The Kingdoms of Evil (33 page)

"Put your hand out!" someone bellowed, "to cast your shadow and catch the death …blast it!"

The king's eyes followed Freetrick as he toppled into the shaft, and fell.

"Why?" Freetrick whirled around. Pale, evil faces grinned or glowered at him from all directions. All directions except the direction of the opening into the volcano, of course. "Why did you do that? There was no need!" Lightning lit across Freetrick's black eyes as a wind reached down from the Maelstrom above to claw at his white hair. The red light streaming upward from the volcano pulsed and flared in time with his racing heart. "No need!" Screamed Freetrick. "What is
wrong
with you people?"

He saw that his court was grinning at him.

Then they reached out, as one, with hands and with necromancy, and shoved Freetrick backward, into the hole.

Chapter the
Ninth

In which the Ultimate Fiend loses his Temper

Madene flew.

Maidencraft carried her through the air in long horizontal leaps, as fast as an arrow through the pine savanna of eastern Virgin Soil.

Madene could not smile against the cold wind that buffeted her face, but her heart soared with joy as the fallen leaves flashed by under her. The air that rushed around her was chill and pure, scented by the ponderosa pines that stood black and proud against the sky, piercingly blue and wide enough to fall into forever.

Madene spun round thrust off again in a shallow arc that would propel her another hundred yards through the air.

Madene had only been there a week, but she already knew she wanted to stay in Virgin Soil forever. She loved the wide open sky, she loved the smell of the air after rain, when the ponderosas released their resin. She loved her sisters, who treated her with respect and taught her the Craft of a Warrior Maiden. Nowhere else, and at no other time, had Madene felt so cherished, nor had she ever felt the purpose she had here, as a novice in the order of Deusca Maw.

The tall slim brush of a pine rose ahead of her and, as she had been taught, Madene spread her arms and banked, the fingers of her right hand brushing between clumps of bunchgrass as she swooped in an arc around the tree. As her body slid past the trunk, she planted her feet against it. The rough, jig-saw puzzle of the bark surface pressed into the soles of her moccasins as she kicked and she shot off like an arrow.

Quick bounces off two more trees corrected her course, shaking cones down from their branches and disturbing flocks of waxwings that rose and swirled, then settled back to their perches. Madene touched down, leapt up, then spun in the air to watch the elegant little birds before gravity overcame her Craft and she began to drift downward.

How many times had she wanted to do something like this in The Rationalist Union? To observe nature from a perspective other than that of a plodding hiker?

Madene glared at the blurring grass before her eyes. Why had her grandmother left this place? Why leave behind such power, such inner peace, such beauty? It was a question Madene would likely never be able to answer.

Ahoo ahoo.
The bright tone of a Maiden’s horn snapped Madene out of her reverie. Two notes...danger! A call for aid! And the call came from the southeast, right where Istain and Selene were supposed to be. Madene fumbled in the leather bandolier that crossed over her chest. There, in the pocket near her hip, was a silver-plated conch shell the size of her hand. She kicked off the ground, rising as she grasped the shell and brought it to her lips to answer.

Ahooo—
The bugle rang off the land below. Selene and Istain would hear it and respond. Unless whatever trouble they had found made answering impossible. But the answer came, and Madene looked down as she fell to see the trail she had to follow. Madene stooped, dove, and in truth flubbed the kick off the ground pretty badly. But a bounce off a tree gave her back her speed and sent her off in the right direction.

The path rushing under Madene was a crude one, more substantial than a game trail only because of the deep tracks left by the horses that travelled over it and the little bridges set over the occasional raspberry-choked stream. This far east, Madene couldn’t expect much more.

As the forests had thinned, so had human presence on the land, until only a few crumbling piles of stone stood to remind the traveler that anyone had ever lived here. It was to one such ruined fortress that High Maiden Kadene marched, from there to strike into the heart of The Kingdoms of Evil and push the Shadow out of these lands entirely.

Another bugle call-and-response took Madene across another stream—or perhaps it was the same one, looping around. She bounced over the reaching raspberry canes and swam through the crackling branches of cottonwoods and aspens. Whenever the road forked, Madene would spy-hop, leaping up to treetop level and bugling for Selene and Istain.

Madene made her way deeper into the border land between Virgin Soil and the Shadow of the Kingdoms of Evil. The land changed as she did, the spaces between trees widening. That in itself was unsurprising—Madene was, after all, moving steadily deeper into the rain shadow of the mountains —but something was wrong. The bunch grass, which should have grown thickly with no trees to shade it, was still patchy and short, leaving ever larger areas of scabby, mostly bare earth.

Madene frowned at the ground as she flew over it. She had seen burned areas coming down from the mountains, but these were different: the tracks of earth urchins.

She didn’t see any of the animals themselves. She was after all looking for Selene and Istain, and they had been sent out here to hunt the vermin. Even so, the bare tracks the little monsters had chewed into the soil made her nervous. Madene bugled.

She waited, hanging in the air, but no reply came. Madene bugled again, more stridently, and although another bugle answered from somewhere back in the direction she had come, she heard nothing from Selene.

Madene’s lips moved in a soundless curse, and she stooped to the ground. In her haste, she came down wrong and fell onto her hands and knees, but soon she was running, then leaping, then flying again. What was keeping Selene from answering? Was she lying poisoned by an urchin? Or had she run afoul of some monster from the Kingdoms of Evil? Maybe Istain had taken away her bugle?

Then Madene saw the horse. It was tied to a half-bare aspen at the edge of another small stream, and Madene had to leap up far past the tree’s tip to bleed off her momentum. She waited, furious, for several long seconds while she slowly drifted down low enough to get a good look at the animal. And yes,
there
, was a large leather sack, and there was a long trident, urchin hunting equipment. Selene and Istain had been here.

Madene leapt into the air again, not so high this time, and bugled again for her friends. There was no answer, but there was a commotion in the uppermost branches of another aspen upstream. Was that the sound of raised voices? Madene grabbed the tree nearest her and swung herself through the air in that direction.

With nothing solid to push against, Madene couldn’t make distance across the treetops as fast as she could over ground, but she still moved faster than a running man could have. She half-jumped-half-swam toward the source of the noises she heard.

Madene’s ears strained as she swung and jumped and scrambled through the branches. There were raised voices, shouting, and over that, a kind of chittering, yowling, like angry cats. Then something streaked across Madene’s vision and she reflexively reached out to grab the nearest branch and stop herself.

Something large, furry, and shrieking scrabbled at her hand. Madene yelped in surprise as the creature swarmed up her arm, and then cried out in terror as a tiny, yowling,
human
face thrust itself at her. She had a blurred impression of yellow, furious eyes, black skin wrinkled and tiny white teeth bared in hate, a little fist raised to strike—

Madene’s eyes squeezed shut involuntarily, but her ears heard the
woosh
and the hairs on her skin rippled in the parting air. Something hot and wet splashed across her face.

Madene fell.

***

Freetrick fell upward through the column of red light. Under him, light from the magma shaft of Castle Clouds-Gather shone through a hole in the black stone platform like an angry and sinister sun.

The red lake of lava was boiling now, directly under Freetrick's dangling feet. The light it cast outlined Freetrick's body, casting his shadow onto the whirling Maelstrom above. That was the hole Freetrick had been pushed into, he remembered. He should have fallen to his death, like the poor exiled king. But instead the red light had pushed him upward
and Freetrick had
become
the Ultimate Fiend
. Freetrick wondered if falling into the lava might not be preferable. It would, at least, be quick.

His subjects were standing now in a circle around him, about twenty feet away and another ten downwards. There were DeMacabre, Feerix, and his bodyguard, Skystarke, looking respectively calculating, murderous, and nightmarish.
I can't trust any of
them
,
thought Freetrick, they'd kill me in a heartbeat.
Bloodbyrn?

There she was, standing in the middle of a retinue of other women
, wo
men in revealing leather and metal, all gleaming spikes, straps, and bulging pale flesh. The sight worried him much more than the blood that dripped from Feerix's hands, and DeMacabre's mouth.

"Mr. Skree?" Freetrick called, but when he opened his mouth there was a clap of thunder and the words were lost. "Mr. Skree!" He called again, "Where are you?"

"Are you afraid of falling, my lord?"

Freetrick turned in the air. "Bloodbyrn!"

She stood at his side, staring at him with those wide, amber eyes. "Would you stare so, my lord?" She said, and for the first time, Freetrick realized that Bloodbyrn was topless. "Beware, oh king, of those who follow." Her breasts felt very soft when he reached out to stroke them.

Freetrick groaned. Bloodbyrn was reaching between his legs, and when her mouth came open, he saw it was full of silver fangs. "
And the Center of the Storm is the Sword,
" she whispered as her fingers closed around him.

"Oh," said Freetrick, "I'm totally dreaming."

***

Electricity crackled as black eyes opened and the twelfth Ultimate Fiend of the Kingdoms of Evil awoke in his black, lava-hearted citadel. Far above his apartments, thunder crashed.

"Strike it out," mumbled Freetrick. He felt under his ear. There was an inkwell down there and a parchment glued to his cheek.

Freetrick moaned and closed his eyes. After a moment of internal debate he placed a hand beside his head and peeled his face off the surface of his desk.

It had been eight days since his coronation and the striking crazy-ass ritual still was still giving him nightmares. That and Bloodbyrn, of course, but what had that last part been about? Something about a sword?

"Mmm…bluh," Freetrick tried to shake the remaining images of topless Bloodbyrn out of his head, then winced as he felt all the vertebrae in his neck crackle together.

He had been practicing Necromancy with Feerix all week, a combination of drilling the forms and studying that had left him aching in body and mind. And it didn't help that he couldn't work any magic here without wracking moral anguish. Or tell anyone he wouldn't kill anyone without looking like a sissy. In their last practice, even the sacrificial victim had felt sorry for him. It had been an exhausting and humiliating three hours of mock-battle, after which Freetrick had stumbled back to his apartments and passed out onto his paperwork. And thinking of which...

Freetrick looked down at the document he had peeled off his face.

"Vile Council Speech. Version 9."

He swore.

The parchment was blotched with arrows, X's, crossings-out, and increasingly frantic notations as Freetrick's research through Skrea's records had progressed. Notes like
where do we get our income
at the top of the page became
how the hell are these laws enforced
as Freetrick read tax records, then
does ANYONE do their job??
and
monsters eat WHAT?

There were circles with phrases in them like "no useful production," arrows leading to other boxes like "no food" and "no taxes," with other arrows that eventually led to a large triangle sketched around the single word "COLLAPSE." There were an awful lot of arrows leading to that triangle. The ones that weren't pointed to another triangle, in which he had written "INVASION."