Dragon War: The Draconic Prophecies - Book Three (31 page)

“What is the Prophecy?” she asked.

Elestrissa looked confused.

“Is the vision in my dream an immutable image of what will be, regardless of what I choose? If it is, then what I do now doesn’t matter—one way or another. I’m fated to end up facing the Blasphemer at the river. I can join your charge knowing that somehow I’ll survive, even if no one else does, because my destiny is to face the Blasphemer in two weeks, when he reaches the Wyr.”

“But we and the Eldeen Reaches are doomed,” Elestrissa said, scowling.

“Or perhaps my vision was just a glimpse of what could be, a foretaste of what might come to pass if I make the choices that lead me to that point. In that case, I’m free to choose a different path and perhaps arrive at a different destination. That would mean I could die in this foolhardy defense, or I could defeat the Blasphemer two weeks early.”

I wish Gaven were here, she added silently.

Elestrissa frowned. “Such questions are best discussed in the groves of the druids in times of peace,” she said. “Now is a time for action.” She took a deep breath, and seemed to swell with it, growing taller and broader. “Perhaps we all die here today, but perhaps our charge is necessary to weaken the Blasphemer so he can fall at the river.” Her skin, where her hide armor left it exposed, was transforming into thick bark, and leafy twigs appeared in her hair. “Perhaps you will live to see the Blasphemer fall, Lady Alastra.” Her voice rumbled and resounded like thunder over the noise of the battle, and her limbs became the mighty trunks and branches of an oak. “Then you can tell the tale of this day, and ensure that the story of the defenders of the Mosswood is told until the end of days!”

A cheer went up from the battle-worn heroes, and Rienne smiled. She would fight beside Elestrissa, and if fate allowed, she would destroy the Blasphemer before his fated day. Perhaps she would die without having seen Gaven again, but after all the times she had told Gaven that he was the author of his own destiny, she couldn’t do otherwise.

Elestrissa raised her war club over her head and roared, drawing another cheer from the heroes around her. She turned and began a lumbering stride in the direction of the barbarians.

Thoughts of Gaven filling her mind, Rienne drew Maelstrom from its sheath and looked down at the blade.

Gaven faced her in Jordhan’s cabin, Maelstrom’s gleaming blade between them. “The day you first touched that sword,” he said, “you set a course for a much greater destiny. It’s a sword of legend, Ree. Great things have been done with it, and more greatness will yet be accomplished. Can’t you feel that?”

She still felt it, and she had come to believe—to hope, at least, or maybe to fear—that the rest of Gaven’s words might be true, that she was the one fated to accomplish so much with it.

“You and Maelstrom are linked in destiny,” Gaven said, “as surely as you and I are.”

Tears streaming down her face, she lifted the blade above her head, gave a wordless shout, and joined the last charge of the defenders of the Mosswood.

*  *  *  *  *

The song of unmaking boomed from his throat, each note throbbing in dissonance with the protesting chords of the Gatekeepers’ seal. Slowly his song bent the druids’ harmonies, twisted their chords into terribly cacophony, and snapped the lines of the binding. The chorus of madness rose from deep below and echoed in his ears, giving strength to his voice. This was why the Blasphemer had come—the beginning of the unmaking of the world.

He crouched and cocked his head, listening. The mad chorus had been clear to his ears for hours now as the battle raged, but he was beginning to hear the high keening notes of a single voice raised above the others. Its song was at once a chant of war and a summons, drawing its kindred from across the depth and breadth of Khyber to come to the opening of the doorway.

I am here
, Kathrik Mel sang in his wordless, tuneless song,
and the door will soon be open
.

The distant voice answered with a banshee’s wail, portending the death of the world.

*  *  *  *  *

The defenders of the Mosswood advanced in grim silence. Elestrissa strode forward like a walking oak imbued with the primal power of her woodland home. The goliath kept pace beside her, resting a greataxe on one broad shoulder. Rienne had never seen a goliath in person before, but she knew of them—the wild mountain-folk of the western Reaches, more at home on snow-capped peaks than in city streets.

Both dwarves had shaggy boars by their sides, but one was a hazy spirit like the healer’s bear while the other was real flesh and bone. Some of the shifters walked upright, but others switched between a crouching run and scampering leaps, pausing frequently to sniff the air or just let the group catch up. Rienne saw humans and elves armed with bows and clad in leather, and others covered from head to toe in plates of metal armor, holding finely crafted swords and heavy metal shields. It was as motley a collection of warriors as she’d ever seen, all united under the Mosswood Warden’s banner to make a final stand against the Blasphemer.

Much like the Blasphemer’s forces themselves, she reminded herself. According to Kyaphar, the Blasphemer had united members of many different Carrion Tribes under his bone-white banners, leading them in a common cause to conquer the lands east of the Shadowcrag and Icehorn Mountains.

Elestrissa’s charge reached the bottom of the slope, and the sounds of the battle engulfed them—the clash of steel against steel or swords splintering wooden shields, the shouts of enraged warriors as they hacked into their foes, the roars of dragons and the great Eldeen bears, and the pitiful screams of the dying.

“For the Reaches!” someone near Rienne called out, and the rest of the charging warriors took up the call.

“For the Reaches!”

“For the Wood!”

Barbarians streamed toward them from both sides, having beaten past or broken away from the Eldeen soldiers that tried to hold the line. Several of the charging warriors slowed, readying to meet them, but Elestrissa urged them forward. “On to the Blasphemer!”

Lightning flashed in the sky, and Rienne looked up—half expecting to see a dragon breathing lightning down on them, half hoping to see Gaven’s dreadful storm. Instead she saw Jordhan’s airship skimming low over the battlefield, the fiery ring of its bound elemental bright against the smoke-blackened sky. As she looked, another bolt of lightning streaked down from a figure on the deck—Kyaphar or one of his druids, she supposed—and struck in the midst of a thick clump of barbarians, knocking them to the ground.

The barbarians closed around the heroes of Elestrissa’s charge like the jaws of a dragon, roaring and howling as they swung their mauls and axes. Rienne was sheltered from the initial assault, surrounded by allies who prevented Maelstrom from meeting her enemies. Inevitably, though, the warriors on the edge of their ragged formation slowed, and as Rienne continued to advance she found room to maneuver, and Maelstrom began its whirling dance of death.

A plague-scarred barbarian thrust his leering visage in her face as she dodged his hammer’s swing. His eyes went blank as Maelstrom bit through his flesh and found his heart. A shifter, his skin splotched with horrible burns, stumbled back, trying to dodge the flashing blade, but Maelstrom sliced through his throat and he fell on his back. A Carrion Tribe woman clanged two rough blades together in challenge, blocked Maelstrom’s first slash, whirled forward in answer, then stopped dead as Maelstrom severed a tendon in one arm, took off the other hand, and finally sank into the barbarian’s chest.

Elestrissa strode in front of Rienne, swinging her club back and forth in devastating arcs that sent barbarians flying away from her and crashing into
each other, clearing a path to the Blasphemer. Rienne kept pace, but what had been a tight formation charging ahead started to thin as the warriors slowed to engage their enemies and some fell under the overwhelming tide of the barbarians. Maelstrom kept her moving forward even as it whirled and cut, jabbed and killed.

The elf just behind her, his two curved blades flashing in the firelight, stumbled as a barbarian’s club swung low at his legs, and Rienne hesitated.

“Keep going!” he screamed at her, then the barbarian’s club smashed his skull.

Maelstrom darted out and slit the Plaguebearer’s throat, and Rienne left him sprawled across the body of the hero he had slain, the elf whose name Rienne had never learned.

*  *  *  *  *

Dragonfire leaped and roared at Kathrik Mel’s back, adding its dissonant voice to the distant chorus down in Khyber. The howls of rage-filled warriors and the agonized screams of the dying sang his song of dissolution. The Gatekeepers’ seal itself, groaning as its bindings weakened and broke, added voices to the song, a crescendo of chaos building to the inevitable climax.

He stepped forward, and the tread of his armored foot turned a new circle of grass to ash, adding the tiny dying breaths of the leaves to the grand cacophony. He looked down and saw a line of the seal, flaring with purple light in protest as the song tore at it.

The Blasphemer spoke a word that was no word, and fire erupted beneath his feet. Like lightning, the flames coursed along the ground, tracing the lines of the seal and igniting them. Fire licked the sky, burning through all the colors of the spectrum until it burned black and terrible.

The flames died, their fuel extinguished. The seal was undone, and the chorus of madness swelled in triumph. The keening voice surged louder as its owner rose to pass through the open doorway.

A
unn gaped, trying to see past the deathless guard and up the stairs. Silence had fallen over the temple, and he was desperate to know what was happening on the upper floor. Why had Gaven killed an Aereni priestess? What was he doing here at all?

“You had better come with me,” the soldier said, clutching Aunn’s arm in his shriveled hand. His touch was ice cold and seemed to sap the strength from Aunn’s muscles.

Without thinking, Aunn wrenched his arm from the deathless soldier’s grip and bolted past him up the stairs.

The soldier shouted, “Stop!” and then something in Elven.

Revulsion and terror impelled Aunn up the stairs. He leaped out of the path of the guard’s poleaxe as it swung at his feet, vaulting up a few more steps to the first landing. The guard was still shouting in Elven as he scrambled up the stairs behind him, jabbing his spear at Aunn’s feet.

A few more guards stood at the top of the stairs. Mostly their attention was focused upward, looking at something on the next flight, though one woman was drawing a curved sword and shifting to block Aunn’s way. Aunn hesitated, but a clatter on the stairs at his feet warned him just in time—he hopped up as the other soldier’s poleaxe swept under him, and kicked down, trapping the weapon against the stairs. The haft broke with a loud crack, drawing a string of Elven curses from the guard.

The guard at the top of the stairs barked something to her companions, but whatever was happening on the stairs above them must have been riveting—they barely gave Aunn a glance before looking back up. The soldier below him shook the axe head free of the splintered haft and repeated the eerie growl he’d made before. Aunn still hadn’t drawn his weapon—he didn’t want to kill any of the guards, but he was starting to wonder, as rational thought reasserted itself, how he could get out of this mess without the use of his mace. Not giving those thoughts a chance to settle in, he charged up
the rest of the stairs, keeping a wary eye on the curved blade of the guard above him.

Instead of blocking his path, the guard fell back from his charge, and Aunn saw the other soldiers around her fall to their knees, heedless of any danger. He cleared the stairs, put his back to the wall, and looked past them.

An elf woman draped in a simple gown descended the last few stairs, carrying Gaven’s unconscious form in her slender arms without apparent effort. Her face was a mask of death, tattooed to resemble a stylized skull, but her eyes were green flames. The other elves had their faces to the ground, ignoring him, and he decided to follow their example rather than draw the ire of this being. She reminded him of Senya’s ancestor in the City of the Dead.

Senya!

Aunn looked up, and the elf’s fiery eyes burned into his. Her head was shaven clean, the skull tattoo obscured her features, and her eyes were not the sapphire blue they had been, but this was unmistakably Senya.

“I know you,” she said. Her voice was not Senya’s husky purr, but a cool, clear song.

How could she know him? Senya had never known what he was, as far as he knew.

“You were with this one and my daughter Senya in Shae Mordai.”

The terror that had gripped him through their entire stay in the City of the Dead returned, a cold hand on his heart. As frightening as the haunted City of Night had been, years ago, to a young spy on his first mission, Shae Mordai had been far worse, a place where the undead walked openly among the living. Senya’s ancestor had been the most terrifying part of a truly horrible day, for in the brief moment when the burning eyes in her empty sockets had met his gaze, he had felt himself utterly exposed to her. It appeared that, somehow, he was facing Senya’s ancestor again—enshrined in Senya’s body.

“Senya?” he said quietly.