The Shining Ones (55 page)

Cyrgon’s fire was fluctuating wildly now, flaring and dimming as his agony swelled and then diminished.

‘What is Zalasta feeling now?’ Sephrenia eagerly asked Xanetia.

‘His pain doth go beyond mine ability to describe it,’ the Anarae replied.

‘Dear, dear sister!’ Sephrenia exulted. ‘You’ve made me happier than you could possibly imagine!’

‘Are you ever going to be able to tame her again?’ Sparhawk asked Vanion.

‘It may take a while.’ Vanion’s tone was troubled.

The writhing, half-formed shape of the flame-like Cyrgon partially rose and waved one huge, fiery arm, and a half-mile or so behind the Trolls there suddenly appeared a vast glittering.

‘He’s called up his Cyrgai!’ Khalad shouted. ‘We’d better do something.’

‘Ghworg! Schlee!’ Vanion roared in Bhelliom’s huge voice. ‘Cyrgon hath summoned his children! Now may
your
children feast!’

The Troll-Gods swelled even more enormous and barked sharp commands to their prostrate worshipers. The Trolls scrambled to their feet, turned, and looked hungrily at the advancing Cyrgai drawn from ages past. Then with a great roar they rushed toward the banquet Cyrgon had so generously provided.

Ehlana was tired. It had been one of those exhausting days with so many things to do that nothing had been really wrapped up before the next intruded itself. She had retired to the royal bedroom with Mirtai, Alean and Melidere to prepare for bed. Danae trailed along behind them, dragging Rollo by one hind leg and yawning broadly.

‘The Emperor was in a peculiar humor this evening,’ Melidere noted, closing the door behind them.

‘Sarabian’s nerves are strung a little tight right now,’ Ehlana said, sitting down at her dressing-table. ‘The future of his whole empire hinges on what Sparhawk and the others are doing in the north, and there’s no way he can keep track of what’s going on up there.’

Danae yawned again and curled up in a chair.

‘Where’s your cat?’ Ehlana asked her.

‘She’s around somewhere,’ Danae replied sleepily.

‘Check my bed, Mirtai,’ Ehlana instructed. ‘I don’t like furry little surprises in the middle of the night.’

Mirtai patted down the canopied royal bed and then dropped to her knees to look under all the furniture. ‘No sign of her, Ehlana,’ she reported.

‘You’d better go find her, Danae,’ the queen said.

‘I’m sleepy, mother,’ Danae objected.

‘The sooner you find your cat, the sooner you can get to bed. Let’s catch her
before
she gets out of the castle this time. Go with her, Mirtai. After you two find the cat, put Danae to bed and then see if you can locate either Stragen or Caalador. One of them’s supposed to bring me a report on what’s going on at the Cynesgan embassy tonight, and I’d like to get it out of the way before I go to bed. I don’t want them banging on my door in the middle of the night.’

Mirtai nodded. ‘Come along, Danae,’ she said.

The princess sighed. She climbed out of her chair, kissed her mother, and followed the golden giantess out of the room.

Alean began to brush the queen’s hair. Ehlana loved to have her hair brushed. There was a kind of sleepy, sensual delight in it that relaxed her tremendously. She was quite vain about her hair. It was thick and heavy and lustrously blonde. Its pale color was astounding to the dark-haired Tamuls, and she knew that all eyes would be on her any time she entered a room.

The three of them talked, the drowsy, intimate talk of ladies preparing for bed.

Then there was a polite tapping at the door.

‘Oh, bother,’ Ehlana said. ‘See who that is, Melidere.’

‘Yes, your Majesty.’ The baroness rose to her feet and crossed the bedroom to the door. She opened it and spoke for a moment with the people outside. ‘It’s four
of the Peloi, your Majesty,’ she said. ‘They say they have word from the north.’

‘Bring them in, Melidere.’ Ehlana turned to face the door.

The man who came through the door did not look all that much like a Peloi. The clothing, tight-fitting and mostly leather, was right, as was the saber at the man’s waist. His head was shaved, as were the heads of all Peloi men, but this fellow’s face was slightly tanned, whereas his scalp was as pale as the belly of a fish. Something was wrong here.

The man behind the first wore a carefully trimmed black beard. His face was very pale, and it looked somehow familiar.

The last two also wore Peloi garb and had shaved their heads, but they were definitely
not
Peloi. The first was Elron, the juvenile Astellian poet, and the second, pouchy-eyed and slightly tipsy, was Krager. ‘Ah,’ he said in his drink-slurred voice, ‘so good to see you again, your Majesty.’

‘How did you get in here, Krager?’ she demanded.

‘Nothing easier, Ehlana,’ he smirked. ‘You should have kept a few of Sparhawk’s knights here to stand watch. Church Knights are more observant than Tamul soldiers. We dressed as Peloi and shaved our heads, and no one gave us a second glance. Elron here covered his face with his cloak when the baroness answered the door – just as a precaution – but otherwise it was almost too easy. You
have
met Elron before, haven’t you?’

‘I vaguely remember him, don’t you, Melidere?’

‘Why, yes, I believe so, your Majesty,’ the blonde girl replied. ‘Wasn’t he that literary incompetent we met back in Astel? The one with delusions of grandeur? I’d hardly call those atrocities he commits poetry, though.’

Elron’s face went suddenly white with outrage.

‘I’m not an expert in the area of poetry, ladies,’ Krager
shrugged. ‘Elron tells me that he’s a poet, so I take him at his word. May I present Baron Parok?’ He indicated the first man who had entered the room.

Parok bowed floridly. His face was marked with the purplish broken veins of a heavy drinker, and his eyes were pouchy and dissipated-looking.

Ehlana ignored him. ‘You’re not going to get out of here alive, Krager. You know that, don’t you?’

‘I
always
get out alive, Ehlana,’ he smirked. ‘My preparations are always very thorough. Now I’d like to have you meet our leader. This is Scarpa.’ He gestured at the bearded man. ‘I’m sure you’ve heard of him, and he’s been absolutely
dying
to make your acquaintance.’

‘He doesn’t look all that dead to me – yet,’ she noted. ‘Why don’t you call the guards to remedy that, Melidere?’

Scarpa blocked the baroness. ‘This bravado is quite out of place in a mere woman,’ he said to Ehlana coldly in a voice loaded with contempt. ‘You give yourself too many airs. All the genuflecting and “your Majesty”s seem to have gone to your head and made you forget that you’re still only a woman.’

‘I don’t think I need instruction in proper behavior from the bastard son of a whore!’ she retorted.

Scarpa’s face flickered a brief annoyance. ‘We’re wasting time here,’ he said. His voice was deep and rich, the voice of a performer, and his manner and gestures were studied. He had obviously spent a great deal of time in the public eye. ‘We have many leagues to cover before dawn.’

‘I’m not going anyplace,’ she declared.

‘You’ll go where I tell you to go,’ he said, ‘and I’ll teach you your place as we go along.’

‘What do you hope to gain from this?’ Melidere demanded.

‘Empire and victory.’ Scarpa shrugged. ‘We’re taking
the Queen of Elenia hostage. Her husband is so stupid that he forgets that the world is full of women – one very much like another. He’s so foolishly attached to her that he’ll give us anything for her safe return.’

‘Are you such an idiot that you actually believe that my husband will trade Bhelliom for me?’ Ehlana said scornfully. ‘Sparhawk is Anakha, you fool, and he has Bhelliom in his fist. That makes him a God. He killed Azash, he’ll kill Cyrgon, and he’ll
definitely
kill you. Pray that he does it quickly, Scarpa. He has it in his power to make your dying last for a million years if he chooses.’

‘I do not pray, woman. Only weaklings put any faith in Gods.’

‘I think you underestimate Sparhawk’s devotion to you, Ehlana,’ Krager said. ‘He’ll give up anything to gain your safe return.’

‘He won’t have to,’ Ehlana snapped. ‘I’ll deal with the four of you myself. Do you really think you can get out of here when one word from me will bring half the garrison running?’

‘You won’t give that word, however,’ Scarpa sneered. ‘You’re just a little too arrogant, woman. I think you need to know the full reality of your situation.’ He turned and pointed at Baroness Melidere. ‘Kill that one,’ he commanded Elron.

‘But…’ the pasty-faced literary poseur began to object.

‘Kill her!’ Scarpa snapped. ‘If you don’t, I’ll kill
you
!’

Elron tremblingly drew his rapier and advanced on the defiant baroness. ‘It’s not a knitting-needle, you clot,’ Melidere told him. ‘You can’t even hold it right. Stick to butchering language, Elron. You don’t have the skill – or the stomach – to move up to people yet, although your so-called poetry’s bad enough to make people
want
to die.’

‘How dare you?’
he almost screamed, his face turning purple.

‘How’s your “Ode to Blue” coming, Elron?’ she taunted him. ‘You could make a fortune peddling that one as an emetic, you know. I felt the urge to vomit before you’d finished reciting the first stanza.’

He howled in absolute rage and made a clumsy thrust with his rapier.

Ehlana had watched Stragen training Sarabian often enough to know that the thrust was well off the mark. The intrepid baroness, however, coolly deflected the blade with the wrist of the hand she seemed to be raising in a futilely defensive gesture, and Elron’s blade passed smoothly through her shoulder.

Melidere gasped, clutching at the blade to conceal the exact location of the wound. Then she lurched back to pull herself free of the blade and clawed at the wound to spread the blood spurting from it over the bodice of her nightdress. Then she fell.

‘You murderer!’ Ehlana shrieked, rushing to her fallen friend. She hurled herself across Melidere’s inert body, weeping and crying out in apparent anguish. ‘Are you all right?’ she muttered under her breath between sobs.

‘It’s only a scratch,’ Melidere lied, also in a whisper.

‘Tell Sparhawk that I’m all right,’ the queen instructed, tugging off her ring and concealing it in Melidere’s bodice, ‘and tell him that I forbid him to give up Bhelliom, no matter what they threaten to do to me.’ She rose to her feet, her face tear-streaked. ‘You’ll hang for this, Elron,’ she said in a deadly voice, ‘or maybe I’ll have you burned at the stake instead – with a slow fire.’ She pulled a blanket from the bed and quickly covered Melidere with it to prevent too close an examination.

‘We will leave now,’ Scarpa said coldly. ‘That other one is also your friend, I believe.’ He pointed at the ashen-faced Alean. ‘We’ll take her along, and if you make any outcry at all, I’ll personally slit her throat.’

‘You’re forgetting the message, Scarpa,’ Krager said,
pulling a folded piece of paper from the inside of his leather Peloi jacket. ‘We
have
to leave a friendly little note for Sparhawk – just to let him know that we stopped by to call.’ Then he drew a small knife. ‘Your pardon, Queen Ehlana,’ he smirked, exhaling the sharp, acrid reek of his wine-sodden breath into her face, ‘but I need a bit of authentication to prove to Sparhawk that we’re really holding you captive.’ He took hold of a lock of Ehlana’s hair and roughly sawed it off with his knife. ‘We’ll just leave this with our note so that he can compare it with later ones to verify that it’s really yours.’ His grin grew even more vicious. ‘If you should feel a sudden urge to cry out, Ehlana, just remember that all we
really
need is your head. We can harvest hair from that, so we won’t need to bring the rest of you along if you start being
too
much bother.’

Voyager

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This paperback edition 2006

FIRST EDITION

Previously published in paperback by HarperCollins Science Fiction and Fantasy 1994, and by Voyager 1996, reprinted fifteen times.

First published in Great Britain by Grafton 1993

Copyright © David Eddings 1993

The Author asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work

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