The Legend of Asahiel: Book 03 - The Divine Talisman (32 page)

A flutter of leaves and needles filled the air, along with a cloud of splinters and the smell of fresh sap. Thrakkon grinned savagely at the devastation. But it was not the blood of the trees he had come for.

The Crimson Sword flared in his hand. Killangrathor sensed it, twitching back to glare at him with a burning eye. Itz lar Thrakkon merely smiled.

The dragon faced forward suddenly, sniffing. Thrakkon sensed them, too. He searched the darkness ahead, gaze darting amid the trees. The Sword helped him pinpoint their location. There, a pair of eyes gleaming softly in the darkness, as wide as the moon whose dim light they reflected. Another beside
him. And another, all around, vague shapes limned in soft starlight, frozen in awe of the devil descended among them.

Killangrathor roared, and they scattered, all in different directions. Swift and powerful as it was, not even the dragon could attend to them all.

A few quick cuts, and his harness lines fell away. The others were slashing free as well. Killangrathor hunched low, hissing as he waited. Thrakkon slid down the monster’s hide, and sensed his minions scrambling after him. Not all, however. When he looked back, he found a pair of goblin corpses still strapped limply into place among the dragon’s spines, jagged lances of woodland debris protruding from their bodies. Most of the rest, he now realized, also bore cuts and scrapes from Killangrathor’s reckless descent through the trees. Thrakkon himself had been gashed across the arm, and found a splinter wedged in his brow. He flicked it away as he regarded the others: two dozen goblins, minus the pair dead, and a duo of giants. Despite their injuries, all appeared ready to inflict some damage of their own.

Thrakkon had scarcely taken stock before Killangrathor snorted and forged ahead, roaring that savage, stuttering cry. His great, armored bulk shoved forward through the forest wall, scattering leaves, shredding boughs, and splintering even the trunks of giant trees. A shower of woodland fragments pelted his body, shafts of broken hardwood and bleeding evergreen careening off plates and ridges of bony flesh.

The rest looked after him, then turned to Thrakkon, taut with feral anticipation.

“Kill them all,” Thrakkon said.

L
ARESSA SKIDDED DOWN THE FINAL
stretch of slope, feet sliding out from beneath her upon a blanket of loose stone. She landed hard, on her elbow and then her back. Pain flared, though her sharp cry was lost amid the cacophony of screams.

She scrambled up at once. Biting her tongue, clutching her elbow, she ran on. The woods rang with a chorus of shrieks and moans and whistles. She staggered toward the worst of it, her heart racing. Her people were dying. She had to warn them, had to signal the escape.

A line of bodies hurtled past, swift and silent as a hunter’s shadow. The last in line froze when it spied her.

“My queen!” he cried. The others paused, but he shouted and waved them on, then leapt through the underbrush to kneel quickly before her. “My queen, you must come at once.”

Tears and sweat stung her eyes. Ciaran, she recalled dimly. In another time and place, when Finlorian royalty had meant something, this stripling would have served among the guardian lords, and she would indeed have been his queen. In the present light, however, Laressa saw him with naught but pity, and herself with only shame and contempt.

“My queen, we—” He paused as he studied her. “My queen, you’re hurt.”

Her eyes peered past him, through shrouded woodland colonnades, to where it sounded as if the forest itself was being devoured. “What have they seen?” she asked him. Her voice sounded thin and whispery. “What have they told you?”

“We are under assault, my queen. The Demwei have commanded all to flee.”

“Go then,” she said. “See to your charges. Help as many as you can get away.”

“That includes you, my queen. We must make for the Veil. There is no time—”

“Nor will there be, for any of us, if the enemy finds us all to be running in the same direction.” She hadn’t realized it until she’d spoken the words, but she knew now where she had been headed, and what she must do. “Go,” she said, softly now, but with authority. “You must keep moving. Tell them all to run, and to not look back.”

His eyes fixed upon hers, bright with youthful bravery and conviction.
He does not know. He has no idea what we face.
“My place is beside my queen,” he said stubbornly.

“Your place is to serve. Do as I say.”

She waited until he bowed, then ran on, through a profusion of underbrush grown suddenly dark and sinister. Other forms continued to race past, flitting through the trees. Some were weeping or clutching one another. Some cast frantic glances behind them and bowled over others in their haste. She could taste their fear now, along with her own, a tang of blood and sweat upon the air. Ahead of her, trees whipped and swayed, as something huge grated among them. The screams grew louder, more desperate.

She came then upon the dragon’s wake, a mangled swath of trampled woodland. Trees that had taken a thousand years to grow had been snapped or stripped or shoved aside as if no stronger than virgin stalks. Dust and leaves and spores and splinters filled the air in a choking cloud. There were other forms tearing past her now, whirlwinds in the dark. When they shrieked, it felt as though their claws were already upon her back and buried in her ears.
Goblins
, she realized. Gods without mercy, there were actually goblins among them.

One flew by her position near enough that she could smell the rotten fetor of its leathery hide. An elf was bounding by, and felled before she could draw breath to shout a warning. Blood sprayed as the doomed elf was swept up and away as if by an entire colony of flesh-eating bats, then cast aside as the spinning goblin tore into another.

She turned to her left, and the goblin was forgotten. For there stalked the dragon, an obsidian hulk that both slithered and smashed, fluid grace and brute strength rolled and hammered into one. Elven corpses lay scattered around it, some in pieces, some as pulp, some only as fleshy stains. Many lay smashed and crumpled amid the ruin of the forest, impaled by splintered shafts or caught between the branches and trunks of felled trees. Their moonlit eyes seemed to stare in judgment of her soul.

The dragon charged, lowering its head and straightening its neck like a ram. A cedar welmwood toppled beneath its rush, flinging bark and heaving soil as roots snapped or ripped free of the earth. Cries of terror welled up from below. A burrow. Realizing this, the dragon seized the mighty trunk with its forelimbs and heaved it aside, exposing the nest of halls beneath. Elves huddled or flailed or scampered, exposed like beetles beneath an overturned stone. A pack of goblins swarmed in to finish them.

Laressa watched it happen, crouched amid seedling shrubs beneath the slant of a juniper deadfall. Though paralyzed with horror, she nearly jumped from her skin when Ciaran squatted beside her, a dozen of his fellow guardians at his heels.

His eyes, she noticed, no longer shone with brash innocence, but were rimmed wide with terror and disbelief. Yet he found the courage to say, “Whatever you mean to accomplish, we are with you, my queen.”

His voice was hoarse, and his gaze a madman’s twitch, flitting at each new sound. She wanted to scream at him, then at herself. What
did
she mean to accomplish? Her people had no weapons, nothing at all with which to stem this carnage. They could run, or they could hide. They could fill the heavens with their prayers. With a hundred wellstones, she might have sapped a measure of the dragon’s strength for use against the goblins—or drawn from the latter for release against the former. Alas, hers was but a handful of such talismans still possessed by the Finlorian people, relics of a former age. And Annleia had taken hers south in any case, as a ward against the unknown. Annleia, who was now safest among them. Or might this slaughter suggest that her daughter had failed and was already dead?

The dragon turned westward, following a flight of elves who leapt through the forest like stricken deer. All were running to the same place. All were making for the Veil.

“Come, then,” Laressa said, her own voice thick in her throat. “Let us slow that creature down.”

They followed without question as she retreated south and west, running what she thought might be a likely intercept course. She sent a pair of her guardians to make sure. The hynara tree. They must see to it that the dragon found them at the hynara tree. That was where they would make their stand.

The brave guardians accepted their task and took to it in full stride, gathering up pouches of stones from a stream whose waters now ran red. Laressa filled a pouch of her own, and had Ciaran and her remaining guardians do the same.

Her band grew as it raced along in loose formation, drawing stragglers to its ranks. Most pleaded with her as Ciaran first had: to flee while she yet might. But when she would not, others refused as well, determined to stand beside their queen. Their loyalty was touching. If only she could believe it would make a difference.

She was not as nimble as her Finlorian brothers and sisters, and her elbow still ached, yet she climbed the hynara with little difficulty. It was the tallest
and thickest in the valley, an ancient ironwood with grooves in its bark that could fit a man sideways. The broad base was gently sloped, with knobs and curls that could be used as steps to the lower branches. The limbs themselves shot outward in such profusion that fifty elves could have climbed at the same time. A shame she had less than a score.

Nevertheless, they scurried up those great sticky boughs without complaint, scaling branches as they might the rungs of a ladder. At roughly two hundred feet—high enough, she hoped, to place her above the dragon’s direct line of attack—Laressa scurried out toward the end of a snaking limb thicker than her entire body. Others climbed even higher before moving toward the tree’s needled perimeter, where they might have a clearer attack line of their own.

Most had barely settled into position when the dragon came bursting into view at the far end of the narrow glade, opposite the hynara. One of the guardians sent to lure the beast squirmed in its black fist. The other raced ahead, twisting now and then to chuck a stone at the behemoth’s face. With the open space before him, the second guardian—Farial, she now saw—gave himself over to a full sprint, bounding through the tall grass. A goblin raced to cut him down, but the dragon roared, and the goblin wisely shied away. Hunting strides became attacking strides. In two lightning-quick steps, the dragon reached out and snatched up Farial as he had Denarr, who continued to writhe in the monster’s grasp.

Then both fists closed, and the pair of guardians exploded like crushed eggs.

Laressa led a chorus of shouts from the hynara, flinging her own stones in challenge. A hail of rocks joined hers. None landed anywhere near the dragon, but it looked up and growled at them all the same.
Topple us
,
if you can
, Laressa thought.
See if you take down
this
tree.

The dragon hissed, crouching down upon its haunches. It then sprang forward, launching another battering-ram charge.
Let its neck shatter
, she prayed.
Let our roots hold strong.

The collision drove tremors through the length of the tree and rattled more than a few of her small host from where they perched, sending them bouncing down through the branches like fallen seed cones. The resounding crack was such that Laressa feared her own skull had split. The great hynara listed and groaned, convulsing already with aftershocks. But the roots maintained their hold, and the tree stood fast.

Laressa opened her eyes, not realizing she had closed them, and peered down through the hynara’s quivering mesh. Her mouth filled with blood from having bitten her tongue, but in that moment it tasted like victory.

The dragon’s most prominent horns swept back from its skull like the spines running down its serpentine body. But smaller spikes topped its crown, and where those had simply shredded the welmwood she’d seen it attack earlier, the hynara had absorbed their punch and swallowed them whole. Twist and yank as it might, the dragon could not seem to wrench free of the juicy ironwood.

Ciaran noticed it, too, and was the first to recover himself and bounce a stone off the dragon’s neck. Others soon followed. Laressa released her full-body death grip upon her branch and added her own stones to the mix, shouting taunts with lusty glee.

Their pelting attack, of course, did nothing but annoy the dragon further. Yet it was enough for Laressa, who at long last had an outlet for all of the doubt and fear and guilt that had ruled her since Torin’s coming and Eolin’s death. Every throw was a triumph, every cry a burden cast aside. And every heartbeat in which the dragon struggled was that of a kinsman saved.

The creature below seemed to realize this as well. With its skull pressed tight against the fissured trunk, it pushed and heaved and shook. Its arms reached up among the boughs, raking and snapping. Elves tumbled to the earth, where goblins dove in and snatched them up, like black crows feasting at the foot of a lion.

The dragon’s furious assault quickly stripped and scarred the proud hynara beyond recognition. Branches lay piled at its feet, or hung limply from the central bole by stretched threads of bleeding sapwood. Strips of bark coiled at the base of long furrows dug by the monster’s claws in the trunk itself, while several of the fallen elves were now sticky smears upon its rough skin. Even above the attacks, the tree continued to shed nests and cones and needles, shuddering with the damage wrought below.

Yet still the hynara held its stubborn grip upon the beast, swaying with the dragon’s flailing, but refusing to fall. The monster responded by tearing gashes in the trunk, deeper than those of any woodsman’s axe. Its tail whipped and cracked, sending powerful ripples the length of its body and into the tree. Laressa soon knew what must happen, and could do nothing to prevent it. She could only clutch her branch and shout for her kinsmen to do the same, warm with dread, cold with denial.