The Flames of Dragons (27 page)

Shogun Katashi Melwar paced the ghostly corridors of Haldessa Castle. No one had lived here for more than a year, yet it still stank of humans. Its harsh lines and heavy stone anchored it to the ground. It lacked all the subtlety, grace, and refinement of Hiabi.

But it would have to do. It was the closest thing to a military center in this uncivilized land. Commanding it would make wiping out the Lodians that much easier.

Of course the need for it would have been less had Hana done her job. When Commander Daichi had returned in defeat, Melwar had almost ordered him to commit seppuku. The man should never have followed the words of a clear traitor like Hana.

Melwar calmed himself. It was not Daichi’s fault. The fault lay with Hana for letting her emotions take control, and with Melwar himself for trusting her to complete so important a task.

No matter. Though Hana had not returned, she was powerless on her own.

More distressing was the loss of the Rock Topaz. Once Melwar finished restoring the Maantecs, he would use the Water Dragon’s magic to locate and retrieve it. It would be a near-impossible task, but he had the time. No matter how long it took, it would be worth the effort.

The tapping of metal on stone caught Melwar’s attention. He turned to find Commander Daichi approaching.

At the sight of the shogun’s face, Daichi knelt and put his head to the floor. Melwar strode up to him.

“Do you have a report for me?” Melwar asked.

Daichi did not rise. “I do, Shogun.”

“Stand then, and deliver it.”

Daichi got up. “A group of scouts has returned from the south,” he said. “They report that the Lodian forces have left Kataile en masse. They’ve gathered in a wilderness area twenty-five miles southwest of here.”

Melwar frowned. “A wilderness area?”

“The scouts indicate that there are a few houses, but otherwise it’s just thickets and farm fields.”

“Tropos,” Melwar murmured, “how appropriate.”

“Shogun?” Daichi asked. “Excuse my stupidity, but I don’t understand what you mean.”

Melwar saw no reason to explain it. “Prepare the army to head out,” he ordered instead. “I want every soldier available. We will crush the Lodians with a single battle.”

The shogun’s pulse rose in anticipation. Why the Lodians had chosen Tropos as their rallying point he could not say, but their mistake was made. It was an indefensible open field. Nine thousand Maantecs would descend on the humans, and that would be the end of Lodia. Tacumsah, Ziorsecth, and even Aokigahara would follow.

Melwar smiled. It was about time.

“Hey, little girl, are you all right?”

The five-year-old fluttered her eyes. She lay on hard ground, and standing over her was a grownup Maantec woman wearing a tan kimono. On the adult’s hip sat a katana with a plain wooden hilt and sheathed in a plain wooden sheath.

“I think so,” the girl answered in a monotone.

The grownup looked pleased. Her pinned-up black hair held firm against the light breeze. “You’re probably in shock,” she said. “Do you have any idea what happened?”

The girl struggled to sit up. She shook her head. “Who are you?” she asked.

“I’m Caly Thara.”

Caly Thara . . . the name wasn’t familiar. She wasn’t one of the local farmers, at any rate.

“What’s your name?” Caly asked.

The girl frowned. “I don’t know.”

“You don’t know your own name?”

“I can’t remember.”

Caly folded her arms. “It doesn’t surprise me. You took a hard blow.”

“What happened?”

“Look around.”

The girl craned her neck and gasped in horror. The charred remains of more than a dozen bodies lay strewn across her family’s garden. The ground was scorched, and the house that she had lived in her entire life was a pile of ashes.

Flashes of memory came to her. She and her brother had been playing in the fields. They’d heard their mother call them, but the girl had tripped and fallen.

By the time she’d climbed to her feet and reached the house, everything had been in flames. Her father had stood over the burned corpses of her brother and mother while a dozen masked men in black descended upon him with steel and magic. They’d killed him and then come for her. She’d run to her father’s corpse, clutching his dagger as though it would keep her safe against the murderers.

Then she’d felt a great power surge inside her. It had rumbled in her body like thunder. She’d blacked out.

“What happened?” she asked again.

“They’re called the Akushi—servants of the Dark God, Plutanis. I’m impressed you survived when so many attacked.”

The girl looked numbly at the scene before her. “I don’t know how.”

Caly’s face filled with sympathy. “Nor do I,” she said, but the girl noticed that Caly didn’t look her in the eye when she spoke those words.

“Well,” Caly continued after a brief pause, “why don’t you come with me?”

The girl folded her brow, confused.

“You can’t stay here by yourself,” Caly said. “I’ll take care of you.”

The grownup offered her hand. With more than a little hesitation, the girl took it.

“There you go,” Caly said. “Now I suppose you need a name seeing as you don’t remember your old one. And in any case it’s appropriate because that part of your life is over now. Say, I have an idea. Instead of me giving you a name, what would you like to be called?”

The girl rubbed her eyes. “I don’t know,” she said. Nervous at being put on the spot, she picked up her father’s dagger and held it to her chest, seeking security in its familiar shape.

An idea came to her. “What’s this thing called?” she asked. She held out the dagger for Caly’s inspection.

“This?” Caly took it and looked it over. “It’s called a dagger,” she said, “but I don’t think you should name yourself that. It would sound too weird.”

Caly started to return the weapon, but then she stopped short. “Well, now, there is something,” she murmured. “This dagger, when I look closer, it really is something special. You see this round hilt? The pommel and crossguard are round too.” She pointed to each part of the weapon in turn. “This isn’t a Maantec weapon. It’s human, from a faraway place called Lodia. A long time ago I visited there, and I saw a dagger like this one. They had a special name for it. They called it a rondel.”

Caly handed back the blade. After a few seconds, the girl grinned. “That will be my name: Rondel.”

The twelve-hundred-year-old memories filled Rondel’s mind as she raced through the open understory of Ziorsecth Forest. She tried to think about those days as little as possible. Caly had told her that that part of her life was over. In the ensuing years of training to become the Storm Dragon Knight, Rondel had forgotten her birth home. Even now she could barely picture her family’s faces, and she had no memories of the days before they’d died.

Iren Saito’s private words inside the Muryozaki came to her. What if he’d been right? Was it really possible? She’d always assumed her family’s murders were a random act. The Akushi were marauders who lived outside the bounds of Maantec society. Surely their attack had been another arbitrary slaying by a group of madmen.

But if Saito was correct, then the murders hadn’t been random at all. Despite living outside the Maantec order, the Akushi had a fierce streak of pride for their species. They hated other races and believed them inferior.

The mere mention of the possibility had been enough for Rondel to slap Saito in the face. Now, though, she had her doubts. Whatever else Saito might be, he was no fool. Those final moments inside the Muryozaki were his last chance to speak to her. He wouldn’t waste words on nonsense.

Rondel stopped as she reached her destination. Ahead of her Ziorsecth’s trees thinned and shortened into scrubby brush. Dry air sucked the moisture from her body, and a great heat welled in front of her.

The old Maantec steeled herself, then took a few final steps. As happened every time she came here, her breath caught when she laid eyes on it.

Serona.

The broken land shot jets of white flame hundreds of feet into the air. In the sky a great storm raged, a thousand-year tempest Rondel herself had created almost at the cost of her life. Its rain poured down, but the water evaporated before it reached the ground.

Rondel hesitated. Why had she come all the way here? She could have tested Saito’s theory on any tree between here and Tropos. Every second mattered if they wanted to defeat Melwar.

Yet she could go nowhere else. Serona was her fault. Two years ago she’d told Iren that such disasters needed to linger. They served as a reminder of the damage wrought by evil. At the time she’d believed that with all her heart.

Not anymore. She had killed an innocent woman, yet that woman’s own son had found a way to move past that tragedy.

It was all so obvious to Rondel now. Okthora’s Law was wrong, or at least, it had been misinterpreted. Evil must be annihilated. For millennia Storm Dragon Knights had taken that to mean the person who committed the evil had to die. Iren, though, had found another way. So had Saito and Divinion. Evil could also be annihilated through redemption.

That’s why she’d needed to come here. It was time to redeem this land.

Rondel drew her Liryometa with her left hand. At the same time, she placed her right hand on the stubby trunk of a short tree, one of the last before Serona’s blistering heat. It would have little magic on its own, but thanks to Ziorsecth’s shared root system, it had the strength of the whole forest coursing through it.

Rondel closed her eyes. Without intending to she lapsed into a memory. It felt more like a dream, but she knew it had happened.

She was five years old again, splashing about in the rice paddies on her parents’ farm. Yet even as she played, worry touched her heart. She’d heard her parents talking. The rice was growing poorly this year. Unless something changed soon, they wouldn’t have enough to cover the tribute due to the local lord. If that happened, their family would starve.

Rondel wanted to help. She touched her tiny hands to the wilted rice plants and prayed for them to grow.

When the plant she was fingering doubled in size, she fell back on her rump in shock.

She reached out and grabbed another plant. It grew too. She tried with three more until she was convinced. She ran back to the house.

“Mommy! Mommy!” she cried. “Come see what I can do!”

Her mother followed her to the paddies, and Rondel touched a plant. It grew full and vibrant. Rondel spun around and smiled her biggest smile. “Now we’ll have lots of food!” she proclaimed.

Her mother slapped her so hard Rondel’s ears rang and she saw stars in the daytime.

“No!” her mother shouted. “You must never do that! Get inside at once!”

Rondel didn’t understand. She’d saved her family. Why was her mother mad at her?

That night she pretended to sleep. She knew her parents had their private conversations after the children went to bed. Her family lived in a one-room hut, so it was easy to eavesdrop.

“What if someone saw?” her mother asked in a hushed tone.

“It was just a few rice plants,” her father replied. “We’re all but alone out here. I doubt anyone noticed.”

“But the Akushi—”

“It was always a risk. You and I both knew that. We married knowing it. We had kids knowing it.”

“What will we do?”

“Say nothing. Forget it happened. And keep a closer eye on the kids, especially Kaede. If anyone finds out where I’m really from, the Akushi won’t stop until they hunt us down.”

Three days later, Rondel’s family was murdered.

*   *   *

The adult Rondel went to her knees. For twelve hundred years her lack of childhood memories hadn’t bothered her. She’d dismissed the amnesia as a side effect of trauma and her intense training with Caly Thara.

But that hadn’t been the case. She’d blocked out those memories because she’d had no other choice. She couldn’t let herself know that her parents and brother had died because of her.

Someone had seen her use plant magic. Among the Maantecs it was all but unheard of. The few who could use it needed decades, even centuries, to control it.

There was only one explanation for her inborn talent. She wasn’t entirely Maantec.

Her father had been a Kodama.

That was what Saito had suggested to her, that the Akushi had murdered her family because a Maantec and Kodama had married and had children. To the Akushi, it was an unforgivable offense.

Rondel stared across Serona’s burning expanse. Somewhere in that lattice of devastation was her family’s farm, long since ruined. Somewhere amid the fires rested the dust of her brother and parents.

She stood and put her hand back on the tree. Magic flowed through it into her. It was a trickle at first. Then, with the memory of the rice plants vivid in her mind, it became a flood.

Rondel had never imagined power like this. How had Aletas managed it against Feng? It was incredible.

Her body transformed. Her wrinkles smoothed away. The hair whipping about her face changed from gray to dark brown.

Now came the ultimate test. Rondel raised her dagger to the sky and commanded the storm. Lightning shot from the Liryometa to the clouds.

Heat burned inside her. It made Serona’s sweltering air seem as refreshing as the breeze off the Yuushin Sea. Ziorsecth’s power threatened to tear her apart, but Rondel held firm. If Aletas could do it, she could do it.

The storm reacted to her addition of magic, and it intensified. The lightning that had struck the ground dozens of times a second now came at twice that pace, then triple. The rain fell harder and harder. The heat from Serona’s flames couldn’t keep up. With each second, the rain reached closer to the ground.

At last Rondel heard the sound she’d hoped for. The first drops hit the white fires and sizzled into steam. Rondel kept up her efforts. The fires lowered.

The storm broke through. Rain thrashed the ground, and the fires vanished. Their lattices still glowed with heat, but even that was fading before the liquid onslaught. Rondel had done it.

Rather, she had almost done it. One task remained. She reversed the flow of magic in the storm, drawing its power to the Liryometa. She let the magic course through her and back into Ziorsecth. It was the forest’s energy, after all. It was only proper to return it.

All but a little. The magic Rondel had released a thousand years ago she kept with her.

Deprived of energy, the storm clouds dissipated. Rondel smiled as the sun pierced through to the ground of Serona. It was the first time in a millennium the two had met.

The fires were gone, never to return. Given time, Serona would heal. Life would grow there again. Perhaps someday, some other family would plant rice where her parents, Maantec and Kodama, once had. Rondel hoped they would.

Putting her back to her homeland, Rondel reentered Ziorsecth Forest. Half of her repentance was done.

The other half lay back in Lodia. It was time to correct her mistake. Evil must be annihilated, and in this case she hadn’t the slightest doubt what it meant.

It was time to kill Katashi Melwar.