow and suffering to hone the edges of our spirits.  Were He a static, comfortable sort of distant presence, how would we ever grow and stretch into greatness, yearn for holiness, know the deep, soaring joy of Truth?”

He chewed blackly at his dust-impregnated bread.  Verrena was right.  Il had turned his world upside down. 

They walked all the next day with their eyes on the seam of rock overhead, hoping it would widen.  Ari refused to think about this passageway ending in a blank wall or another cave in or going on into infinity while they ran out of sustenance—though his subconscious was doing a fine job with it.  His dreams were rank with a helpless panic he refused to acknowledge awake.

When they stopped that night, his leg was aching almost unbearably.  Selah ran an expert, soothing hand over the knot, shaking her head.  “You
’ve torn one of your major tendons pretty badly.  It’s going to take a long time to heal.”  She looked up at him in sympathy, standing close in the gloom, and it took everything in his power not to sweep her into his arms and permanently attach his lips to hers. 

Clearing his throat, he backed against the nearby wall and sat down.  She settled opposite him, unfortunately out of the thin light, rummaging in the rapidly collapsing sack for food.

To keep his mind off her lips, he said with studied casualness, “One thing I don’t understand…”

“Just one?” she was smiling in the dark.  He could feel it.  He was sure he could feel every move she made.

“How did I get here?”

She chuckled.  “The usual way, I assume.  You grew up around animals, Ari, you know the way these things work.”

His face went scarlet in the dark.  “No!” he said quickly, “I mean…what you said in there when you introduced me.  What Rheine told me…” 

“How you can be the offspring, many generations removed, of a disembodied man?” she said seriously, and sighed.  “I
’m not sure I have the answer.  We know Raemon was an absolute lecher—his craving for that particular benefit of the flesh was well-documented.  The gods had figured out how to hear thoughts, how to send power through inanimate stones, how to appear to anyone in the Realms—they had that desk with buttons in their chamber, though they had no legs to reach it or fingers to move the switches—so I assume Raemon could figure out how to get a woman to conceive with his child.  For a short space of time, no more than a couple hundred years, he became fixated on the idea of having a son, a ‘demi-god’ he termed it.  Who knows why.  He was one of the vainest, most self-glorifying monsters I’ve ever had the displeasure of spending five hundred years with.”

“Well, the problem was that Raemon had changed the women of his people,
‘touched their wombs’ is how their language sums it up.  Tarqinas didn’t have anything but multiple-infant births.  Six, seven, eight, nine,
ten
children at a time became the norm.  To the point that quadruplets became the sign of unhealthy breeding capacity and those women usually nobly offered up as sacrifice.  So, Raemon’s offspring almost instantly became an out-of-control endeavor.  I think he was picturing a single child to raise up, one that would have a son of his own, who would in turn bear a son, etc.  Well, when his first try resulted in six children, four of which were boys, he was in a dilemma.  He didn’t want four sons, and no girls at all, but one just couldn’t callously dispose of excess demi-gods if one wanted the rest of one’s society to honor such creatures.  So he had to come up with an excuse and then killed off that whole batch—he had a bestial disregard for human life, which he was so good as to pass on to his people.”  Her voice was wryly bitter.  Ari missed the torch, missed being able to see her face and look into her eyes.

“Then he started over, carefully fixing it so that he produced just one boy.  However.  One of the girls from the first batch had been spirited away…by some fool priest who thought he could use a demi-god as a political tool.  He carefully controlled her breeding, and for centuries the highest ranking priest—back then it was a priestess that served Raemon directly and all the men sort of fought among themselves for the other positions of power—kept this line going, kept track of all the individuals spawned from it.  But boy did the
’Shard come alive when Raemon found out.”

“How did he not know?” Ari asked.  “Wasn
’t this all going on right under his nose?”

“In a sense,” she allowed.  “Though he was pretty busy warring
with the Realms, and to be honest, he doesn’t really pay that much attention to the Tarq.  But he was forced to when one of the illegitimate individuals stumbled into one of these restricted access halls.  I can only assume they were built when the gods walked as men…there’s no other reason for them to be here and only those with the blood of the gods can get into them.  Well, the poor kid had no idea what he was doing; it was a complete accident.  The Tarq didn’t even know this alternate web of passages existed.  But the gods were convinced it was a plot by Raemon’s out-of-control people and forced him to do something about it.  I feel he must have been alarmed at least a little himself,” Selah drawled.  “You know now how effective most of their dealings with Raemon were; I’m pretty sure they couldn’t have persuaded him if he didn’t want to be.”

“Well, the official histories relate to us that
‘Raemon repented of his ways,’ a fluffy euphemism for the single-minded hunt for and extermination of well over a thousand people.  He stayed away from human women after that, but somehow, the search for
Gaermon
, (which means ‘of the blood of Raemon’), went on and on and on and they kept finding one here and one there and another secreted away in Skoline, and another in the slave pits at Czagaroth…This went on for centuries.  Personally, I suspect they became even more valuable as potential tools, so that those ambitious enough and hungry enough for power dared to hide one away now and then.  It was a mess.  Raemon became so infuriated at the inability to clear the whole thing up that it became a capital offense—meaning a trip straight to the altar of sacrifice—to be found hiding or protecting a
Gaermon
.”

“So my mother…” Ari said heavily.  This was unreal.

“She found out that she was…” Selah said, in a much gentler voice.  “Most of them weren’t told, since the idea was to use them.  You didn’t want them getting ideas about themselves.  But she discovered it when she was sold to a Skoliner—the Tarq that sold her insisted on keeping the young she was still nursing, though the new owner wanted them all.  She was pretty strong-willed, according to what Rheine found out, leaving her batch of children to pursue a very slim hope of sanctuary for just one, the eldest.”

“I have brothers and sisters?” he cried.  He wasn
’t sure he was happy about that, given the lifestyle of the average Tarq.  What would they talk about?

But Selah was quiet for several seconds, and he realized he was being stupid.  They would not have let them live.  “Rheine thinks she ran—which is a crime punishable by death in Swamp Town—because she knew she was found out.  That the Sheelmen were coming for her.”

Silence fell.  Images ran in tortured circles through his head, his imagination insisting on providing him with pictures of things he’d never wanted to know.  He came from inhuman stock. 

“Was Perraneaus really under Raemon
’s spell?” he asked quietly, remembering another confusing little tidbit from their chat with the gods and wanting to change the subject.

“Mm.  It was most fortuitous, that earthquake.  We
’d never been able to get our hands on the Coffer, and to have it right there, and then the confusion available to actually destroy it…I think Kai saw me do it, though.”  Her voice was pensive in the thick dark.