Warautumn (54 page)

And then the dome was falling. It took Avall a moment to realize that it represented an untold weight of stone and would surely crush him, but by that time, it was too late to rise and flee.

The only thing left to do was to raise the shield—and even that he did mostly from reflex.

It was the loudest noise Avall had ever heard, and the
strongest force he had ever felt. Though he was already sprawling upon the floor, the weight continued to push down, as though it would grind him into the marble.

And then it was over. His ears were ringing, he noted—which was not what he had expected. And then he realized that he really was alive, if totally filthy and totally awash with pain. He could see nothing at first, however, for the lightning had—for the nonce—burned away his vision. But then he discovered that he
could
make out dim shapes cut out against a duller light.

Shapes that moved. He tried to move as well, and felt something shift, then meet resistance, mostly against his left arm. Stone grated against stone; dust trickled down.

Sweat—or blood—slicked his hand and he released whatever he held—it proved to be the shield—and only then did he truly puzzle out what had just occurred.

Tyrill had brought down the dome, which should by rights have smashed him. But he had still born the shield at the time, and had raised it without thinking, and the power it possessed—which was to take whatever force was directed against it and fling it away to the Overworld—had still been in effect, and had taken even the force of the falling dome onto itself. And since that act also stripped away matter from whatever struck the shield, it had effectively made a hole in that portion of dome above him. Which, with the sturdy stone pews against which he had lain, had saved his life and limb.

Giddy with surprise, he tried to rise to a crouch, aware at some level that people were yelling, screaming, and crying out, but that most of those cries came from beyond what was now an open-air cylinder, not an enclosed hall. Yet the instant he moved, he was reminded of the arrows that pierced his flesh. Perhaps the gems would cure him, perhaps not, but neither would occur while those shafts still burrowed deep in his muscle and bone.

He had to get out,
had
to, and so he began to work his way free.

Which was when he discovered the pain in his right little finger—with so much else to torment him, he had almost missed it. He blinked through sweat and dusty blood and through the eye holes of a helm that had shifted askew. But what he finally saw through the clouds of stone dust still swirling around him made his heart skip in his breast and all his blood run cold.

His finger had been severed
. A fragment of the fallen dome had clipped it neatly at the joint that wore the nail, pounding it completely flat and leaving it hanging by a thread of skin.

He was still staring stupidly at it when Merryn and Lykkon found him.

Only when he saw their faces and felt their arms slide around him to help him to his feet did he relinquish the helm at last. Merryn took it away solemnly, urging him across the shattered stones to where waited an army of earnest, confused faces above the nondescript colors the clanless wore. He tried to smile, but staggered, then collapsed entirely, and was totally unaware of anything but pain as Merryn and Lykkon laid him facedown in the corridor outside the shattered Hall.

He heard something about getting the arrows out, and something about the likelihood of there being a lot of blood, and something else about keeping the regalia free of blood, just in case, but also of keeping it close to hand.

And then someone—one of those nameless men who had followed him, he thought—was gripping the arrow in his calf and—not pulling, but pushing: driving it onward through his leg. The pain was epic, yet he endured. The arrow in his shoulder had evidently fallen out, while the one that had nicked a rib still jogged and poked, held in place by his mail. His unknown healer made short work of that as well, and pronounced him likely to live.

“Live,” Avall echoed groggily. “Oh Eight, Merry—Lyk—
Is
it over? That in there? Did it fix things, or will I have to—?”

He reeled again as blackness hovered near, and only then
discovered that his churgeon was tying a bandage around his leg.

That accomplished, he let Merryn and Lykkon lead him to a seat beside the greater chaos that was the Hall. Dimly he was aware of a noise a-building: a rising chant of joy. It took him a moment to realize that they were chanting his name: “Avall! Avall! Long live King Avall!”

“I didn’t do anything,” Avall mumbled, even as he tried to determine what to do next, since standing did not seem to be an option. These people needed a King, and he had no Kingliness left to give them.

Yet even as he sat there debating, the chant began to fragment, as a new phalanx of commoners pressed their way into the vestibule. Avall blinked at them stupidly, noting flashes of red among the duller hues. Red … Warcraft crimson … The colors of War-Hold and Clan Ferr.

Ferr …

All at once he recognized them: the stocky, bearded man on the left, the solidly built woman on the right. And the tall, handsome man in the middle.

“Tryffon,” he gasped, trying to grin. “Veen. And Vorinn …!”

Vorinn …

Something jogged in his memory at that. He started to rise, to take their hands, but as he slapped his right hand against his thigh, the severed finger joint made its absence known with a preposterous pulse of pain. But with that pain came realization: something he should have recalled earlier.

The King of Eron had to be physically perfect!
And he, Avall syn Argen-a, was perfect no longer!

In spite of the pain that throbbed up his wrist, he grinned—and was still grinning, as he rose shakily to his feet and extended that hand before him so that Vorinn and Tryffon and Veen could see before all others. And then he raised that hand on high, with blood still running down his palm to vanish up his sleeve.

“Long live High King
Vorinn
,” he shouted.

Tryffon syn Ferr-een, called Kingmaker, gazed at him like a fool—and then a grin likewise split his face. “Long live High King Vorinn!” he yelled, even louder than Avall.

And then that name once more—from Veen, and almost as quickly, from Merryn and Lykkon.

And finally, like a return of the storms Tyrill had unleashed, the chant took fire within the assembled multitude and went rumbling around the Hall.

“Long live High King Vorinn. And blessed be Once-High-King Avall.”

It was to alternating chants of “Vorinn” and “Avall” that Avall finally succumbed to shock, blood loss, and pain and lapsed from consciousness, there in an out-of-the-way corner of what had once been Eron’s Hall of Clans.

The first thing he heard when he recovered was “Vorinn, Vorinn, Vorinn …”

If someone had told Avall a day—or an eight—or a quarter—earlier that he would be no more than a passive observer during the fall of the Ninth Face—and probably Priest-Clan along with it—he would have laughed in their face. Fate didn’t work in his life that way. Fate had taken a fancy to him on the day of his conception and had, in retrospect, gifted—or cursed—him with a life that seemed doomed never to be ordinary. Of course he hadn’t thought of it that way at the time. His talents with metal had seemed perfectly normal to him, as had his facility at design. He had been born shortly before the seminal moment of modern Eronese history in the agency of the plague, and had been blessed with two of the most accomplished smiths in generations as teachers and advisers. But, again, he knew no alternative. He’d had a twin sister, so he had never been lonely; and for brotherhood he’d had Rann, who was better than most people’s brothers-by-birth. Finally—

Where to begin on finally?

With that preposterous chain of events that had culminated in his assignment to Gem-Hold and all that had precipitated, perhaps? Certainly, any other person confronted with any of
those variables would have acted differently. Yet he, a very good goldsmith by his own reckoning, had somehow, through an equally odd set of circumstances, found himself on the throne of Eron—at another seminal moment in its history: two of them, in fact—and had, beyond all hope, survived to see his side ascendant.

The side that he chose to believe truly was the side favored by The Eight.

And now, suddenly, Fate seemed to be casting him aside.

Nor did he object even slightly.

Still, he had to go through the motions of being King a little longer.

Which was why he was sitting on a makeshift throne that had been set up in the Court of Rites in anticipation of an execution that had been capriciously relocated at the last possible moment. And
that
had to be Fate, too; for nothing of what had happened in the Hall of Clans there at the last could have occurred anywhere but where it had happened.

Even this seat had been Fated, he supposed: set up so that he could witness that in which he could not participate.

And curse his wounds for that, too; because the last thing he needed to be doing when more things needed to be done quickly and well in Tir-Eron than had ever been done before was sitting.

The victory was still imperiled, after all, maintained as it was by a few loyal and more-than-competent friends and an army of clanless folk, who had not existed as an army half a day gone by—some of whom had not even held swords that far back.

But they were at it now: enforcing his will, though it was Vorinn they—rightly—idolized, not him.

Vorinn, they liked because there was nothing
not
to like. Avall, they not so much liked as feared.

All because of the regalia. More precisely, all because of the Lightning Sword. Of course it was gone now: buried beneath the rubble of Sarnon’s dome, and probably smashed past repair
in the process. But that fact seemed of minor consequence to those who had seen what it could do, besides which, he still had the helm and the shield, one at his feet, one at his right hand.

For that matter, he still had a sword that could reasonably well pass for the Lightning Sword to those few who had not seen the two together. Why, it was even set with gems, though Zeff had put them there, not Avall himself, and that made all the difference. That sword was like him, he reckoned: basically well made but now tragically flawed past more than occasional—and risky—using.

So Avall simply remained where he was, wearing the first crown anyone could find in the Citadel, and robed in a reasonable simulacrum of the Cloak of Colors, watching folk scurry around the Court of Rites securing a Kingdom that was still, until Sundeath, legally his to rule.

He could wait that long, he supposed, but no longer. And then—

Better not to think about that now!
He was still King and this was his Kingdom, and while he could not do much of anything until the wounds in his thigh and back healed—which he knew they would, and preternaturally rapidly—he could still oversee the swift and proper execution of his orders.

Actually they were mostly Vorinn’s orders now—Vorinn, who had once again arrived expecting a fight and hadn’t got one, and was even now overseeing what were still occasional, but very real battles, as Priest-Clan’s secondary officers and chiefs mounted sporadic, if futile, resistance.

Vorinn’s advice had been simple. A quarter of their combined forces had been dispatched to Priest-Hold to deny anyone entrance or exit until that person’s loyalty could be confirmed. A quarter remained here at the Citadel, with one third of that number constituting a personal guard for Avall; another third, under Merryn, searching the Hall of Clans for residual rebels; and the remainder, under Tryffon himself, searching the Citadel for the same.

As for the rest of the clanless army: They had been dispatched down the Ri-Eron, to search each hold and hall as they came to it and depose any rebels they discovered, while summoning any clansmen with pretensions of being Chief to audience with Avall.

He wished he had the Sword of Air to ensure the truth of the oaths some of them were already swearing, but that was back at Ninth Hold. In the interim, he found that even the rumor (or threat, more often) of intervention from the Lightning Sword was generally more than sufficient to turn the tide of self-preservation in loyalty’s direction.

He missed Rann, though—and Strynn, and the rest. But there was no going back to either of them—not yet.

And so, he sat, waited, hurt a very great deal, and bled less and less frequently from his wounds, while he drank more wine than was good for him, ate everything in sight, and tried to look Kingly while not moving his right hand more than required.

That had to be Fate, too: making the decision for him he still, in his heart, wasn’t certain he could have made.

And so time passed, and finally those he had dispatched on various errands began to return with their reports.

Merryn was first to arrive. Breathless and dusty, yet obviously very pleased with herself, she came striding out of the Hall of Clans with a bounce in her step, a grin on her face, and two dozen Ninth Face archers and half that many Priests neatly chained together behind her, the whole under close escort by her clanless militia. A final word to the fellow she had appointed as her second, and she dashed up the steps to stand before Avall. Her cloak belled out behind her, and it took him a moment to realize that it was not the one she had worn earlier, but one of Warcraft crimson.