Cascade
Chapter Six: Echoes of Dragonkind
Ephraim cringed, gasped, twitched, and generally looked like a man trying to knot his own feet around his neck. The sigil seemed insignificant at first, unremarkable, until it melted and began to flow into the lines of his skin like a bloody web. He would never tell anyone what the experience was like, what voice he heard in his head, what he saw drawn on the insides of his eyelids.
As the sigil did its work, Tana wasn't idle, but sheer terror at what might happen if Saleh was wrong shook her focus. Instead, she struck savagely at all four attackers with the Frelian techniques designed for knights impossibly outnumbered. Trying not to remember that the style was officially called 'the Suicide Sequence', the queen centred herself and lashed out with a spinning attack that ricocheted off their helmets in a symphonic storm of metallic hammering.
The burst of beatings only lasted for a moment, otherwise she'd have gotten dizzy and collapsed on her ensorcelled husband's legs, but it startled even the calm, drone-minded knights for long enough that Tana was able to fling Vidofnir at two of them sideways with some force, hoof a third in what would at least be called a vulnerable spot, and go for the last one's throat. She tackled the knight to the floor in a clatter of armor and barely resisted the urge to choke the undeath out of him.
With acrobatic agility typical of Pegasus knights – less frequently the pregnant ones, but this was Tana, after all – she leapt up to face the knight who had suffered the least harm from her lance-fling and, bracing herself within and without for the worst that could yet come, slapped him. This was not an impetuous strike, the act of someone in such emotional turmoil that her thoughts had scattered like a catastrophic spill in a marble factory. This was a firm-footed backhand that looked like it could fell oak trees.
Nevertheless, the queen was surprised at the flash of light that sprayed from the impact, like a burst of liquid diamonds in the air that caught the torch-glow before dissolving into nothing. It was almost as dramatic as the effect Tana's touch had on the slavish knight, namely laying him out flat on the floor without so much as a murmur of protest more.
"Oh," she said, blinking in nonplussed surprise. "I guess Saleh was right about the teacups."
The three standing knights watched Tana cautiously as she moved quickly to Ephraim and kneeled at his side. His first convulsions had given way to subtler shaking and sickly paleness, and he gave no indication that he sensed Tana's presence. She gripped his hand, which steadied it but drove the other into wild flailing, and whispered soothingly to him. The king merely rocked from side to side, as though trying to shake the sigil off his forehead.
Admitting to herself that it had to be impossible to make his condition any worse, Tana pressed her fingers against the red stain of a mark, and was immensely gratified to see the blood-like liquid burst like a bubble, leaving behind only a trace of ash on his skin. Ephraim lay still at last, but too still, not even breathing. Shocked by the lack of life in him, Tana found she had to fight off a sudden, visceral choke. Instead she bent further down and blew the dark dust away – and Ephraim's arm darted up to bring her the rest of the distance for a kiss.
…
A long one, given the circumstances.
…
Eventually the bit about being surrounded by their enemies registered in both king and queen's heads again, and they parted, if only enough to be able to speak. "What was that?" asked Tana, smiling.
"Instinct," Ephraim replied.
"Your instincts really are the best."
Ephraim swung his legs up, used his back as a springboard, and leapt to his feet again, though the pose was slightly tarnished when he had to look around and duck again to retrieve Siegmund. It was worth it to see two of the knights re-evaluate their chances against the king's legendary lance and charge away into the castle's corridors. The third one brought his axe up to a guarding position as he backed away, still uncertain of what had just happened.
Tana struck first with an upward thrust that started low and to the side. He parried it as expected, but the twirl with which he did so brought his axe back around to block Ephraim's attack as well, and even left the king open to a killer downward sweep, forcing him to back off. Of course, while Ephraim was backing off, Siegmund needed to do no such thing. The king withdrew, the lance shot ahead, and its razor edge carved neatly into the knight's armor before searing with holy fire.
Again the queen came to the rescue – given the chance, the lance would simply burn until anything evil touching it was dead. So Ephraim didn't run his opponent through, but merely scorched him long enough to hold the knight's attention, long enough for Tana to step in and deliver a resounding slap. She seemed to strike with the force of a ram, and he fell back off the spear-tip, unconscious.
"Healing and exorcising," Ephraim observed. "Quite the polymath, you are."
"I'm just glad that it healed you," said Tana. "…Even when crazy, Saleh knows his magical properties. Did anyone ever tell you that the life-building power of pregnancy was a natural anti-undeath force? Because they didn't tell me. That's something everyone should be taught."
"I'm glad that it didn't blow me into a thousand ceramic shards," said Ephraim. "That was a little risky, wasn't it?" He prodded the prone knight with his boot.
"Well, I figured special rules would apply to you," Tana explained as they continued for the main entrance. "You're the father, after all."
"Oh, really? Good." Whack. "Ow! All right, all right, deserved. Where's that map?"
By now, though none of them were in a position to measure it, the sigil was exerting influence over the whole of Grado Keep and all of its surrounding towns. It didn't have control over everyone – only those who had the sigil on them, in some form or another, were becoming undead. Peace fell over the rest of the affected, coaxing them to stay inside, stay together, and wait. The ultimate peace, as many had claimed over the centuries, was death, and it appeared to be in a generous mood tonight.
The people of Grado waited, and where individuals were able to resist, the others around them had only to hold them still, whisper to them the things they wanted to hear, and let the magic take hold of them again. Willpower meant little to anyone, and where it was significant, the resistant few were tremendously outnumbered.
Flying over the quiet kingdom, Franz wondered why they weren't being affected the same way, and said as much at some point to Ewan, whose magical education led him to postulate that Franz should keep his eyes on the wyvern so they landed in the terrifying monster-crammed ruins safely and without being eaten by their steed. If he were omniscient, he might have been helpful enough to note that no one ever caught the same cold twice; having fought off the sigil once, they were immune.
"How long will we be flying, General?" Franz called to the lead wyvern. The Obsidian hadn't pulled too far ahead, to make sure he would hear his impractically young lieutenants if necessary. He looked back over his shoulder, his face as hard as his namesake, and equally dark.
"Until the end of the world, give or take an hour," Duessel estimated.
"Doesn't look that special," Amelia remarked, taking in the coastline with a critical eye. "I mean, what, you've got rocks, water, sand, grass – nothing out of the ordinary. Oh, right." She looked up, nearly drowned, and fell to coughing as she tried to wipe her eyes clear. "Also, torrential rain."
"Yes!" Saleh confirmed. "Perfect, perfect, all of it! Well, not the wyvern riders coming in from the northeast, especially since they all have the undeath-sign splashed across their shields, but the rest of it is perfect!" At that, Amelia whirled to face the northeastern sky, but in the storm she couldn't make out anything. When lightning flashed, she got a hint that maybe there was something out there, but tiny details like 'sigil on the shield' or 'gigantic wyvern' were impossible to make out.
"Let me guess; you've gone from blind to telescope-vision," she said.
"Could be, could be something like that. Now, this will take some considerable… power… power…" As she watched, Saleh staggered and nearly fell over his own cape. "Power… power not mine, it's not mine to use, can't have it, can't control it, too much light at once, so much I can't see the shadows to know where the world is, it's too much, too hot–" The sage crumpled to the ground, and Amelia rushed to his side.
"What's wrong? You don't get to fall apart at a time like this!" Amelia protested. What had he said before? Or maybe it was Ewan – one of them had said that Saleh tried to perform some sort of unifying ritual with Myrrh, and this was the result. Well, eccentricity was one thing, but this was the sort of hiccup in plans that would lead to both of them being shredded by wyvern knights.
"Too much, it's not mine, I can't, it'll burn me…"
"Make sense, man!" the soldier shouted, but Saleh was huddling in the rain now, his cloak pulled tight around him. "Whatever you think the problem is, can it wait until after we save the world? I'm sure Myrrh won't mind you… doing whatever it is you need to do!" Hmm. That was probably a lot like encouragement, only useless, and the wyverns wouldn't take long to find them. "Okay. On your feet."
"Mine is, mine is, mine is," Saleh repeated endlessly as she hauled him up by his shoulders and tried to help him stand. Actual walking was out of the question, but he was able to stumble in generally the same direction she dragged. Further along the coast, broken stone pillars had a vaguely carved look that said 'abandoned coastal fortress' to Amelia's military mind, and that was the best they had on hand.
The rain was loud enough on the coast – with the roar of the surf as a backup chorus – that the wyverns' wingbeats were drowned out; Amelia's first hint that they had caught up was a break in the storm as the dragonkin flew overhead. She did her best not to break her stride, which didn't quite make up for Saleh, who was entirely break with occasional patches of stride. By the time they stumbled inside the weathered stone gate, they had certainly been spotted.
"I don't suppose you can tell if we know any of those riders?" she asked.
"Mine is, mine is, mine is but it isn't mine can't touch it too hot too hot too hot!" Saleh chanted mindlessly.
"How can you be hot in this weather?" Amelia demanded. It was a rhetorical question; she didn't care. The doorway was high but still too narrow for a wyvern to walk in, which meant as soon as the riders landed and settled their beasts, she would only be facing five-undead-to-one-mortal odds against armoured lancers.
And then, for whatever reason, they didn't come. At first Amelia thought it was just her imagination, stretching out the moment before the impending battle, but they really weren't coming. She knew better than to assume good luck, or that the riders hadn't seen them run inside. Expecting death from above at any moment, she gently shoved Saleh into a corner and crept out. The ground just outside the door was strewn with broken rocks, perhaps pieces from the building carved by the slow chisel of the sea wind.
From behind parts of this wreckage, she spotted the gathered wyverns on the beach. There was some kind of commotion in their midst; between the flaring wings she couldn't spot its cause at first. Then she spotted him – one of the riders had dismounted, and his wyvern had gone berserk immediately. Amelia recalled vague stories, from Frelia and Grado, that wyverns and pegasi were distant relatives, and both shared their ancestral draconian hatred for unliving forces.
The others' mounts weren't fighting, and Amelia puzzled over this as fast as possible. The sigil was made for humans, according to Saleh's mutterings, but if it was gaining power, maybe it could overpower the wyverns' straightforward hunter minds, too. So as long as the sigil-bearing riders maintained contact, they kept the wyverns docile. If they let go, the beasts turned on them.
"Any ideas how we can use this?" asked Amelia. "Without getting savaged, I mean."
"The dance to the drumbeats of the blood in your ears and your heart is a dirge of ruin and a rhythm that keeps us alive and tells of red swans swimming on a lake of tears. They move with grace and fluid hope no matter the chaos around them, a perfect sculpted beauty that can break your arm with a flap of one wing."
"Really? Fantastic. Sit down before you hurt yourself."
"Here they come."
The lucidity of this startled her, and Amelia turned to glance out the door. The riders had given up on dismounting, and were instead approaching the fort by wing. "Oh, sure, when it's bad news…"
Duessel led them to ground in the middle of Lagdou's surface ruins; Franz and Ewan weren't certain that charging into a known nest of hateful aberrations was the best plan the Obsidian had ever formed, but fanged terrors failed to charge from every corner. Although the destruction of the majority of the Sacred Stones had weakened Magvel's defence against monsters, L'Arachel and Joshua had led more than one demon-hunt into Lagdou over the last two years. Rausten and Jehanna's combined might had slain countless monsters and driven the remainder deep underground.
"Where to now, sir?" asked Franz.
"Deep underground," said Duessel. "How well do you know the catacombs, Sir Franz?"
"I didn't pay a lot of attention when Ephraim made his raid during the war," the paladin admitted.
"Ooh! Ooh! Ooh!" Ewan exclaimed, leaping off the wyvern with his hand in the air. The general and knight exchanged a look. "What? I know this place like the back of my hand. Saleh has a bunch of maps that were made by Morva when he was Great Dragon, just after the first war wiped out the city."
"Excellent. I suspect we'll all – them and us – be looking for a major altar of some kind, something appropriate for dark rituals. My knowledge of the ruins is similarly shaky past the second subterranean level," said Duessel.
"Well, there was the Court of the Blood-Red Moon, about four levels down," said Ewan, concentrating on the remembered maps. "I think the people of Lagdou used to execute monsters there as part of their holy rituals."
"Simultaneously justified and deeply disturbing," the greatknight remarked. "Good work, boy. Follow me." Franz raised a critical eyebrow at Ewan; the boy responded by sticking his tongue out in smug victory. "I heard that," Duessel warned. Ewan nearly jumped; Franz shifted to a smirk. "And that."
"Moving, sir!" Franz confirmed, and pursued the Obsidian at doubletime. Ewan scrambled not to be left behind.
Despite the overgrowth that now covered most of the broken stone walls, it wasn't hard to navigate Lagdou, and Duessel quickly found the main entrance to the catacombs. Outside, night had long since fallen, and the moment they turned the first corner into the tunnels, the trio was enveloped in absolute darkness. "Stop," Duessel whispered. "Just listen."
At first, Franz experimented with opening and closing his eyes, but once he had determined that there was truly no difference, he did as ordered. He could hear the wind blowing outside, the occasional ghostly whistle when it breezed through the right sort of gap in the stones. Coming from the darkness ahead, there were no echoes of motion or footsteps, although somewhere water might have been dripping.
"I don't hear anything," he murmured.
"Which likely means it's safe to press on. Don't forget that sometimes being blind can be helpful. Seeing blinds us to things that need to be obvious."
"Um… right," Franz agreed.
The greatknight smiled. "Never mind. Hold this for me," he said, dropping a brightlance into Franz's hands. "But don't use it."
"…Don't use the weapon designed and blessed specifically for the slaying of demons?" Franz repeated. Duessel nodded. "I guess I never liked lances much anyway," he said, and slid it into the straps on his back.
"You, boy, the same," said Duessel, tossing a sack into Ewan's hands. "In fact, don't even open it." Ewan was bright enough not to comment, but he was pretty sure the mystery object was a book, and it felt slippery with magic under his fingers. "Now, move as quickly as possible while remaining quiet. I didn't see any other wyverns in the area while we were in the air, and that could mean that we got here first, but I find it much more likely that our quarry has already descended and allowed his mount to escape. We would do well to close the distance."
The wyverns were crowding around the door, but Amelia still had a good lance in hand, and the portal wasn't large enough for them to rush through. Any tentative attempt to clamber inside was quickly deterred by a meaningful stab, and while she didn't like harming any of the bewitched attackers, their collective yelps on contact suggested she was causing the sigil-mind a lot of pain.
"Saleh?" she called, after a long lull in the assault. "Feeling sane yet?"
"I think in rhyme and speak in music, inspiration comes to me in pairs, in couples, in the sea of the sky and the rain under the land."
"That's super."
"I see the way to restoration, but first the land must be cleansed, rinsed, scrubbed clean like the white tuxedo shirt of freedom stained by the red wine of fear and hatred draped over the washing board of justice."
"Get away?"
Saleh stepped toward the doorway, letting the flash of lightning outside illuminate him. "I will be that washing board."
Amelia nearly choked laughing, but she was interrupted only a few seconds later by a sudden intrusion. The wyvern riders were circling the weathered fort, and now through the windows they flung wood and kindling, dead fuel from anywhere nearby. With the storm raging, it was much too damp to burn properly, but that was all the more useful, as the drowned wood immediately began issuing thick smoke and an acrid stench.
"They're trying to smoke us out," Amelia remarked for the sake of the sage.
"Smoking is a terrible habit and entirely inappropriate to polite society."
"What the hell is wrong with you?"
"I recommend developing an insatiable hunger for fish-shaped cheese crackers, but I'll have to invent them first." Saleh said this even as Amelia reversed her grip on her lance, slid her other arm under the sage's shoulders, stumbled through the thickening smoke, and attempted to force him through the largest fracture at the far side of the fort. Now that they were being driven out, the riders had stopped trying to get in the main entrance, and with the smoke billowing they hopefully wouldn't be able to see what she was doing…
…Of course, a moment's longer thought would have reminded Amelia that the riders had thrown in the smouldering wood from every direction they could, including the same fissure she was scrambling through now. That explained why the first sight Amelia caught as she blinked the smoke out of her eyes was Saleh trapped under a wyvern's foot. The second was a serrated lance approaching at high speed.
She parried it into the ground, freed her lance with a twirl, and drove upward at the cursed rider – at least, where the rider probably was, more or less, given that clouds of smoke were boiling from the hole in the stone behind her. Amelia had misjudged the distance and instead tangled her lance in the wyvern's barding, so that, when the rider hauled back to dislodge his weapon from the earth, she was pulled along. In fact, with an extra shove of effort at the last moment, Amelia boosted herself off the ground.
Her trajectory wasn't planned or remotely controlled, so her lance was wrenched from her grasp as she flipped headfirst through the air, but landing feetfirst on the rider's shoulders was well worth it. Keeping her balance was out of the question, so Amelia fell backwards to sit on the back of the wyvern's long neck, grabbed its reins, and yanked hard. Obediently, the wyvern kneeled and raised its haunches to aid a dismounting rider, thoroughly unaware that dismounting was the last thing this one wanted to do. Amelia cared for his wishes about as much as she cared for pickled carrots.
She hated pickled carrots.
Her foe was firmly seated, but vulnerable with his saddle at such an angle. Amelia grabbed his lance before it could be shoved in her face, locked her arms around it with desperate firmness, and let herself fall off the wyvern's neck. The sudden force levered the rider out of place and they tumbled to the wet, sandy ground. Amelia landed badly, but rolled and got to her feet quickly with only a few painful cringes. The knight, impassively malicious and driven by magic, hadn't even noticed the impact, and was all set to run her through with a mighty thrust when his wyvern stomped him.
"Thanks," she said to the drake, nodding appreciatively and taking up the dropped lance. The wyvern paid her no interest, instead backing up toward the fort wall and screeching fiercely. Amelia groaned and turned around; in the blitz of combat, the other riders had surrounded her completely.
"This appears inconsistent with your plans," Saleh remarked, still nearly facedown on the ground with drake-talon gouges all around him.
"My plans? What part of any of this is supposed to be about my plans? I'm supposed to be out here helping you save Grado!" Amelia snapped at him. Most of the riders were still keeping their distance, for whatever reason, but one approached through the rain, his wyvern stalking slowly and purposefully. Gripping a sword firmly in one hand, the rider raised a staff in the other, and a faint blue shaft gleamed in the air – his wyvern collapsed onto the sand, forced to slumber.
Another thing Amelia detested was people who couldn't make up their minds between martial weaponry and magic, and so cheated by using both. The rider dismounted, with his beast safely pacified, and cast the staff aside to draw another. This he waved in her direction, and Amelia braced herself for the battle of willpower that it would take to fight whatever spell was coming. Instead, the Torch staff glowed like an ember, and a witchfire sparked in the air in spite of the storm, illuminating the hopeless battlefield.
"Not again!" Saleh screamed, and scrambled to get away from the hovering beacon. "Why do you demand it, demand the searing in my blood and the hunger creeping through my soul? I don't want it all, it's too much, take it back, let me go, it's not mine!"
"Could you just get a hold of yourself?" Amelia asked. Oh, Light, I refuse to die in a stupid place like this… She rushed the rider before he could try something unpleasant like a Berserk staff on the other wyvern. There was always a chance that they'd only come at her one or two at a time, and if the wyvern was willing to do some instinctive undead-biting at key moments – good lord, this rider knew how to fight.
She started with a straight-on thrust that would only have worked on a panicked foe anyway, spun with his parry to slam the haft of her lance into the rider's side, backstepped into a guarding stance, and began deflecting a storm of steely blows that rained down nearly as fast as the thunderclouds above. It was hard to believe there was only one sword coming at her; Amelia could have sworn that by the time she had even blocked one swing, it was halfway through a cutting arc from another angle completely.
"Mine is, mine is, mine is…" Saleh was back to muttering, as if the recruit needed another annoyance at a time like this.
"Hey, look," she bit out as the relentless slashes drove her slowly backwards, "at this point, I could not possibly care less whether the thing is yours or not. If it's any use right now, just borrow whatever you're raving about and get to work! I'm kind of counting on you, here!"
"Mine is, mine is…"
"I'm not the only one, you know!" Amelia shouted, because any sort of roaring had the same effects as a battle cry, and it wasn't as if her enemy was paying attention to anything but his assault. "King Ephraim sent you, trusted you; Ewan's probably as doomed as anyone else if you don't get a grip – probably all of Magvel with them! What about your home? What about Myrrh?"
"Mine is, mine... Mine is…"
The rider seemed to be settling into a routine, and Amelia couldn't blame him; with a sword arm that fast, most opponents wouldn't be able to find an opening if he gave them a map and a head start. But she wasn't most opponents, and he took a little longer on the curve with every second backhand-recoil. There it was, and again, and this time she'd–
Take a boot to the gut as he instead slapped her lance down, spun, and kicked out hard. Before Amelia had even hit the ground he rushed ahead, sword raised for an execution-cleave, and at that signal the other riders leapt onto the attack. She had never seen so many fangs coming at her at once.
"Mine is the fire in the heart of the dragon under the holy sky! Forblaze!"
A globe of raging light in Saleh's hand turned into a fiery hurricane, a blazing rain fell from the ground and erupted from the earth, though it thoughtfully left Amelia and the wyverns unscathed. Their riders, however, cried out with hideously monstrous voices.
"I'm sorry!" Saleh bellowed over the furious roar of flames. "I can't save you; it's too late for that! All I can give you is freedom…" The sage faltered as his spell of wrath ended. The riders had been uniformly consumed by fiery light and reduced to ash. Their wyverns were only lightly singed; dragon blood made them nearly immune to the legendary flame.
Amelia swayed slightly even once she had regained her feet. "You… Saleh, you burned…"
"It's done," he said, and even through her shock she noticed that a steady serenity had returned to his voice. "Sorry I've been useless for so long; the process of uniting my powers with Lady Myrrh's was more… demanding than I expected."
"…Dragonfire," Amelia observed. In some places, the wet sand had been blasted into twisted flowers of glass.
"The very purest," Saleh confirmed. "That's only the beginning. Thank you for guarding me this long."
"You're awfully polite for someone who just incinerated–"
"I didn't want to!" the sage protested. "The sigil had already taken them too fully; it's gaining power fast now. All I could do was break the bond and destroy the beasts that had replaced them. Now I've got to get to work, or the same will happen to everyone in Grado. Go. I can take care of the rest here."
"I should bloody well think you can," said Amelia. The rain still hissed and steamed where it struck the ground around them. "Am I really that useless again now?"
"Good grief, you overreact. I thought you'd want to leave. This sense in my head – well, I only heard Lady Myrrh describe the Demon King, so I can't compare, but the darkness emanating from Lagdou is the most abhorrent void–"
"Franz," Amelia breathed, and ran for the wyvern she had freed first.
"Quite," Saleh muttered. "So fly fast–" he waved his hand and the winged creature seemed to surge with strength "–and make sure that what I'm doing here isn't undone by morning." He raised his voice for the last part, but Amelia still couldn't hear him. She was already in the air.
The royal couple walked hand in hand through the empty streets of Grado's capital. Occasionally they had glanced in through windows and seen the residents sitting motionless, staring at nothing, radiating a sense of deep patience. When it quickly became clear that no ordinary force could rouse them, they stopped looking. End of days or not, a stroll at night was a stroll at night, and the stars were out.
"I am so glad that storm shifted south," Tana remarked. "All we need for this to be a perfect night out would be an archvillain to pound into the paving stones."
"I can't think why I didn't notice sooner that you're perfect," said Ephraim. In his other hand, Siegmund was humming a low tone, like a cat growling at a lurking threat, and occasionally sparking from its blade, very much unlike a cat. "Hold on, do you hear that?"
They paused, and in the dark stillness an echoing melody was drifting across the city. "Sounds almost like a hymn," said Tana. "Are we anywhere near the cathedral?"
"Cathedral!" Ephraim exclaimed. "Good one, yes. It's a couple of blocks that way. Blessed sanctuary; now that's the place to be when a curse of undeath is sweeping the city."
"Really? You don't think it's sort of ominous that everyone in the city is completely bound by a demonic stupor but they're having a hauntingly lovely singalong at the cathedral at three in the morning?"
Wearing an expression of serious contemplation, Ephraim looked in turn at Siegmund, Vidofnir, and Tana's fingers entwined with his. "…Nope," he determined.
" 'Kay."
