Blood in the Valley Read online

  Air blasted into his chest, nearly ripped him free. He clenched his thighs tight till pain slivered through the muscles of his groin. He fumbled blindly, eyes watering in the gale, and got a hold of something. The dragon growled, its torso thrumming beneath Jayce as it protested his grip on the tuft of coarse hair tracing its spine down the neck. But it didn’t shake him free.

  Lake Remordan glittered in the dawn below, Jayce saw as his vision finally cleared. The dragon banked slightly, angling into a southwesterly course that would bring them back over Eredynn. Jayce could see the mountains to the east, could catch golden sunlight flashing amongst snow-capped peaks, see the lower foothills crowded nearer and carpeted with rolling tracts of woodland. Fierce exhilaration blasted through pain and fatigue, drove a cry of triumph from his throat as he rode head-and-shoulders above all Creation.

  To Jayce’s left, Eredynn squatted atop its hillside perch, half-ringed in the fires of the dragon’s passing. He had a panoramic view of the goblinoid horde, a kicked-anthill’s chaos of retreat and advance, shattered groups intermixing with those coming up, still untouched by panic. A sortie from the city could make all the difference now, could rock the besiegers back on their heels, maybe break them altogether and send them streaming southward before the ponderously slow columns of their reinforcements came up. But the defenders, struggling for their lives at ground-level, could not know it.

  Not without help.

  Another pass, he thought.

  The beast rumbled beneath him, increasingly resisting his hold over its simple mind. Holding the dragon in thrall to him didn’t require concentration so much as it did Jayce’s constant assertion of dominance, like a smaller but scrappier wolf cowing a larger but lazier pack-mate. Jayce backed up his insistence with imaginings of fat cattle and time to enjoy them, knowing that, bound together as they were, the dragon would sense and understand the implied reward for its submission. It banked more sharply and gave its wings a beat, launched into a course that would take them over the city once again.

  Together they passed over the towers of the Imperial Palace. The main road through the city flashed by beneath them, a straight line the dragon seemed to instinctively follow. Over the howl of wind, Jayce made out the clamor of bells from the spires of the temples. As they skimmed rooftops, cheers rose in their wake. Jayce saw figures in the streets, waving hands and weapons.

  Grinning, Jayce raised his free hand high, let all of Eredynn see.

  Ahead, smoke and the steely flutter of weapons highlighted the fight at the gatehouse, some of the goblins having gotten through despite the punishment of the dragon’s first pass, to grapple with the defenders. The cheering of the rest of the city seemed to be reaching the citizens, though, giving them heart. Some of the attackers saw the dragon’s approach and began to break, scattering back through the blazing no-man’s land between the knolls the horde occupied and the city walls.

  Let them have it, Jayce thought with bared teeth.

  Muscles tensed, scales rippled and pinched beneath Jayce’s legs as the dragon dragged in a breath. Tendrils of sulfuric fumes sucked into its gaping maw with a hiss like water poured over cinders. The dragon drew in its wings, cupping them to produce drag and slow its approach, the motion tilting it back in midair. They flashed over the gatehouse and the dragon beat its wings down hard, its whole body tensing into a trembling line as it bellowed and sent hell riving forth.

  Heat washed up over Jayce. He felt hairs on his bare forearms shrivel and fall away in crisp flutters. He curled in upon himself, tried to draw his cowl tight over his head, even as sweat cascaded into pinched eyes and red intensity clawed through his body. He could hear nothing, see nothing, could feel only the dragon’s roar and the dragon’s breath.

  Something else wormed its way through to Jayce, not unlike the terrible instant before the dragon’s exhalation; an upsurge in the tides of cosmos. He had a moment to recognize the terrible power he’d sensed before, in the south.

  Lightning flashed through Jayce’s clenched eyelids. He felt more than heard the blast, magical fury sleeting through his mind, his nerves. Then he was rocking back with the dragon’s whole mass tilting beneath him, as if recoiling from some eldritch kick to the midsection.

  Blinking through a dazzle of afterimages, Jayce saw the world spinning around him, the sky and the earth reversing sides, everything going wrong. The dragon shrieked and fluttered its wings, the frantic motions battering Jayce, tearing his legs loose of their grip for a terrifying instant before the beast managed to right itself and Jayce slammed back down upon its spine, pain hammering to his core. Somehow, he kept his grip on the dragon’s mane, but it was one more twinge of pain shredding Jayce’s control of the monster.

  Too scared, too panicked, Jayce didn’t sense the second blast coming. He caught a nervous glimmer of energies from the line of hills, thought he saw a female figure at their crest with arms upraised, before lightning sawed across the sky to smash into the dragon’s smoldering chest. Crimson scales crisped and sloughed away with a stench of seared stone, the sorcerous impact driving the air from the dragon’s lungs with a ragged scream as it was carried backwards over the walls of Eredynn.

  Jayce’s grip failed again and he toppled over the dragon’s right shoulder, dangling by his precarious grasp on the monster’s tuft. The dragon shook like a bull desperate to rid itself of an insect’s bite. An arm came up, flailing for Jayce and instead rocking him up over the dragon’s back to swing down the other side. Control was gone. Pain dominated the beast now. Jayce glimpsed the charred ruin of its chest and belly, scales cracking away from quivering, steaming meat.

  The dragon beat its wings for altitude and shook itself again. Jayce flopped free, taking a handful of hair with him. The city spun beneath. He rasped arcane words he could not hear over the roar of air, could not be certain he’d gotten them right as death rushed up to meet him.

  He felt the thrill of energies in his nerves just as he lost consciousness.

  LONADIEL COWERED UNASHAMEDLY behind his cackling mistress as the dragon thrashed across the sky, trailing smoke and glimmers of shattered scales. The beast righted itself before its frenzied course carried it into the ground, a flap of wings turning a plummet into a controlled crash. It struck down just outside Eredynn’s gatehouse, the impact rippling the ground out from under Lonadiel’s feet then slamming him back down, driving him to his knees.

  Satayebeb remained unmoved. Cyan and crimson energies snaked about her, kicking off sparks that bit Lonadiel’s exposed skin. The lightnings wormed up her raised arms to meet in a nexus of snarling power that was neither color, was blackness that glowed with malevolence trapped a thousand years in the Void beyond the mortal world. Her laughter rose to a shriek of exhilaration not unlike her cries of passion. The joining of energies shrank in upon itself, became a pinprick of focused power before a twitch from her sent it ravening forth in a shaft of pure malice given form.

  The dragon spread a wing before it as a shield, a reflex that would have protected it from a rival’s fiery breath. But Satayebeb’s magic took its heat from another world and feasted upon leathery, scaly flesh, searing it away in blackened tatters and tracing up the fingers of the wing, slagging bone in billows of white flame. The beast roared in agony and stretched forth its neck. Its fanged maw opened wide, the darkness within sputtering with flames.

  Dragon fire washed uphill. Lonadiel howled and curled into a ball, expecting—and wondering if he didn’t deserve—death. But the heat didn’t consume his body. Stunned to hear his heart still thundering, though the world roared around him, he forced himself to look up.

  Fire spread around him to either side, frothing away from a barrier shimmering crimson about Satatyebeb, flooding across the grass of the knoll and kicking it into an inferno that continued to the crest of the rise where the loyal blocks of hobgoblins still waited. The first ranks had not time to scream, dragon breath charring them to mockeries of skeletons in armor that crumbled backwards upon
their comrades. Those that survived broke, the last vestiges of their mercenary pride blasted to ashes as surely as their kin had been.

  The Blood-drinkers fled, leaving the hilltops blazing and bare.

  Its breath expended, the dragon stomped up the rise, dragging the smoldering wreck of its immolated wing, keeping the charred ruin of its chest low to the ground. Its foot falls shook the earth beneath Lonadiel like the quivers of a dying man. It bellowed as it clambered over a steaming pyre of slain goblins, working itself up for another breath.

  Satayebeb lowered her arms, but the energies played still about her hands. With a contemptuous flick of fingers, she sent lightening crashing forth again. Forks of power struck the dragon in the muzzle, sent shards of teeth spinning. Jets of flames puffed from its savaged mouth, fanned harmlessly in the air. It toppled from its perch atop crisped corpses. Satayebeb let one hand drop but kept the other up, pointed. More lightning ravaged from her fingertips, took the dragon in its now exposed chest and sent it tumbling backwards down the low incline towards the city.

  Lonadiel looked up at his mistress and had to fight back a quail of horror. The strain of her work—or was it the expression of her true self?—transmogrified her visage, had drawn skin taut over sharp bones, pulled her face into something more like a leering skull. She laughed, seeing his gaze upon her, her mouth stretched impossibly wide, the jaw shuddering as her cackles left it, her eyes sinking back into the sockets to become tiny glimmers of purest hellfire. She left him there, striding downhill to cast half-hearted bolts of power into the twitching mass of the still-struggling dragon.

  The ringing of Lonadiel’s ears drowned out sound and he was enveloped in something that could almost be quiet. He rose unsteadily to his feet, skin tight and tingling with minor burns and the electric tickle of energies still playing chaotic in the air. He took a breath, the first he could remember in an eternity and his lungs ached in protest. He stood alone, surrounded by a tapestry of devastation that he realized was the vision his mistress intended to bring to the world.

  Figures began to appear at the crest of the hills, goblinoid forms silhouetted against the blaze. Lonadiel glanced over them, noted the shock and terror in their faces, but noted, too, the expressions of awe and ecstasy as they watched their demon-goddess punish their worst nightmares with sadistic ease. One-by-one, they began falling to their knees, jabbering in mass worship of the One they loved.

  Like a thunder strike on a clear day, Lonadiel remembered Illah.

  Long-legged strides carried him past the supplicant goblinoids, over the knoll and down the reverse slope to the shattered confusion of the baggage trains. The hobgoblins were returning, heads hung low, unwilling to look up and risk his disdain. He elbowed through them, passed an awe-struck Groon Blood-drinker on his way. He paid them no heed. Urgency drove away the pain and weariness of the hellish morning.

  He caught sight of the prison cart. He saw bodies strewn about it and felt his heart flop against his ribcage. No. He saw goblinoids beginning to form a semicircle around the wreck. It cannot be! Not now! He pressed through the mass and emerged into the open ground before the cart and...

  Illah sat in the open hatch, a tulwar held casually in a bloody fist.

  “Did you think I’d let you off so easy?” she asked.

  Lonadiel froze, relief that she was still there, still alive, warring with the realization of what a free, armed Illah might mean. He put his hand to the grip of his sword and took a step forward. “What are going to make me do here, Illah?”

  She offered him a half-smile that highlighted the glimmer of tears in her eyes. “Our battle will not be fought with blades—at least not blades alone.”

  “Then drop yours,” he replied, spreading his legs for a fight.

  Illah shrugged and let the tulwar fall. A ripple of relief passed through the goblins. One started forward but Lonadiel put up an arm, hissed at it for restraint. He regarded her again.

  “I don’t understand,” he said.

  She nodded and smiled again. “I know you don’t.” Her tone was heavy with mourning. “But I am Yntuil.”

  Somehow, the implied insult hurt Lonadiel where he knew it shouldn’t. He stared at her a moment longer before shaking his head in disgust and moving away, calling over his shoulder to the goblins, “Put her back in the cart.”

  Chapter Eight

  Desperate Plans

  Kodror Aigann and the City Watch commanders turned to watch as Palace Guardsmen opened the doors to the Strategos’ Office and permitted Vohl and Muddle entry. They stomped past gaped-jawed expressions of gathered citizens and came to stand before Aigann’s desk. Muddle hefted the stiff, stinking weight he bore off his shoulder and let it crash to the marbled floor.

  Though hacked to a blood-crusted ruin, missing an arm and half its face, the corpse was still recognizable as what had once been Satu Vennitius.

  “The Strategos has returned,” Vohl said with a grimace he meant to be a grim smile.

  City Watch commanders paled or gasped or looked away. Aigann blanched, his eyes bulging, and turned to one side, emptying his stomach with a dull retch. An aide rushed from behind but Aigann slapped the man away, his free hand fluttering to wipe vomit from his lips. Stains spread across the breast of his white tunic.

  “Corpses,” Vohl said. “Living corpses of Legionnaires, sent by some hell-magic to attack us.” He looked around at the other commanders. “I assume it was the same in other sectors?”

  A few vague nods answered him. One Watchman—Severs, if Vohl recalled correctly—knelt beside the body. A bloodstained strip of parchment scrawled in barely-recognizable Thyrrian Standard was tacked to Vennitius’ chest with a carpentry nail. Gingerly, Severs yanked the paper free and proceeded to skim its message. “The leader of the horde offers us terms of surrender.” With his free hand he wiped sweat from a tortured face. “It...it promises amnesty to any who lay down their arms and open up the gates to them.”

  The commanders murmured and exchanged glances while eyes widened with glimmers of hope. Aigann sat up, the glaze of nausea leaving his face. “Perhaps...perhaps we should consider?”

  Vohl snorted. “Have you lost your wits? Are you serious? Do you all want to watch your women and daughters raped, your sons sold into slavery, and our youngest and strongest handed over to butchers to feed goblinoid stomachs?”

  “You don’t know that will happen!” Aigann snapped.

  Vohl shook his head, knew this kind of desperation and knew, even more, he had to smite it down before it spread like a yellow plague and gained acceptance. “Don’t surrender your wits to this! The barbarians from the north—the Skinners, humans, mind you—massacred everyone that fell in their path until we stopped them. None of you could be so daft as to think goblinoids, led by the kind of thing that could conjure this—” he gave the corpse a kick “—would honestly offer us better!”

  Silence clutched the gathering. Even Aigann slid down in his chair, his lips moving in some unheard monologue.

  “So, we fight,” Muddle rumbled into the quiet.

  “We survive,” Vohl corrected him.

  “They’re right!” another of the Watchmen declared. “Why...we turned them back this morning!”

  “With the help of that dragon,” Vohl said. And Jayce, he thought but did not add.

  “Yes,” Aigann said, sitting up. “What of it? It is slain and left smoldering outside the gate, but my Guardsmen said a rider fell from its back into the city. Certainly, anyone who could bend such a beast to his will would make a valuable ally. Do we have any word of this individual?”

  “Dead,” Vohl lied. “He...ah...wore what passes as a uniform amongst the horde. We can only assume he was a wizard who had some falling-out with the horde’s leadership.” He flicked a glance at Muddle, whose eyebrows arched up in admiration of Vohl’s burst of imagination.

  “Too bad,” Aigann said slowly, eyeing Vohl with sudden suspicion. The expression passed as he went on. “What of our de
fenses? Can they hold?”

  “The Veteran Cohort paid dearly for holding the walls against the undead,” Vohl said. “And the walls themselves, though improved, remain in poor condition.” He shrugged. “Our lookouts report fresh numbers coming up to replenish what the horde lost this morning and bolster them to new levels. Against that, I don’t see how we can hold the city longer than another night.”

  Sever pulled his eyes from Vennitius’ body to meet Vohl’s gaze. “What are you saying?”

  Vohl rubbed his hands together, steeling himself for what he knew he had to say, noting Muddle’s tension at his side. “I’m saying we need to consider that maybe we should abandon the—”

  “Do not say it!” Aigann shrieked.

  “Procurator,” Vohl retorted, “there are enough ships in the harbor now to—”

  “Say no more, I command you!” Aigan cut him off again, rising from behind his desk to jab a finger at Vohl. “To speak any more of this is treason, I tell you! It is cowardice!” He cast his maniac eyes across the gathered Watchmen, waving his hand. “Don’t any of you even think it! I will throw you all in the Imperial dungeon!”

  “That would leave you with few to follow your orders,” Vohl could not help but reply.

  “And you will be the first, Rhenn!” Aigann turned the quivering finger back on him. “Test me once more and, by the Gods, I’ll have you eating wormy bread in a cell with your little gnome friend!”

  Vohl clenched his jaw tight. The other Watchmen refused to look at him, lowered their faces and stared at the floor. Silence dragged, disturbed only by Aigann’s hoarse breathing. Muddle’s eyes pinched to murderous slits, focused on the Procurator as muscles stood out in cords across his folded arms, a furious fight with himself all could see if they dared look.