Crown of Dragonfire (14 page)

"You are healed," she
told them. "You are life. Let this no longer be the Valley of Golem but the
Valley of Erev, a blessed homeland to you."

They knelt before her
in the mud, the wind ruffling their feathered wings.

"Blessed be Meliora!"
cried King Eresh. "Blessed be Meliora the Merciful, our Holy Mother. We are now
a nation. Like other nations we will build halls, and we will paint, sculpt,
sing, and tell many tales. And in them we will remember our mother. Blessed be
Meliora! Forever will the erevim fly to your aid should you walk in darkness."

And much darkness
still lies ahead,
Meliora thought.
I have saved one nation, but another
still languishes in the dirt. Requiem still needs me.
She reached into her
pocket and felt the crumpled key.
The path still winds through many shadows.

"I thank you, King
Eresh." Meliora bowed her head. "May your nation grow and become as plentiful
as the stars."

The king of erevim
stepped toward a hill, knelt, and raised a bundle from the mud. He brought it
forward, laid it at Meliora and Elory's feet, and unrolled the leather
encasing. Inside lay two longswords of ancient making, the blades thick and
double-sided, the hilts wrapped in leather and large enough for two hands, the
pommels shaped as dragon claws clutching crystals. Stars were engraved onto the
blades, shaped as the Draco constellation.

Meliora gasped. "Swords
of Ancient Requiem!"

Eresh nodded. "We
claimed them from travelers centuries ago—they are treasures the seraphim
stole from the northern realms. I grant them to you, Meliora and Elory of
Requiem, for these are things of your homeland."

Elory knelt and gasped.
She pointed at names engraved onto the hilts. "These are famous blades! Here
lies Lemuria, the blade of Queen Kaelyn, a heroine of Requiem who fought the Cadigus
Regime, the traitors to the crown. And by it lies Amerath, sword of Prince
Relesar, an ancient hero who fought in Requiem's great civil war. These are
royal blades of legend." Tears gleamed in Elory's eyes. "They belonged to the
Aeternum dynasty, our ancestors, for we're descended of Rune through Lyana and
many other heroes of Requiem."

Eyes wide, Elory lifted
Lemuria, the thinner of the blades. Despite being smaller than Amerath, it
looked so large in Elory's small hands, dwarfing the young woman, but when
Elory swung it, it whistled through the air.

"It's so light," Elory
said. "Queen Kaelyn slew many enemies of Requiem with this blade. It's an honor
to hold it."

Meliora lifted Amerath,
the second blade, the larger of the two. The pommel, shaped as a dragon claw,
clutched an amber stone. While large and wide, it felt light in her hands, no
heavier than a dagger.

"We will return these
blades to their proper land," Meliora vowed. "They will never more lie buried
in the mud. They will shine again in the halls of rebuilt Requiem."

Under the noon sun,
Meliora and Elory left the Valley of Erev, the ancient swords upon their sides.
As they walked across the hills, they saw that new life spread across the hills:
grass rose from the dirt, flowers bloomed, and rushes began to grow along the
riverbanks.

May we bring life
wherever we go,
Meliora prayed silently as they walked westward.
May
life bloom again from the ruin Saraph has inflicted upon this world. May I live
to see the birches grow again, halls of marble rising among them.

 
 
ISHTAFEL

He flew over mountains of
pines, rivulets, and flowering meadows, heading toward a place of darkness and
screams.

He had always thought
this land beautiful. Here rolled the low, rounded mountains of Relen, a
wilderness Ishtafel had wandered often in his youth. He had not been young for
five hundred years, yet the land below had not changed. Pine, olive, and carob
trees grew upon chalky slopes, and wild goats and deer herded between them,
feeding on wild grass and drinking from streams that flowed through verdant
ravines.

I learned to hunt
here,
Ishtafel thought.
I learned to kill. I learned to fire arrows into
the hearts of beasts, to skin them, gut them, smell the blood, hear their
echoing screams.

When later Ishtafel had
gone to kill men, he would always remember the animals he had slain here,
looking back fondly upon his first taste of death. That was something he could
never get back, he knew—the thrill of it. The power. The drunken realization
that with his own hands he could snuff out life—as easily as snuffing out a
candle's flame. He had felt like a god. He had since become a true god, ruler
of a reborn Edinnu, but that thrill now escaped him. Perhaps he had lost it in
the tunnels of Requiem.

He flew here without a
chariot, using his own wings, and when he shut his eyes, Ishtafel could imagine
himself flying over Requiem again. He could still remember his first kill—a
burly blue dragon with white horns and amber eyes. Ishtafel had dodged the
beast's fire, thrust his lance, and pierced its neck. In its death, the blue
dragon had returned to human form, tumbling down as a man with a red beard and
a wooden leg. Ishtafel had tried to find the corpse after the battle, had
offered a reward for any soldier who could bring him the body, but the
red-bearded man was never found.

And the dead had piled
up.

Ishtafel never knew how
many Vir Requis his forces had killed that year; some said a hundred thousand,
others said a million. To Ishtafel it had stopped mattering. All that mattered
to him was to seek that thrill again. To be a boy, hunting in the woods. To
experience the magic, the true power of taking life. His mother had once tried
to create life. The Eight Gods of Edinnu had created many living things. But
those were tricks for the weak. He, Ishtafel, was a god of death. There were
only two true powers: to birth life and to take it.

He opened his eyes and
stared back down at the forested mountains. He glided toward them, deciding
that he wanted to walk the rest of the way. A ravine spread ahead between two
piney mountainsides, and Ishtafel had to kick and thrust his spear, clearing an
opening in the canopy. He glided between the pines' trunks and landed on the
banks of a dried streambed, its water gone for the summer. Mossy stones rose
here like cobblestones along a road, and Ishtafel walked alongside, stepping around
boulders and over logs. Ivy grew upon the pines around him, and cyclamens
dotted the forest floor, their leaves veined and their lavender blossoms
swaying in the breeze.

He did not walk for
long when he saw the wild boars ahead—a mother protecting a litter of cubs. He
slew the sow first with a thrust of his spear, then spent a while collecting
the young ones, lifting them one by one, and snapping their necks in his hands.
Each gave a squeal and
crack
before falling silent. He tossed the little
bodies aside, food for the crows and coyotes. He walked onward.

After an hour or two of
walking, the landscape began to wilt around him. The canopy thinned out. The
cyclamens were thinner, paler, then gone completely. A sticky film clung to the
boulders, and the soil was gray. Soon no more leaves grew on the trees, and the
air had a sickly, ashen smell. He was close now. The presence of the cursed
ones flowed on the wind here, seeped into the soil, stained the landscape. Even
locked behind stone walls, they exuded their rot into the world.

As he hiked through the
ravine, Ishtafel grimaced. Nausea rose in his belly. The creatures he was about
to visit sickened him. He had fought many creatures in his long wars—beasts of
the sea, terrors of the mountains, creatures of deserts and caves. He had
fought demons that haunted the nightmares of lesser men, that had driven some
of his soldiers insane. Yet now Ishtafel was approaching what were, perhaps,
the foulest creatures in this world—for they had once been fair. They had once
been like him.

The mountain slopes
turned to cliffs at his sides, the ravine sinking into a deep canyon. As he
kept walking, the walls grew taller at his sides, soaring taller than any
temple. No more trees grew here, and the only sign of life was a few crows far
above. The cliffs were craggy and gray, and Ishtafel imagined twisted faces on
their facades.

After walking for
another mile, he reached a towering gatehouse built into the canyon, three
hundred feet tall. Each of its towers was shaped as Shafat, the god of
justice—a bird of prey with the head of a bearded man. Between the two
glowering idols stretched a massive stone archway, breaking a wall engraved
with scenes of men cowering beneath swooping ravens with human heads. Seraphim
guards topped the battlements, their armor bright in the sun. The gatehouse was
so large, the guards seemed like nothing more than flecks from here.

Closer to the
gatehouse, Ishtafel reached a staircase that rose toward a stone doorway worked
into the brick wall between the cliffs. Ten seraphim stood before the doors on
a platform, holding the leashes of serpopards—felines with curling necks
longer than their bodies. The beasts drooled and sneered, but the seraphim
bowed before their king.

"My lord Ishtafel, Great
of Graces!" cried their captain. "It's an honor to kneel before you, oh
glorious son of Edinnu."

Ishtafel was about to
reply when a deep, guttural scream rose from beyond the wall, shaking the
canyon. He cringed. The sound was almost too twisted to belong to a living,
sentient being; it was demonic, a scream from the Abyss.

"Do they always make
that sound?" he asked, grimacing.

The guards nodded. "Yes,
my lord. Many guards have gone mad, my lord."

If their bite is as
bad as their bark,
Ishtafel thought,
you're in for a delightful little
treat, my dear sister.

"Open the doors," he
said.

The guards obeyed, and
Ishtafel stepped through the doorways and into the shadows.

A great hall awaited
him, large enough for an army of dragons to fly in. The cliffs soared at his
sides, and above, the seraphim had raised a vaulted roof of stone. An oculus,
small and barred, let in a beam of light, leaving most of the hall shadowed.
The scream rose again, guttural, tortured, echoing through this craggy nave. A
second scream answered it, high pitched, shrill as ripping skin. Soon more
voices joined the din—laughing, screeching, moaning, howling. The cacophony
rose louder than charging armies.

Ishtafel beat his
wings, rose to hover a hundred feet above the ground, and flew along the chasm.
Cells had been carved into the canyon walls, rugged and barred. Within those
holes he saw them.

"The dark seraphim," he
whispered.

They tugged at the bars
of their prison cells, hissing, leering, wagging their tongues at him. Too
dangerous to be kept in Shayeen, they had been languishing here for centuries.

Traitors,
Ishtafel thought.
Corrupted souls.

They had been seraphim
once, he knew. Among the mightiest seraphim, the greatest warriors, bodyguards
to Queen Kalafi herself. Seraphim who had spat upon their rulers, who had
rebelled against the Thirteenth Dynasty, who had suffered the horrible curse of
Kalafi.

Banished from the light
of Saraph, the feathers had fallen from their wings. Those wings had darkened,
hardened, become the wings of bats, tipped with claws. Their eyes were no
longer golden but blazing white, the irises colorless, the pupils slit—the
eyes of snakes. Indeed, aside from their dark wings, they seemed bleached of
all color. Their long and tangled hair, their skin, the fangs in their mouths,
the claws that grew from their fingertips, all were a sickly white. Like
seraphim, they were immortals, and no lines of age marked their faces, and
their bodies were still young, well formed, beautiful, forever youthful, but
their souls were rotted black, and no more halos shone above their heads.

Sixteen had rebelled
against Saraph. Sixteen had been cursed. Sixteen had been imprisoned here,
among the most powerful beings Saraph had ever known. Some called them the dark
seraphim. Some merely called them the Sixteen. They called themselves the
Rancid Angels—sinners of rotten holiness.

"A golden one enters!"
screeched one of the dark seraphim.

The creatures hopped in
their cages like rabid animals. "A king, a king! King Ishtafel enters our
realm, murderer of Queen Kalafi!"

Hovering in the chasm,
his swan wings spread wide, Ishtafel ground his teeth. So the news of his
ascension had spread here too. He either had chatty guards or these cursed
creatures possessed a sight their uncorrupted brethren did not.

"I have a deal for you,
friends!" Ishtafel spread his arms open, spinning around to face cell by cell. "For
too long have you lingered here in the shadows, blood of my blood. For too long
did your wings wither, cramped in your cells. For too long did the corrupted
sons and daughters of Saraph languish between stone and iron."

"Too long!" they cried.
"Too long!"

Ishtafel nodded. "Yet
who better than I, the son of Kalafi, knows of failed rebellions? My mother
rebelled against the Eight Gods in Edinnu! And even the Eight Gods did not
imprison her in stone but banished her here to build a new life, a new
paradise. And yet you, who rebelled against the new Edinnu, which we call
Saraph—you wither in cells."

"We wither!" they cried.
"We wither!"

He flapped his wings,
rising within the beam that fell from the skylight. His voice dropped to a
whisper. "But I can free you."

Silence fell, perhaps
awed, perhaps scornful. They all stared, their snake eyes shining white. Their
bat wings creaked, and their claws wrapped around the bars of their cells.

Finally one among them
spoke.

"You want us to hunt."