Elvenbane (7 page)

So while she waited for an opportunity to reach the roof, she decided to create another episode in a long-running ploy most of the Kin had played with at one time or another—

The Prophecy of the Savior of Humanity, the Elvenbane.

She found a pile of bags in the corner of the kitchen, filled one with the rest, and headed down into the cellar.

She had discovered some time ago, that if she acted as if she had business in a place and was under orders, humans tended to leave her alone. She had only to avoid elven overseers, who questioned everyone and everything out of the ordinary. This time was no exception; she carried the overstuffed burlap bag right past the cook and the kitchen overseer—who was, fortunately, human—and opened the cellar door without ever being challenged.

Since there was quite a bit of traffic up and down the cellar stairs, the staircase was well lit, as were most of the areas where common things were stored. Cool, damp air, fragrant with onions, garlic, sausage, and the earthy smell of vegetables, struck her in the face as she hurried down the steps.

She waited a few moments to ensure that she was alone, then she shifted form again, this time into that of an old, seemingly blind human woman.
She
could see perfectly well through what looked to be milky cataracts, but no one looking at her would know that. Clothing herself roughly in the burlap sacks, and hiding her white-and-silver tunic, she seated herself just under the light at the bottom of the cellar staircase, and waited for the next servant to be sent after something.

In fact, the next slave down the stairs was as near to perfect a victim as she could have asked for; young, female, and so burdened with a stack of empty boxes that she couldn’t see and was having to check for each stair with a cautiously outstretched bare toe. Alara waited until the girl had reached the bottom of the staircase, then spoke, in a voice like a rusty hinge.

“Hast thou heard the Word, child?”

The girl shrieked in startlement and jumped, boxes flying in all directions. She wound up with her back to the wall, her eyes round with fear and surprise, her hair straggling over one eye in untidy curls. Alara sat like a statue, white-filmed eyes staring straight ahead.

“Gods’ teeth, ol’ mam!” The girl panted, one hand at her throat. “Ye ‘bout frighted me t’death!”

Alara said nothing.

The girl pushed away from the wall, and peered at Alara, her eyes still round with alarm. “How ye get down here, anyways? Ye don’ b’long t’ th’ Lor’ Rathekrel—”

Alara raised one hand, and pointed upwards; the girl looked up involuntarily, then dropped her gaze to Alara’s “sightless” eyes. “The Voice of the Prophecy belongs to no one, mortal or immortal,” Alara intoned, doing her best to sound mysterious. “Only to the ages.”

The girl’s brow wrinkled in puzzlement. “I don’ know no Lor’ Ages.” She started to edge away, and cast longing looks up the stairs. “Belike I better get th’ cook—”

“Hear the Prophecy!” Alara cried, forestalling the girl by standing up with a swiftness at odds with her apparent age, interposing herself between the slave and the staircase. “Hear and remember! Remember, and whisper it, and pass it onward! Remember the foretelling of the Elvenbane!”

The girl uttered a strangled yip as Alara stood, and backed away. Alara gathered her rags around her as if they were the silken robes she had lately worn, and stared straight at the girl, her expression stern and forbidding. Since she
looked
blind, this unnerved the girl even more. “There will come a child,” Alara whispered. “One born of human mother, but fathered by the demons, possessed of magic more powerful than the elven lords! By this shall you know the child, that it shall read the very thoughts upon the wind, travel upon the wings of demons, and master all the magics of the masters ere it can stand alone! The child shall resemble a human, yet its eyes will be those of the demons; of the very green of the elf-stones. The child shall be hunted before its birth, yet shall escape the hunt. The child shall be sold, and yet never bought. The child shall win all, yet lose all.”

Standard prophetic double-talk, she thought to herself. If the slaves had any belongings of their own, she could make a fortune in preaching. You could tell them anything as long as it sounded impressive and mysterious, and they’d believe it.

“And in the end,” she concluded, her voice rising, “the child shall rise up against the masters and cast them into the lowest hell, there to make of
them
slaves to the demons of hell!”

The girl stepped an involuntary pace forward, fascinated in spite of herself. Her-eyes were bright with mingled fear and excitement, and her curly hair damp with nervous sweat. Alara looked straight into her eyes, and thrust a bony finger at her.

“Hear the words of the Prophecy!” she shrieked, as the girl jumped back. “Hear them and heed them!”

“Jena! What’s going on down there?” a deep female voice scolded from the top of the staircase.

Young Jena jumped again, and went pale and frightened. “N-nothing!” she called back.

“Then who the hell are you talking to?”

“I—uh—” The girl looked at Alara in confusion; Alara remained silent and statue-still.

“Get your rump up here
now
, girl!”

Jena looked helplessly at Alara, and scampered up the stairs as fast as her legs could carry her.

But when she came back down, trembling with fear, the kitchen overseer behind her, there was no sign of a mysterious old woman. In fact, there was no sign of anyone at all.

But there
wax
one extra wine cask, if anyone had bothered to count…

And shortly thereafter, twenty or thirty witnesses, including two elven overseers, saw a Great Kite launch itself from the roof of the manor. It rose into a bloody sunset, wings blotting out the sun itself, screaming doom down upon the Clan of V’Larn.

That was fun
, Alara decided,
even if the rest of the Lair would have had a fit about the shaman risking herself like that
.

The elven lords suppressed the Prophecy and those who spread it whenever they could—but the best way to spread something is to try to outlaw it, as they found to their frustration. It was hard to do anything about it when it was being spread by old men and women who vanished into thin air—and the more they punished those who had listened to the forbidden words, the more others wanted to hear what was so dangerous.

It was just one more way to make the lives of elvenkind a little more uncomfortable. The elves hated and feared the Prophecy, not the least of which because there was a germ of truth in it.

It was not commonly known, but elves and humans were cross-fertile. The offspring were relatively rare, even when contraceptive measures were not being taken, but there had been halfblood children in the past. And those children, like many hybrids, had gifts that surpassed those of their parents.

That was why the elves controlled the fertility of their slaves through contraceptive measures in the very food they ate. Breeding was permitted only under the eyes of the overseers.

Humans had magic of the mind; speaking mind-to-mind across vast distances, reading the thoughts of others, seeing things at a far distance, or in the past or future, or manipulating and moving things without the use of their hands. Elves had magic as the dragons understood the concept, for dragons had the magic of shape-shifting and a few other, minor abilities. Those who became shamans tended to have the ability to read thoughts, but not to the extent that talented humans or halfbloods could.

But the children of mixed blood had both human and elven magics, and the human mental gifts tended to amplify their abilities as magicians.

“Wizards,” the elves called the halfbloods, and attempted to use them in their own never-ending feuds with each other. But the wizards were not helpless creatures like the human slaves, and used their own magic to win free of their masters.

Right then the elven lords should have welcomed the wizards into their own ranks
, Alara thought cynically.
That’s what I’d have done. There’s nothing like a life of luxury to make thoughts of revolution melt away like snow in the sun.

But the elves didn’t; instead, they panicked, and tried to destroy their halfblooded offspring.

So the Wizard War began, with the wizards ranged on one side, and the elven lords and their slave armies on the other.

The dragons entered the world before the Wizard War and the defeat and destruction of the wizards, but for the most part were too busy with their own establishment to pay much attention to the goings-on across the desert. Later, they became aware of at least some of what had happened through faulty, faltering, human word-of-mouth and through elven history, and through the memory of those few of the Kin who
did
pay attention to the elves’ troubles—most notably, Father Dragon.

As a result of that War, halfbreeds were hated and feared, and if by accident a human woman were bearing an elven lord’s child, she and the child would be put to death as soon as it was known.

Alara wasn’t sure where the Prophecy came from, if it had been created by the Kin or was something one of the Kin picked up and decided to use, but it certainly kept the elves nervous…

And by now, between the disappearance of his “bride,” the reemergence of the Prophecy among his slaves, and the Great Kite appearing as an omen of disaster, Lord Rathekrel was probably paralyzed with rage. That had been several months ago, long enough for word to spread among the other elven lords and give them time to complete plans of their own for him. And meanwhile, a dozen of the other power brokers were undoubtedly jockeying for position, hoping he’d fall.

It was about time for a Council session. If he was thrown out of his Council seat for incompetence, that would upset the balance of power. The elves would all be too busy trying to find a compromise candidate to pay any attention to what went on out on the borders, which should make it safer to hunt this way for a while, and those rumors that Rathekrel had seen dragons were going to be completely discredited—

Which was what she would tell the others if they ever found out what she was doing. But she would have done it all anyway. Elves deserved to have trouble visited on them, the hateful creatures.

Still, none of this had anything to do with the meditation she was
supposed
to be doing. In fact, she’d actually been distracted enough that she had shifted form a little, allowing her tail to move a claw-length. She gave herself a mental shake, and tried to settle down again.

But something had entered the immediate vicinity, something that was not a dragon. She felt its—
her
—presence.

She abandoned all thought of mischief, and all pretense at meditation, as a human female staggered from behind the wall and fell against her side.

Alara shifted back quickly, all but a very thin veneer of her surface. She still
looked
like a rock, but now she had eyes and ears, and she employed both cautiously.

The woman, heavily pregnant, moaned and got to her hands and knees, crawling towards the water. This was not the sort of desert traveler Alara would have expected; the woman was young, unscarred, burned red and blistered by the sun, and the clothing she wore was of delicate silk, fit for a boudoir, but hardly for desert travail. Her long red hair had been looped up in a series of elaborate braids; now half of her coiffure hung down in her face, and the rest was a tangled mess. Her feet were bare, the soles burned and cut, but she seemed oblivious, so delirious she was beyond pain. Even as Alara watched, she fell again, but not before she had reached the pool.

She dragged herself to the water’s edge, put her face down into the water, and lapped at the cool liquid like an animal. And the moment she touched the water, there was a sharp
click
.

The woman clawed at her neck, and an elaborately jeweled slave-collar came away in her hand. She dropped it unheeded beside her, and sank back on the stones, exhausted.

Alara’s attention was caught and held by the sunlight winking on the gems of the neckpiece. All humans wore slave-collars, but she had never seen one this ornate. Easily a thumb-length wide, it seemed to be made of solid gold, with emeralds, sapphires and rubies arranged in a series of geometrical patterns all around it. Her acquisitive soul hungered for it; no dragon ever had enough gems for its hoard, and this bit of jewelry drew her as nothing before ever had. She
wanted
it, not only to possess it, but to
wear
it

And that anomaly warned her off, before she shifted fully back to draconic form in order to seize the thing. Suddenly alarmed, she eyed the collar carefully. Sure enough, there, among the gems, just over the point where the collar fastened, were three tiny, inconspicuous elf-stones. She knew the type, and the setting of the stones. One to hold the collar locked onto the slave’s neck, one negating any mind-magic the slave might have, and one, evidently still active, holding a spell of glamorie that made anyone who saw the collar want to wear it. A safe way to ensure that no slave ever abandoned his collar willingly.

Suddenly the collar no longer seemed quite so desirable.

Then, like a shout, a voice cried inside Alara’s mind.
:Ah, gods—
!:

Alara had one moment of surprise before she found herself pulled
into
the woman’s mind.

Serina Daeth
. Not “the woman.” Alara was just barely able to hold on to her own identity, caught in the desperate grip of Serina’s mind.

Serina was too fevered to actually build coherent thoughts; Alara found herself overwhelmed by memories, feelings, emotions, all tumbled together, out of sequence.

Alara pulled herself free of the woman’s mind with a gut-wrenching effort, and lay for a moment with her head pounding and a terrible pain between her eyes.

She’s a concubine
, the dragon thought, amazed. She had never even gotten near enough to one of them to really
see
them well, much less listen to their thoughts. Lord Dyran—that must be V’Kass Dyran Lord Hernalth. He was an elder, practically chief in Council. But how did a High Lord’s concubine end up in the desert?