Master Of The Planes (Book 3) (27 page)

All thought Niarmit had of clinging to the bow or the last pair of enchanted arrows was banished into irrelevance as gravity claimed her for its own, dragging her downwards.  In the choking cloud of dust, she found herself tumbling past the dragon’s side, the serpent having flung itself free of the destruction it had wrought.

She tumbled end over end, just one hand to press the Helm upon her head the other reaching into empty space while Thren mumbled a hurried spell.  At last she felt her descent slowed as she fell through an opaque mist of dust, she had no idea how far she had fallen, or what lay beneath her until, just when she thought the ground would never come, she met it.  Or at least she hit the dusty rubble of the base of the broken tower.  The slow falling spell which Thren had cast had reduced her downward speed to little more than a brisk walking pace, but even so a brisk walk into a pile of rock is an unsteadying experience.  She fell forward, arms outstretched to cushion the harsh landing on unseen obstacles.  She tripped and rolled, curling herself into a ball to minimise the bruising effect of hard rock beneath the layer of dust, and then at last she came to a halt. 

Standing up all was silent in her head, as silent as the enveloping cloud of dissolved wizardstone.  She checked quickly that all her limbs still functioned, that all bones remained in their proper alignments and proportions.  There was an aching lump on the back of her head that surprised her at first for the Helm should have shielded it, and then she realised with horror, the Helm was not on her head.  It had to have fallen free in the last battering roll down the rock pile.

She gazed around, stupidly found herself calling the names of the monarchs of the Helm, though there was no way they could hear her across the planes.

The dust was clearing, settling or evaporating and as her circle of vision expanded she caught a glint of steel further up the stack of rubble which had been the base of the tower. She scrabbled up the uneven rock pile, frantic for the artefact she had once foresworn for ever and which was now her only safety.

A movement behind her, stones and then rocks sliding over rocks made her flesh crawl.  Despite herself she stopped and looked round, over her shoulder.

The dragon had landed within the circle of walls of the inner bailey; the peaked summit to Quintala’s fortress now held only a pile of rubble in token of her folly.  The beast crawled across the broken stone, its great head barely thirty feet from her.  She was paralysed by the sight as it opened its mouth. 

She had gazed before down the creature’s throat, seen the tiny jets of flame behind its back teeth which would ignite the volatile mix of its breath, and the pair of openings by each jet one for the flammable fluid it secreted the other for the rushing air from its lungs to ensure the mixture made a flame so hot it could melt steel and warp stone.  But before when she had seen that sight, she had been wearing the Helm, protected by its dweomer.

Niarmit glanced round at the great Helm of Eadran, perched tantalisingly out of reach.  In an awful instant she realised the alignment of serpent, queen and Helm was almost exactly the same as the one Maelgrum had intended when he had set the dragon against her.  Not only would the dragon’s next breath destroy her, it would chase her fleeing soul across the planar bridge into the Domain of the Helm and destroy that too.

She flung herself sideways, determined to break the destructive link and at least spare her ancestors from her fate.  She felt the wind of the dragon’s inward breath and braced herself for the instant immolation which Haselrig had assured her was at least a swift end.

There was a shout, a clang of metal on metal and a blast of heat as the dragon’s fire swept not at her, but past her.  As she rolled, she looked and saw a steel spear fall from the dragon’s eye, flicked away by a bat of its eyelid over the surface of its impenetrable cornea.  The jet of flame was playing across the top of the inner gatehouse. Kimbolt stood bent over a scorpion, working the windlass to reset the giant crossbow and launch another steel spear.

“Kimbolt!” she cried.  “Down!”  The seneschal flung himself flat out of sight behind the embrasures just as the flame reached the wooden siege engine, which immediately erupted into flaming kindling. 

Shaken free at last of the paralysis of dragon fear, Niarmit lunged the last few strides for the Helm, pulling it onto her head as she rolled down the far side of the slope of broken rock and stone.

“What happened?”

“What’s happening?”

A cacophony of ancestral demands greeted her re-connection with the Domain of the Helm.  “See for yourself,” she growled, rising to her feet and calling a challenge at the dragon.

“Where’s the bow?”

“Where’s the arrow?”

“Hush, Bulvelds,” Mitalda commanded.  “Let me concentrate.”

“Hey, you, lizard!”  The dragon’s ears, mere pits in its skin at the point where its jaw met its skull, flared a little wider as it tried to trace the sound.  “Yes, you.”

The dragon lunged, surprisingly quickly for something so large, but as before in the cavern beneath Morwencairn, the blow of its claw stopped short with a crackle of energy as the protection of Eadran’s Helm held good.

It opened its mouth then, drawing in a houseful of air to ignite.  Through the communion of the Helm the five monarchs stared into the gaping maw and the vulnerable upper palate that was their target.

“If I had the bow and the arrow now,” Bulveld moaned as they braced themselves for a blast of harmless fire.  “By the Goddess even Santos could hit it from here.”

“The bow’s on the far side of this rubble, buried about two foot down,” Mitalda announced.  “Let’s get over there and get digging.”

The blast of fire never came.  Instead, as they turned Niarmit’s body where Mitalda had directed, the dragon swept its claws through the loose rubble beneath them.  Niarmit, tumbled again in a spray of falling rock.  With some difficulty she kept the Helm on her head while rolling through another battering by rock and stone. 

“Lost it again,” Mitalda cursed.

“Can you cast your ice-ball spell on anything other than an arrow?” Niarmit demanded as her grasping fingers lighted on something thick and cold.

“What have you in mind, Queen Niarmit?”

“How about this?” Niarmit raised the steel spear infront of her.  It took the additional strength of the Bulvelds to manage the heavy weapon with any ease. 

“That will work.” The great queen’s will worked the fingers of Niarmit’s hand as the dragon shuffled round for another attack.  Just as the great beast’s head lowered towards Niarmit, Mitalda announced the spell complete.

Niarmit held the spear above her shoulder one handed, like a javelin, grateful for the help of the three kings.  The dragon looked at her blinking slowly.

“Come on, you bastard,” Bulveld’s scream broke from Niarmit’s lips.  “Come on, open your ugly mouth and try and breathe a little fire on us.  Come on!”

“He’s not going to,” Thren decided.  “He’s not going to offer us the shot.”

The dragon evidently agreed with the kinslayer’s bane for, with mouth firmly closed, it set to clawing at the ground infront of its tormenting prey. The rock and earth shook making Niarmit sway unsteadily.  “He knows he can’t hurt us while I wear the Helm,” she cried.  “He’s going to keep shaking us until the bloody thing falls off again.”

The dragon added its snout to the work of its claws, and then for good measure lashed at the far side of the low hillock with its thunderous tail.  Niarmit staggered and fell to one knee, still holding the spear one handed, but feeling the Helm slip forward on her head.  She had not stood on a surface so unstable since the shipwreck all those months ago, the event which had halted her flight to Oostport and the Eastern Lands.

She staggered upright as the dragon crashed its jaw with such force into the ground infront of her, that she was flung up in the air. She landed knees bent just feet from its nostrils, its baleful eyes watching for the slightest slippage in the protective artefact.

“Come on!”  She saw an opportunity and sprang upright. “Jump.”

The monarchs leant their strength to her legs and she leaped and landed squarely on the dragon’s nose.  With a roar it lifted its head as she ran between its eyes, sliding across its swaying scaly skull, hand scorched by the hot steel of its armoured plating, and then she was slipping past its ear.  With a twist and a lunge she flung the spear deep into the opening, the thrust given added force by the weight of four other monarchs’ wills.

And then she was sliding and falling as the dragon raised its head still further with a roar and she fell from him onto the ground with a blow that drove every gasp of breath from her body and shook the Helm free from her head.

The dragon was howling as it swung its great head round, the last few inches of the butt end of the steel spear still visible protruding from its ear. Niarmit, alone with her thoughts once more, was quite spent.  No part of her body would answer to her will and she gazed up in blank acceptance as the dragon raised its head, opened its mouth to draw in air to fuel a killing breath of fire.

And then there was a dull whump a flash of blue and white light behind the steel glass of the dragon’s eyes and its head fell forward like a toppled temple, crashing into the ground just feet from Niarmit’s prone body.  It struck with enough force to lift and shift her two feet in the air and as many again back.   This time, when she hit the ground, Niarmit decided she would really rather just stay there.  

              The setting sun was silhouetting the mound of Colnhill as it sank towards the western Horizon.  The tower was gone, the dragon too.  Quintala prowled her camp in magnificent solitude.  Rondol was doubtless celebrating her misfortune in company with his shaven headed mistress.  Either that or he was wise enough to avoid all contact with her in the moment of her humiliation and his vindication.  Being shown to have been right all along would not save him, indeed it was more likely to condemn him.

Haselrig too had eschewed her company, skulking in the outer reaches of the camp.  Doubtless he was delighting in sharing news of the disaster with Maelgrum, even as the sun’s light faded on a day of abject failure for the half-elf’s plans.

Only Mazdurg dared approach her, the scarred orc chieftain entirely lacking the skills to sense her mood and beat a sensible retreat.   But then it was not his emotional awareness that had brought Mazdurg to this high command.

“Orders, lady?” he demanded.

“We attack,” she snapped.  “Tonight.”

“But dragon gone, castle walls still stand, men too.”

“Are you scared, Mazdurg?” she rounded on him.

He shook his head slowly, blinking puzzlement in his yellow eyes.  “Not scared, lady no.  But we have no ladders.  Walls are high, hill is steep. We go there, we just die.  Mazdurg not scared, but Mazdurg not stupid.”

“And you think I am?”

His silence was the height of orcish eloquence.

“Then you can just fuck off, you dwarf-buggerer,” she shouted. 

The orc gave a curt nod, his eyes fixed on the half-elf’s furious face, before backing away.  Quintala put her hands to her face, steepled fingers pressed over nose and mouth.  She drew in long but ineffective calming breaths, spat out more curses at the dusk and then at last bent her fingers to pull open another gate.

Niarmit guessed it had been a long time since Santos had been so happy, maybe an entire millennium.  The steward’s face was split in a beaming smile of happy servility. Two more monarchs of the past had joined what was almost a throng in the Chamber of the Helm, and Santos was making delighted introductions.  Niarmit racked her brain, trying to place these new arrivals in the pantheon of rulers which her dry history tutor had struggled to impress upon her.

The first, a striking woman with hair as red as her own, was spare of form but had a grip of iron when she took Niarmit’s hand.  “Your reigning Majesty, Queen Niarmit” Santos gushed, “may I present her emeritus Majesty, Queen Baltheza.”

“Your father is a man of a certain charm,” Baltheza said keeping a sharp eye on Niarmit’s face.  “He knows how to entice a lady from her boudoir, or into it I dare say.”

Gregor’s skills of courtship within and without wedlock were not a matter Niarmit wished to dwell upon. She hurried for safer ground. “I learnt much of you, your Majesty, of your struggle to keep the Petred Isle free from dominion by any prince of the Eastern Lands.  You are renowned as the saviour of Salicia and the guardian of the salved people’s independence.”

Baltheza smiled.  “The trick with princes, my dear, is to be charming to all of them and to marry none of them; that is how a woman keeps her throne and her kingdom intact.”  

“Historians remember you as the Maiden Queen,” Niarmit sought a compliment.

“Do they now? How sweet of them,” Baltheza arched an eyebrow and smirked most unregally. “However, let me just say, if there is anything you would know of the ways of princes you have only to ask.  There are some things in the world that I am sure have not changed much in four hundred years, and without wanting to contradict the historians’ view of me, I am not entirely inexpert in that field.”

“You are too kind,” Niarmit bowed low, grateful for Santos’s impatience to make a second introduction.  This one a rotund gentleman with a twinkling smile. 

“His emeritus Majesty, King Gregor the Third.”

The man pumped her hand enthusiastically.  “Tell me my dear, how does history remember me?”

The name triggered an instant association of ‘mad’ in Niarmit’s mind which she only just managed to rephrase.  “You are known as Gregor the … troubled,” she said.

The substitute epithet seemed to disappoint him just as much as the truth would have.  He shook his head sadly.  “Oh dear, oh dear.  It was never me you see, never me at all. They say I killed my servants, I know they said I was insane, but it was him, always him.  He seized the Helm from me.  It wasn’t me that did those awful things, it was Chirard.”

“I know,” Niarmit said grimly thinking of the murders Chirard had so nearly committed with her body.

“You must tell them, you must tell people.  I wasn’t mad.  I couldn’t tell them then.  The Helm wouldn’t let me.”

“I will find a way,” Niarmit assured him.

“Excuse me, your Majesty,” her Thren murmured in Gregor’s ear.  “May I have a moment to speak with my many times over great grand-daughter.”

“Of course,” the round Gregor bumbled his way to one side.

“How many does that make?” Niarmit asked.

“Nearly half of them.  Your father has done well.  The more he can persuade to come here, to hold the palace secure against Chirard, then the more we will be able to assist in your struggle against the Dark Lord.”

“I am not sure what use we will get from Gregor the Third,” Niarmit confessed as the portly monarch hovered uncomfortably on the edge of a conversation between three Bulvelds and a Thren.

Her Thren smiled, drawing out a long accented “well,” as he thought on her words.  “The greatest powers in the Domain of the Helm do accrue to those who have existed here the longest.  Add to that the fact that, thanks to my idiot son, no monarch after me has practiced the art of sorcery, and I grant you yes this Gregor and my grand-daughter Baltheza may have a more limited contribution to make.  But still, they are here and the Kinslayer is not and so we can act at last.”

“Maybe Tordil was right,” Niarmit felt the beginnings of belief scratching at her scepticism. “Feyril too.  The dragon is dead, maybe we can destroy Maelgrum as well.”

Thren nodded, “indeed my dear and when this is done, maybe before, you must let me show you something of this place.  The Vanquisher’s gift is a curse, but there is still the scope for beauty and wonder within it.  A place where anyone can create a flower merely by thinking it, is not entirely without pleasure.”

“Niarmit, my Queen.” A voice that did not belong to the Domain of the Helm broke in on her conversation.  She shifted her focus to the receiving room in Quintala’s hall, where she had sat her body to rest while her mind reassured the monarchs of the helm of their collective success against the dragon.

Kimbolt was there, Jolander too.  “The half-breed witch is at the gatehouse again,” the seneschal said.  “She is insisting she speak with you, with you alone.”

“Do not trust her, your Majesty.” Jolander’s moustache twitched his indignation.  “Let my men send a score of arrows at her impudent hide.  That is no more than she deserves.”

“I will speak with Quintala.” Niarmit rose from the chair.  “Alone.” She tapped the Helm.  “This is all the protection I need against her evil.”