The gaping hole in the side of the upper chamber was letting the weather in. Several times, it had rained hard enough for water to pool on the upper floor. The floorboards were going to rot, and already water had seeped through, and dripped into the nest, and the library below it. If she knew the commands to use Pael’s lift, she could bring up some masons, and have the damage repaired, but she didn’t.
She had had to rearrange some of the ancient volumes, so that the weather wouldn’t damage them. She had a mind to move the orb, and the contents of the library out of Pael’s tower to somewhere more convenient. If Pael had anything to say about it, she would tell the truth, at least about the books. She was fairly certain that a little rain, or even a long fall through the rotted floor, would do little, to no damage to the powerful Spectral Orb.
She sighed again. Moving the texts and the crystal could wait till morning. She transported herself back to her bedchamber, wondering if the staff she had commissioned to be made was finished yet. If it was, she would shrink the orb, and place it as the staff’s headpiece so she would be able to carry it around with her.
Cole was overseeing the staff’s creation. He was laying spells of protection and binding into the materials as well. She was confident that he wouldn’t fail her. He never had before. He had known Gerard, and how she felt about him. He knew how important trying to contact him was to her.
As she strolled through the castle, in her blood red silken robes, she wondered at how smoothly things were going. The people of Westland seemed to be carrying on as if nothing had changed. Sure they mourned their losses, but those losses were mostly due to Glendar, not her. They had all seen the amount of power she wielded, both as a sorceress, and as a dragon rider. It seemed to her that, as long as she didn’t start blatantly abusing her power, she would go on unchallenged as the new ruler of Westland. Crops were still being tended, and herds were still being sheared, or brought to market. Trade and commerce continued as it always had, save for the addition of Dakaneese slave ships in the Westland ports.
The Zard weren’t accepted in the cities very well, but they had found their places to work, and to dwell, and they stayed to themselves as much as possible. There was a lot of animosity between the three races, but Shaella made it clear that open violence against each other wouldn’t be tolerated. The Breed giants were having a hard time trying to settle into the northern reaches of Westland. Farming and raising animals had never been a part of their heritage. They would eventually figure it out if they wanted to survive. There would be no more raiding and pillaging. Shaella, with Claret’s effectively persuasive abilities, had driven that message home. The message had been clear: learn to associate and work with each other, or die.
Bzorch, her Lord of Locar, was the exception to her rule. He was given some leeway in his dealings with the humans in his little part of her kingdom. Shaella was pleased with the effort he was taking to strengthen the defenses along the riverfront. His idea to build towers along the banks, not only had created work, but would go far in keeping barge thieves and smugglers from sneaking in and out of her territory. Already, men were harvesting the lumber for the construction from the Reyhall Forest, and barges were being readied to float the wood into place.
She refrained from telling Bzorch that the idea was far from original. The Westlanders had done the very same thing along the marshland border a few hundred years earlier. Settsted Stronghold and all of its outposts were further apart than Bzorch’s towers would be, and they were made of stone; but Shaella saw no point in bruising the Lord of Locar’s feral ego by telling him this.
She wandered into her empty, yet torch-lit throne room, and touched the burn scar on the side of her head absently. The wound Claret had inflicted there was now healed over, but her hair still hadn’t grown back. From a line that ran across her left temple, up and over her ruined, but still functioning ear, then down to the middle of her neck, there was nothing but scar tissue. At times, she felt like a monster. Only those quick and fleeting glimpses in the reflecting glass, where she saw only her right profile, reminded her that she was still quite beautiful.
The low feelings she was having as of late, had more to do with losing Gerard, than with her personal appearance. She was the woman who let her father send her dying lover into the blackness of the Nethers, and the guilt of not protecting him better was where her saddened state was rooted. Other than that, she just plain missed Gerard.
She tried not to care what people thought about her, but it was hard. She was the Dragon Queen after all, the Conqueror of Westland. She couldn’t let her emotions show. She had to appear confident and in control. As much as she hated the idea, appearances did seem to matter. So, she spent a lot of her time in public trying to mask the turmoil that roiled inside her.
She was startled by the sudden, sizzling pop of someone snapping magically into the room. She was even more startled to see that it was Pael. He looked angry, anxious, and spectacular in his glittering black robes. His pupils were dilated, his eyes open wide, and the deep purple bags of exhaustion under them, gave his head a skullish look. He moved skittishly, as if he was wound up as tight as a drum. Shaella realized she was more than a little bit frightened of him.
“Where are my texts?” he asked sharply.
The question threw her off, because she hadn’t yet moved any books out of the tower. After a moment’s thought though, she realized that he was most likely referring to the volumes she had moved to protect them from the rain.
“The hole you left in the wall up there was letting in the weather.”
She spoke the words slowly, and then paused, letting the idea that they might have been ruined, have a chance to sink into his slick white head. The way his angry eyes flared, and the way he nervously wrung his hands together, caused her to cut her pause short.
“I moved them so that they might not take damage.”
Pael slowly stopped his fidgeting, and let out a long sigh of relief.
“Show me!” he ordered.
“Come,” she snapped back, as she turned and strode away.
She wondered if this was the way other fathers and daughters got along. She would have been surprised to learn, that her relationship with her father, wasn’t that much different than many others. Most young women were traded like chattel to other men, not for money, but for position and favor.
“If you will show me how to use your lift, I will have repairs properly made to the tower walls, so that we don’t have this problem again.”
She spoke over her shoulder, as she led him through the castle. The people, and Zard, that they passed, parted for them, as if they were contagious, but every last one of them gave a bow or curtsy of fealty.
“You’ll have to kill the masons when they’re done,” Pael said conversationally.
He suddenly stepped around Shaella, and led them from the semi-crowded corridor, down a narrow servant way. She followed him through a maze of stairways, corridors, and even through a hidden passage, which was cleverly disguised as a stray run of wall. It was all she could do to take in the route as they went.
When they finally arrived, at what looked like a storage pantry set into the wall, not too far from the entrance to the upper dungeons, Pael spoke a word that released his wizard lock, and the false door vanished. He spoke the word to make the door reappear, and raised a querying eyebrow at Shaella. She repeated the release word for the magical door, and it went away again.
Pael smiled at her approvingly, giving her a good look at his crooked, almond colored teeth. Then he called down the lift.
As they rode it up, he went through a series of command words, and showed her what they all did. After she had repeated them all correctly, he had her take them the rest of the way up. She only cared about the commands for up, down, and stop. Since she had no need to sneak around the castle, because a King’s wandering eye was on her, or nosy servants might report her movements, she didn’t think the lock, or several of the other commands, would be necessary for her. She learned and repeated them anyway. When the lift was moving upward by the command of her voice alone, Pael gave her another nod. A look of fatherly satisfaction was in his eyes. Seeing this, gave her the courage to ask him about the Spectral Orb. Pael didn’t hesitate to tell her a lot more about it than she really wanted to know.
“This human you’re so concerned with, this Gerard, has absorbed part of what is empowering me,” he told her. “Through some ethereal bond, I can feel him in my mind sometimes, like a pesky mosquito. He buzzes around in a daze of confusion, and occasionally stops to suck off bits of information from Shokin’s – no, from my mind, as if it were a drop of blood.”
He met Shaella’s gaze then, his expression as dire as ever.
“You must never even so much as attempt to release what he has become from the Seal. He is no longer human. He consumed the yolk of the dragon’s egg. At the moment, his power is infinitesimal. It’s doubtful that he will be able to survive amongst the evil he’s bound with, but if he does find a way to survive the Nethers he has the potential to become a power beyond imagining.”
“I just want to communicate with him,” she lied.
“If you’ll make a Binding of Blood with me, that you’ll not attempt to set him free as long as I live, then I’ll show you how to use the orb, but I want a future favor in return.”
A Binding of Blood is a magical binding, which forfeits the life of one who breaks the oath the instant that the oath is broken. The ancient spell was specifically created to keep powerful wizards from cheating each other. Still, Shaella thought, Pael should know better than to try to make an oath that a woman couldn’t find a way around. Even the least clever woman could work her way around such a promise, be it binding or not, and Shaella was as clever, and deceitful, as they came. Without hesitation, she agreed to Pael’s terms.
She wanted desperately to reach out to Gerard. She was confident that eventually she would find a way to set Gerard free from the Nethers. Especially since Pael seem so worried that it might happen. If it wasn’t a possibility, then the mighty Pael wouldn’t be concerned about it.
She couldn’t conceive of Gerard being some ultra powerful force though. He wasn’t a greedy or lustful person. Even if he did have power, he would be content with it, and not yearn for more. Pael’s concern seemed rooted in fear for himself. If what Pael had said was true, that the same power that had manifested in him, had also manifested in Gerard, then it made sense that Pael would fear Gerard if he were released. After all, it had been Pael who had shoved the dagger into Gerard’s heart. He of all people would expect Gerard to come seeking vengeance.
Shaella had to force the excitement from tingling through her body. She had to be clearheaded when Pael had her speak the blood oath. She couldn’t be filled with daydreams, and delusions of Gerard. The exact words of a given oath were sometimes the undoing of it. It wouldn’t do to have her head in the clouds when she spoke hers.
Once they reached the floor below the library, Shaella halted the lift. She showed Pael where the books were stacked up off of the floor on a plank of wood that she had sat on a couple of stone blocks. The room stank sharply, with a mixture of scents that were foreign to the common nose. A cask of bear urine, and an open jar of pickled griffin livers were the main contributors, but a crate full of dried bat wings, and many different bags of the herbs and powders used in spell crafting, added to the fierce aroma.
Pael ignored the stench, as he hurried to kneel on the dust caked floor before the stack of books. He ran his finger down the spines, searching the titles. More than once, he growled in frustration. Before long, he had the once neat piles scattered across the floor, and had created a new stack. Flipping through the pages of these with a feverish intensity, he ended up discarding all but two of them into the disarray.
The two that he kept, he sat on a shelf, next to a jar full of grayish, yellow liquid, labeled
Plague Pus
. In the jar next to it, a fat black spider with a bright yellow star-like design on its back, floated in clear liquid. Shaella studied it all as she waited on him. The shape of the spider’s mark was like three double jagged lightning bolts, all crossing in the middle. Shaella and Cole had been trying to decide what symbol she would use on her banner, and now the choice had been made. Cole’s dragon design was fierce and impressive, but this was not the dragon’s kingdom, nor was it Cole’s. Shaella would have the lightning star.
“What kind of spider is this?” she asked her father.
Pael was making a halfhearted effort to restack the texts he’d strewn about, but he stopped long enough to look and see what she was referring to.
“One you don’t ever want to get bitten by,” he said, as he went back to what he was doing. “It’s called Arachnid Voltonimous, common name, the Luminous Weaver, or just the plain ol’ Shock Spider. Its web glows a soft, yellowish color at night, and with a single bite, it can kill an animal as big as an opossum, or lemur, with a shock of lightning-like intensity. The shock is not quite powerful enough to kill an average human, but its venom is acidic, and painfully lethal. The venom is excellent for etching, and enchanting steel with a rune or a symbol.”
Her eyes drifted to the cover of the book Pael had left exposed. It had the letter
P
scribed ornately upon its leather-bound face, four times. She had to peer in closer, to see the smaller script between the letters. “Plants and Potions for Poison and Preservation” the book was titled.
A brief tremor of paranoia passed through her, only subsiding after she convinced herself that her father had no reason to kill her, and that if he did, he didn’t need poison to get it done. Neither Cole, nor Flick, who would each die for her in any other situation, would do anything to thwart Pael. They both emulated him in every way that they could. If Pael wanted to kill her, all he had to do was kill her, or possibly order one of them to do it for him. She shook her head, and cursed herself a fool for being so stupidly suspicious.