“We could try leading them,” the Emir said in his thick accent. “Perhaps if we offer them bread and ale, they will think well of us?”
“I think…I can talk to them,” Warlord Madoc said, his voice sounding dreamy, lost in thought. Then he took off, striding downhill.
The small folk began shouting, waving their weapons, and Madoc unstrapped the great ax from his back, gently set it on the ground, and called out something in a strange tongue.
Alun had never heard such words before, and he wondered where Madoc could have learned them.
Suddenly, on the northern horizon, a white light blazed so brightly that it looked as if a shard of the sun had fallen to earth.
Everyone turned to see what was going on. Several people gasped in wonder.
“It’s coming from Cantular,” the Emir said.
Indeed, even with the naked eye, Alun could see that the bright light issued from Cantular. The sandstone buildings glowed gold in its brilliance, and long shadows were cast everywhere. The city itself was still a good four miles distant, though, and Alun could see little else.
The Emir pulled out an ocular-a pair of lenses made from ground crystal, held together by a long tube. He aimed the ocular toward the city, touched a glyph on the side of the tube, and spoke the name of the glyph.
Suddenly, an image appeared shimmering in the air, a dozen feet behind the rod.
It was an enlarged replica of the city, far away.
Alun could see clearly that a man stood atop a building, a man so white-hot that he glowed like the sun. He waved a sword, while above him three wyrmling Seccaths in crimson robes hovered in the air like hawks.
“Sweet mercy,” the Wizard Sisel cried, “the Knights Eternal have been loosed!”
But Alun’s fear quickly turned to wonder. There were people fighting the Knights Eternal, four small humans like those in the village below. A bowman loosed an arrow, and one of the Fell Three plummeted from the sky.
The bright one blazed even brighter, and light flooded the sky across the horizon.
Then the horizon abruptly went dim.
The ocular showed the scene, ropes of fire twirling between the bright one and a Knight Eternal, and then the lights went out, the humans dropped in a faint, and a pair of wyrmlings plummeted from the sky, like falcons stooping for the kill.
What happened next all took place in shadows. The ocular could not reveal much in so little light.
The warlords stood staring in dumb amazement.
“You saw that?” one of them cried. “Their archer slew a Knight Eternal! He killed one of the Three!”
Another warlord asked, “Are all of these small folk such warriors? If so, they would be grand allies! We had better make them allies, before they slaughter us all.”
High King Urstone glanced down the hill at the poor farmers with their torches and clubs. The whole village together didn’t look as if it could fend off a single wyrmling beggar. The king said thoughtfully, “I think that those four were folks of some import. They would have to be for the wyrmlings to send the Three after them.” There were grunts of agreement.
The Emir said thoughtfully, “Daylan Hammer said that it was a wizard who bound our worlds together. One of those small folk is obviously a wizard. Could it be that he is the one who bound our worlds?”
“Look,” one of the lords said, “the Knights Eternal are dragging them away. I think they’ve taken your wizard captive.”
Madoc, who had been down in the valley, came huffing up the hill, his breathing ragged with excitement. He was looking to the north, where the lights had been.
“Then we will have to free the hostages,” King Urstone said. “Perhaps that is why we are here. The Powers conspired to draw us here, lest some greater doom fall upon us.”
“You would fight the Knights Eternal,” Madoc grumbled, “in the dark, in a fortified position? That’s madness. You’ll foil our mission!”
The High King bit his lower lip. “Those small folk slew one of the Three. If we learn how they did it, we may be able to win this war once and for all.” He gave Warlord Madoc a stern look. “The world has changed. We have more than just our own people, our own vain ambitions to think about. We will attack an hour after dawn, in the full light of day, and hunt the wyrmlings down. If any of the Knights Eternal are still abroad, we’ll take off their heads. If done by the light of day, it might take weeks before they can rise again. No word of what happens here must reach Rugassa.”
HIDDEN TREASURE
One cannot be perfect in all things, but one can become perfect in some things.
Thul ransacked the prisoners’ packs, pulling out spare garments, studying trinkets and mementos, then casting everything aside as if it was excrement. The Knight Eternal’s cowl and robes hid his face, but his disgust showed in every angry move.
The prisoners lay frozen upon what was left of the floor of the house, scorched as it was from the battle. The touch of the grave was upon them, and they lay paralyzed, like mice that have been filled with scorpion’s venom.
The spell would wear off by dawn.
“I see only three packs here,” Vulgnash said. “Where is the fourth?”
Thul glanced around, looking for sign of a fourth pack. “Perhaps it fell when we pulled the walls off,” Thul answered.
“Find it,” Vulgnash said.
Thul growled in resentment, and then walked around, carefully studying the ground. “I don’t see one. I think…the wizard is their leader. He would not carry a pack. He would make the others carry.”
Vulgnash could not argue with that. No wyrmling lord would stoop to such menial chores. He climbed down to the ground level and grabbed some withered vines, long tendrils of morning glory that had been burned by the sun. When he had several feet of them, he leapt in the air, flapped up to the prisoners, and threw the vines upon Fallion in a twisted heap.
“Bind them firmly,” he commanded.
The vines began to slither, twisting around the hands and feet of each prisoner, clamping legs together, cinching the arms tight against the chest.
When the prisoners were firmly bound, Vulgnash knelt and studied their weapons. He touched the fine reaver-bone bow that Jaz had held, and recoiled in horror. There was life in that bow, the blessing of a powerful undine.
He kicked it over the edge of the house with his boot, studied the other weapons. They were similarly accursed. He kicked them all into the bushes behind the little shop. “Rust upon you, and rot,” he hissed, casting a spell. In a month the fine steel would be nothing but mounds of corrosion, the bow turned to dust, and the wooden staff would be food for worms.
Thul turned away from the packs, went and hunched over one of the small humans, the smallest of the women. Vulgnash glanced at him, saw Thul reaching down to place a finger over each eye.
“Do not feed on her!” Vulgnash hissed.
“But she is sweet!” Thul said. “Besides, we only need the wizard.”
“We need them all,” Vulgnash countered. “We must get the wizard to accept a wyrm. Sometimes, a man cannot be tortured into it, but he will break if another is tortured in his place.”
Thul growled deep in his throat, whirled, and went back to the packs, began hurling things around in his rage.
There was a clanking, the sound of some bits of metal, copper perhaps, banging against one another. Thul dumped a bag of rods upon the floor, sniffing at them. “What are these?” he asked. “I smell wizardry.”
Vulgnash strode to him, knelt and peered at the rods, thinking that perhaps they had stumbled upon a human harvester, and that these were his harvesting spikes. But the rods were not made of iron. They were made of corpuscite. Each rod was about the length of a hand, from the bottom of the palm to the tip of the middle finger. Each was about the diameter of a small willow frond.