Dragon War: The Draconic Prophecies - Book Three (45 page)

“Find the Blasphemer, Gaven!” Shakravar growled.

The red dragon folded its wings and rolled onto its back, bringing its
claws around to scrabble against Shakravar’s armored belly. Shakravar caught the red’s mouth with one claw and wrenched its head back, then bit into its exposed neck and tore out its throat. Gaven stepped back, deciding to take the dragon’s advice and continue looking for the Blasphemer—and Rienne.

The bulk of the Aundairian forces had closed the gap while Gaven faced the dragon, and bodies in Aundairian blue lay alongside those in the leather and fur of the Carrion Tribes, their blood flowing together on the gore-slick ground. As the wind whipped around him, he was a still point in the center of a raging tempest, the noise of battle swept away in the whirlwind. He was seized with the sudden sense that he’d been there before—witnessed this exact scene before. A crash of thunder shook the earth, and the wind fell.

An alien, incomprehensible sound replaced all the noise of battle and the howl of the wind—a string of syllables with no meaning, sounds that signified the unmaking of the world. They tore at his ears and ripped at his mind, defying him to form sense or reason.

All around him, soldiers and barbarians fell to the earth, hands pressed to their ears, mouths wide in silent howls of agony. They parted like a subsiding flood, leaving only two figures standing in their wake.

One was Rienne—so close, no more than ten yards away—her face wrenched in pain, both hands clutching Maelstrom’s hilt. Her mouth moved, forming words Gaven couldn’t understand, as though their structure and meaning were her only defense against the sound of the Blasphemy.

The other figure was a tall man in bloodstained plate armor, twisting ivory horns rising from the brick-red skin of his brow. Blasphemy streamed from his mouth as he raised a flaming sword to the sky. His burning eyes fell on Rienne and anger twisted his face, and he strode toward her to cut her down.

*  *  *  *  *

Rienne fought her way toward the banner as Gaven’s blue dragon swept out of the sky to attack the gargantuan red dragon. Maelstrom spun around her like a steel whirlwind, cutting through armor and flesh, weapons and bones. Barbarians parted before her.

An eerie quiet fell over the battlefield and time seemed to slow. The only sound that reached her ears was the inhuman babbling of the Blasphemer she’d heard at the Mosswood—his unearthly chant, words defying language.

Aundairians, Reachers, and Carrion Tribe barbarians fell to the ground as one, agony written on their faces as the Blasphemer’s chant tore through their minds.

Rienne clutched Maelstrom tightly and screamed words of the Prophecy again, the only remedy she had found for the pain. “The Blasphemer’s end lies in the void, in the maelstrom that pulls him down to darkness!”

He stood before her, and her presence and her words seemed to infuriate him. Fury burned in his eyes as he took a step toward her.

*  *  *  *  *

“No!” Gaven screamed. Lightning crackled across his dragonmark, now fully formed on his skin again, and crackling bolts shot to the Blasphemer, stopping him in midstride.

But the lightning didn’t strike him. It coiled in blazing rings of light encircling him, and a dazzling arc bound him to Gaven’s dragonmark. The fabric of creation began to unravel in the path of the lightning. The Blasphemer turned to look at Gaven, and a twisted smile formed on his face. The sounds issuing from his mouth changed, and Gaven felt a jolt of pain in his chest, not in his dragonmark but beneath it.

His are the words the Blasphemer unspeaks, his the song the Blasphemer unsings
.

Words sprang to Gaven’s lips unbidden—the words inscribed in his dragon-mark, words in no mortal language, words of his being and his destiny—and the Blasphemer’s voice devoured his speech. Utter silence swallowed them, the complete absence of sound at the edge of the absence of being.

A rift formed in the world, a tear in the dimensions of time and space where a tempest of raw elemental forces stormed, like an echo of the chaos before creation, the world unshaped. Devastation swirled out from that breach and washed across the battlefield, fire and lightning like no storm Gaven had ever made, boulders of ice crashing into the ground, slabs of stone wrenched from the earth and set free to crash among the gathered armies.

Gaven and the Blasphemer hung together in a space that was outside of all space, no part of the created world, a space of pure annihilation that slowly spread out around them.

*  *  *  *  *

A crash of thunder drowned out the sound of his Blasphemy for a blissful moment, and lightning circled the demon’s towering form.
A coruscating arc of lightning linked him to Gaven, to her left. Rienne almost wept with relief, seeing him so close at the moment she least wanted to be alone.

The Blasphemer turned to face Gaven. Gaven’s lips moved, and a total silence fell over the world. Rienne watched in mounting horror as the air before her seemed to part, the ground split open, and chaos raged in the void. A storm of fire and ice, lightning and stone swept silently out and across the battlefield, and Rienne spun around to find Cressa huddled on the ground behind her. She crouched down beside the girl, put an arm around her shoulders, and lifted her to her feet. Tears left streaks in the dirt that caked Cressa’s face, and blood trickled from both her ears.

“Sing,” Rienne urged her, but her voice made no sound.

Cressa looked puzzled, but when Rienne repeated her command, puzzlement turned to a blush of embarrassment. She shook her head.

“Sing!” Rienne said a third time, just as Gaven’s voice pierced the silence.

“No,” Gaven said, and the storming chaos and the Blasphemer’s words of madness and Cressa’s choked sobs sprang to life in Rienne’s ears.

*  *  *  *  *

“No,” Gaven said, though it took a supreme effort of will to bring that single word to voice. The arc of lightning that bound him to the Blasphemer died, though rings of it still flew around the Blasphemer’s demonic form. Gaven stood on solid ground again, and he was suddenly aware of Shakravar standing behind him, his mouth close by Gaven’s shoulder.

“What are you doing?” the dragon said. “Don’t stop!”

“We would destroy the world,” Gaven said.

“Yes! For six hundred years I have worked to bring this about! I will not let you undo it!”

Gaven spoke in the Common tongue, but other words danced in his mind as he spoke. “Under the unlight of the darkened sun, the Storm Dragon lays down his mantle; he stops his song before it can be unsung, and so his storm is extinguished.”

Rage twisted the Blasphemer’s visage, and he strode closer to Gaven, his Blasphemy fallen silent.

“What is that?” Shakravar roared. “That is not the Prophecy!”

“It is now,” Gaven said. “I am player and playwright.” He repeated the verse, but this time his words were not Common, but the very words of creation, the tongue in which the world was spoken into being.

“No!” Shakravar howled, and the sky shook with thunder again.

The Blasphemer extended the long, clawed fingers of one hand toward Gaven and spoke again. Pain stabbed through Gaven’s ears and he felt blood trickle down both sides of his neck. He let his sword fall to the ground, and the Blasphemer snarled as he drove his curved blade through Gaven’s chest.

*  *  *  *  *

Cressa looked around, her eyes wide with terror, and she began to sing. Her voice was clear and pure, achingly sweet. Rienne didn’t know the song—it sounded rustic and childish, but it didn’t matter. She felt as though her heart might burst with the beauty of it. The Blasphemer fell silent, Gaven’s dragon roared in fury, and thunder shook the sky. The Blasphemer spoke another word and Cressa’s voice faltered. In that moment, Gaven died.

G
rief and rage jolted Rienne into motion. She sprang at the Blasphemer, Maelstrom exulting in her grip, and swung at him with all her strength. The Blasphemer raised his fiery sword to parry, and when the two blades met the sound was a piercing scream of metal that obliterated all other sound.

The Blasphemer’s face twisted in confusion—he was evidently feeling the same sort of life in his own weapon, and it surprised him. The expression was oddly human in such a diabolic face.

“Barak Radaam,”
he said. “What is this?”

Maelstrom led her in its exquisite dance, flashing in circular patterns around her, drawing her arm in cuts and parries, leading her feet in lunges and dodges. Every blow struck the steel of the Blasphemer’s sword, bringing the unearthly scream of the two blades.

The Blasphemer was a clumsy partner for his own blade, stumbling through the motions of its dance, which was no less intricate than Maelstrom’s, if less elegantly executed. He struck when he was supposed to, fumbled into lunges as she stepped back, staggered back when she lunged. Fury twisted his face, and every blow Maelstrom blocked or dodged drew a snarl of frustration.

Rienne saw countless opportunities that Maelstrom didn’t take, but when she tried to alter the course of the dance, it resisted. Slowly it dawned on her that Maelstrom wasn’t interested in fighting the Blasphemer—it wanted to fight the Blasphemer’s sword. The dance of the blades was not a duel intended to establish a victor in the battle, so what was it?

Another blast of lightning crashed around her and the Blasphemer, and Rienne glanced over to where Gaven had fallen. The great blue dragon had one huge claw planted over Gaven’s body, and its other front claw held a shining red dragonshard. Lightning poured from its mouth and the dragonshard to whirl around them, adding to the storm of chaos that Gaven had started.

Rienne saw the rift where the Blasphemer’s words and Gaven’s dragonmark had torn through the world, some bizarre interaction of Blasphemy and Prophecy that threatened to unmake the creation, and she realized that the steps of the swords’ dance were leading them steadily closer to that hole in reality. She saw Cressa watching the battle in stunned silence, and the rest of the armies—Aundairians, Reachers, and barbarians alike—slowly finding their feet, breaking into scattered fights again or fleeing the field in terror.

“Yes!” the dragon hissed, exulting in the devastation. “In the city by the lake of kings, the city scourged with his storm, the Storm Dragon becomes as the Devourer, and he opens his maw to consume the world.”

With a dawning sense of horror, Rienne realized that the dance of Maelstrom and the Blasphemer’s blade was doing more than leading them toward the rift. Each wide sweep of her blade, she noticed, tugged at the raging forces around them, shaping the storm, giving form to the chaos. The Blasphemer’s sword had the same effect. She thought at first that the swords might be repairing the rift, re-creating the sundered world. But no—each cut of the blades tore at the edges, unraveling the fabric of reality still more.

“Now the world is consumed!” the dragon shouted, plunging itself into the lightless void that split the ground and air. Its body buckled and shuddered, and the rift contracted around it. The dragon became the void, spreading inky wings of nothing that annihilated everything they touched.

But if the dragon had sought to control the void by merging with it, it appeared to have failed. It hung suspended in the center of the raging storm, and the blood-red dragonshard floated at its heart, lightning streaming out from it even as it seemed to draw Rienne and the Blasphemer toward it. But the void seemed to be slowly consuming the dragonshard, drawing trickles of red like blood away from the stone to vanish in the inky depths.

The Blasphemer’s fiery yellow eyes met her gaze. In her dream, she had seen him as a demon, an incarnation of evil given substance solely for the purpose of destruction. But she saw now that he was flesh and bone, that he or a distant ancestor might once have been human. He was not so different from Gaven in some ways, drawn by the Prophecy into the role it demanded of him—not so different from her, really. Could he have chosen differently? Could he have arrived at a different destiny by taking different paths along the way?

But they had both arrived at this moment, along their different paths, bound to the same Prophecy and its fulfillment. They faced each other across their whirling blades, both drawn into the dance of steel and apparently powerless to stop whatever consequence might arise from the dance. They seemed to be unwitting partners in the destruction of the world, pawns of the weapons they wielded.

Her rage subsided, and she sought the stillness in the center of her soul. She first found the depths of grief, but she plunged her mind through it to a point beyond grief, beyond concern for her life. She turned Maelstrom over in her hand, and her mind slipped from history into eternity. She stepped back from the unending dance of the dueling blades, and the Blasphemer faltered.

Somewhere—far off, it seemed—Cressa began to sing again, her voice quavering. The dragon-void writhed in pain and contracted, growing visibly smaller as its dragonshard diminished. The Blasphemer roared in fury, stumbling forward as his sword sought Maelstrom again. Rienne stepped away from his clumsy charge, keeping Maelstrom low at her side. As he fought to regain his balance, she slid Maelstrom into its sheath.

The Blasphemer grinned, running the tip of his tongue across the points of his teeth as if savoring the anticipation of her blood. “Now you die, Dragonslayer.”

Rienne shook her head. She had spent her life mastering her sword, mastering her thoughts and emotions, learning discipline and technique, drawing on the deepest reserves of power in her soul. She would not be mastered by her blade or by the Prophecy—she would be a playwright as well, as she had said to Gaven so long ago. The Blasphemer, though, was willing to be a slave, enslaved to his rage, his hatred, his sword, and his role in the Prophecy. In all the ways that mattered, she and he were utterly unlike each other.

He lunged and she stepped around him, he swung his sword like a cleaver and she dodged and rolled. She found a position behind him and stayed there as he whirled in rage, trying to get her in front of him again. As the Blasphemer’s rage grew, the fury of the chaotic storm diminished, no longer fed by the clash of their blades. The dragon-void grew still smaller, thrashing in impotent fury as reality repaired itself around it, woven together by the strains of Cressa’s song. Finally the Blasphemer threw himself backward, thinking to knock her over, but she dodged that as well, and he landed hard on his back, right at the feet of the dragon, the very edge of the void.