The Realms of the Gods (26 page)

Circling, she returned to take on her own shape and report to the king. After hearing her description of the sea battle with satisfaction, Jonathan ordered her to rest. A runner gave her meat and cheese between slices of bread, and a cup of heavily sweetened herbal tea. Eating quickly, the girl felt her strength return with every bite and sip.

The sun was almost directly overhead when thick, multicolored smoke rose in an unnaturally straight column from the enemy camp in the northeast. Daine viewed it uneasily: It looked far too much like the Chaos vents in the Divine Realms.

“Sir Raoul, what is that?” Jonathan asked the mirror.

“Booby trap,” Daine heard the knight reply. “A squad of men found a box in a tent. One was fool enough to open it before we had a mage check it. The gods-curst thing exploded. It killed everyone in the squad—and I don't think it's done making mischief.”

The column bent and stretched, colors rippling, until it touched one end to the ground where the eastern road and the road that circled Legann met. Anchored there, it condensed until it was nearly thirty feet in height, and solidified until it formed a monstrous, three-headed serpent. Its scales changed constantly, from pale green to pink to yellow, never holding to one color or pattern. Only the eyes in the three heads remained the same, all blood red, with no pupils that Daine could see.

The smoke-snake turned on the line of Tortallan allies and struck in three directions, each head stretching its long neck for prey, baring overlong, onyx fangs. When the creature straightened again, one head gripped a shrieking man-at-arms in its jaws, the second a green-skinned ogre, the third a female centaur who fought to stab her captor with a javelin that she carried. The serpent devoured them, and searched for its next victims.

The Tortallan centaurs and ogres fled. One knight
turned his warhorse to face the serpent. He was a huge man in brightly polished plate armor; his mount was armored as well, her size well-suited to her master's weight. A tight band around Daine's heart squeezed. Raoul of Goldenlake, the Knight Commander of the King's Own, was not a close friend, but she knew and liked him. She was used to thinking of him as a giant, but the serpent rose at least ten feet over his head before the body split into three necks.

Steel wings and claws flashed in the sun. Rikash—his blond hair with its bone decorations streaming behind him—plummeted, talons first, to slam into the monster's central head. The snake roared, its voice tearing at the ears.

Silvery fire bloomed on the snake's left head: The badger materialized there, burying claws and fangs into the thing's skull as a small, moving shadow dove into one of the creature's nostrils. Daine gasped. That was Gold-streak!

Starlings burst from the trees in a sizable, jeering crowd. Like a swarm of bees they swirled around the serpent's right head, blinding it, digging sharp beaks into its flesh.

Sir Raoul galloped in, massive, double-bladed ax in one hand, hacking at the serpent's body as if he were felling a tree. He struck a vital organ; blood of no particular color gushed forth to splatter his armor, smoking where it struck. His mount screamed when the drops lashed her rump. Hurriedly the knight guided the mare back from the stream of blood. The snake convulsed.

The starlings were not fools. They didn't need a command from Daine to get clear. Pulling back, they left the eye sockets of the head that they had assaulted packed with dead birds. The head that the badger had torn into lolled uselessly on its neck; he had chewed through bone to its brain, without taking harm from the
thing's acid blood. Gold-streak looped itself around the badger's forepaw as the god vanished.

The middle head shrilled in rage and pain. It whipped frantically, tossing Rikash into the air. The blond Stormwing slammed into a boulder, and slid to the base of the stone.

The plate and cup slipped from Daine's numb fingers to shatter on the deck.

“Rikash—no!”
someone cried in a voice that cracked as it rose.
“No! No! NOOOOO!”
It was her voice. If she screamed loud enough, long enough, he would live. She hadn't realized that he meant something to her. She hadn't known he was her friend.

It was the three-headed thing's last defiance. It drooped, then dissolved into a liquid soup with colors that shifted over its surface as it soaked into the ground.

Queen Barzha settled onto the rock that had broken Rikash, shrilling her grief. Hebakh landed beside her, keening, eyes ablaze. They had lost the follower who had brought them hope when Ozorne held them captive. They had lost the only Stormwing who had tried to set them free.

Their voices fell into an odd silence, one of those which came in battles when most fighters stopped briefly to catch a breath. Their eerie wailing sent shivers through everyone who could hear.

The battle resumed, but the tide had turned. Everywhere that Daine looked, she saw the enemy fighting to defend themselves, not to attack. Some humans began to lay down their arms. In the north, black fire flared around crimson still, but the lesser mage fires were dying.

In the northeast, so far away that only an eagle —or a girl who had turned her own eyes into those of a raptor—might see, a lone Stormwing took to the air and flapped away. He was trying to escape, leaving the others of his kind who fought on.

Daine had a idea who it was. “No you don't,” she muttered, blackly furious. “Not this time, and never again! Sire, I request permission to go after that Stormwing!”

“This is not a good idea,” Tkaa said, placing a gentle paw on her shoulder. “You risk capture or death from others of the enemy. He will be pursued, and caught.”

She faced the basilisk, eyes ablaze. “That's what I said last time, and
look!”
She swept an arm to include the battlefield before them.

A hand rested on her other shoulder. “Then go,” the king said, blue eyes direct. “Go, and the gods look after you.”

“If they are not busy themselves,” Tkaa pointed out. “Chaos must have plenty of strength to draw upon, with all this.”

Daine shed the blanket that she had worn around her human form. Jumping into a wide notch in the stone wall, she leaped out, changing as she did, trading hair for feathers, arms for wings, and legs for talons. As a sparrow hawk, a small, fast bird of prey, she streaked after Ozorne.

TEN

JUDGMENTS

Her flight carried her over the ruins of the wooden towers and the enemy's dirt bulwarks. Fighting continued there, but even a quick glance told her that the enemy was losing heart. A growing number of men and immortals sat in clusters everywhere, guarded by wary knights and soldiers in Tortallan uniform.

On she flew. Beneath her lay the enemy's northern camp. The ground was littered with bodies, weapons, and the things men needed to live in hostile country; some wagons and tents were ablaze. Here mages battled, the fires of their Gifts waxing and waning. Some mages had surrendered; others lay dying, the loss of their power turning their bodies into skin-covered skeletons before they were dead.

Beside the river, the fiery, black-and-ruby ball that was the interlocked Gifts of Numair and Inar Hadensra pulsed with unchecked fury. Daine glanced at it, then
fixed her eyes on her quarry. She couldn't think about Numair, couldn't stop to watch—she was gaining on Ozorne.

Speeding over the river, she saw the queen enter the enemy camp. If she'd had a mouth, she would have grinned. She had been there when Thayet's commanders told the queen that she would not be permitted to ride to battle herself, not when the king was trapped and vulnerable in Legann. They had made Thayet agree that Tortall could not afford to lose both monarchs, but not before she had expressed her feelings in words that Daine usually heard only in the Corus slums.

Rising air bore her above the forest where the relief force had hidden. Her quarry was clearly in view—and much closer. Stormwings could fly, but not gracefully or speedily. Daine shrieked her elation. Ozorne looked back and saw her. He sped faster; Daine matched him. He searched the land below, trying to spot a place where he might escape her.

It was harder to shape a human mouth and voice box in a bird than it was to give her two-legger self raptor's eyes, or bat's ears. She had no idea why that was true; it just was. After a few moments' struggle, she had something that she could talk with.

“Ozorne Muhassin Tasikhe!” she called. “I am fair vexated with you!”

He turned, hanging in midair, smiling contemptuously. There were marks of soot, blood, and sweat on him; the scars of Stormwing battles decorated his chest. The black, glassy stone she had seen in visions of him still hung on a cord around his neck.

“I quiver,” he said as she approached. “You have no notion of how terrified I am.” For a moment he sounded as he had when she first met him, cool, aloof, and grand, seated on an emperor's throne. In those days he had been someone who placed himself far beyond the kind of life that she knew.

His eyes flickered as he looked over her shoulder. Daine turned. Two Stormwings, and three winged apes, crested the trees between her and Legann. He must have ordered them to wait for just this, so that he could set the trap, and she could fly into it.

The girl-eagle sighed. “Here I was thinking that, just once, it would be nice if you fought a battle
yourself,
without getting others to do your dirty work.” She was thinking hard. She would have to be fast now, faster than she'd ever been in her life.

“
I
am not the one who gets my little animal
friends
killed by the hundreds for defending me,” he taunted her.

Any anger that had clouded her mind vanished. “I made my peace with that—and with them—three years ago. Fight, damn you!”

“I won't soil my claws.” He sneered. “I was the Emperor Mage of Carthak—”

“Oh,
please,”
she retorted, glancing back. The other immortals were coming on fast. “That's finished, and by your own acts did you finish it!”

“How
dare
you judge me?” he snarled. “You're a common-born bastard, a camp follower's brat who spreads her legs for any passing man—just like her mother.”

To her own surprise—and quite clearly, to his—Daine laughed. “And you're as ignorant as you are evil,” she retorted. “I'm done listening to you!”

Wheeling to face the immortals behind her, she changed, as quickly as thought. A giant strangling-snake, she dropped across two apes who flew close together, wrapping her tail around one throat, and her first three feet of length around the other. To her surprise, two small, blobby forms dropped past. Spreading themselves like kites, they steered until they fell onto the faces of both Stormwings. Leaf and Jelly had stolen a ride on Daine's back.

The Stormwings tried to scream; instead they only
pulled darking bodies into their throats. Daine couldn't wait or watch. In one burst of strength, she squeezed, and heard dull snaps as both of her victims' necks broke.

Agony burned her side: The third winged ape wielded a sword. Daine fell away, forcing herself into raven form as she dropped. The cut was long, but shallow; with a grimace she made herself ignore the pain. If she didn't bleed too much, she would be fine. She would
have
to be fine.

Plummeting, she remembered the feel of wind under feathers and the loud calls of raven flock-mates. The wind caught her outspread wings and carried her aloft.

There was a crash: The smothered Stormwings dropped into the woods. Leaf and Jelly fell away from their victims, gliding flat until they latched onto the naked limbs of a tall, long-dead tree. Daine swooped to get them, as Ozorne screamed a word.

The two darkings flared crimson, and exploded. Pulling her wings in, stretching her body, she banked, murder in her heart. The last winged ape was forgotten. There was no one bird that she drew on, but many, as Daine shaped angled wings to give her speed, a ripping beak and talons to match for combat, a starling's talent for quick, midair dodges. She stayed as large as she dared: She would need size to fight this battle. Hurtling through the winds, she came at Ozorne.