Lonen's War (15 page)

He didn’t miss the way the young king, his
adviser, Folcwita Lapo, and Prince Yar all exchanged glances that
radiated smug satisfaction, even through the blandness of their
masks. Most of the Bárans, however, looked confused and uneasy. As
did many of city guard, who drew their weapons.

Shouts turned to screams.

Ion surged to his feet, his chair falling
from the force of it, King Archimago a beat behind him. “You betray
our truce!” Ion roared.

King Nat stood also, facing them down the
long table. “You attacked our city. Are we not meant to defend
ourselves?”

“You are a people without honor,” King
Archimago gritted out. “We should never have accepted your
surrender.”

“A surrender offered under duress,” Nat
snapped back, “by an untried girl with no mask and no authority to
commit Bára to any treaty.”

“She is a princess,” Lonen said, before he
thought better. He would never live down that decision. “Your
sister.”

“You know nothing of us, barbarian.” Nat’s
sneer oozed from behind the mask. “And you never will because
you’ll all die under Trom fire.”

“We waste time here.” Ion signaled his man,
sending quick orders. “Seal them in. No Báran leaves. King
Archimago, we must move you to safe quarters. Lonen, Arnon—with
me.”

They jogged behind him, leaving a small crew
of men to guard the city elders. At least they’d gathered
conveniently in one room. The Destrye could ensure they’d remain
there. All but the high priestess of their temple. He’d last seen
her sitting on that bench by the great chasm, apparently
meditating. Where had she gone?

“I’ll stay with you,” King Archimago said,
drawing his great sword. “I won’t cower behind my sons.”

None of them argued. The king’s word was law
and they could not defy it at that moment any more than they ever
could.

“What’s the situation?” Lonen asked.

“Monsters,” Ion replied, terse words shot
through puffs of breath. “Attacking from the sky.”

Indeed they were.

At the gut-watering sight, only hard years
of training made Lonen continue his headlong rush to battle the
impossible. He recognized the creatures, however—giant versions of
the dragonlet he’d spied with Oria. He still hadn’t mentioned it to
his father and brothers, though their men had seen it also and
could corroborate his story. On top of everything, it had
seemed…too much.

And not relevant until that moment.

Batwinged and bellowing fire, the dragons
roared through the sky, barreling between towers and roasting
Destrye and Bárans alike.

“Why would they call upon a savior that
kills their own people?” Arnon cried out the question as they
skidded to a stop at the edge of the chasm surrounding the palace.
The confection of a bridge that Lonen had walked over less than an
hour before had disappeared, cutting off the palace from the rest
of the city. At whose behest?

“We cornered them,” King Archimago said with
weary resignation. “They saw no other way out. Desperate men take
desperate measures.”

“We could have come to an agreement,” Arnon
protested. “We only wanted to be sure they wouldn’t come after us
again.”

“He’s too young to be king.” Their father
shook his head. “I should have seen it before this. He’ll sacrifice
his people to retain his pride, to keep his grip on a throne he
never earned. His people have become my responsibility now—unless
we all perish together.”

Helpless to do anything—not that any of the
Destrye within the walls could do much to battle the giant
monsters—the four of them watched from the brink of the chasm as
people ran, some to the safety of the stone buildings, some in
flames to collapse in heaps, burning into ash. Much as he wanted to
look up to Oria’s tower, Lonen forced himself not to, to bear grim
witness to the destruction and terror before him. After a while it
became clear that the beasts never crossed the chasm that
surrounded the palace, though they could easily have flown over.
Nor did they cross outside the walls, save for one section, toward
the high mountains, where more streamed in.

If she was in her tower, Oria would be more
or less safe. Along with her brothers and the others who’d so
thoughtlessly sacrificed their people to destroy their enemy.

Within a short time, nobody remained outside
shelter, the city as deserted as that first morning Ion and his men
had walked them through. Less so, because no Destrye warriors could
be seen. Not alive, at any rate.

A winged beast flew up, hovered, then landed
on the far rim of the chasm. It looked like a snake with its
unwinking black eyes, but with hind feet and leathery bat wings
affixed. Talons the height of a man dug into the edge of the
precipice, rocks falling way as they crumbled beneath its grip.
Perched on its neck where it narrowed above the wing joints sat a
creature that, while human in shape, bore no resemblance to any man
or woman Lonen had ever seen.

The dragon creature snaked out its long
neck, pointed chin coming at them like a spear. The four of them
scrambled back, weapons drawn. Foolishness, in truth, as the dragon
could have roasted them where they stood. Instead it laid its
triangular snout on the ground, opaque eyes fixed on them. The
man-thing on its back stood and walked with preternatural grace
along the sinuous neck. As it grew closer, more detail resolved.
And yet Lonen still struggled to make sense of what he saw, even as
the hair rose on the back of his neck.

It looked like a corpse that had been dried
in the sun, skin shrunken over bones. Moving with a strangely
articulated movement, almost insectile, it possessed no room in its
angular body for the organs of a normal man. Black lidless eyes
gazed unseeing out of the sockets of an overlarge, mouthless skull.
Lonen had thought nothing could be more of an abomination than the
golems. Another lesson learned.

“Arill save us,” Arnon breathed, horror in
his tone. “What is that thing?”

“If it lives,” Ion grated out, “it can die,
like any living thing.”

It walked precisely, the way the forest cats
do, one foot aligned exactly in front of the other, following a
straight line between the giant lizard’s eyes and down its snout,
onto the rock of the palace promontory. Ion could very well be
wrong, as the thing didn’t seem to be living, beyond the fact that
it apparently moved on its own initiative. A puppet on strings did
the same. No expression showed on its smooth face, unnervingly like
the masks the sorcerers and priestesses wore. A deliberate
imitation of these monsters? If so, the Bárans were even sicker,
more twisted than Lonen had believed.

King Archimago stepped forward, crowned by a
wreath of bronzed oak leaves glittering in the sun, sword high, the
polished steel bright. An impressive sight, though Lonen preferred
the solid wooden haft of his iron-bladed axe. This creature could
well be magically animated, like the golems, which meant the coarse
iron would do far more than the king’s sword.

“Halt!” King Archimago commanded, in the
steel tones that had left more than one hardened warrior leaking
into his boots. “This land belongs to the people of Destrye. You
trespass uninvited. State your purpose here.”

That was the king and father Lonen had
always known—brave, commanding, the sun of his universe. With
righteous wrath fueling him, King Archimago no longer looked old or
worn. He blazed with glorious purpose. Protecting even the Bárans
he found himself reluctantly responsible for. Lonen’s heart swelled
with pride. Despite all the terror and despair, the world also held
honorable men who stood up for the good and the right.

The desiccated thing continued forward,
expressionless and undeterred, easily a head taller than any of
them. Nothing more than skin stretched over bone, it walked
smoothly up to King Archimago.

Onto the point of his sword.

And kept going.

Somewhere Ion shouted a warning. Lonen sent
slow messages to his muscles to raise the axe.

All moved as in a dream. The man-thing
continued forward as if the sword didn’t exist, the metal slipping
through him like a hot knife through grease, the point emerging out
its back. The moment spun out forever, a long, sticky summer’s
afternoon. And yet Lonen couldn’t lift his axe in time to stop
it.

Like a mother lifting her hand to test the
temperature of her child’s brow, like a lover caressing his
beloved’s cheek, the thing stroked spidery fingers over King
Archimago’s face.

And watched him fall.

King Archimago crumpled into a boneless pile
of empty flesh, the sword and oak leaf wreath clanging down with
him. Lonen’s axe arced through the air, but Ion had been moving
first.

Always first to defend, to protect, Ion
swung his iron broadsword, releasing the battle cry of the Destrye
warriors.

It went through the thing as if it didn’t
exist. A brush of light fingers and Ion, too, collapsed.

Somehow a sense of self-preservation kicked
through Lonen’s wild horror and he checked his swing.

“No!” he shouted, his voice taking up Ion’s
still-echoing warrior cry as Arnon lunged past him.

O
ria flung herself through
the doors to the garden terrace and pelted for the balustrade,
gripping the stone with shaking fingers as her mind caught up with
the sight that greeted her.

Derkesthai filled the skies—only they were
hundreds of times Chuffta’s size, and darkly shaded instead of
white. When they weren’t silhouetted against the sun, their deep
metallic colors gleamed bronze, copper and gold. Their fire,
though, blazed the same green as Chuffta’s, and even more lethally,
incinerating on a proportionally grander scale.

One swooped below her tower, broad-winged
and chasing a squad of city guard who ran for the bridge to the
palace. The men nearly made it across before the bellowing fire
that chased them—so beautiful, like leaves fluttering in a cooling
breeze—immolated them and the bridge, too. They plummeted into
Ing’s chasm, becoming floating ash as they fell, their death wails
rising up to Oria.

It took her to her knees, the bruising pain
of hitting the stones barely registering above the agony of so many
lives pouring through her, with all their desires, sorrows and
unspent wishes.

Chuffta landed on her shoulder, tail winding
over her sleeve to wrap around the bare skin at her wrist, the pain
receding. Not gone, but less intense, like the sun’s heat fading
behind a rare haze of clouds.

“
You can’t save them—at least spare
yourself the burden of suffering along with them.”

“Why?” The question sobbed out of her. She
laid her palms flat against the softly gritty carved balustrade,
peering through the openings, aghast at the scene playing out
below, Bárans and Destrye alike running before their attackers,
then vanishing into clouds of ash. “If Nat called to them for help,
why are they attacking
us
, too?”

“
That’s why calling upon the Trom is a
dangerous proposition, why the temple warns against it. They follow
their own code. Once invited, they are as a beast released from
confinement—killing indiscriminately.”

“So they’ll destroy us all. After everything
we’ve suffered to try to make a peace, we’ll simply all die at the
hands of your brethren.”

“
Only distant brethren and those you see
serve the Trom. We are similar, yes, as you are to the Destrye, but
even more unlike. There are tales from long ago of a Báran mating
and producing children with a Destrye. A derkesthai could no more
mate with the Trom steeds than a Báran cat could with its larger,
wilder cousins.”

Obscurely that comforted her, that her wise
and gentle Familiar wouldn’t someday grow into the monsters that
terrorized a city full of defenseless people. Angry as she was at
the Destrye for bringing this blight upon Bára, she couldn’t revel
in their agonizing deaths. When Lonen dashed out from the palace
entrance, recognizable even from her great height by the massive
double-headed axe he carried, she cried out an involuntary
warning.

A useless one, as he couldn’t possibly hear
her. Three other men accompanied him, one wearing some sort of
golden crown and carrying a bright silver sword. Like the other
Destrye, they’d abandoned their heavy cloaks, likely as a
concession to the Báran heat, but still wore their furred vests and
leather-strapped boots. They seemed as stunned as she, watching
both peoples die in great numbers. Though she looked for them to
appear, her brothers did not emerge, nor did any of the rest of the
council.

She prayed that they remained under
shelter.

The immense derkesthai never crossed Ing’s
Chasm that isolated the palace and temple, however, as if an
invisible wall prevented them.

“
It could be the temple’s magic acts as a
barrier, though I’m not sure.”

How could Chuffta remain so calmly
speculative?

“I don’t even understand how that would
work,” she muttered, mostly to herself, stewing with
frustration.

“
Probably one of the many secrets they
intended to teach you.”

“Information that could be critical to know
if we’re not going to be incinerated. But no.” She was as far from
attaining
hwil
as she’d ever been in her life—and never
likely to reach it under these conditions. The trials of the past
week dragged her emotionally to the opposite pole of where her mind
and spirit were meant to be for
hwil
. Instead of calm
detachment, she jangled with death energy and despair. She became
aware that her Familiar hadn’t replied and turned her head to look
at him. Chuffta also gazed at his giant cousins, soaring through
the sky, a pensive look in the quiet green of his eyes.
“Chuffta?”