House of Shadows(116)

Geriodde Nerenne ken Seriantes closed his eyes briefly, letting out a breath. His expression eased.

The dragon tilted its head, regarding Nemienne out of one black eye. It began to speak.

Mage Ankennes, moving suddenly, stabbed to either side with knives fashioned out of darkness. Both his guards cried out and fell back—one clutching his stomach where the knife still stood and the other stumbling to avoid a second blow.

Ankennes dropped his shadow knives, deftly caught his staff as the first guard dropped it, raked the end of the staff through the blood still pooling on the floor where the prince had lain, raised the staff an inch from the stone floor of the cavern, and brought it down. The sound of that blow was like thunder, but like thunder that did not end: like an avalanche, like the sound of a mountain falling. All around them, the mountain trembled and cracked.

It had honestly not occurred to Taudde that Ankennes might still challenge the dragon. That despite its vast size and terrible power, the dragon might still be vulnerable. But at once it was obvious that he had merely suffered from a failure of imagination, because Kerre Maraddras itself was cracking open. And when Ankennes threw his staff, it flew like a spear straight for the dragon’s own heart; and this time, Taudde knew that when it struck, carrying with it Prince Tepres’s mortality, it would strike deep.

The dragon whipped its long neck back and around, but despite its speed, Taudde knew it was not going to be fast enough to block that flung staff. So, in the only instant that remained, Taudde set the bone flute to his lips and called out of it a note pitched to echo the dragon’s own powerful, resonant voice. So small a flute should have been unable to produce such a note, but it did. The deep, powerful sound found Ankennes’s staff in its flight and flung it aside from its course to spend its force slashing harmlessly across white stone. The mage turned, furious. Taudde pitched his second note high, to match tides and chill currents and subtle greenish light, and cast music like a flung knife across the cavern.

Like Ankennes’s own shadow blades, Taudde’s weapon of music and sea craft was hard to block. Though the mage flung up his staff, Taudde’s attack struck straight through Ankennes’s defenses and found his heart, which, despite the dragon’s illusion, was still in his chest and not made of stone. The mage had time to look surprised. Then he fell, not all at once, but crumpling slowly first to hands and knees and then at last to lie in abandoned disorder on the cavern floor.

Everyone stared at the fallen mage, and then turned, almost as one, to stare at Taudde. Geriodde Nerenne ken Seriantes turned slowly, but with the power of the mountain in his pale eyes. The dragon itself tilted its head and regarded him from one vast, unreadable, black eye.

Taudde was glad he was still sitting on the floor, for if he’d been on his feet, the force of that combined gaze would surely have thrown him down. He stared into pale human and dark dragon eyes, each containing the same powerful depths. He thought, rather desperately, of the brilliant, windswept heights of Kalches, so unlike these caverns of shadows. If he played a melody of traveling and distance, a melody that recalled the cold heights of distant Kalches and called to them across all the miles that lay between… There was so much power loose in this cavern, he knew he could gather merely the smallest part of it, wrap himself up in his song, and drop right out of the sky to land on his grandfather’s doorstep. He could take Leilis away with him. He thought she would not object—hoped she would not object, because he had no time to ask her. He lifted the flute again, reaching after power.

But there was, after all, no time to play a second enchantment into life. The king’s power came down on Taudde like the weight of the mountain. Crushed by that weight, Taudde fell into the dark, down, gone.





CHAPTER 16




For a long moment after Taudde crumpled to the cavern floor, Leilis thought his collapse was an aftereffect of the strength he’d spent on all his foreign sorcery. Certainly he’d spent himself without stint this night. She’d watched him wear himself down to bone making that path for the king, and that was before the… dragon. Just bearing the weight of the dragon’s immense gaze would surely be enough to exhaust a man.

Then she saw the weary satisfaction in the king’s eyes, and the glance he shared with his senior officer, and understood. At once she was so angry she couldn’t speak. Or dared not speak. She was already kneeling beside Taudde. She lifted his head to rest on her knee and hid her anger carefully behind a keiso mask.

“This mage of yours called mortality into his staff,” said the dragon, putting out a saber-long talon to gently nudge Ankennes’s body. Its somber, powerful voice continued with slow condemnation, “But once released, the mortality he sought claimed him instead, as is only just.” It folded its talons around the mage, and when it opened its long, strange hand again, the body was gone.