Crown of Crystal Flame (47 page)

“It doesn’t matter, Tam.” She turned piercing gray eyes on Rain. “Get your people out of there, Feyreisen. This is not an enemy Celierians can kill, and Fey will find it difficult.” Authority snapped in her voice. “Swords are useless—worse than useless—as is most magic.”

Rain gave the command without question, then scowled at Silverleaf. “If swords and magic are useless, how the Hells are we supposed to kill them?”

“Elvish Light arrows. Tairen fire. Hundred-fold weaves—though more than hundred-fold is better. Other weaves have little effect. Whatever you do, don’t slice off even the smallest bit of the revenants’ flesh. They multiply when split.”

“Lovely,” Gaelen muttered.

Beside him, Bel’s eyes went hazy as he spun the warnings to the allies. Dozens more holes in the ground had opened up, and revenants were pouring out into the sunlight. The Celierians were running for their lives back to the allied encampment, while the Fey brought up the rear and spun shields to slow the revenants’ advance.

“Bas’ka,
you heard her,” Rain commanded. “Swords and magic are useless.
Kaiven chakor,
get Ellysetta and the
shei’dalins
to safety.”

“Bayas,”
Commander Silverleaf countermanded. “That you must not do, Tairen Soul. The Feyreisa must fight at your side.”

Rain’s brows slammed together. “What? Are you mad?” He glanced from Greywing to Commander Silverleaf. “Who the scorching Hells are you, Elf? And don’t give me that ‘You may call me, Silverleaf’
krekk.
Obviously you are not Greywing’s subordinate.”

“I am a seer of the Elves, Tairen Soul, and I have come to advise you on behalf of Elvia’s queen, Illona Brighthand. If you send the Feyreisa away, you will perish and she will fall to Darkness. Your only hope to survive this battle is to stay together and fight as one. You hold each other to the Light.”

“Are you saying if we fight together, we will survive this battle?”

The Elf hesitated.
“Bayas.
I cannot say that. There is risk. But if you send her from you, risk becomes certainty. You will die; she will fall.”

Rain stared hard at the Elf commander, trying to read those impenetrable gray eyes, but as with most Elves, looking into her eyes was like staring down a bottomless well. They gave away nothing.

“Rain, let’s go.” Ellysetta’s hand brushed his. “You heard her. Tairen fire is one of the few weapons we have against this army.”
«It’s time for trust, not doubt, shei’tan. The Elves are right. We’re stronger together than apart. You know it as well as I.»

He wanted to refuse. The danger to them both was very real. He’d just almost died himself. But already, the entire field around Lower Orest was blanketed with foul, maggot-colored monsters. There were easily two hundred thousand of them, and thousands more scrambled out of their boreholes with each passing chime. Behind the allied lines, the earth shifted and bulged upward as a new line of holes erupted and began spewing revenants to cut off the allies’ retreat.

Rain spun to face Ellysetta’s primary quintet. “You five organize the hundred-fold weaves. Let’s kill as many of those creatures as we can, starting with those.” He jerked a hand towards the line of revenants threatening the allies’ rear flank.

“The Aquiline riders will assist you,” Commander Silver-leaf said.

“I’m counting on it.” Rain leapt into the sky and Changed. Ellysetta’s quintet flung her skyward on a weave of Air, and she slid effortlessly into the saddle strapped to the back of Rain’s neck, her
dahl’reisen
-forged armor shining in the sunlight.

As Rain wheeled around to head back towards the field of revenants and prepared to fire, he heard Greywing cry, “Elves! Take aim!”

The Elvian general didn’t look up to watch Rain’s approach, but just before Rain flew past, he cried, “Fire!” The Elves loosed their Light arrows, and the sky before Rain and Ellysetta lit up with blinding brightness.

Rain, the tairen, and the Aquiline riders flew through the wake of the Light storm. They burst from the brightness with tairen fire and arrows blazing to incinerate the monsters threatening the allies’ retreat.

Fire consumed long tracts of revenants in red-orange flame. As they burned, they emitted a grating, high-pitched screech that rattled Ellysetta’s bones. She shielded her ears against the noise but kept her eyes open and scanning the sky.

Bowcannon bolts turned the sky dark, flying from Orest and across the river. She spun whirling cyclones of Air and Fire to stop them, but the missiles were too plentiful for her weaves alone.

«Gil!»
she cried.
«You and the Air masters keep those bowcannon bolts off of us.»
Instantly two dozen cyclones sprang up around the tairen and Aquilines, catching the bolts midair and leaving the tairen and Elves free to rain fire and Light arrows down upon the revenant masses.

The Mages clearly didn’t like that much, because the rest of the dragon flock took wing from the peaks surrounding Upper Orest. They screamed, the sound like great trumpets blaring. Long, serpentine necks ended in wedge-shaped heads with snouts filled with sharp, curved teeth. They flapped their massive wings and soared over the fields of Orest on a direct course with the tairen and the Aquiline riders. With them was a female dragon nearly twice the size of the rest. Clearly, she was the pack’s queen, for when she bugled a command, the others obeyed.

«Dragons, Rain. Coming from our left, off the Rhakis.»

«I see them. Silverleaf, you deal with the revenants. The tairen will take the dragons.»

Commander Silverleaf raised her bow in acknowledgement, and the Aquiline riders spiraled down. Elvish bows sang and Light arrows zipped towards the ground in streamers of golden light, as if the sky were raining sunshine. Each revenant pierced by the golden arrows went bright and exploded in a cloud of black dust.

Above the fray, Rain’s wings spread wide and pumped to gain loft. Steli, Xisanna, and Perahl raced ahead in a V formation as, with a deafening roar, four more tairen burst from the Faering Mists south of the healing tents. Fahreeta, Torasul, and two younger pride mates sped north across open Celierian land to join their pride-kin above the battlefield.

The dragons rocketed towards the pride, fangs bared, razor sharp claws extended. Great cats and dragons slammed into one another in the sky, fangs and claws slashing, tails whipping as they tumbled through the air. As the ground zoomed up to meet them, they broke apart. Both tairen and dragons were soaked with their own blood, still neither gave quarter. They simply flew back to a higher altitude and reengaged.

The tairen belched boiling clouds of flame, but the dragon queen heeled back and flapped her great wings. Magic swirled in the air, and a brutal gust of wind blew the tairen’s fire back upon them. The monster dove below the pride and rolled onto her back beneath them. The dragon queen opened her own venomous maw and spewed searing jets of green, concentrated acid-flame.

On Rain’s back, Ellysetta cried out in horror as the monster’s corrosive spew sliced through the tairen like Mage Fire, scything limbs from bodies. Maimed and mortally wounded, Fahreeta and the two younger tairen fell from the sky in a shower of blood and smoking gore.

The queen screamed in victory and shot out on a burst of speed only to circle around for a second pass. Fire boiled from Torasul’s muzzle in a searing orange cloud as he dove to the aid of his fallen mate.

Steli roared and burst through the concealing cloud of smoke above. With her white ears laid back against her skull, razored claws extended, she stooped towards the dragon queen. The foul beast glanced up too late to dodge Steli’s attack, and the pair clashed in midair, claws and fangs ripping and rending, wings and tails tangling in a savage battle for survival and supremacy. They plummeted towards the earth, roaring and screaming as each fought to rip out the other’s throat and claw open the other’s belly.

They crashed into the ground with the force of a meteor. Debris exploded upward into the sky, then showered down in a hail of dirt and shattered rock, radiating out from the great crater where the two creatures lay in a limp tangle of limbs.

Steli had taken the brunt of the fall. Wings and back broken, she lay in the pit, struggling for breath. The dragon queen hadn’t fared much better, but she could still move. She dragged the heavy weight of her body towards Steli and lifted herself up on trembling forelegs over the white tairen’s shattered form. The monster opened her maw, yellowed fangs dripping green poison as she prepared to deliver the death-bite. Steli’s pupilless blue eyes, their fierce glow dimmed with pain, gazed up, unflinching, defiance mixed with the grim acceptance of defeat.

“Get away from her, you monstrous
petchka!”

Ellysetta’s furious shout heralded a searing jet of tairen flame that enveloped the dragon’s head just before she struck.

The queen reared back, roaring. Ellysetta leapt from Rain’s back, riding a column of Air down to Steli’s side and peppering the dragon queen’s head and neck with Fey’cha as she went.

Rain’s curved tairen claws sank into the tough, superheated hide of the dragon queen’s back, and with a mighty pump of his powerful wings, he hauled the foul creature into the air. Curving tairen fangs snapped at the dragon’s neck but the long, serpentine neck writhed and twisted, eluding him. The dragon hissed and struggled, spewing acid flame. He rocketed skyward in a rapid, magic-powered ascent, carrying the queen far above the earth, to a part of the sky where the air grew thin and so cold a drop of water would freeze in an instant.

The abrupt change in altitude and temperature acted like ice shot on the dragon’s hide. Steaming scales cracked, ripping fissures down into the vulnerable flesh beneath. The queen shrieked in agony as the icy cold of the high atmosphere seared her.

At last, Rain managed to sink his fangs into the dragon’s long neck. The touch blistered his muzzle and tongue, but he held on with grim determination and pumped venom into her veins until the creature went limp.

With a roar, he released her.

The dragon plummeted earthward. Limbs limp, dead wings fluttered like pennants tied to a falling rock as down the body of the great beast fell. She landed on the battlements of Orest with a mighty crash, shearing the whole of Maiden’s Gate off the side of the mountain and taking four full batteries of bowcannon and thousands of Eld troops with it.

With a scream of triumph and vengeance, Rain followed close behind her, tairen fire boiling from his muzzle to scorch the remaining bowcannons.

*   *   *

Ellysetta laid a hand on Steli’s broken body and flooded her with a wave of healing and strength to ease the great cat’s labored breathing. From beneath half-closed lids, the cat’s dimming eyes regarded Ellysetta with mute suffering. The dragon had struck a mortal blow. Steli’s body was shattered and losing blood rapidly. What wasn’t pouring out through the gaping holes ripped into her hide was flooding her lungs and chest cavity. Steli was dying.

Howling, shrieking with savage bloodlust, the revenants were closing in. They had already reached the edges of the crater. Ellysetta stared up in horror at their round maws, filled with row upon row of needle-sharp teeth, that gnashed and bubbled with frothy green slime. They moved with shocking speed, their clawed hands and feet gouging into rock and dirt for traction. The monsters would be upon them before she managed to do more than stop the worst of Steli’s internal bleeding.

«Rain!»
she cried.
«Help us.»
“Hang on, Steli,” she begged. She’d cut her fingers throwing Fey’cha at the dragon queen, and she wiped the blood off on her armored leg before holding her hands over Steli and summoning her healing magic.
Please, gods, please,
she prayed in silence as she sent her consciousness and healing Light into her beloved pride-mother.

A golden light gleamed at the corner of her eye. Ellysetta turned, expecting to find one of the Elves, only to gasp at the sight of a Fey warrior, gleaming bright as the sun. But it was the sight of the warrior’s radiant, unearthly beautiful face that left Ellysetta stunned.

“Varian?” It was him. The
dahl’reisen
—one of the first thirty-six who’d sacrificed his life for her in the Verlaine. She’d felt him die, heard the song in his soul as he passed through the Veil. And yet, here he stood, impossibly beautiful, unscarred, unburdened by the shame that had weighed so heavy upon him. His skin shone like the sun, and eyes were filled with such boundless love and serenity she wanted to weep with joy.

“I don’t understand,” she whispered. “How can you be here? “

“None shall harm you while in life or death I have power to prevent it,” he said, and his voice tolled like a great bell, resonant and pure. “This I did swear with my own life’s blood, in Fire and Air and Earth and Water, in Spirit and in Azrahn.” He drew his sword. The blade blazed with a radiance so bright Ellysetta had to cover her eyes. “Summon the others,
kem’falla.
Touch your blood to the bloodsworn steel. Quickly.”

Rising to her feet, Ellysetta pulled a Fey’cha from the harness across her chest and sliced her palm deep. Pain stung for a brief, sharp instant, then blood welled, bright red and plentiful. She coated both hands and smeared them across her armor’s shining steel.

All around her, bubbles of strange mist appeared like clouds of sunlight, golden bright and radiant. The clouds expanded until they became a ring of light surrounding Ellysetta and Steli that coalesced into the forms of a hundred shining Fey warriors, former
rasa
and
dahl’reisen lu’tan,
standing side by side, each clad in golden armor that gleamed like the sun.

“Heal her,
kem’falla,”
he urged. “We will keep you safe.” Varian raised his sword high overhead. “For love and for Light!” he cried.
“Miora felah ti’Feyreisa! ”

The ring of Light Warriors echoed his cry, and together, they plunged towards the oncoming revenants. Their swords sliced through the unholy throng, and unlike steel which merely split the hideous creatures and left them to regenerate into twice the threat, the Light Warriors’ swords, like the arrows of the Elves, turned the revenants to clouds of harmless black dust.