wyrm to feed upon your soul.”
My soul, Areth wondered, to save a city?
How often he had dreamed of freeing himself, of slaughtering the emperor and returning to Luciare as a hero. How often he had imagined the cheers and the adulation.
Now, in a twisted way, those dreams could come true.
One soul. One tormented soul was all that it would take.
“You have taken an endowment of touch from a single boy,” Zul-torac said. “I will take a knife, hold him down. When I cut his throat, you will be freed from the source of your pain, and then the wyrm will enter you, and the city will be spared.”
A wave of pain and nausea washed through Prince Areth Urstone, and he peered at the image of Luciare through eyes misted by tears.
DARKNESS FALLS
In darkness men breed and dream. The poets write the songs that fill their hearts with longing.
For this, Lady Despair shall give men eternal darkness.
Dogs can talk, Alun knew. And right now, his hounds told a tale of wyrmlings in the warrens above him.
Alun stood beneath a thumb-lantern in the yellow light, holding the leash to Wanderlust in one hand and the leash to Brute in another. He was supposed to be on lookout, a mere rearguard.
The wyrmlings had not yet even attacked the front gate. Instead, for five minutes now they had been pounding the thunder drums, crumbling the facade that hid some of the tunnels of the warrens, making a dozen entries. Tremendous booms and snarls snaked through the tunnels, accompanied by the sounds of cracking rock. Motes of stone dust floated in the air, and Alun had worried that the whole mountain would collapse.
But now Wanderlust was barking in alarm and peering up the empty tunnel. Her ears were drawn back flush with her leather mask. Her rear legs quivered in anticipation, and her tail was still.
“We’ve got problems,” Alun called to the troops in the cavern. “There are wyrmlings above us!” He strained his senses.
Warlord Madoc was in charge. He glared at Alun. “You certain, lad?”
Distantly, Alun heard a woman’s scream echoing as if out of some nightmare. “Yeah.”
Madoc looked at his troops, shook his head in dismay. He obviously didn’t want to split his forces, for that is precisely what the wyrmlings were after.
“Hold the gate!” he shouted to his men. “Let me see what we’re up against.” He came rushing toward Alun. His sons, Connor and Drewish stared at him in terror, as if afraid that he’d ask them to follow, but he just shook his head no.
Madoc alone would brave the tunnels above, it seemed.
But at the last instant, Siyaddah peeled away and rushed to join him, followed by a pair from the warrior clan, a young man that Alun did not know, and the girl Talon, that he had helped rescue from the Knights Eternal.
“Let’s go,” Alun told the dogs. Wanderlust gave a strong jerk on her leash and went racing up the tunnel into the warrens, barking.
“Quiet!” Madoc shouted at the dogs. “Quiet now.”
Both dogs went silent, for they were well trained. Still, they strained at their leashes, leading the way.
These won’t be common troops up here, Alun realized as he tried to hold the dogs back. No common troops could have climbed the sheer walls of the mountain.
With a pounding heart, he realized that there would be Knights Eternal ahead.
In the darkness, Rhianna reached the corpse of the dead knight and grabbed at his wings. The creature’s skin had gone gray with age and his flesh felt dry and mummified. As she pulled at his wings, his whole body followed. It could not have weighed fifty pounds. Even his bones must have rotted and dried up.
Rhianna’s blow had taken the creature square in the skull, bursting it like an overripe melon. All that was left of its head was a single mandible hanging by a scrap of skin.
Rhianna was afraid to move, afraid to draw attention. She could not see much in the darkness, but wyrmlings were filling the courtyard in front of the warrens, and the snarl and bang of thunder drums filled the night. Stone slabs were sliding down from the mountainside, revealing its secret passageways, and for the moment, that seemed to hold the wyrmlings’ attention. But at any instant, the wyrmlings could come for her.
Grasping the wings with both hands, Rhianna gave the knight’s remains a swift kick, and the wings came free with surprising ease.
She studied the fearful prongs in the powdery starlight, wondering how to insert them, afraid that the obvious answer was the only one.
There was a rush of wings behind her, and Rhianna whirled, afraid that a Knight Eternal had found her.
High King Urstone landed with a grunt.
“Gesht,” the high king whispered, casting a worried look into the sky. The word might have meant hurry, or follow me. Rhianna could not be certain, so she tried to do both.
She grasped the wings, held them over her head.
The high king leapt forward, shoved the metal prongs into her back, hard.
The pain that lanced through her drove a gasp from Rhianna’s lungs.
But the king spared her no sympathy. He raced to Fallion, took one look at him, and picked him up.
“Gesht! Gesht!” he hissed, and King Urstone leapt into the air, his wings flapping madly, trying to lug Fallion up along with his own bulk.
Wait for me, Rhianna thought forlornly. Her wings felt like dead weight on her shoulders, and she had to wipe away tears of pain.
She heard a shout off to her left, saw a trio of wyrmlings charging out of the darkness. Her own staff was at her feet, so she grabbed it and went sprinting along the wall, fleeing the wyrmlings. In a hundred yards, the wall ended.
Rhianna ran, swiped the tears of pain from her face, and tried furiously to flap the wings.
She had only gone fifty yards when she felt a tingling sensation as the wings came alive.
The heavy footfalls of wyrmling warriors closed in behind her, accompanied by the sounds of bone mail clanking.
Rhianna raced, fearing that at any moment a poison war dart would strike her square in the back, the way that one had with Jaz.
She peered upward, saw King Urstone flying high up the mountain toward a parapet.
A wyrmling roared at her back, came racing up with a burst of speed. Rhianna knew that she couldn’t outrun the monster, so she whirled to her right and leapt over the wall.
A wyrmling leapt after her and grabbed her right wing. She pulled free. The wyrmling plummeted with a scream.
Her wings were barely awake. She could feel blood surging through them, and she flapped frantically as she went into an uncontrolled spin.
She hit the ground with a thud some eighty feet below, her fall softened both by the flapping of her wings and a pile of dead bodies.
There were shouts off to the east. She heard a clang as an iron war dart bounced off the ground beside her.
Rhianna took off, running and flapping her wings feverishly, and then it seemed that some power outside herself took control of the wings, began forcing them to stretch forward and grasp the air in ways that she had not imagined, then pull downward and back, propelling her into the air. The wings had awakened.
Rhianna pumped furiously, aware that it was her own blood that sang through the veins of the wings, that it
