“Aaaaah,” the wyrmling sighed. “A fine battle it was. Kan-hazur won scars both of flesh and of the heart that day.”
“Yes,” Daylan said. “And now, do we have a bargain?”
A LIGHT IN THE HEAVENS
Death never comes at a timely hour.
Alun waited for the two to leave-the wyrmling flying back north, while Daylan Hammer climbed gingerly from the wall.
He let Daylan Hammer have a five minute lead, and then hurried for the castle.
I’m in a real fix now, Alun decided. It was eleven miles back to the castle, and he’d never be able to make it before dark. The wyrmling harvesters would come out by then. Indeed, the last sliver of sun dipped below the horizon as he began his race, and he knew that he had perhaps a half an hour of light, and there would only the faintest waning moon tonight.
Maybe I’ll get lucky, he thought. The lords have been hunting the harvesters hard. There can’t be many around the castle.
But he had little hope. Wyrmling harvesters butchered humans, taking certain glands that the wyrmlings used for elixirs. Thus, the castle attracted the wyrmlings like wolves to a carcass.
So Alun ran, heart pounding, sweat streaming down his forehead, his back, his neck and face. He came up out of the bogs into the wastes and kept to a rocky ravine, the dry bed of creek.
The shadows grew long and deep, and he struggled to keep up with Wanderlust.
The dog will warn me of danger, he thought-until he rounded a boulder; something large lurched in front of him.
He heard the sound of steel clearing a scabbard, and Daylan Hammer’s boot knife pressed up against Alun’s nose.
“What are you doing?” Daylan demanded. “Why are you following me?” Daylan studied him with a cold eye.
“I, I, I uh, was looking for a lost dog,” Alun explained, coming up with the lie. “Wanderlust here is my favorite.”
The dog growled at Daylan Hammer but didn’t dare attack. Oh, she’d try to take him if Alun so commanded, but Alun knew that if he ordered her to kill, Daylan’s knife could plunge through his eye before the hound could even get a bite of the immortal.
Daylan smiled, sheathed his knife. Apparently he decided the Alun didn’t represent much of a threat. “You’ve followed me for hours.”
“I didn’t see nothin’!”
“You didn’t see me meet with a wyrmling Seccath?” Daylan smiled at the lie, as if it were nothing.
“No!” Alun insisted.
“Then you’re a terrible spy, and not worth the half of what they’re paying you.”
Daylan sat down on a large rock and patted a spot next to him, inviting Alun to rest. Alun was gasping from fear and exhaustion. Daylan suggested, “Lean your head between your knees. Catch your breath.”
Alun did as he was told, unnerved at the realization that there was nothing he could do to protect himself from a man like Daylan Hammer. “What are you going to do with me?”
“You mean do to you?” Daylan laughed. “Nothing. If I wanted to kill you, I’d leave you here in the waste for the wyrmlings. They’d take a meager harvest from you. But I won’t leave you alone, and I won’t harm you. I just want to know one thing: who sent you?” His tone was mild, affable, as if he were asking what Alun thought of the weather.
Alun sat gasping for a moment. It was no use lying. If he lied, Daylan might leave him for the wyrmlings, and that would be that.
But there was something more to it.
He liked the way that Daylan had asked. When Madoc had come, he’d stood over Alun with his brutish sons at his back, and had taken an intimidating stance. There were subtle threats implied, Alun suddenly realized.
But even when he made the mildest of threats, Daylan didn’t sound serious. Indeed, he was smiling, as if sharing a joke.
“Warlord Madoc,” Alun said at last. “Warlord Madoc sent me.”
“What did he say about me? What does he suspect?”
“He thinks that you’re a traitor, that you killed Sir Croft.”
“Sir Croft got himself killed,” Daylan said. “He followed me, as you did, but he didn’t keep to his cover as well. I didn’t see him, but the wyrmling did. She caught him. By the time I heard Croft’s cries, the harvest had been taken.”
Alun said nothing.
“Did you hear our conversation?” Daylan asked, “Mine and the Seccath’s?”
Alun shook his head. “I was too far away to hear anything. I didn’t dare try to get close.”
“Ah,” Daylan said. “I am trying to make a bargain with the wyrmlings. They have High King Urstone’s son. They’ve held him hostage now for more than a decade. And as you know, we have Zul-torac’s daughter. Zul-torac has forsaken his flesh, and lives only as a shadow now. He cannot spawn any more offspring, and so his daughter is precious to him. I hope to make an exchange of hostages.”
“Prince Urstone is still alive, after all these years?”
“Barely, from what I understand.”
“And is he even human?” Alun asked. “Surely by now they’ve put him in a crystal cage and fit him with a wyrm.”
“He’s resisted the cage, and the wyrm,” Daylan said. “He is still human.” Alun doubted that anyone could resist the cage for so long. It was said that the pains one endured there made a person long for death, long for release. Better to let a wyrm infest your soul, lose your humanity, than to resist. “Through a messenger, I have put questions to him,” Daylan explained, “moral questions that no person infected by a wrym could have answered correctly. The crystal cage destroys most men, but others it only purifies, filling them with compassion and the wisdom that can only come from having endured great pain and perfect despair.”
Alun peered up, hope in his eyes. If Daylan was right, then the prince was the kind of hero that men only hear of in legends.
Daylan Hammer grasped Alun by the wrist. “Old King Urstone is failing. He won’t last much longer than that dog of yours.
“In three days, a thousand of the strongest warriors in Caer Luciare will ride north to attack the wyrmlings, to take back the fortress at Cantular. In seventeen years, no attack so bold has been attempted, for word of such an attack might well drive Emperor Zul-torac mad with bloodlust, and the life of Prince Urstone would be forfeit.
“And so I am trying to negotiate an exchange of hostages-before the attack takes place.”
“But, once we give up their princess,” Alun asked, “won’t the wyrmlings attack Caer Luciare in force?”
“Of course they will,” Daylan said.
Alun didn’t understand. The immortal was giving up their hostage, the only thing that had protected the Caer for more than a decade. If Alun understood him aright, with the hostage lost, the wyrmlings would attack, and by the end of this week, everyone that he knew could be dead.
“This is madness!” Alun shouted. “You’ve gone daft! King Urstone would never agree to such a plan. What do we gain? You are just hurrying our end!”
“The end is coming, whether we like it or not,” the immortal said. “Warlord Madoc has convinced the others to make this assault in an effort to secure the borders. Madoc is a fool who dreams of rebuilding the kingdom. Others are tired of hiding, of watching our numbers dwindle away day by day, and so they hope to die fighting, as
