Return of the Guardian-King (71 page)

He turned to look at her in astonishment. “What is wrong with them? Madam, we have a dragon outside breathing fire at us, the Esurhite army fast on its way, and a massive earthquake has nearly brought the walls of our sanctuary down upon us.”

“But it didn’t,” she said. “We are safe here.”

“Well, ma’am, I’m sorry to say that you are the only one among us who believes that.”

She frowned down at the terrified throng and was just about to clap for their attention when her eyes fixed upon a tall, dark-haired man moving among them, touching now this one, now that—just a hand on the shoulder, a brush of the hand, a tap of the finger. He seemed to feel her eyes upon him, for he glanced up at her, and she saw the gold scaling flash across his cheekbones, and as his dark eyes met hers, they turned golden, the pupils elongating into draconian slits.

Outrage burned in her, and she started down the stairs to confront him, stopping only a few steps later as she realized that was precisely what he wished her to do. She’d confront him; then he would use those honeyed words, that marvelous voice, lace some truth into his lies, use his undeniable appeal to guide the people even more firmly into their fear, make her look stupid, and probably leave her confused and doubting, to boot. And he would love her outrage. To know that he had succeeded in provoking her . . . that would be his victory.

No. You had it right before,
she told herself.
Just ignore him. They will not
change their minds even if you stand up and tell them
.

So she went back up the stairs, stepped to the edge of the platform, and called the people to listen to her. “I’ve come to tell you that King Abramm has returned and that he has won. The Shadow is breaking up over the plain and soon will be blown away from Deveren Dol, as well. The beast that is outside”—and here she looked directly at Tiris where he stood among her people—“cannot harm us unless we allow it to. Its greatest weapon is the fear it seeks to build in us. But I tell you now, it is the last desperate ploy of the defeated. King Abramm has returned. Right and good have won. We are free even now.”

Tiris smiled up at her, but she sensed the ire behind it. Then his eyes flared like gold disks, and he moved among the people, who now began to speak to one another, quietly at first but with growing emphasis and ire. Snatches of their words emerged from the general incoherent rumble:

“She’s insane!”

“The strain has driven her mad.”

“Abramm’s
dead
! When will she finally believe that?”

“Belthre’gar is swarming up the river! Nothing can stop him. Look at all this mist.”

Finally a stout, red-faced woman stepped forth from Tiris’s side and cried angrily, “O Queen, I think you lie to us. There is no victory! Fannath Rill has fallen, or you’d not have fled. And now that it has, it’s only a matter of time before they come here. And because of you, they’ll kill us all.”

Tiris glanced casually over his shoulder and smiled at Maddie. Behind him a blond man stepped up beside the woman and took up her complaint. “Aye, why didn’t you stay there and meet your death with dignity? Why did you have to drag all the rest of us down with you?”

“No one has been dragged down,” she said. “The battle of Fannath Rill has been won. As the dragon’s presence here proves.”

“Oh, I don’t know,” said Tiris himself now. “Why would you think that? It seems to me the dragon’s presence proves exactly the opposite. If Abramm has won—and how you would know he was even fighting is a mystery— wouldn’t the dragon be dead?”

She stared at him and felt his laughter, for she’d fallen into exactly what she had intended to avoid—she’d started talking to him, and already he was twisting everything around.
Eidon, please, get him out of here. I can ignore him,
but these others cannot. I am not great enough to stand against him, but you are.
So, please—

Turn and walk away, my daughter. Leave him to me . . . .

Father Eidon?

The thought did not come again, nor did she ask, she merely gave Tiris a little smile and turned away, heading for the tower stair at the back of the landing. She’d not even reached the archway when the air fluttered about her as with an upheaval in the warp and woof of reality. Behind her the room erupted, people shrieking and scrambling to get away as a burst of wind whooshed around her and something came to rest at the landing’s edge directly behind her. At her side, her guards were backed against the walls framing the archway, staring at it in abject terror. Even Captain Channon, ever so mindful of his duty, had forgotten it in his distress.

Tiris, it seemed, had shown his true form at last.

She felt his immensity in a strange displacement of space, and in the way great whooshes of foul breath washed rhythmically around her with his every exhalation, hot on the back of her neck, blowing tendrils of hair around her face. He wanted her to turn and look at him, but she would not.

“You see?” she said to Channon after a time. “If he could flame me now, he would have.”

“Do not confuse forebearance with inability, my flower!”

She ignored him. “But he can’t. We are covered by the Light, we are covered by the promises of Abramm and Eidon, and we will stay in our fortress until Abramm comes.”

“If Abramm is coming, why is the Shadow still here?” asked Channon.

She looked at her guardsman and was struck by the image of dragons hovering northeast of the castle, flapping their wings as if they were fanning a flame. Or was it the Shadow they fought to keep from slipping away?

She smiled as she realized that was exactly what they were doing. Trying to keep it here, trying to hold it here just long enough. Oh yes, he was definitely coming.

Excitement welled up within her, and she laughed aloud.

Behind her, the dragon snorted.

“Turn and face me, woman. I command it.”

She ignored him and laughed again. “You see? He cannot do a thing.”

Suddenly the beast behind her let loose a blast of hot air so fierce it sent her staggering. The ululation of its cry was deafening as it launched itself off the balcony and shot upward through the Great Room’s wooden roof, burning it away with a burst of flame as it went.

CHAPTER

38

Abramm’s headlong tumble slowed. Something pressed against his feet, and he found himself standing on another weed-grown plaza ringed by broken-off columns of stone in a grassy mountain valley that looked like Seven Peaks. The little man, having exited the corridor ahead of him, turned now to look over his shoulder. His pale eyes fixed on Abramm and widened as he turned to face him fully.

It was Gillard. As he’d been since the morwhol had taken most of his life and substance. Except for the two scars running down the left side of his face. . . . He looked at Abramm as if he couldn’t believe his eyes. Then his mouth opened in a soundless wail and he fell to his knees, his face as full of grief as of fear.

The ground lurched under Abramm’s feet and the ragged columns waved like stalks of grass. Then darkness flooded around him as great blocks of stone tumbled down on every side, crashing into a massive pan of scarlet flames that appeared out of nowhere. So did the white-robed guardians running hither and thither in the chaos. Abramm’s eyes fixed on those of an old man hung on a whipping rack before him. Simon? The man and the pan did not seem to be in the same place exactly, but near each other.

The man stared back at him, eyes blank with pain. Then he blinked and frowned with recognition as above them a domed ceiling collapsed. Abramm escaped on emerald winds shot through more and more with white, until it was all white, all Light, all Eidon himself.

The light faded. Pressure bore against his soles again, and he stood once more in the ruin outside Fannath Rill. Nothing remained of the green corridor but a smoldering black spot on the uneven, grass-invaded pavement. The arcade’s remains lay flat, splayed outward across the grassy basin as if an explosion had emanated from the corridor. In every direction up the basin’s gradual slopes, pillars, wagons, tents—even men—sprawled in the same outward-pointing array. And as Abramm extended his senses outward he caught up with the great wind ripping over the land, tearing away the darkness as it went. He saw the dragon, flipped head over tail, wings tangling awkwardly around it, all grip on the air lost. It was blown northward, it and all its subordinates, hurled out of the realm like autumn leaves.

He sensed his wife turning toward him, blooming with the delight of recognition. He smiled.
Soon, my love . . .

“Sire?”

Trap and Rolland approached him, picking their way through the tangle of bodies, their clothing torn and stained with dirt and blood, and pocked with tiny burn holes. They still gripped their bared, blood-soaked blades, eyes startlingly white in faces darkened with soot and marred with cuts and bruises and blisters from the falling embers. As they stopped before him he saw their exhaustion and realized they had not deserted him after all, but had been covering his back as much as they could, though in the chaos he’d never seen them. He felt a surge of gratitude and affection for both of them.

“Are you all right?” Rolland asked, his eyes drawing away from Abramm to survey the bodies piled around them.

“Yes,” Abramm said. He glanced at Trap, who was staring at the darkened disk where the corridor had been. Its diameter was easily the length of a horse.

His friend’s gaze came back to his. “I thought for sure it was a trap he’d set for you.”

“It was,” Abramm said. He moved from the center of the ruin, treading carefully between the bodies across the smoking battlefield back toward the city gate, now a ragged, soot-stained hole in the wall. Behind it bright flames leaped beneath billows of black smoke. More of the dragon’s work. . . .

By then news of his presence had spread, and men came toward him from all directions—his men. The soldiers he had gathered as he’d come across the realm: exhausted, bleeding, and filthy, but glowing with triumph. A man on a bay horse picked his way among them, leading a tall gray stallion behind him. Warbanner . . . whose neck had not been slashed after all, merely stained with Belthre’gar’s blood. People emerged from the city in a weary stream to crowd around Abramm in rising jubilation.

It was Borlain who brought him Warbanner, and he came with news of how after the dragon had killed half his own soldiers, the rest had either turned on themselves or fled. Most of the Broho had fled even earlier and could not be found. He feared they had slipped into the city to do more mischief when folk least expected it.

The stream of people emerging from the city had doubled, and it included a cadre of mounted noblemen. As Abramm swung onto Warbanner’s back and surveyed the field of victory, his heart fell. For he saw there was much work to be done in Fannath Rill—work that required a king’s presence—and seeing as Chesedh had no king right now, it was a role he would have to play. So, once again, he could not go to her just yet. But he had learned nothing in these last two years if not how to accept Eidon’s will with grace, and he contented himself with the pleasure of knowing that eventually their reunion would happen.

Gillard fell spinning and tumbling, closing his eyes and sinking into that place of semiconsciousness as he’d been taught, feeling the Other rise up to enclose him. He sensed its satisfaction with something, and then through it, his brother coming after him. He had drawn Abramm into the corridor after him, and that was good, for the Other meant to kill him, to take him where he did not want to go. To—

He didn’t know what it would do. The notions tumbled too swiftly through his brain to hold on to any of them. Finally he stopped falling as solid stone pressed beneath his feet and he stepped out of the corridor into the central plaza of Tuk-Rhaal, where he had started. The great crowd of Kiriathan soldiers that had been here two days ago was gone, transported like him to the Fairiron Plain outside Fannath Rill. Most were likely dead now.

One of the shaven-headed priests who supported and maintained the corridor and who had been kneeling nearby now stood and started toward him. At the same moment something hissed from the corridor behind him, and he leaped forward, his skin puckering with alarm. Embarrassed to have startled right in front of the priest, he made himself stop and turn back, and was horrified to see the emerald column now shot through with streaks of white. A figure had taken shape in it, one about to step out of the light and into the reality of this place. A figure he recognized.

Abramm.

The green cleared and the white light illumined his brother’s face—the blue eyes, the level brows, the hawkish features so like those of their father and their long-dead brothers, and those white scars raking down the side of his cheek. Fear mingled with a strange grief as he looked into Abramm’s eyes. His only living brother. The man with whom he had more in common than any other in all the world. Come back to him at last.

Come back to kill him.

He fell to his knees, weeping. They could have been friends. They could have been as the brothers they were. They could have ruled together. Abramm as his counselor . . . but he’d never understood that. Never wanted to take the second position. Now he would kill Gillard with his own hand. Because of that wretched shield on his chest. Because of that monstrous orb that put it there. Because of the dying, useless, vicious god he served.