3 When Darkness Falls.8 (5 page)

Savilla blinked slowly. Her son was kneeling at her feet, the picture of perfect humility. It was not precisely feigned… but it was something Zyperis granted, not something Savilla took. It was a shift in the balance of power, and both of them recognized it.

But it is only temporary,
Savilla vowed.

"I was contemplating the great favors I shall bestow upon you," she said. "We have all worked hard for this day — you with your agents among the humans most of all. Now it is time to move forward… "

Savilla spoke long and persuasively, mantling Zyperis with her great scarlet wings — a token of great favor. The Endarkened Prince's face glowed with delight, for he had long chafed at inaction — and at being excluded from her plans.

"Oh, Mama, how wonderful!" he said, when she had finished speaking. "Surely the Elven King's allies will desert him to look to their own once we begin to act in the Wild Lands! But… you have always said… "

"Oh, my son," she said, stroking his cheek fondly, "it will not matter soon. Just go slowly, as I have told you. Stay far from any lands the Mage-men have ever claimed as their own, for it would not do for them to suspect that their ancient enemy is anything but an ancient myth."

Zyperis drew himself up proudly. "You will see, my sweet Crown of Pain. I shall do all as you would do it yourself. They will sicken, sorrow, and despair — and barely know at first that it is we who are to blame for it all. You shall feast upon unicorn and dryad, wood-nymph and selkie: I shall bring them to you with my own hands!"

"I shall rely upon you," Savilla purred, stroking his long black hair as he knelt at her feet. "Sow dissension in their ranks, fill their homelands with sickness and blight, drive the game from their hunters' nets, and all the time let them wonder if we are to blame, or if it is terrible coincidence… "

"Because they dare not ignore either one," Zyperis said happily. "Whether the cause is an enemy's hand, or simple misfortune, the result is the same."

"Our victory," Savilla agreed.

Zyperis raised her hands to his lips and kissed them. She felt the touch of his fangs upon her skin and closed her eyes momentarily in pleasure.

She would bring him to heel. And his anger and frustration would make his utter and inevitable submission all the sweeter.

When Zyperis had gone, Savilla accepted a spangled cloak of gossamer spider-silk from one of her attendants. Draping it loosely about her shoulders, she left her private chambers.

* * * * *

THE World Without Sun was vast, extending far beneath the surface of the earth. Let the Light-begotten think their world was vast: That of the Endarkened was vaster still, so enormous that there were few indeed who knew every chamber and pathway of it.

It was a place of secrets, for the Endarkened treasured secrets as much as they cherished the pain and death of others. It took Savilla more than half of her Rising-cycle to reach the place she sought, a chamber of incalculable age, deep in the living rock. Its very existence had been forgotten by most of the Endarkened. Uralesse had not known of it.

Savilla had come here once before, long ago, and learned the magics that would one day allow her to pierce the wards of Armethalieh and make a young boy her servant. When she had first come here, the walls of the Golden City had barely been begun. It would be centuries before she dared to try the spells she had learned that day.

The cost to her of forging that tiny chink in Armethalieh's defenses had been great. It had taken her years, as the World Above measured time, to prepare the spell, years more to fully recover from the casting of it, as her human catspaw grew from boy to man.

Now she meant to cast a spell more subtle still.

Uncounted thousands of years ago, when the Elves were a hundred scattered warrior tribes who fought against each other as often as they fought together, and humans were no more than grunting brutes yet to find their magic, the Endarkened and the Elves had fought for the first time. In those days, there had still been Elven Mages, and the most powerful of these was Vielissar Farcarinon, whose name was still a curse among the Endarkened.

It was she who had united the Elven tribes beneath her rule, she who had brought the dragons to be their allies, increasing the power of the Elven Mages a thousandfold.

It was Vielissar Farcarinon who, through the power of the Wild Magic and the power of the dragons, had forged the bargain that would keep He Who Is from acting directly upon the world for ever after. To win that boon, the Elves had given up their magic.

Wounded nearly to death in that war, maddened with grief by the casting out from the world of their Creator, it had taken the Endarkened millennia to recover from their defeat. When they had next struck against the Children of Light, they had expected their victory to be quick, for though He Who Is had been barred from the world, the Endarkened were still creatures of magic, and the Elves now had none.

But while they had slept in the World Without Sun, a new race had risen in the World Above. Humans had aided the Elves, and with them had come the Wildmages. Though human magic was a subtly different thing than the Elven Magery the Endarkened had faced before, the Endarkened had still been defeated.

But now they are weak, all of them. They have forgotten. And I… I shall call
He Who Is
back into the world again. His presence will assure our victory. I shall become first among His children, and none of my subjects will ever challenge my power. And all this world will at last become what He willed that it should be, what He intended it to be when we were first created.

Changeless.

Perfect.

Eternal.

Savilla drew a deep breath, readying herself for what she would do next. Later would come the sacrifices — and there would be many of them, until she had filled this chamber once again with blood, as she had done once before, so many years ago. But now, to begin, simple intent was enough. In a sense, a promise.

To any senses but those of the Endarkened, the chamber would have been unremittingly black. Savilla saw, not colors precisely, but a thousand shades of darkness, hues that no other race had words for. The darkness showed her a chamber carved of the living rock. Every inch of the walls and ceiling was covered with deeply-incised symbols in the ancient Endarkened script. They did not run in neat rows, but swirled along the rock, dipping and arcing, as if perhaps they had once been straight, and Time itself had bent the lines of writing, while leaving each etched symbol sharp and clear as the day it had been cut into the rock. As if what was written there was too horrible for even Time to touch it.

In the center of the chamber there was a long hollow spike of obsidian that stood as high as Savilla's heart. It tapered to a needle-fine point, and looked as delicate as any of the glass knives in Savilla's own torture chamber, but she knew from experimentation that nothing she could do would chip or break it.

There were a hundred ways to kill someone with the obsidian spite.

Impale a victim upon it, and they could die as quickly or slowly as Savilla wished. The chamber enjoyed the slow deaths, as was only to be expected. But most of all it enjoyed the deaths she brought about when, as a living victim writhed, impaled upon it, she struck the obsidian shaft with one of the round smooth black stones that lay scattered about the floor of the chamber.

Then the entire chamber rang like a crystal bell, the glyphs upon the walls blooming into dark fire. The victim died at once — but not painlessly. No. That death was the most agonizing of all, as if every iota of pain it was possible for one frail mortal shell of flesh to experience were somehow compacted into one single moment.

Those bodies simply vanished.

But those executions were not without cost to Savilla, for when she engineered such ultimate communions for her victims with the obsidian spire, she felt everything her mortal victims did.

A high price.

But it will be worth it, to allow
He Who Is
to return to the world once more.

The last time Savilla had left the chamber, it had been littered with bone and decaying flesh. All that was gone now, dissolved by the strange alchemy of the Black Chamber. All that remained were the scattered stones upon the floor, the spell-runes upon the walls, the obsidian spire itself.

Once begun, once promised, Savilla could not stop or turn aside. At best, she could delay, and delay would come at a price.

But she did not wish to delay.

She would prepare the way. She would gather the power.
He Who Is
would enter the world once more, and reward the one who had made it possible.

And destroy all His enemies.

Savilla placed her hands atop the obsidian spire, and pressed down. The point pierced both her hands. She saw the glistening black point break through her scarlet skin, and saw the dark blood well forth around it. Her body shuddered faintly with pain, her great ribbed wings trembling and unfurling.

All around her, the chamber sang faintly in approval.

Against the Odds

NO MATTER HOW desirable it might have been to keep what the Wildmages had learned confined to the High Command alone, Kellen quickly discovered that wasn't possible. Almost the first thing he'd learned when he'd first met the Elves was that they gossiped as naturally as they breathed, and that gossip flew through an Elven city — or an Elven war-camp — as swiftly as summer lightning. "Everyone knows," Idalia said succinctly.

She'd come to his pavilion the morning after he'd seen Redhelwar. Isinwen had undoubtedly asked her to come — at the moment, Idalia was the only Wildmage Healer they had.

Kellen had slept for the rest of the day and through the night as well, and awoke feeling much stronger. Not fully recovered, of course, but if the Gods of the Wild Magic — and the Enemy, of course — allowed him another sennight of rest, he knew he'd be back to his old self.

"I'm fine," he'd said hastily, the moment he'd seen her. Idalia's strengthening cordials were notoriously unpalatable.

She'd laughed, seeing his expression. "Then I'll just make tea. That way I can tell Isinwen that I've seen you, and that you're not at Death's Gate."

Kellen made a rude noise. "He's seen me at Death's Gate. He should know the difference."

Idalia glanced over her shoulder, in the middle of kindling the brazier for tea. "But this time it's more than a matter of a few Shadowed Elves, and an Enemy who may not come for decades… or centuries. Tell me, when you saw Redhelwar yesterday, how did he seem to you?"

"Not very happy." Quickly Kellen related the details of his conversation with the Army's General — and the strange orders that had come from Andoreniel.

Idalia set the pot on the brazier to heat and squatted beside it. She shook her head ruefully. "Well, Andoreniel has to do something. The whole army knows what we saw in the mirror by now — and that includes the Centaurs, the Herds-folk, and the Mountainfolk. They don't have Elven land-wards to protect them. And the Mountainfolk trade with Armethalieh. They know how powerful the High Mages are. The idea that Armethalieh could come in on
Their
side…"

"That doesn't mean we just give up!" Kellen protested.

Idalia met his eyes. There was no despair in that violet gaze, but there was no hope there, either. "Can you tell me Armethalieh isn't going to fall because of Anigrel? Can you tell me we can convince the High Mages to fight on our side? Can you think of some way we can protect out Allies? You said it yourself — even if they try to move in winter, the weather will kill as many of them as
They
will. And winter's only half over."

"So we need to give them hope," Kellen said stubbornly. "Idalia, I don't have answers — not all of them, anyway. Most of the time I just seem to know when something's a bad idea — and giving up and trying to fight a defensive war against
Them
is a really bad idea.

"And I know — and so do you — that if
They
didn't think we could defeat
Them, They
wouldn't be working so hard to weaken us instead of attacking us directly."

The water had boiled, and Idalia sifted loose tea — Armethaliehan Black, Kellen's favorite — into the waiting pot and filled it. While the tea steeped, she and Kellen sat in silence, listening to the wind whistle over the heavy silk of the pavilion.

When the tea was ready, she filled two mugs, added several honey-disks for sweetening, and passed one to Kellen.

"You know Redhelwar values your advice," she said at last. "What will you suggest?"

Kellen ran his hand through his hair, raking it back out of his eyes. It hadn't been cut since he'd left the City, and it was long enough now for some of the shorter Elven styles — though no Elf would ever have to contend with Kellen's mop of unruly light-brown curls.

"Right now two-thirds of the army isn't fit to fight, and we've got a lot of wounded. On top of that, we still need to locate the other Enclave of Shadowed Elves that the Crystal Spiders told us about. And… " Kellen hesitated. "Andoreniel is the King. Redhelwar will follow his orders, not my suggestions."