The damned of Hell mended bone and flesh after a long painful process. Wounded typically were not removed from battlefield. It was a measure that smacked of desperation-not mercy-for there was only one reason to bother: to deny Mephistopheles converting even the weakest of her warriors to his cause.
It also presented Louis with an interesting problem. He slowed his pace and hid in the ditch. Sneaking past so many numbers would take time.
He glanced about, seeking opportunity.
And he found it: a battle had taken place here recently. Among broken lances and smoldering opium stalks, one knight lay in three pieces, each part struggling to find the other and its missing head.
Louis removed the warrior’s thorned mail. “Might I borrow this?” He then kicked the knight’s head across the road into the far ditch. “I thank you, brave sir.”
He donned the armor-a tad loose for his frame-and then shuffled forward along the road, joining the ranks of despondent soldiers marching toward their doom.
Through his spiked and slotted visor, Louis watched as the twelve towers of Sealiah’s fortress loomed larger. Atop each flickered a tongue of flame to keep darkness at bay. This fire was ghostly blue. . marsh gas piped in from the surrounding flooded lands. In their murky waters, tangles of razor vine squirmed and thrashed and waited for something to wander into their hungry embraces.
More soldiers joined their ranks-hundred and hundreds, but not the numbers that he knew Sealiah had at her disposal.
How badly had Mephistopheles beaten her?
This concerned Louis, not because he felt any pity for his most beautiful adversary, but because it would not give him the chance to take advantage of
Or perhaps there was more to this? Certainly Louis had no monopoly on deception (even if he was the
He and the others marched along drawbridges that spanned the wide black waters of the Laudanum River. Along the banks, barrels of oil sat half-buried, awaiting the torch to transform them into floating sheets of fire- unassailable proof against the dark. . for a time.
Louis then stood before the base of the towering mesa that held Doze Torres. The wisteria-covered earthen ramps that had once zigzagged along the cliff face had been torn away, leaving only sheer rock.
He looked straight up and saw industrial cranes perched on the castles’ walls. On their steel cables, a lift descended that could carry three hundred soldiers.
Louis got on with the others, and it rose into the air.
From this aerial vantage, Louis saw not hundreds, but thousands of soldiers and wobbling cannon and catapults and wagons piled high with soldier pieces struggling back toward the castle from every direction. Most of these ragtag lines came under attack from the darkness.
Louis heard their distant screams and futile shots.
Although if he hadn’t just walked through the killing fields himself, he would have sworn it all had an air of theater to it.
The crane lifted his platform over the ramparts.
A silk spider line brushed Louis’s face, and he absentmindedly brushed it away.
Louis then saw a pleasant surprise: the art of the Poppy Queen’s duplicity.
Within the outer walls surrounding the Tower of Whispering Lilacs, camped under tarps to shield their glow, were ten thousand knights-each with gleaming silver rifle-lances and phosphorescing fungus sprouting from their armor and flesh. There were lines of spore catapults, steam-powered missiles, and squadrons of hanging cluster bats. Firepower to
Certainly equal to any force Mephistopheles could muster.
He glanced back at the devastated, deflowered Poppy Lands.
All a calculated lure? He didn’t quite think so.
Sealiah’s lands (much like herself) had admirable natural defenses, ones she would not have so casually abandoned. The fact that she had chosen this particular deception was telling.
It was also information that Louis could sell-perhaps so ingratiate himself with the Lord of the Mirrored Realms that he could learn something of
All the while eroding any advantage either might have over the other, so when the final battle came, the victor would be weakened.
He licked his lips. So dangerous. But so tempting.
The crane set him and the other knights down and they limped toward the Tower of Nightshade, darkest among its fellow flowering structures.
Louis fell behind.
There were precious few shadows in the courtyards with all the pink and lime green and robin’s-egg blue light pulsing from the fungus that grew everywhere. He found a sliver of shade, however, entered its welcome depths, and slinked away unnoticed toward the Oaken Keeper of Secrets.
That was where Sealiah’s map room was (if he remembered correctly). All her plans would be laid out there for the taking.
He almost giggled. How easy this would be.
Of course, she would not expect such a skilled infiltrator-and not him of all her relations. Who was he? Lowly Louis? The earth under her feet? It would not be the first time others had fatally underestimated his cunning.
Louis passed the guards and triple-locked outer door of the keep without notice, and glided up the stairs.
The map room would be on the third floor, where her winged insect spies brought the latest intelligence from the field.
He set one finger on the living wood of the map room’s tiny door.
No pulse beyond. It was empty.
He then undid the puzzle knots that would have given any mathematician specializing in topology psychotic fits. He slipped inside and ever so carefully eased the door shut.
Louis was grateful for the cool darkness within. The only light twinkled from the map table in the center of the chamber. From the decided lack of echoes, he felt of the dimensions of this place were larger than he recalled.
No matter. He tiptoed closer and saw the snaking Laudanum River and the Valley of the Shadow of Death, smoldering jungle and patches of black silk draped over fields that marked the locations of Mephistopheles’ armies in the Poppy Lands.
He also noted with great interest that a game of Towers had been set up alongside the map table, white and black cubes stacked and arranged to fight, and a handful already removed from play.
How intriguing.
Torches whooshed to life-thirteen fiery brands about the perimeter of the room-each held by a Champion of the Blood Rose, Sealiah’s personal guard.
Sitting upon a tiny throne, orchids twinning along her arms, was Queen Sealiah in armor that appeared as if it had been painted upon her body-curves of dark silver that flashed with light and shadows and reflections of fire. . and pulsing a nacreous green from the emerald set upon her exposed throat. She was all the more lovely because her features also smoldered with the angry passion that came from bloodlust. . and lust. . and anticipation of the kill.
She held a sliver of dark-matter steel that had existed before the mortal Earth had been dust gathering in void: Saliceran-the broken sword. Its blade wept poison from its Damascus metal folds that had sent many to a painful demise. She pointed the jagged tip at his neck.
“Welcome, Great Deceiver,” Sealiah said in a mocking tone. “Welcome to your death.”
Sealiah, Queen of the Poppy Lands, raised one finger, and her thirteen personal guards set their torches in
