When Darkness Falls Page 9

“Not a night goes by that They do not try our walls,” a woman named Elodi-ane grumbled dourly. She was the chief of the weavers—or of those who remained in Lerkalpoldara. “We have built them thicker than ever before, and on the outside they are as smooth as Elvenware, yet it does not stop the creatures from trying to climb them. Each morning we melt away the damage they have caused, and rebuild the walls anew. They will not break them down.”

  But some of them can fly over your walls, Jermayan thought bleakly. And he had seen what an ice-drake could do: If it did not simply slither over the walls as if they were not there, it could smash right through them.

  As if to underscore the truth of Jermayan’s grim thoughts, the Coldwarg howling, which had been intermittent through the late afternoon, began again in earnest, rising and falling like cresting waves. It was as bad as he had ever heard it when the packs had followed the army, looking for any opening to exploit.

  Magarabeleniel had made certain that all of the pregnant women were present that evening, and that each was given the opportunity to speak with Jermayan. He was not in the least surprised that all of them refused to obey Andoreniel’s decree. Here, knowing that their city faced extinction at the hands of creatures of the Shadow, to save themselves must seem faithless and cowardly.

  Though it was impossible not to hear the howling of the Coldwarg, it was possible to ignore it. There was even music during the meal—not to mask the sound, precisely, but to transform it into something else: The sound of harp and flute, blending with the howling of the Coldwarg and the moaning of the wind, made a strange sad melody that was perfect for this time and place.

  “And now that you have spoken Andoreniel’s word, and heard the word of the Vicereign of Lerkalpoldara, you are naturally welcome to remain in the House of Sky and Grass for as long as may please you,” Magarabeleniel said. “Though I fear we cannot offer such rare sport as you may have lately been used to.”

  “I would say that you hold yourselves too lightly here in the Winter City, Lady, and that it is possible that I may yet linger a few days. Come the morning, should Ancaladar be able to manage it, I believe I should like to fly once again over the valley.”

  “Tanarakiel tells us that the weather should remain calm for the next sennight—unfortunate, in a way, as the Deathwings prefer to fly when the air is still, and no walls will keep them out. Still, they dare not try the Flower Forest, so we will move beneath the canopy until the winds bluster again. And in doing so, we will make the space for you and Ancaladar to go forth in the morning.”

  “It will be as you say, Lady,” Jermayan said, inclining his head.

  “And perhaps, should you see my brother upon your journeying, you would be so good as to tell him that it is not convenient for me to await him a fortnight from now, but that I should prefer him to return to the city at once.”

  AN hour before dawn Jermayan was awakened by his hostess, and assisted her and several others in collapsing the House of Sky and Grass and rolling it into a neat bundle about its poles. A few of the smaller tents would be taken into the Flower Forest until the danger of attack from the sky was past, but the majority of the tents and furnishings that made up the Lerkalpoldarans’ possessions would remain tidily bundled against the walls.

  By an hour or so after dawn, the entire city was packed and ready to move, and the entire space within the walls of ice had been emptied. Only the marks in the packed snow, the sculptures of ice, and the gently-meandering trails darkened with ash gave any hint that a city had once covered the several acres enclosed by the gleaming wall of ice.

  The day was free of snow, and the air was still, but though it was clear, the day was far from bright: There were high clouds in the sky, and the light was gray. Still, the day would serve for flying.

  When the preparations had all been made, and the city had been cleared away, Ancaladar emerged from the forest. Kellen had described the dragon’s uncanny ability to insinuate his massive form into the tightest of places, and now Jermayan watched the same process in reverse, as the dragon seemed to ooze from between the trees as if his great scaled form were liquid, not flesh. If Jermayan had not removed Ancaladar’s harness last night, he doubted the trick would have been possible now, so tightly did the dragon seem to be wedged among the trees. Yet Ancaladar extracted himself from the forest without dislodging a single trunk.

  Jermayan could feel his Bondmate’s relief to be done with the delicate operation, however, and once he was free of the forest Ancaladar shook himself all over, rattling his great wings like half-unfurled fans.

  Now Jermayan came forward carrying Ancaladar’s flying harness—or, as the dragon insisted, Jermayan’s flying harness, as Ancaladar had no need of a saddle and straps to fly. First Jermayan wiped away the last of the quickly-melting snow with a soft cloth, then buckled the flying harness into place with the swiftness of long familiarity.

  But though there was more than enough room here outside the Flower Forest for Ancaladar to stand and even to spread his wings, there was far from sufficient space within the walls of Lerkalpoldara for him to launch himself into the sky.

  “It is not such a high wall,” Ancaladar said, peering over it. “And I think, if I am careful, I can climb over it without damaging it. Mount up, Bonded, and we will see if I am right.”

  “By all means, do as the dragon says,” Magarabeleniel said to Jermayan, a stifled note of despairing amusement in her voice. “I am sorry that we could not make the walls higher, Ancaladar, but if they were very much higher, they would fall down, and then we would have no walls at all.”

  “If the walls were higher, I could not climb over them,” Ancaladar said soothingly, crouching down so that Jermayan could step up to the saddle upon his neck. “And most creatures will not be able to climb over even these.”

  By now Jermayan had buckled himself into place in Ancaladar’s saddle. He raised a hand in salute to Magarabeleniel, and Ancaladar got to his feet once more.

  A few steps brought them to the wall itself. The portion they faced had been prudently cleared of sentries; now Ancaladar reared up on his hind legs, spreading his great wings wide for balance. Jermayan was grateful, once again, for the straps that held him firmly in the saddle no matter what position Ancaladar assumed.

  Jermayan had expected many possibilities from his friend in scaling the wall, but he had not expected Ancaladar to simply hop. Ancaladar furled his wings, gathered himself, and sprang strongly upward off his haunches, bounding into the sky as if he were a giant hare.

  Though he spread his wings as soon as they had cleared the top of the wall, nothing could prevent a bone-jarring landing. Still, Ancaladar sounded pleased with himself as he said:

  “The wall remains undamaged. As I promised.”

  “Let us only hope there will be no need of it soon,” Jermayan said.

  Ancaladar dropped to all fours and began to canter forward, then to run, and soon had launched himself into the air. As Tanarakiel had promised, the air was entirely still, and the clouds were so high that for Jermayan and Ancaladar’s purposes they might as well not have been there at all. As a result, of course, the air was far colder than it had been on the previous day, so cold that there was hardly any difference between the temperature on the ground and in the high sky.

  As they rose in a long flat spiral, Jermayan could look down and see the whole of the valley—an unbroken sweep of whiteness save for the Flower Forest and the Winter City now falling far behind them. Moving dots on the landscape below resolved themselves into herds—of horses, cattle, talldeer—some with accompanying riders.

  But less congenial things roamed the landscape as well. Jermayan saw the faint gray shadows of prowling Coldwarg, and lean dark slashes that Ancaladar identified as shadewalkers. As Magarabeleniel had warned him he would, he came to a place where he found the snow stained with the blood not of simple kills, but of mass slaughters, and that place was ringed with tracks unlike those of any animal Jermayan had ever seen. Ancaladar told hi
m that the tracks belonged to a herd of serpentmarae. They had undoubtedly run their prey to exhaustion, and then kicked and trampled it to death with their sharp cloven hooves.

  They flew on.

  If he could not do this thing, Jermayan knew, some day a few moonturns from now, all in Lerkalpoldara would share the fate of those unfortunate beasts below.

  And if Kellen could not—somehow—find a way to save them all, it would be very little longer until all the Elven Lands—in fact, all the world—shared Lerkalpoldara’s fate.

  It was a heavy burden to place upon the shoulders of a child—for Kellen was young even by human standards—but it was no Elf or human who had placed it there, but the Wild Magic itself, which had made Kellen Tavadon a Knight-Mage.

  They approached the Gatekeeper.

  This close to the mountain wall, on even the mildest day, the air was unsettled, and only speed could make their passage smooth. Jermayan had only a few moments to regard the pass before Ancaladar had soared past it in a wide circle.

  He would be near the pass for seconds only—but time enough to set the spell, if he could set it at all.

  The Elves had given up their share in the Great Magics in the time of Great Queen Vieliessar Farcarinon, at the time of the First War. It was she who had learned the secret of Bonding with dragons, and so had gained the power for the Elven Wildmages to defeat the Endarkened, long before humans had been much more than a particularly promising sort of animal, far less civilized than the fauns of the forest.

  But all the Wild Magic was based on prices and bargains, and so in exchange for that victory, Vieliessar Farcarinon, in the name of her people, had surrendered the Elves’ share in the Greater Magics, in exchange for peace and long life. The Elven Mages lived out their brief lives—as the lives of the Elves had been in those days—and died, and no more Wildmages were born among the Elves, though the Elves’ lives could thereafter be measured in centuries. The Children of Leaf and Star taught the arts of Civilization to the brief bright humans, and when that race was old enough to understand, the Elves taught the humans about the Wild Magic as well, for they had never ceased to revere it, and to follow its teachings. And soon magic flared bright among the humans—and just in time, by Elven standards, for a scant few thousand years later, the Enemy struck once more.

  That war the Elves had fought without Greater Magics of their own, for in that time the last Elven Mage was ten thousand years dead. Yet they had fought beside allies in whom the Wild Magic burned brightly, and thought that they had triumphed, thinking themselves as secure in their victory as the Great Queen and their ancestors once did.

  Now the Great Enemy gathered once more, and Jermayan found himself resurrected, a creature out of legend, with powers that had not been seen since the ancient days of Elven civilization, powers subtly unlike any others those of the Light could claim.

  The human Wildmages’ magic was that of what could be. However unlikely it appeared to a non-Mage, its workings were merely improbable, not impossible.

  The High Magick—which Jermayan understood much better now that Cilarnen had come to live among them—was also a magic of change, but of tiny changes layered one upon another like coat after coat of lacquer. The end result was often profoundly startling, but not to one who truly saw how it had been accomplished. And so, though the High Magick did not work closely with the natural world as the Wild Magic did, each individual change it made in the fabric of the world’s being was not large.

  But an Elven Mage, especially one Bonded to a Dragon …

  Elven Magery was the magic of Transformation. One thing became another, without regard for what it had once been: Fire burned upon ice, stone became water, air became ice.

  Perhaps that was the deeper reason for Vieliessar Farcarinon’s bargain. With such power, might not the Elves, in time, have become no different than the Enemy they fought? Perhaps Men would never have risen up at all if the Elves had not renounced their Magery. And there would never have been any Wildmages.

  “Are you ready, Bonded?” Ancaladar asked, breaking into Jermayan’s thoughts.

  “It is now, or not at all,” Jermayan responded with grim humor. It was a favorite expression of Kellen’s, and one that had always puzzled him. For the Elves, there was always another time one could do a thing.

  Until They had returned. And at last, “now” was the only time there was, for all the races of the Light.

  He concentrated his mind upon his purpose, and let it fill with the unnam-able colorshapes that were the forms of the spells of Elven Magery.

  To do even that much filled him with pain, but Jermayan had felt pain before. He gathered up the spell waiting in his mind, and struck.

  The snow and ice of the pass suddenly glowed as brightly as if the sun had suddenly come forth from behind the clouds, and for a moment that was all.

  Then suddenly the pass itself began to boil with mist, as the ice and snow, down to the bare rock of the mountainside itself, began simply to waft away.

  Jermayan felt as if he could not breathe. His heart hammered in his chest, the air darkened in his vision, as if Ancaladar had unwarily flown too high. He felt the power of the spell flow from him as if it were the blood from his veins. Each beat of his slowing heart bound the magic more firmly to its course—and drained away more of his life with it. A spell was only as strong as the focus of its power—while Jermayan’s power was the limitless power of a dragon’s magical might, his focus was the mortal power of an Elven Knight.

  But he did not die. He would not, for if he did, Ancaladar’s life would be extinguished with his own, for the Bond that was the source of the Mage’s great power was also the dragon’s greatest weakness.

  At last the spell was run, and Ancaladar carried them gently to the ground, and Jermayan roused himself to gaze up at his handiwork.

  The mountains that ringed the valley of Bazrahil were white with snow, save for the few patches of gray where a snow-spill had ripped the burden of snow and ice from the face of the rock—in every place but one. The pass the Elves called the Gatekeeper was now a dark scar against the whiteness, its rock as bare as it would be at summer’s height.

  “One obstacle gone,” Ancaladar said, both relief and satisfaction in his voice. “Now all that remains is to convince the Vicereign of the wisdom of abandoning her city.”

  Four

  The Smoke of That Grat Burning

  BUT IN THE end, that was far easier than casting the spell had been—easier, in fact, even than the return to Lerkalpoldara itself, for with the clear weather, the Deathwings were out in force, hunting for any prey they might find, and Jermayan was in no condition to offer battle. It was left to Ancaladar to outfly them, which was a long and delicate matter. The dragon’s one advantage was that he could fly far higher and faster than his enemy, and unlike in his previous clashes with the Deathwings, he did not have to worry about protecting the army from aerial attacks. In the end, Ancaladar carried Jermayan high above the clouds, where the creatures could not follow.

  “This,” Jermayan observed, gazing down at the tops of the clouds speeding by below them, as Ancaladar made a wide circle about Lerkalpoldara far below, “may provide the two of us with a temporary respite, but it does nothing to accomplish our return in safety.”

  And in fact he was not certain how safe Ancaladar would be once the dragon was on the ground, even if he could land within the walls of Lerkalpoldara. The Deathwings’ favorite tactic, as they had seen so far, was to swoop upon their victims and carry them off into the sky. Obviously that would not work on Ancaladar—but it was always possible they might have another form of attack held in reserve.

  “If we are quick, we can land before they are aware of us. I can see them through the clouds—they circle the city like ravens over a battlefield. I will take off again to draw them away, and return again at nightfall. You need not fear for my safety—they are nasty and foul-tasting, but their claws cannot pierce my hide, and I will take care to fly h
igh.”

  Jermayan knew that Ancaladar was being optimistic for his benefit, but he also knew they did not have the luxury of waiting out the day in the hope—no more than that—that the Deathwings would leave with the darkness. The creatures had flown by night before, and Ancaladar’s presence might incite them to do so again.

  “Very well,” he said.

  “Then we go—now.”

  Ancaladar folded back his wings, and for a moment he hung weightless in the sky. Then he began to fall—no, more than that, to dive, his long sinuous neck extended, the wind whistling along his neck-barbs as he arrowed head-first toward the earth. Even through his armor, the saddle-straps cut into Jermayan’s shoulders and torso; he hung against them rather than being pressed down into the saddle.

  They flashed through the clouds, and now Jermayan could see the Winter City far below. Gray-white shapes circled above it, seeking for some unwary victim to snatch, but everyone had retreated within the Flower Forest, and the Deathwings dared not venture too close to its protection.

  Then they plunged through the flock of Deathwings. Pain lanced through Jermayan’s head as the creatures shrilled their soundless cries. Ancaladar spread his wings with a boom like distant thunder, his body jerking itself level with a whiplash crack that rattled Jermayan’s teeth. The Elven Knight had been waiting for that part of the maneuver; the moment it was done, he began loosening the buckles and straps of the flying harness. A fall from this height would not kill him, and it would save precious moments on the ground.

  Even though he was expecting it, the jarring shock when Ancaladar dug all four sets of claws into the ice to stop himself flung Jermayan from the saddle. His training in the House of Sword and Shield stood him in good stead, however, for he converted the motion to a forward roll and came up running, fleeing for the safety of the Flower Forest as if his very life depended on it. Behind him he heard the hiss and squeal of the ice as Ancaladar sprang to his feet and turned, bounding toward the wall and then over it as lightly as a unicorn could leap a hedge.