The Fanged Crown: The Wilds (33 page)

“Keep him out of that chamber,” Boult said, circling around the guardian to Verran and the debris pile.

“He wants the blood more than the Torque,” Harp yelled back. He was between Shristisanti and the entrance to the Torque chamber, but he doubted he would be much of an obstacle if the guardian decided to slither back into his enchanted lair. The guardian curled and spiraled around himself as he swung back and forth, making him a very hard target to hit.

Shristisanti turned his attention back to Verran, who had scrambled to his feet and backed away from the guardian until he was pressed against the pile of debris from the collapsed roof. Dazed and bleeding, he stood there, staring up at Shristisanti’s ruthless expression. If there were mercy to be had that day, it would not come from the ancient ophidian warrior. As if in a trance, Verran made no move to climb the rubble and get away from the guardian.

“Run, Verran,” Liel called.

“Throw me the blood,” Harp yelled as he and Kitto charged

the guardian again. Harp’s sword sliced Shristisanti below the shoulder blade, and Kitto stabbed him in the side. Coiling around like a whirlpool, the undulations of the Guardian’s body kept them at bay. Verran stood passively, as if he knew what was coming but had no will or inclination to stop it. Shristisanti reached forward and snapped Verran’s neck, snatching the vial as the boy fell to the ground. “Verran!” Harp screamed.

Shristisanti held his prize up to the sunlight flooding through the jagged hole in the roof. As he peered at the blood elixir, the red light coming through the glass vial stained the guardian’s haughty, self-satisfied face. Harp knew that as soon as the guardian slithered back into the chamber with the Torque, they would be powerless against him. Staring at Verran’s body slumped on the ground, his head twisted wrong on his neck, Harp was struck by an overwhelming sense of hopelessness—evil always won, and there was nothing he could do to change it. A flood of images filled his mind: Majida lying dead by Verran’s hand, Tresco smugly leading Ysabel down the aisle of a cathedral to marry Cardew, Anais’s palace in flames. Harp heard Liel calling his name and looked up to see Shristisanti moving toward him. Harp was overcome by a sense of desperation. He’d failed, yet again.

Boult screamed in Dwarvish and sprinted to the pile of rubble. In the instant that Harp understood what Boult planned to do, his hopelessness evaporated, and his survival instincts kicked him into action. Across the hall, Liel immediately grasped the dwarfs plan as well. She grabbed Kitto’s hand, and everyone scattered away from the guardian.

Still holding the vial of elixir above his head, Shristisanti stared in surprise as they ran like frightened bunnies. With his loaded crossbow in his arms, Boult charged up the debris pile like he was being chased by a pack of flaming hellbeasts. Liel and Kitto dashed under the gallery and

dived behind one of the marble statues. Since the guardian was between him and the debris pile, Harp bolted for the Torque chamber. Scrambling through the door, he skidded past the blackened screen, slid feet first onto the glassy floor, and smacked into the stone wall.

When he reached the top of the rubble, Boult leaped high into the air, fired his crossbow at the apex of his jump, and rolled down the far side of the pile.

“You missed,” Shristisanti boomed as he watched the bolt soar harmlessly over his head.

The bolt struck the wall above the pearl door, precisely in the center of the mosaic depicting the Captive in the last moments of his life. The impact of the bolt against the hard tile snapped the wooden shaft in half, and the splintered pieces fell to the floor. In the heartbeat of silence that followed, Kitto sucked in his breath, Liel laid her hand on Kitto’s arm, and the sound of a wire snapping echoed across the hall.

The mosaic swelled outward from the wall, like a giant hand was pushing it from behind. Licks of fire burned between the gaps in the tile. A flaming piece of ceramic blasted out of the mosaic, ricocheted and sank deep into the stone pillar near Liel and Kitto. With increasing speed and frequency, fragments of tile snapped off the wall, shot through the air with a whine, and peppered the cavernous hall with flaming projectiles. Most of them sailed over Shristisanti’s head, but one shard winged him, piercing his flesh and carving out a circular hole all the way through his shoulder.

The remainder of the mosaic tiles exploded from the blackened stones of the wall behind them. The flames blinked out, and deafening noise, like the sound of a tidal wave crashing into a forest, swept across the hall. The mosaic exploded in a maelstrom of knifelike shards and choking dust. The torrent of blistering hot shards

engulfed Shristisanti, slicing through his scales and shredding his body. The bloody remains of his body dropped to the floor with a wet thud while the shards continued on their trajectory. They sailed through the air until they hit the debris pile and stuck into the rubble like colorful spikes.

“Everyone all right?” Harp yelled from inside the chamber. When the gritty dust cleared, he saw the fleshy chunks of Shristisanti heaped on the floor.

Hearing his friends’ voices call back in assent, Harp stood up and brushed himself off, every muscle in his back and neck complaining of misuse. The glassy floor gave off a faint red glow, but not as brightly as it had done before. At the far end of the chamber, the Torque lay unceremoniously on the floor. Harp leaned over and tentatively touched the band of metal. It felt cool and harmless against his fingertips. When Shristisanti died, the barrier around the city that had prevented their easy entry must have fallen, leaving the Torque unprotected.

Harp turned the Torque over in his hand and wondered at all the machinations that had gone on for a simple piece of tarnished metal, a shackle that had once bound the giant Captive. Had the plan already been in progress when Captain Predeau kidnapped Liel? When Cardew snapped his fingers and had Tresco torture Harp at Vankila? Was Boult right that everything was part of a larger order of events, and when Verran stole the blood elixir, he was acting in someone else’s theater? Who was getting revenge on whom? And had it been the Captive’s day of vengeance, above all else that had transpired during their tenday in the jungle? Harp shook his head. A man could go crazy thinking such thoughts.

“Harp!” He heard Liel calling to him. There was a tension in her voice that made him hurry out of the chamber to see what was wrong. As he crossed through the pearl

door into the great hall, he saw ropes dangling down from the hole in the roof. Several masked archers perched on the side of the hole with arrows notched and pointed down at his friends.

3 Flamerule, the Year of the Ageless One

(1479 DR) Chult

Liel, Boult, and Kitto stood in the center of the hall with their hands on their heads, surrounded by a dozen men in leather armor and dark tunics. A handsome, square-jawed man stood off to one side talking to a hooded man in a dark cloak. As Harp emerged from the chamber holding the Torque, the man pushed back his hood revealing long gray hair and a knowing smile. At the sight of the man’s face, Harp’s stomach clenched. The last time he’d seen the gray-haired man, Harp had been strapped to a chair in the Vankila Slab watching parts of his body die piece by piece.

“Master Harp,” Tresco sounded pleased, as if he were seeing a friend after a long absence. “It’s been so long.”

Harp kept his mouth closed. If Tresco was

here, that must mean the soldiers were husks and the man beside him was Cardew. Harp had never met Liel’s husband before. Involuntarily, he glanced at Liel and saw that she was looking at him already. When their eyes met, Liel gave Harp a gentle smile.

“You retrieved the Torque,” Tresco said, clasping his hands in delight. “I must say I’m grateful.”

Still, Harp didn’t speak. He avoided looking at Shristisanti’s oozing remains where he’d last seen the vial of elixir. Instead, Harp looked at Verran’s corpse with a strong sense of regret and sadness. Harp wasn’t angry with the boy for what he’d done. If Verran hadn’t stolen the blood, Kitto would still be cursed, maybe even dead. But then, Majida wouldn’t have been hurt, or maybe even dead.

“Does anything happen for a reason?” asked Harp, looking past Tresco’s archers at the blue of the sky. “Or is it just random events ramming into each other in search of a purpose?”

“There’s a reason, Harp,” Liel assured him, earning a dark glance from Cardew.

“Such optimism from someone who should already be rotting in the ground,” Tresco sneered. “And yes, there is a reason. Apparently, you were meant to retrieve the Torque for me. With the barrier in place, there was no way through the ever-so-convenient hole in the ceiling that Cardew found. But once you killed the guardian, we were able to drop in, just like that.”

But Harp barely heard what Tresco said. He was thinking about each of his friends, what might be going on in their heads, and how they might react to the situation they now faced. Kitto would be all right—he wasn’t personally involved with Cardew or Tresco. Harp was concerned about Liel. Her husband had plotted to kill her, which was was bound to shake her sensibilities. But she had given Harp that serene smile, so he figured she was in control of herself.

Harp swung his glance to Boult, who looked stoic on the surface. Yet Harp knew that the dwarf must be ready to explode.

Cardew was Boult’s accuser and the object of the dwarfs hatred for years. At its core, every action Boult had taken for a decade was a calculation on how to slay the man who had doomed him to a life in the Vankila Slab and had ruined his name. Boult must have figured out that Tresco was the mastermind of the Children’s Massacre. Harp had no idea what Boult was about to do, but unless something shifted in their favor, it was unlikely that a dwarf on a rampage would accomplish much except another dead body on the floor.

“Your skin has healed since last I saw you …” Tresco began to say to Harp.

“What’s this guy’s name again?” Harp interrupted. “I can’t quite keep it straight. Practitioner? Ermine? Treecow?”

“Murderer?” Boult asked.

“Scum?” Kitto offered.

“Coward?” Liel suggested.

“I prefer that one for Cardew,” Boult said.

Cardew stirred angrily and opened his mouth to speak, but Harp cut him off.

“So that is Cardew,” Harp said, nodding toward the tall man. “Liel, you could have done so much better than him.”

“I did,” she said, smiling at Harp again. “You.”

“You have no idea what’s going…” Cardew began.

“Cardew,” Tresco warned. “I insist you keep your mouth shut, or I’ll have to kill your whoring wife.”

With his shoulder down like a battering ram, Harp launched himself at the cloaked wizard. But several of the masked soldiers intercepted him. They surrounded him, grabbing his arms, while one of the men punched him in the stomach. As they forced Harp to his knees, Liel slammed

her elbow across the face of the nearest soldier. The soldier grabbed his nose, blood gushing between his fingers, while another man swung his sword at Liel. She sidestepped and knocked his hand away, then kicked the man’s leg above the knee, forcing it back unnaturally, before two other soldiers grabbed her from behind.

They dragged Liel over by Harp and pushed her down beside him. Harp really wanted to stand up and gut Tresco. He really, really wanted to see Boult cut off Cardew’s head with a meat cleaver.

“Hand it over, Harp,” Boult said grimly. “There’s not much you can do about it.”

“Yes, Harp,” Liel said in a monotone voice. “Give him the Torque.”

Harp looked between Liel and Boult in surprise, trying to see if there was a hidden message in their acquiescence, but he didn’t hear anything but defeat. He looked at Kitto, who shrugged noncommittally. Harp held out the Torque to the nearest soldier, who carried it to Tresco and bowed slightly as he handed it to his master. Tresco took an audible breath and accepted the Torque, his face lighting up as he touched the curved band.

“I did it, Evonne,” Tresco said, cradling the Torque against his chest. “I did it for you.”

When Tresco fit the Torque around his neck, the air yellowed and seemed to settle around him, as if it had tangible weight and definition. Tresco’s body became indistinct, the way an object appears through a grimy window. He looked down at Liel and Harp like they were nothing but ants beneath his feet.

“You have no idea how powerful I am,” he said to no one in particular. “No one will ever underestimate me again.”

Tresco turned his back to his prisoners, and a dark shadow formed in the air in front of him. Wisps of smoke appeared, and an acrid smell wafted across the air, as if

the shadow were burning the air as it materialized in the stillness of the hall. The shadow elongated and took the shape of a rusty doorframe with a barred metal door that looked like it belonged on a prison cell.

Through the open bars of the metal door, they could see a windswept moor and a castle on a hill in the distance. A cool breeze swept in from the desolate countryside bringing the scent of autumn to the sweltering ruins. The familiar smell made Harp long to be in the cool quiet of a real forest and not that hot, fatal jungle. He glanced at Liel’s profile, but her attention was focused on Tresco and his portal back to Tethyr.

“Cardew, you have your instructions,” Tresco said, turning his head slightly and speaking over his shoulder. “Bring me flesh tokens, and I shall embrace you. Ysabel may have given up on you, but I have not.”

Tresco pushed on the door, which made a harsh grating sound as it opened onto the field of gorse and purple heather. Without a glance behind him, the old man stepped through the door, which closed with a metallic clang and dissolved into nothingness. With the ringing sound still reverberating off the walls, everyone looked at Cardew. Cardew looked vaguely surprised at the sudden attention, and then his shoulders slumped,

“Liel,” he said, walking in front of where she kneeled on the ground. He stood in front of her and leaned dowa so he could look down at her face. “I’m very sorry to have to do it.”