The Curse of the Phoenix Crown Page 19

  Thoriol dismissed the servants and Sea Guard who sought to attend him as he made his way into the tower and mounted the steps to his chambers. He was weary, worn out from all the pomp and circumstance of his arrival.

  No, he corrected himself, scowling into the silvered mirror standing above the clamshell washbasin in his bedroom. It wasn’t ceremony and society that had worn him down. It was trying to smile and maintain a facade of cheer as he listened to everyone around him praising him, lauding him as the great hope of their city and the colonies. Every word, every gesture mocked him more cruelly than he could have believed possible. He had come to Tor Alessi with such a clear vision of what he had to do; now that he found so many ready to follow him, it made him question his motives and his plans.

  Who was he to lead anyone? The accident of blood and birth wasn’t enough. There needed to be more than that. He only had to think of his uncle Menlaeth, he who was crowned Caledor II, to know that birthright didn’t mean one was worthy of power.

  Thoriol turned away from the mirror and walked across the richly appointed room. He frowned when he saw a tattered old banner bearing the heraldry of Tor Caled hanging on one of the walls. What battle had the standard been recovered from, he wondered. What great deeds had Imladrik done that day?

  Glass-paned doors pivoted outwards at the prince’s touch, opening upon a broad balcony. From this height, he could look out across the waterfront and watch the ships returning to the harbour. Even now the docks were bustling with activity, gangs of stevedores helping to unload the supplies that had arrived along with Lady Kelsei’s warriors. On the point, a great lighthouse threw its brilliant beam out across the waters, beckoning any wayward fishermen or merchants landwards.

  Thoriol followed the path of the beam, but when it illuminated a patch of rock rising out beyond the mouth of the harbour, he found himself captivated. He walked to the edge of the balcony, hands closing tight about the railing. Leaning forwards, he kept his eyes focused in the direction of the rock, waiting for the beam to illuminate it once more.

  The light revealed a mouldering heap of burned, blackened armour, mail too small and stout to ever close about the body of an elf. The jumble of armour littered the rocky island, strewn in heaps and mounds, spilling into the waves slapping against the craggy shore. Sometimes a charred skull or bit of bone was thrown into sharp relief by the probing light.

  Caledor was wrong to think all the dragons had deserted Elthin Arvan. There was one who had remained, though the fact would hardly reassure the king. Ever since Prince Imladrik’s death, his steed Draukhain had refused any overture made by the asur. Even Lord Teranion and the other dragon riders had been unable to appeal to the enormous drake. Draukhain had lost its taste for the war when Imladrik died. In its place had arisen a savage and unstoppable thirst for revenge.

  Draukhain hunted on its own, ranging far and wide over the countryside. Thoriol heard the drake would sometimes be gone for months on end, then come flying back over the harbour, its claws filled with scorched dawi armour. It’d drop them on the spit of rock, piling them about the stone rising from the island’s centre. It was a stone the dragon had brought from far away, an obelisk that had been salvaged from the ruins of Oeragor. Those who had known the city before its fall said it was the first stone that had been raised there and upon it was chiselled the name of Imladrik and his title, Master of Dragons.

  The people of Tor Alessi thought of Draukhain as a loyal dog, mourning its master’s memory. Thoriol knew better than that. He might never have shared the dragonsong with a drake, but he knew the majesty of the creatures. Their minds were far beyond those of beasts, alien and strange to any kind of true understanding, even for the wisest of asur. Only the dragon riders came close to any kind of communion with them, and even then it was affectionate indulgence on the part of the dragon, not a true rapport among equals.

  Only two elves had ever been accepted by the dragons as equals. Caledor Dragontamer, who had walked through the mists of legend, and Imladrik, who had died on the end of a dwarfish axe.

  As he looked out upon the island, at the heaps of armour Draukhain had brought there, Thoriol felt ashamed. Everyone expected him to live up to his father’s memory, but how could he ever match the legacy of a hero who could move even a dragon to sorrow with his passing?

  ‘The dwarfs call him Uzku – the “Crawling Death” – because his wings are ruined and won’t let him soar high among the clouds.’ Lady Liandra stepped out from the room behind him. She looked much as he’d last seen her, almost two centuries ago. A little more weathered perhaps, some of the heat in her eyes dimmed by regret, but she was still the noblewoman he remembered, the one who’d ridden Draukhain back from Oeragor with his father’s corpse clutched in the dragon’s claws.

  Thoriol looked at her only briefly before returning his gaze to the island. ‘You were the last one he ever suffered to ride him,’ he said. ‘Is it so painful for them, when the link is severed?’

  Liandra joined him beside the rail, following his gaze out to the rock. ‘No,’ she said. ‘It is nothing like the pain we feel if we lose them. To them we are temporary, transitory things. They may become fond of us, feel sad when we are gone, but they know we aren’t enduring. Vranesh was fond of me, cared about me, but she didn’t love me.’ She pointed out to the morbid island. ‘He loved your father. That is why he stays, why he hunts the dwarfs. There’s an empty hole inside him where your father used to be. He’s trying to fill that emptiness the only way he can.’

  They were silent for many minutes, the cold sea breeze whipping about them, the briny tang of the harbour stinging their noses, the distant shouts of sailors and stevedores drifting up to them. ‘You bribed your way in, of course.’ Thoriol didn’t look at her when he made the statement.

  ‘It was the most discreet way to see you,’ Liandra confessed. ‘You are the lord of the hour and all eyes are on you right now. If I’d come to visit you openly, that information would have spread like dragon fire.’

  ‘It is easy to understand how that might become a scandal,’ Thoriol said. ‘My father’s mistress having a liaison with his son.’

  Liandra’s voice was strained when she replied to his jab. ‘I was thinking of the king’s spies.’

  Thoriol turned and glared at her. ‘Of course. Lady Liandra always conducts herself with propriety.’

  ‘If you expect me to apologise for loving your father, then you’ll be waiting until the Pale Queen beckons you into her halls,’ Liandra snapped back. ‘I came to visit you because I thought we shared a common purpose. I thought we had mutual ambitions.’

  ‘Perhaps we do,’ Thoriol conceded, ‘but that doesn’t make us friends.’

  ‘Nor does it have to,’ Liandra said. ‘Duty and purpose often draw enemies together. Our differences can’t be allowed to affect our obligations.’

  Thoriol nodded. ‘That much we can agree on.’ His expression became thoughtful for a moment, some of the hostility draining from his eyes. ‘You aren’t my enemy, Liandra,’ he said. ‘I don’t hate you the way I do the dawi or my uncle. I’m just… envious, I suppose. Envious of all those years when my father was taken from me and sent here, with you. Envious that you were there with him when he died.’ He turned and waved his hand out towards the island. ‘I’m envious that you were able to share that with him, that you were a dragon rider, like he was.’

  Thoriol shuddered as he turned and withdrew from the balcony. ‘I think I would have given anything to have made him so proud.’

  The spires and domes of Athel Toralien were glimmering in the last light of the fading sun when Lord Ilendril left his luxurious chambers and hurried by hidden stairs and secret corridors into the cellars far beneath the roots of his tower. The message his steward had brought to him was one he’d been anxiously awaiting for weeks. Now, at last, he could allow his worries to abate. In just a few moments he would have what he’d co
veted for so long. Another concealed door, a final flight of steps and he was down in the vault. He barely noticed the other elves who awaited him, his interest at once settling upon the dusty, road-worn figure of Ashelir.

  Ilendril clapped his hands together in delight when Ashelir threw back the silken covering and exposed the long, curved length of bone. The highborn’s hand slid down the side of the object, savouring the rough caress of its pitted surface. With an expression almost of rapture, he turned and looked at Vithrein.

  ‘Well?’ Ilendril demanded.

  The gaunt mage closed his eyes, his lips moving in a whispered incantation. A chill swept through the room, a crypt-like cellar deep beneath Ilendril’s tower in Athel Toralien. The lanterns flickered as unseen forces pulled at the flames. Rats and spiders scuttled off into the shadows, repulsed by the aethyric stirrings around them.

  Vithrein’s shoulders sagged. He seemed to wilt into the chair. His attendants, mages formerly in the service to the late Lord Caerwal, hurried forwards to help him. Vithrein waved them back, somehow summoning the strength to give them a reassuring nod. Gradually, he lifted his head and faced his patron.

  ‘The beast lives. Ancient and powerful,’ Vithrein said. ‘There are some in Ulthuan mightier, but few in Elthin Arvan that are its equal.’

  Ilendril’s face beamed with delight. Soon, soon a long-­cherished dream would be realised. He turned away from the recuperating Vithrein. Snatching up the curved bone from the table, he marched across the dank crypt to the steel cage resting against one of the walls.

  The inmate of that cage stirred as she saw the asur lord draw close. The hate that shone in her eyes brought a cruel laugh from Ilendril’s lips, the sardonic mockery of one who hears a snake hiss at him and knows he is safe because he’s already pulled its fangs.

  Drutheira was thin and wasted, her hair matted and torn. A simple shift covered her pallid body, clinging to her like a funeral shroud. The crude garment did nothing to conceal the garish glyphs that had been tattooed across her flesh. Hands and feet, forehead and breast, all were marked by needle and ink. Wards of great potency drawn by a loremaster of Hoeth, the tattoos served to blunt the witch’s magical abilities, to cut her off from her aethyric attunement.

  ‘I will soon need your services again,’ Ilendril told his prisoner. ‘How much torture will it take to make you submit this time, I wonder?’ He glanced over at Ashelir. ‘I was impressed at the restraint your son displayed the last time. Perhaps I will give him a freer hand.’

  Drutheira laughed at Ilendril and at the fury she saw in Ashelir’s face. ‘No torture this time, asur dog. I’ll be happy to speed you to your doom.’ She lifted her hand as far as her shackles would let her and pointed to the thing in Ilendril’s grasp. ‘The creature that belongs to will kill you. You are a fool to even think you can command it. It will kill you, Ilendril, but it will make you know terror first.’

  Ilendril sneered at the druchii’s threats. ‘Instruct Vithrein as you did before. Work your magic, witch. When the dragons are broken, I may even find it in me to be merciful.’

  Drutheira laughed again. The druchii were a people alien to the concept of mercy. In Ilendril, she recognised a kindred spirit.

  She also saw an elf racing headlong to embrace his own doom.

  Chapter Ten

  Blood of the Dragon

  393rd year of the reign of Caledor II

  High above the vastness of Elthin Arvan, Lord Ilendril watched as the sprawling greenery of Loren Lacoi stretched away across the horizon. In the distance he could see the sombre, brooding peaks of the Arluii, what the dwarfs called the Grey Mountains. From this height, the broad Anurein river was just a narrow ribbon of silver snaking its way across the landscape. If he strained his eyes, he fancied he could see the farms and vineyards supporting Sith Rionnasc away to the north. Of course, he had no business in the north this day. It was into the dwarf-held south that his destiny led and towards which his steed bore him.

  Power! Ilendril had never appreciated just how absurd and juvenile his concept of that word was. Not until Vithrein and the other mages had enchanted the dragon-fang for him. It was only then that the elf lord understood what it meant to truly have power.

  He barely felt the cold of the wind as it whipped through his hair and set his cloak billowing out from his shoulders like ebon wings. The tatters of cloud that flashed past left little beads of condensation on his armour, dripping from the steel plate in slithering rivulets, soaking the silken finery of his undertunic and gloves. The air was thin, burning as he drew it down into his hungry lungs. Yet these were but trifling annoyances, obstacles that would be overcome with the proper application of invention and enchantment. Of far more importance was the fact that he’d succeeded.

  The reek of wyrm filled his nose, a thick, musky, sulphurous smell that seemed to sink into his skin. Ilendril could feel the dragon’s pulse pounding through its colossal body, his bones vibrating in harmony to the reptile’s heart. When the beast beat its wings, flexed its claws or turned its head, the elf lord’s body shivered at the working of the wyrm’s titanic muscles. When he commanded the dragon to vent a blast of fire from its jaws, it seemed to Ilendril that the entire world was engulfed in the roaring flames.

  This was power – might beyond that of simply commanding vassals and armies. Strength beyond that of hoarded wealth and lands. It was a power more primitive and raw than even the mage’s mystic arts. To harness a dragon was to control a force that was ancient when the gods themselves were new.

  Ilendril exulted in the primordial might of the dragon he rode. He could well believe Vithrein when the mage claimed this beast was among the largest and most powerful in Elthin Arvan. Almost two hundred feet from snout to tail, wings that seemed to blot out the sun when they were unfurled, claws like lance heads and fangs like daggers. The wyrm was covered in crimson scales as thick as steel plate, and massive horns swept back from its head to offer further protection to its sinuous neck.

  Ilendril closed his hand about the dragon-fang hanging around his neck on an ithilmar chain. Such a small thing, yet it connected him to the wyrm on a level the dragon riders of Caledor could only dream of. It was true, he didn’t have that sense of communion the dragon riders always claimed to share with their steeds. He couldn’t make sense of the wyrm’s mind, only capture vague impressions of the primitive impulses that motivated it. He didn’t need any deeper communion than that. He had something better.

  He had control.

  A dragon rider could only appeal and request the obedience of his steed. There were no better examples of that than the desertion of the drakes during the Siege of Barak Varr and their later retreat from Tor Alessi. The old ways of Caledor Dragontamer left the beasts wilful and independent. It didn’t impress upon them their place as servants of the asur.

  Ilendril had found magic that would change all that. His ancestors had been cast out of Caledor for seeking such secrets. Now, he had them in his possession. He would prove to all Ulthuan that they were meant to control them and to command the dragons – not as supplicants but as masters.

  First he would prove it with the wyrms of Elthin Arvan. Then, when he had the attention of the Phoenix King himself, he would show that the drakes of Ulthuan could be commanded in the same way.

  Ilendril wondered what price in fortune and glory could be placed upon a secret that would bring not just an end to the War of the Beard, but give to the asur the keys to conquering the world.

  It was a ponderous question, and one Ilendril gave great thought to as he commanded his wyrm to fly him back to Athel Toralien. There was much to do, and the first step was demonstrating for Lady Kelsei the new weapon he had to offer her armies.

  Solemnly, Morek Furrowbrow watched as his master, Ranuld Silverthumb, was removed from the chair in which he’d died. It took ten dwarfs with a winch to move the ancient runelord. By some hideous process Mo
rek couldn’t begin to understand, his mentor had been petrified. A basilisk’s stare couldn’t have wrought a more complete petrifaction. Upon discovering Ranuld’s body, Morek had given his hand an exploratory tap of his hammer. One of the fingers, extended as though pointing, broke away. From skin to flesh to veins and bone, everything within the finger was still distinct, but it had become solid stone.

  Morek looked about the vault-like forge where his master had died. The Anvils of Doom, those precious artefacts of the ancient past, stood upon their pedestals. It was when returning one of the Anvils to its place that Ranuld’s body had been discovered. The High Runelord of Karaz-a-Karak hadn’t been seen in decades, but that wasn’t unusual in itself. Ranuld had been given to long ruminations in private and lengthy sojourns into the forgotten reaches of the Karaz Ankor. His absence was noted among the other runelords and runesmiths, but it hadn’t been considered a cause for alarm.

  They might never know how long Ranuld had been sitting there in the dark, as lifeless as the hulking gronti-duraz who crouched in the semi-darkness of the vault. What strange process had struck down the High Runelord was of more pressing consequence to Morek. Already there were whispers of elgi sorcery, but he was reluctant to entertain such an easy explanation. If the elgi could dispatch such murderous sendings then how was it that they’d neglected to strike down High King Gotrek or Morgrim or King Varnuf or any of the other great warlords of the dawi?

  A chill crept down Morek’s spine as he considered other possibilities. Watching the apprentice runesmiths loading Ranuld’s statue-like corpse onto a cart, there was no denying the unnatural condition of the body. Some sort of magic had brought the High Runelord to ruin. There were strange, unnatural creatures, it was true, that killed by changing their prey to stone. But if a basilisk or cockatrice had somehow snuck into the halls of Karaz-a-Karak, the brute would hardly have stopped with a single victim. It would have killed again and again to fill its belly, continuing to prey on dawi until it was hunted down and destroyed.