Elvenbane (57 page)

Father Dragon turned a little, and smiled at her. “So you are.”

“What we need is someone who knows warfare,” she pointed out. “That’s you. That’s why we need you and made you the leader.” Then she grinned a little. “Besides, old Parth himself said that no one was going to argue with a leader who had teeth as big as he was tall!”

Father Dragon actually chuckled a little. “An astute observation. Well then, I suppose I had better do
my
part. I doubt there is anyone here who knows more about Lord Dyran—and
he
is our most implacable enemy…”

He turned his eyes back towards the enemy army, but Shana saw that the expression of strain he wore had been replaced by one of thought—and the set of his jaw argued his renewed determination that
this
conflict not end as the last had.

There was pain there, still, from those old memories. But pain could be dealt with. And now he had decided to do so.

She smiled, and trotted off to join one of the others fighting to keep a battering ram ablaze.

Valyn wiped his mouth with the back of a trembling hand and staggered away from the jakes. His first reaction, on seeing the helpless, weeping children herded before the fighters in a human shield, had been horror. The second, as they tried to turn and run, and as the fighters behind them slaughtered those who would not cooperate in their own peril, was to be suddenly, violently, sick.

Valyn had hunted all his life, but he had never seen another thinking creature die. He had never seen the violent death of another adult until this conflict, much less that of a child.

He’d run from the walls to the safety and shelter of the fortress, and once there, had succumbed to his own weakness.

Outside, muffled by several thicknesses of stone, the sounds of the conflict continued, and increased as the elven lords regained control over the weather and cleared away the storm that had hampered them.

He leaned his back and head against the cold stone wall, wrapped his arms around himself, and shook—because he alone, of all the people here, truly knew his father. This atrocity was only the beginning.

He’d seen this before—there was even an elven term for it, the strange fixation on some object or cause that came after living centuries.
Shi maladia
. He’d known that Dyran had fallen into that fixation when the others had described his father’s changed behavior. Dyran was not sane, as the halfbloods knew the meaning of the term.

He was sane enough by elven standards, but he had no balance when something triggered the malady, and no sense of proportion. There would be worse to follow, horror piled atop horror, until, even if they were in a position to win the fight, the wizards would surrender. And then, no matter what terms Dyran agreed to, he would violate them, and kill them all as remorselessly as the dragons killed a deer for dinner. Shana kept talking about achieving a truce, he thought in despair, but there wasn’t anything that would hold Dyran to truce terms. He simply didn’t care. The others might hold to a sworn truce, even Cheynar. But not Father. Not now.

Valyn had seen his father twice in a mood like this—both times when he had run into unexpected opposition. Once, in the process of getting an ally onto the Council, and once when negotiating an alliance marriage for himself. In both cases, he had not given up on the task until the opposition was not only eliminated, but buried. In the second case, where the girl herself had pulled the unexpected maneuver of running off with someone else, he had not rested until both the girl and her lover were dead.

No one had suspected anything at the time. Elves did not connive in the deaths of other elves—and both deaths were accepted as tragic accidents… but Valyn wondered. There had been unsettling signs—and just before each “accident,” his father had trained and sent away a particular “bodyguard.” A bodyguard who had returned after the accidents, to be retired.

Human life was hardly worth commenting on to an elven lord. Halfbloods were less than vermin. And there was no vow strong enough to hold Dyran to a treaty with either. He would see that they were all utterly destroyed.

Unless Dyran was somehow stopped.

Unless he could be calmed, broken out of the obsessive-compulsive cycle, and convinced that he, personally, would lose too much by continuing the fight. Unless he could be brought out of his… state… to a point where he was able to think rationally again.

There was perhaps one person valuable enough to him to convince him to give up the fight as futile. One person he would not slay out of hand.

Or so I tell myself
, Valyn thought. He pushed away from the stone wall, no longer shaking, but quite thoroughly determined.

A few days ago, he had made a tentative plan, and to secure it, he’d had Shadow steal a particular beryl out of Dyran’s tent. The elven lord, preoccupied as he was with the larger threats, had taken no thought to the fact that locked cabinets were not enough to stop a determined wizard. Especially one who knew exactly where a small valuable might be. Valyn felt for the stone in his pocket and found it, warm from the heat of his body. This was one of Dyran’s talismanic stones, gems in which he stored some of his own power against a time of depletion. More than that, it was one of the
first
of those stones, a gem he had worked with for centuries, and attuned to him as few other things were. With this in Valyn’s possession, anything Dyran tried should be fed right back to him.

So if Dyran tried to strike him, his father would feel it too, Valyn thought, as he made up his mind, and went down to the ground floor in search of Zed. That should be enough to make Dyran think. And he might be able to use it to control his father, at least a little. It was at least worth trying.

Zed was with another of the young dragons (in halfblood form), both of them working furiously to make the last of the claw-tips into finished arrows. Zed had just finished setting the last of the claw-scraps into an arrow-point when Valyn found him.

“Zed?” Valyn said diffidently. “Can you do me a favor? It’s a big one—”

“I think so,” Zed replied, putting the last of the arrowheads on the pile beside the young dragon-fletcher—who was taking green, crooked, virtually useless branches, rolling them between his hands, and transforming them into perfectly straight, smooth, arrow-shafts, then molding a slot for the arrowhead, slipping the arrowhead into place, and passing the result on to another wizard-child for binding and feathering. Zed stood up, wincing a little as cramped muscles protested his movement.

“What do you need, Valyn?” the wizard asked, tucking his long hair in back of his ears with a gesture that seemed to be habitual. Valyn beckoned him to follow, and once they were in a secluded corner, out of earshot, turned to face him.

“First of all,” the elven lord said quietly, “I think you should know that I’m not a halfblood.”

“You’re not?” Zed said in surprise. “But—”

“I’m full-elven,” Valyn confessed. Then, while Zed was still recovering from that revelation, he added, “Dyran’s my father. I’m his heir.”

Swiftly Valyn explained the reasoning that brought him to seek out Zed. “You know all the exits and entrances to this place. I have to get out—once I make it to the camp, the fact that I’m elven should keep me safe enough until I can get to my father.”

“Then what?” Zed asked.

“Then I try and talk to him,” Valyn said, a lot more calmly and confidently than he felt.

Zed scratched his head. “What if he doesn’t want to talk? What are you going to do then? Just walk out? I don’t know, Valyn; I don’t think he’s likely to let you.”

“I—think he’s likely to underestimate me, Zed.” Valyn wondered how much to tell the young wizard. “I’ve got something of his that should give me an edge with him. I think I can neutralize him. If I can’t talk reason to him.”

Zed stared at Valyn for a long time before replying. “So tell me, just for curiosity’s sake: If Dyran pulled out all the tricks, brought the walls down, and found you here, what would he do to you?”

“Probably kill me,” Valyn replied as nonchalantly as he could.

“And if Dyran manages to bring in all the elven lords on the Council?”

“He’ll be able to pull out every bit of power all the High Lords can muster, stored and internal, and tumble the walls.”

“And—how likely is that?” Zed asked carefully.

“More so with every day,” Valyn told him honestly. “The longer this goes on, the greater a menace we seem, the more likely it is. They can afford to keep throwing fighters at you until the last of them can climb the walls on the bodies piled underneath. They can wear you down with magic, then pull something unexpected. They can block your thieving, and starve you out.”

Zed chewed on his lower lip for a moment, and seemed to come to a decision. “Come on,” he said. “Let me show you the back way out.”

The “back way” was a tiny trapdoor letting out on a shaft that in turn led to a tunnel that came out somewhere on the valley bottom. Presumably behind the enemy lines. The shaft was a sheer, circular drop of several stories, too wide for someone to brace himself against and inch upwards. Valyn made a light and floated it down to the bottom, and it seemed very far indeed. The only way to use the shaft was to climb down a rope—and there was one, just inside the door, attached to a ring sunken into the stone. Valyn looked at the drop, and at the rope, and sighed.

“I didn’t say it was easy,” Zed told him. “I just said it was the back door. You could always ask one of the better mages to transport you into the camp.”

“No thank you,” Valyn replied, as he rigged the rope around his waist for rappelling. “I need to get in quietly; I don’t want to announce myself.”

He leaned backwards over the long drop and tested the rope. It seemed firm enough.

“I’ll wait for you to get down,” Zed said quietly. “I have to pull the rope up when you’re done.” Unspoken was the obvious: He would not need the rope to return. He would either be a prisoner, or he would be the go-between in a truce negotiation.

Valyn glanced down one more time. It was a
very
long drop, and the stone was slick with damp.

“Well, I guess I’d better get this over with,” he said. And, at the strange and worried look Zed gave him, he added, “Don’t worry, I intend to be the winner in this. In fact, I intend to split a bottle of victory wine with you!”

He smiled at Zed, and stepped backwards off the edge.

The filth and misery of the camp were unbelievable. The stench alone was enough to make Valyn’s stomach churn. And the plight of Dyran’s slaves almost made him turn and run.

Here, among the fighters that were supposed to be earning his victory, Dyran’s single-minded obsession with wiping out his enemy, the halfbloods, was even more evident.

The camp looked as if disaster had already struck, and there was no one left to set things right afterwards. No one was setting up the tents that had been knocked down by the storm. No one was cleaning the flooded jakes-pits, which had overflowed into the camp. Wounded fighters had dragged themselves into camp, but no one was tending them. Warriors too sick to fight or wounded previously lay in what little shelter they or friends had managed to contrive before Dyran ordered the current attack. Many of the wounded and ill were dying, some were already dead. No one took the bodies away.

Valyn held a handkerchief over his nose and pretended an aloof indifference to the misery around him. He picked his way through the wreckage of the camp, studiously ignoring anything not in his immediate path. No elven lord would have cared that humans were lying and dying in their own filth—except that if they were dying
here
, they were obviously not dying
there
, out on the front lines, “where they belonged.

Valyn wondered momentarily where the support crews for the fighters were, then decided, given the attrition rate on the walls, the support crews had probably been thrown into armor and out onto the field with the rest.

Dyran’s tent was easy to spot; it was one of the few still standing, intact, and untouched by the storm. It had been pitched at the top of the slope opposite the wizards’ fortress, standing level with the stone edifice, a gold-and-scarlet pavilion that had made an irresistible target. Not that it mattered; nothing the wizards or the dragons had thrown at it had touched it. Valyn could hardly believe his luck when he was able to stroll right up the stony slope to it without being stopped by anyone who knew him. It occurred to him at that point that perhaps the halfbloods had missed an excellent chance to assassinate Dyran—all anyone would have had to do was to put on an illusion of fullblood—

No, that wouldn’t work; there was probably an illusion-dispelling barrier at the edge of the camp. Father might be obsessed, but he wasn’t stupid.

There were two guards at the tent entrance. Both of them Valyn recognized, and he braced himself. One of them knew him.

“Master Valyn?” he said-He was calm. Not surprised to see the Lord’s son. Not as if the guard knew something… Hmm. It must not be general knowledge that the heir had “vanished.”

“I’ll just wait for my father inside, if I may,” he replied, just as calmly, as if he strolled across a battlefield every day to see his father.

“Certainly, Master Valyn,” the human replied promptly, and held open the tent-flap for him.

Valyn ducked inside; when his eyes adjusted to the dim light, he was somehow not surprised to discover that the tent was furnished as sparsely as the manor was sybaritic.

There was nothing to distract Dyran from his obsession. Out here, he was the Warrior, the Champion of the Clans.

The tent was divided into two sections by a screen; private quarters, and public. In the public area were the portable desk and chair, a map table, stands for arms and armor, and chests for documents. In the private area was a bed, another chair, trunks of clothing, two storage cabinets, and nothing else.

Valyn just had time to take that much in, when footsteps outside the tent heralded the arrival of someone else.

He turned, his hand on the screen, just in time to face his father coming in through the door of the tent.