[Lanen Kaelar 03] - Redeeming the Lost (42 page)

Berys is chanting. Why isn’t he healing me,
the bastard? The thing seems to nod in reply to Berys, while I lie here in
agony, dying again as they go through some stupid ritual. And at last, here
again is Berys. He is speaking to me.

“You are chosen, Marik of Gundar. Your soul
will blend with the Demonlord, you will fly with him, you can kill every dragon
ever spawned. Do you consent?” he asks, as unconcerned as if he asked about the
weather.

“Let me die, you bastard!” I scream.

“No, no, we must have consent,” says Berys
evenly, as if he corrected an errant child. “That is the way to end the pain,
Marik.”

Pain pulses through me, endless, agonizing. I
half open one eye—he’s keeping me alive, bastard, I can see the thin stream of
healing—not enough to do any more than keep me on this rack. “Bastard,” I
croak. “Let me go!”

“Consent, Marik,” he says, “or you will live
forever.”

I can barely hear him. What is he saving?
Consent. Forever. The prospect of living another instant is torture upon
torture.

He wants me to say I consent to something.
What was it?

I don’t know. I don’t care. I will say
anything that will end this torment.

“I consent, I consent, damn you forever let me
die\” I scream, my voice thin—but it is enough.

A voice unimaginably deep rumbles through the
courtyard, shaking through me. ‘Your wish, brother, is my command,” says the
great black beast.

No
!

It reaches for me, I am lifted from the
ground, I can smell the burning and hear the sizzle of my flesh where its skin
touches mine.

I turn my face away, towards the cool blue
sky, and close my eyes on my last glimpse of the world of life, as I am pulled through
that thin shell and into the body of the beast. AAhhhh, it burns, it burns—but
what…?

And behold, we are one. I-Demonlord I-Marik,
we are in one body, powerful, free of pain. As we are joined, I-Demonlord find
a mind not unlike my own—weaker, unstable, but not so very different in kind,
and rather than send that half screaming down into madness I listen to it and
we both learn. We are one, and we have a soul again.

I-Demonlord realise immediately that this
poses a problem. The Distant Heart spell requires that the heart cannot inhabit
a body that has a soul. If that should come to pass, the heart would become
mortal once more.

Swifdy I-Demonlord reach into my chest and
remove the Distant Heart from the molten rock of my being. It shines in my
claws, an unlovely thing the shape and size of a human heart turned to
silver-black stone. It remains unchanged: I have acted in time. Berys’s eyes
glitter. Ah, yes, he would see this as a desirable object.

I leap into the sky. The mountains here are
high and perilous and the range extends over a huge area. I can drop the heart
somewhere in the trackless heights for now. I will find it a safer resting
place later.

For the second time in this hour, I feel the
force of Berys’s binding spell like spikes driven deep into my soul. This body
cannot feel pain, but he is not working in the realm of the physical.

He’s a clever bastard.

“Back you come,” I declare, pulling the
binding tether. It rages, it spits fire at me that slides off the shield I have
raised against it, it screams defiance.

“For one reputed to be so wise, you are an
arrant fool,” I say.

“Whatever your pride may make of things, you
are bound to me.” I feel a triumphant grin stealing on to my face. “And by the
power of that binding, I tell you that I will not release you to the pleasure
of destroying the Kantri unless you leave that ugly silver-black lump of stone
with me.”

It hisses like ten thousand serpents. “You
cannot force me to this!” it cries.

“Fool, I tell you I can,” I respond. I jerk on
the binding, driving the spikes of the spell ever deeper into the tender flesh
of the bound soul. “You required my living hand for the binding spell,
Demonlord. Blood and bone binds deep.” I dropped my calm mask and growled, “Give
to me your Distant Heart, Demonlord, or I will tie the binding at its sharpest
and leave it there forever.”

It screams. It curses me a thousand times, it
writhes, it flails about—but it knows that I have spoken truth. At last, the
agony wins over its defiance. It flings the Distant Heart at my feet.

“Thank you,” I say to it, secreting the thing
in a deep inner pocket of my garments. “I was certain that you would see
reason. Fear not,” I add. “I will put it somewhere very safe indeed when time
allows.”

It tries to tear me with its teeth. I shrug it
off.

Ah, life is sweet.

I will kill him. I will find a way, for he
must sleep sometime.

For now, I-Demonlord must admit defeat.
However, I-Marik know that Berys did indeed have beneath his hand the only
creature in all of time who can control me, that she is our daughter, and that
Berys has no idea where she is. I-Marik have realised that for all our new
strength we are yet bound to Berys and for the most part controlled by him.
I-Demonlord learn from my brother that we do not know where the Lanen is, but
she will not be far from the Kantri, and once they are dead she is defenceless.
I-Marik remember that I could hear two of the Kantri, but when we listen, there
is nothing. I-Marik am truly changed.

The best we can do in the present moment is to
turn to Berys and say, “You are dead, demon-spit.”

“You are bound to me, beast. You serve me,” he
replies.

“Fool! I keep telling you that I am not a
demon,” I-Demonlord reply. ‘Your lies are made plain. She is gone out of your
hands! And when she is dead, I owe you only enough allegiance not to destroy
you.” We laugh. “Perhaps I will leave enough of the Kantri alive to do that for
me, for once she is dead I will have all the time in the world in which to
destroy the few I will leave alive.”

The Kantri. There, in the sky above us. If
they are here, she must be as well—but for now, they stand between us and our
prey. We will have to fight them. It is good. We are strong, we share thought
and will, we share hatred.

We rise with a thunderclap, beating vast wings
that do not grow weary, and fly straight toward the largest assembly we can
see. We breathe fire upon them, and three are stricken at once. Our fire is
thick and viscous, it clings to them and sears them to the bone. The three fall
from the sky screaming and burn to powder before they strike the ground.

We dance on the wind with delight, just for a
moment, then we scan the ground for humans—but there are too many dragons forcing
us into batde. They are many, and the spell we once used works no longer to
tear them from the sky. We will have to fight them—but ah, Berys never knew. We
have a soul again, we are the Demonlord once more. A price once paid to demons
is paid until death, and I-Demonlord have never truly died.

I can call upon six of the Seven Princes of
the Hells to aid me.

I heard every word, every thought, felt
everything that Marik went through. I fell to my knees, retching, when Berys
stabbed him to the heart, when Berys would not let him die and fed him to the
Demonlord.

As deeply as I hated my cursed father, surely
no one deserved such a fate.

Blessedly, when he merged with the Demonlord,
his voice in my mind was silenced. My mother Maran was at my side, full of
concern, Aral right behind her.

“Can I help?” asked Aral quickly.

“I’m alright,” I said shakily. The others had
gathered round. Varien gave me his hand and I pulled myself to my feet. “It’s
Marik. He’s dead, but he’s not—oh, Hells!” I cried. My gut was wracked with
spasms. “There is part of him that’s still alive, and it’s in that great black
beast. His mind has merged with the Demon-lord’s, it knows everything he knows
or ever knew—Goddess!” I shuddered from head to toe. “There are two of them in
there!”

Do not believe the songs: they were made many
years later, by those who were not there.

The battle was nor glorious, nor simple, nor
swift. It was hideous. It began when the Black Dragon first took to the sky,
murdering three of the Dhrenagan, dancing with delight and then turning to
destroy wherever it could.

Watching my people and the Restored fighting
for their lives against something that breathed death, and against which our
natural weapons were useless, wrung my heart and my gut until I could barely
draw breath. Lanen, at my side, was hardly in a better case.

Our strategy—the strategy of all the
Kantrishakrim—had been decided. The question was simple enough. How do you
fight the fires of the earth? That is what the thing seemed to be made of, to
our sorrow. We had never defeated the molten stone on our own Island of Exile,
despite thousands of years of trying. We had often tried to drown the advance
of flowing rock, but we could not carry enough water swiftly enough.

Thus the basis of our strategy for this
battle. Lake Gand was deep and its waters cold, Rella had told us. Perhaps the
sudden cooling of being dashed into the water would render the creature
immobile. Idai had another thought, about using the Black
Dragon’s poor powers of flight combined with a screen of smoke in the
mountains, but that depended even more upon swift pursuit of one or more of us.
We could only hope.

From the moment the Black Dragon rose from the
castle courtyard, it was plain that it had changed. Most noticeable, alas, was
that it flew a great deal better, as though it were no longer under the control
of a spell that compelled it to fly only in a straight line. It seemed more
alive, less like a golem—but it was still plain that it was not a natural flying
creature. That was one of our few advantages.

“All keep well apart,” I said yet again,
gazing down at it. The dead weight of the stone in my claws was reminding me
more and more of Nikis. “Do not present a target. Naikenna, see to your people!”
I cried, for three of the Restored had begun flying together.

It only took an instant. The Black Dragon
arrowed towards them, breathed its unholy Fire onto them all three, and danced
on the wind to see their deaths. I too watched, and saw the Swift Death take
them all ere they could be killed by that solid fire.

Three too many, and they were only the first.

I dove at the thing, dropped my great rock
onto its back, and was rewarded by seeing it lose height swiftly. However, I
had managed to get its attention. “Ready, as many as may, above the north end
of the lake,” I cried, riding up on the momentum of my dive and wheeling around
towards the water. I was pursued rapidly; the thing was fast, with those huge
wings, but it flew stupidly, trying to gain height in a straight line
regardless of the air currents. I rolled away left and into a shallow dive,
rising up again after two swift wingbeats, and felt the heat of its attack pass
behind me as I gained height. When I glanced back it was slowing down—its great
size and weight worked against it while climbing, despite its wingspan. Still,
it was coming directly towards me. In a straight line. Over the water.

Surely it was not that stupid?

There again, I would take any advantage I
could get.

I went into another dive, much steeper this
time, straight at the surface of the lake—and pulled up, for the Black Dragon
was no longer behind me. I had hoped that it would pursue me, that its obvious
unfamiliarity with flight would betray it to simple manoeuvres, but no, it had
turned away towards the northwestern shore, towards where Varien and his
company of Gedri stood.

It also became apparent that even Naikenna had
not taken complete account of the bone-deep hatred of the Dhrenagan for the
Demonlord. Some, it is true, had barely noted the passage of time, but a few
now come back to the world yet remembered being trapped, voiceless and alone,
all down the long centuries. The death of their three comrades struck deep, and
for all that counsel and reason might urge, our instincts incline us to
physical battle.

The moment it was clear that the Black Dragon
was not blindly pursuing me, a large group massed above it and all loosed their
burden of stone at once. Some missed, but many struck their target, and it was
forced down nearly to the surface of the water. So near, so near—

Then, of a sudden, I saw that six of the
Restored were not leaving this to chance. They fell on the beast, all of them,
from a great height, and like Treshak were trapped. Also like Treshak, they
forced the creature down by their sheer weight. The moment those of my Kindred
touched the thing, they began to burn, but they did not choose the Swift Death
until the whole mass of them fell into the cold waters of the lake with a great
hiss and a cloud of steam. The waters closed over them all, and boiled at the
spot where they had fallen. I felt in my deep heart the sighs of the Restored,
as they welcomed the Swift Death once their task was done.