The energy from the child was sweet, as sweet as flesh fresh after a kill.
She died with a feathery wail rising from her throat, her lips quivering, beads of sweat upon her brow, and a haunted look in her eye.
Crull-maldor broke off the attack early. The girl had died inside, but Crull-maldor left her with her heart still beating.
The girl managed to sway on her feet for a moment before she crumpled to her knees. There she just stared forward in a daze.
She was a hollow shell. She would never speak again, never eat.
Her family would try to restore her, to feed her, but it would take days until she died.
“Raze this village as an example to the humans,” Crull-maldor growled.
The wyrmling troops cheered. Even Yikkarga rejoiced, and the sound of it brought a smile to Crull-maldor’s lips.
Raze the village, Crull-maldor thought, and the people will scatter and tell what we have done. The humans will become even more enraged, more determined to destroy us, and perhaps they will create the very hero that the emperor fears.
Thus, I will turn the tables on him, and see him destroyed.
It was on the lonely march back to the fortress that Lord Despair communed with Crull-maldor—for the first time in nearly two hundred years.
The lich lord was floating among pale gray boulders that glowed eerily in the light of a thin moon. A slight breeze blew, so that she could nearly catch it and float on it, propelled by its strength alone. In the distance, foxes yipped and barked, while nearby the mice rustled among the thin grasses. The land was dying, succumbing to the curse of the lich lords, and so the stalks of wild oats were dry. As the mice scrabbled about, the reedy voices of grass betrayed their presence.
Then Despair came. He took Crull-maldor’s mind, much as she might seize that of a crow, and he filled her consciousness with a vision of his presence.
Despair could take many forms, Crull-maldor knew. Male, female, old, young, human, wyrmling, beast. They were the same.
He came to her in the guise of a human this time, one of the true humans of Caer Luciare, with nubs of horn upon his brow. He was clean shaven, with flashing eyes and a regal look, and he wore black robes with diamonds sewn into them, so that they caught the starlight. He stood upon a parapet, upon a tower in Rugassa, so that in the distance forests loomed above the castle walls, dark and brooding.
He smiled in greeting, and peered right through Crull-maldor’s soul, penetrating all of her evil designs, all of her little schemes and betrayals, and then dismissing them with a shrug.
“I know you, little lich lord,” Despair whispered. “Though you feel alone and forgotten, I remember you still.”
Immediately, Crull-maldor dropped to the ground, prostrating herself before her master. “As I remember you,” Crull-maldor hissed, “and honor you.”
“Is it honor to spar with your emperor?” Despair demanded; fear lanced through Crull-maldor. “Is it honor to withhold the blood metal that he demanded?”
“Forgive me, milord Despair,” Crull-maldor said. “I kept back a part of the blood metal only to serve you better, so that we might conquer the humans in this realm.”
Despair glared at Crull-maldor for a long moment, then broke into a hearty laugh. “You amuse me, my pet,” he said. “Long have you and the emperor sparred from a distance, and in this you have done well. Both of you are stronger now because of it.
“But the time has come to put aside your differences. A war is coming, one that will span the universe. You are my great wizard, and I will lean heavily upon you.
“In securing the North, you have done well. But more needs to be accomplished. I need warriors, runelords of great power. But I need more. I will need weapons and armor by the score. Your people must work faster. Give endowments to all of your people—to every man, woman, and child. Give them ten endowments of metabolism each.
“Begin with your facilitators, so that they might grant endowments more quickly. Then move to your warriors.
“Do you have enough blood metal for this task?”
Crull-maldor thought quickly. She had seventy thousand wyrmlings under her command. It would take a pound of blood metal for each ten forcibles. She would need seventy thousand pounds just to grant metabolism. But her warriors would need more than just speed.
“My lord,” Crull-maldor confessed, “I have but twenty thousand pounds of blood metal.
“Fear not,” he whispered. “I shall send more soon. I must secure Rugassa and the blood metal mines at Caer Luciare first. Then you shall receive your rations.
“Go in among the humans, and harvest them as you have been doing. Strip them of endowments, so that even those who are unwilling to serve me shall find themselves converted to our cause.”
Crull-maldor was struck by a thought. “Milord, if our people take ten endowments of metabolism each, it will create vast logistical problems. With seventy thousand wyrmlings here in the North, we struggled to feed ourselves. But with so many endowments, our people will need ten times as much food to eat. . . . The land cannot support it.”
The more that Crull-maldor listened, the more frightening Despair’s proposition sounded. By granting all of his people endowments of metabolism, he would give them great speed. The endowment itself would boost all of the metabolic processes. It would speed up the body so that the wyrmling runelords would move at ten times their normal speed. Thus, in one year they would accomplish as much as they might have in ten years.
But they would age more quickly, too.
And they would need to eat ten times as often. Thus, they would have to harvest caribou and elk, wild oxen and seals. But there was not enough game on the island for that. In a month or two, all of the animal population would be decimated, and the wyrmlings would face starvation.
“There is much to eat on the island now,” Despair said. “There is not just game—there are the horses and cows and sheep that belong to the humans, and then there are the humans themselves.
“Take endowments from the young,” Despair said. “And as you do, seize their livestock to feed yourselves. By the time that the livestock is gone, the small folk will be too weak to fight you, and you can harvest them. . . .”
Crull-maldor considered the plan. It was monstrous in nature. Despair would create a nation of runelords, something that—as far as she could tell—had never been tried before.
Among the humans, such a plan could not have worked. The humans were farmers and herdsmen. They relied so much upon their harvests that they could not have attempted anything on this scale.
But the wyrmling armies that swept across the worlds would move so quickly that they would be impossible to stop, and they could simply feed upon their enemies.
“I see,” Crull-maldor whispered. “We shall be the devourers of worlds.”
“You see but a glimpse,” Despair corrected. “For now, your people shall each take ten endowments apiece, and in doing so they shall ascend above all other races.
“But in a few weeks, they shall get ten more endowments of metabolism, and ten more—until each has a hundred. Thus each wyrmling will be born and die within a year, and conquer much. The work that we are set to do is vast indeed, so vast that it could take millennia to perform under normal circumstances.
“Yet within the year, your people will begin populating a thousand new worlds, breeding and multiplying. Inside a few de cades, we shall not rule one world, but all worlds.”
Crull-maldor smiled, unable to fathom what this might mean. “Milord,” she whispered, “what place will you find for me to serve in such a vast kingdom?”
Despair gazed at her thoughtfully, and whispered, “You may choose a world, the finest jewel that you can find, and there you may reign.”
15
Water
There seems to be an unwritten law to the universe. Whenever you determine to do something great, something extraordinary, your fellow men will mock you and combine against you.