The Sleeping King (14 page)

“This is not the time for childish attitudes!” she snapped back. “Listen to me, Will. You can be as great a battle mage as your father if you wish. He has given you all the building blocks you need to develop your abilities.”

Of a sudden all the boring lectures about calming his mind, emptying his thoughts, and disciplining his emotions took on a whole new meaning. He'd always thought Ty merely taught him how to avoid the sorts of thoughts and words that would get him killed by the Empire.

His mother muttered, “It is time for you to become a man and take up the torch your father has passed to you.”

Now
she told him to grow up? After all those years of treating him like a helpless child?

“How am I supposed to master magic if he never taught me?” Will demanded.

“Because it is a simple and powerful truth that cannot be taught, cannot be proven, and cannot be measured. The most powerful magic is all around us. It is in the air we breathe, the earth we stand on, the water we drink, and the fire that warms us. It is always and forever, never waning, never fading. It is what you feel in your heart, what you know in the deepest part of our spirit, and what you believe in your wildest dreams. It is simple and pure like the scent of lady's breath.”

Lady's breath was a beautiful plant that produced sweet-smelling white flowers. Its leaves were burned as incense and made healing poultices for wounds. It was said the last breath of the Green Lady upon the land had created the plant.

Something rustled in the bushes behind them and Will whirled. Without thinking, he channeled his magic through the broken spear he clutched and blasted the orc scout into an unconscious heap. Will watched in shock as his mother darted forward and efficiently finished off the beast by slitting its throat.

Ty, who'd raced up the hill, no doubt at the sight of Will's magic blast, reached them, sword drawn and hands glowing dangerously.

“It's handled,” Will's mother murmured.

Ty turned an amazed stare on Will, who glared back, furious.

Serica interrupted the burgeoning confrontation sharply. “There is no time for this. Husband, the trail is laid.”

Trail?
Was she a trained tracker, too? What other secrets had his parents kept from him all these years? Will shot her a thunderstruck look, brimming with demands for answers. Her exotic uptilted eyes flashed him back one of those severe “not now” looks of hers that quelled all questions.

“Give me that.” His father held out an expectant hand, and Will laid Adrick's broken spear in it. “Close your eyes, both of you,” Ty ordered.

Will did as instructed. A bright flash shone beyond his eyelids for an instant but was gone before his eyes could fly open and see the source.

His father held out Adrick's spear to Will, remade yet again. The entire end of the staff, a forearm's length of it, was now wrapped neatly in what looked like copper. “How—” Will started.

“An old spell I know,” Ty interrupted impatiently. “Go back to the edge of the forest and draw another patrol to me.”

“Are you mad?” Will demanded.

“You are the one who insisted I save your friends. Bring me another pair of orcs.”

Will ran down the hill without giving voice to the myriad questions dancing upon his tongue and went in search of another Boki patrol. He did not need to leave the forest to find one. He darted across the path ahead of this duo and the chase was on. This time he had no way of slowing the orcs' pursuit and the creatures had drawn frighteningly close by the time he charged up the hill toward the split boulder.

He caught a flash of reflected light as his father leaped out of the brush on the attack. The weapon in Ty's hand looked like a long sword, but made of no material Will had ever seen before. It gleamed milky white in the shadowed glen. Will skidded to a halt underneath the pine tree and lurched as his mother materialized beside him.

“What is his sword?” Will whispered.

“Dragon's Tooth,” his mother replied absently, her concentration entirely on the scene below.

Was that its name, or was she suggesting that was an actual … Dragons didn't even exist. Right?
Right?

Will's jaw sagged as his father slipped his left arm free of his shield and thumped his chest with his left fist, uttering something in what sounded for all the world like guttural orcish. His foes bared their huge teeth in bloodthirsty grins as Ty donned the shield once more and gestured the orcs forward with the tip of his sword. Both orcs pulled huge battle-axes off their backs and advanced.

Will started forward, but his mother grabbed his arm tightly. “Hold,” she breathed. “He wishes to make enough battle noises to draw more orcs this direction.”

“But he's outnumbered,” he whispered back.

“It is only two orcs,” she replied dismissively. “And it is not as if they are thanes.”

He stared aghast at her unconcerned face. What was he supposed to say to that? Boki were known to be among the fiercest and most skilled fighters in the land. The last time they had poured out of their forest and attacked the humans, they had nearly annihilated Dupree. A clash of weapons captured his horrified attention, and he watched in shock as his father's gleaming white sword danced like chain lightning, darting in and out, leaving nicks and cuts behind everywhere it went.

If he didn't know better, he would say that Ty was toying with the orcs. Apparently, the orcs concluded the same, for they began to growl. The pair separated, attempting to flank Ty, concentration now grim upon their hideous visages. Will would have stepped forward again to help, but again his mother forestalled him.

Apparently tired of swordplay, Ty abandoned his light fencer's stance and settled into a deeper, bent-kneed stance Will recognized all too well from years upon years of beating wheat to knock the grains loose with staves. Which, now that he thought about it, had often been about the heft and length of an actual sword.

With casual efficiency, Ty went on the attack using a swift, turning move that Will had seen many times before on the threshing floor. His mother flinched as the left-most orc's decapitated head thudded to the ground a second before the body collapsed. Ty reversed the sweep to his right, smashing past the orc's defenses and burying his weapon in the creature's chest.

The orc bellowed as Ty yanked his blade free. Before the second orc had barely hit the ground, Ty grabbed the creature by the feet and commenced dragging it into the brush.

“Go help him,” Will's mother urged. “That roar will bring more orcs than your father hoped for.”

Will rushed down the hill and grabbed the roughly shod feet of the headless orc. The stench was unbelievable as he dragged the heavy corpse after the first one. His father kicked the orc's head into the bushes just as the sounds of more orcs approaching disturbed the woods.

“Get out of here,” Ty ordered tersely. “Go cover your mother, and give her time to kill orcs as they come. And no more magic out of you unless you are going to die. I'll continue to use mine so they concentrate on me and not you.”

Will nodded, taken aback at the terse tone of command ringing in his father's voice. It was unlike anything Will had ever heard from Ty. To Will's ear his father sounded just what he thought a Kothite general in charge of a great army would sound like.

Numb with shock, Will took the spare quiver of arrows his mother shoved into his hands as she strung her bow and assumed an archer's stance. His mother? A trained archer?

“Keep the quiver on my back full,” she ordered, her gaze trained on the slope below.

He had a feeling that this time when the orcs came there would be many more. And this time there would be thanes among them.

 

CHAPTER

5

Princess Endellian did her best to look bored as she followed her father, Emperor Maximillian, down the long hallway to the most isolated corner of the Imperial palace where the Empire's most secret business was conducted. It was isolated for good reason. Even now, faint screams echoed down the ornately decorated hall toward her. With casual ease of long experience, she blocked from her mind the terror and desperation accompanying the noise.

The smaller “interrogation” chamber behind her father's throne was used mainly for oracles who had already been made to understand their need for utter cooperation with Maximillian. But the chamber to which they proceeded now was where that cooperation was learned.

Harder to block than the agony accompanying the echoing screams was the random and frequent mind probing her father projected in an all-encompassing net around him. Even his daughter was not exempt from his continuous scrutiny.

In fact, he particularly watched her. As his heir, she posed perhaps the greatest threat to his throne of all. Not to mention that of all their kind, she came closest to matching her mighty father in mental power. Even the nine archdukes who were Maximillian's contemporaries in origin were not as powerful as she.

And then there was her suspicion that he actually wanted her to intrigue against him. Not seriously enough to threaten his throne, of course, but enough to hone her skills in the art of manipulating the complex politics of the Imperial Court.

Even so, it was a delicate dance to shield her innermost thoughts from her father without him realizing she was doing so. Whether she succeeded or not was anyone's guess. Mostly, she made sure to couch all of her plotting in terms of how she was serving the best interests of the Empire with her machinations.

“You are unquiet, my princess.”

She turned an innocent gaze upon her sire. “I confess I cannot abide the mewling of these oracles of yours. Please forgive me if I block their whining from my mind.”

“These Children of Fate are a fragile lot to be sure but their gift for true prophesy cannot be denied. Their Mistress has imparted great power in them.”

And yet it is an enduring mystery from whence came their extraordinarily accurate tellings of past and future, as if they see beyond the Wall of Time itself.

Maximillian commented, likely in direct response to her thought, “The Children have a taste of Fae magics about them. Such power allows them a certain freedom from the limitations of our world. While their powers of prophesy are enhanced, their forms lack any real protection from the rigors of that power.”

Ahh, but the weakness of those bodies also gives you power over the Children of Fate.

Maximillian responded to her thought dryly, “True enough.”

A pair of guards swept open the door before her father and she followed him into a torture chamber outfitted to take maximum effect upon the vulnerable flesh of the Children, who were becoming harder and harder to find throughout the Empire. It had been nearly a year since one had been brought in, and Laernan had reported secretly to her that the latest one was not particularly talented or the least bit cooperative. Apparently, this one had expected to be tortured for his visions and flatly refused to give them up shy of torture. Although it was not Laernan's preference to resort to such crude tactics, he was willing to get his hands bloody when necessary.

The uncooperative oracle turned out to be a shirtless man of middling age chained upon the left-most wall, wrists and ankles manacled in a sprawling X well above the floor. His gut was split open at the moment, Laernan's fist buried in his innards. The prisoner screamed hoarsely, his voice cracking and abruptly falling silent.

Of course, the prisoner did not die. The Lord High Inquisitor was of sufficient mental power to forcibly hold the man's spirit within his body, regardless of how broken it might be. The prisoner could be roused to full consciousness with little more than a thought by his torturer, and Laernan did so now. The screaming took up where it had left off.

“How are we doing today?” the Emperor asked his chief inquisitor pleasantly over the din.

Laernan extracted his hand from the prisoner's gut, wiped it upon a towel, and bowed deeply to his liege. “This one exerts much effort of will to die. He will fail, of course.”

The oracle slumped in his shackles, sweat and blood streaming down his body. Endellian noted that this one had the distinctive hourglass-shaped infinity sign of his kind crudely carved into his right side. It looked as if the prisoner had marked himself thus.

The oracle was bold in his defiance of her father to display his symbol so aggressively.
Ahh, well.
Laernan would extract the defiance from the fellow soon enough.

“What details have you garnered?” her father asked a little less pleasantly.

Laernan answered, “The Children continue to be stubbornly silent on the subject of this nameless one who thinks to threaten you. Either they do not know, or else they guard the secret with particular tenacity.”

“Get me a name.”

“That's just it, Your Majesty. There is no name.”

She noted with approval that Laernan had carefully avoided any mention of the end of Maximillian's reign. As unconcerned as her father had seemed that night sixteen years ago at hearing the prophecy, she had always suspected he'd been secretly alarmed by the oracle's death brought on by the prophecy of his own end.

“Get me a name before I am forced to take extreme measures,” her father growled, openly displeased now. The waves of his ire rolled through Endellian's mind, and she was careful not to block them in any way. It would not do to show resistance to her father while he was in this mood. He was apt to mind blast first and get around to regretting the results later.

The only other person in the room, a woman leaning against a far wall well back in the shadows, commented wryly, “If Laernan's Taming does not constitute extreme measures, surely your … guest … must quake to think what actual extreme measures will entail.”

Endellian glanced up and, out of the corner of her eye, spied a yellow tint and hint of vertical, slit irises in the woman's bland face. She looked more fully upon her father's ward, and the impression faded away, replaced by entirely unremarkable, brown human eyes.