The Grand Crusade (3 page)

Alyx nodded, drawing off her cloak and scarf. “Your welcome is appreciated, Highness, as is the speed with which you all assembled. We bring you news of great import. This is Kedyn’s Crow, and he has accepted the responsibility to make our report.”

Crow stepped forward. He’d spent a quarter century traveling with Resolute and waging a private war against Chytrine. Scars crisscrossed his body and old injuries made him ache, but even though the pain of Will’s death weighed heavily on him, his shoulders did not slump and his head did not sag wearily. He moved with the strength of a younger man—strength born of a conviction that Chytrine had to be stopped no matter the cost—and seeing that strength brought a smile to Alexia’s face.

He made her proud, and that made her love him even more.

Crow slowly drew the mittens from his hands and unbuttoned the sheepskin coat he wore. “My lords and ladies, I bear grave news. In Yslin you were presented with a lad, Will Norrington. He was the fulfillment of the Norrington Prophecy. He was in my care and under my protection. With me and my companions, Will did much good, from Vilwan and Port Gold to Fortress Draconis, Meredo, and Muroso. His courage and spirit can be attested to by thousands.

“Yesterday Will spoke for humanity at the Congress of Dragons on Vael. He spoke eloquently, arguing that the dragons alone should be custodians of the DragonCrown fragments. He argued one of Chytrine’ssullancirito a standstill and when the dragons agreed with him, thesullanciriattempted to murder one of them. Will prevented that murder, but could only do so at the cost of his own life.”

Crow’s words tightened into a croak as his hands balled. Alexia reached out, closing her hand on his shoulder. She felt the tremor running through him and squeezed.

King Scrainwood slowly rose from behind Oriosa’s table. He unfolded himself and straightened in a manner that somehow struck Alexia as wrong, but she could not place why. He moved as a man might, but there was something else there. Something evil, which came through in the venom saturating his words.

“TheNorrington isdead?. What further proof is needed that you are indeed the traitor, that you are Chytrine’s agent? You betrayed heroes an age ago, and you betrayed Will Norrington now.” Scrainwood pointed a quivering finger at Alexia. “Come away from him, Princess. To be near him is to be in jeopardy, and to call him friend is to hold a viper to your breast.”

Alexia started to mouth a protest, but Crow unballed a scarred fist and laid it on her hand. He gave her a glance full of love and confidence, then hardened his expression and turned to face the crowned heads.

“This endsnow, King Scrainwood.”

Scrainwood’s eyes widened as he opened his arms. “You dare threaten me, here and now? Youareevil’s agent.”

Crow snorted. “And how do I threaten you, King Scrainwood? I have no sword. Is it that you still feel the sting of my slaps on your cheeks? Is it your shame that wounds you, and your memory of it that makes you fear me? Fear rules you, and it infects all of you here. I have never liked you, nor have you ever liked me, and that is the way of the thing. It cannot be allowed, however, to doom the world.”

He looked past and around Scrainwood. “For a quarter century there have been two strategies for dealing with Chytrine and her threat to the Southlands. One has been defensive, as exemplified by Fortress Draconis, and perverted by Oriosa’s covert acquiescence to Aurolani pressure. Do not be smug. All of you have adopted this strategy to a greater or lesser extent. The fact that you are here, not at the head of armies pushing into Muroso, is further proof that you think this strategy can win.

“Resolute and I, on the other hand, have waged a war against her. We have cost her troops and leaders. We have thwarted plans. We have slowed her advances. We may not have stopped her, but we are only two. As part of our war we

sought the Norrington. We plucked him from the slums of Yslin, trained him for his role, watched him assume it and acquit himself well.“

Crow’s voice tightened a bit, but deepened as well. “One of you dismissed him as gutterkin and a whoreget, yet he won his place in history. While still a youth, he inspired men with a willingness to fight and even die for him, and many did—all in opposition to Chytrine. His death won for us a neutrality among dragons. As a nation they will not fight for Chytrine.”

Scrainwood sniffed. “A better man would have won them to our side.”

“Silence!” Crow’s shout produced astonished expressions on faces long unaccustomed to taking orders. “You are all playing at games. You need to make serious decisions, and you can’t do it with posturing, nor with a lack of information, and it is information I bring.”

He turned and pointed to Dranae. “This companion of ours is Dravothrak, a dragon in manform. He is our ally, as Chytrine has allies. In the mountains of Sarengul he slew one of her dragons. There are others among dragonkind willing to help us.”

King Fidelius stroked his chin. “What do they desire for their help?”

Dranae nodded slowly. “What you do. The destruction of the DragonCrown.”

A woman in a black robe stood at the Vilwanese table. “What of Adept Reese? Was he slain, too?”

Crow shook his head. “No, he has remained on Vael to receive instruction in the ways of dracomagick.”

Her eyes widened. “On whose authority?”

“His. Mine. Does it matter?” Crow’s hands again became fists. “Have none of you been listening? You ask after authority, after allies, assuming that you can look past to the time after Chytrine. But the job before you is to deal with Chytrine. You failed twenty-five years ago to end this threat, and for all that time I accepted the burden of your blame. Well, no more. If the world is to survive, you will have to do something other than plot and scheme.”

He stabbed a finger off to the northeast. “You have a horde pouring in this direction. It has devoured Sebcia. It is consuming Muroso. It has invaded Sarengul and struck at Bokagul. Oriosa will not stop it.Youmust.”

Crow’s shoulders slumped a little. “Will Norrington accepted the responsibility for saving the world. The actions he took have hurt Chytrine and made her vulnerable. If you give her time to recover, you will have betrayed him, your people, and yourselves. Because every second you fail to act is a second in which she grows stronger, and a second in which the chance to stop her slips further away.”

He straightened his shoulders and raised his head, then turned and strode from the room. The guards at the door made no attempt to stop him, despite Scrainwood’s hissed orders. Alyx fell in behind him, and Resolute beside her.

Beyond the door, in the small corridor, Crow hammered a fist against a stone wall.

Resolute smiled and rested a hand on the back of Crow’s neck. “I thought you said this needed to be handled diplomatically?”

Crow growled, then pressed his forehead to the cold stone and smiled. “Well, that was my intention, but I assumed that if they were going to hate me, they might as well have plenty of reason. After the last war against Chytrine I told them this would happen. It was gratifying to remind them of it. But I don’t know that it will do any good.”

Alyx stroked his arm. “I watched them. Augustus smiled and my great-grandaunt did not, so I consider those both solid points. Queen Carus of Jerana and King Fidelius listened, and they are key players. You reminded them all that Scrainwood could not be trusted, and he did little to reassure them on that point. They liked seeing Erlestoke there.”

Crow turned and slumped back against the wall. “There is hope, then, slender though it might be. This is good.” He raised a hand and caressed her cheek. “You and Erlestoke will have to carry on the political battle, since I am useless.”

Alexia frowned. “You’re never useless, and I will be needing your help.”

“Oh, I’ll help as much as I can.” The corner of Crow’s mouth twitched in a grin. “I’ll distract Scrainwood. While you are rallying the crowned heads, I’ll write my memoirs, with all the details of the last campaign against Chytrine. Trying to get at the manuscript will keep him preoccupied, I hope.”

Resolute nodded and the upright stripe of white hair shifted as if kissed by a breeze. “No matter what they think of you, Crow, the assembled leaders know that to do nothing is to die. It is a spur that will drive them to action. With luck, the princess and Erlestoke can unite them, and we will put an end to this scourge for once and all time.”

Kerrigan Reese sat cross-legged on the stone floor and studied the seamless silver globe in his hands. He could see himself easily in its polished surface, his face all piled up around a fat nose and diminishing until his ears became little more than buds. He looked singularly unappealing, but though possessed of a normal amount of vanity, concerns about his looks shrank to insignificance. He was less worried about the globe’s visual distortion because another aspect of its nature held his full attention.

As the globe distorted reflected light, so it seemed to distort magick. The first spell the portly mage had cast on the globe had confirmed that it was enchanted, but the energy he had put into a simple diagnostic spell was quickly drawn and shredded. It seemed to him as if it had been a thin cloud stretched and dissipated by an unfelt wind.

His mind raced, both in puzzling out the globe and because of other recent events. Will Norrington’s death still hurt. Not only had Kerrigan lost a friend— the only friend he’d had his own age—but he should have been able to prevent Will’s death. He had failed to act and while he acknowledged that Will knew what he was doing when he sacrificed himself, Kerrigan’s failure gnawed at him. Will’s dying act, however, had saved the life of Kerrigan’s new master, a dragon named Rymramoch. Rymramoch’s physical body lay in the Congress Chamber, deep in the fastness of Vael, though the dragon traveled and observed through means of an elaborate wooden manikin. Until a confrontation with asullanciriin the chamber, Kerrigan had no inkling that Rymramoch was anything but a powerful mage.

The dragon had traveled with the help of Bok, a hirsute urZrethi male with malachite flesh. He had turned out to be quite a surprise. As with all of his race, Bok could shift shape, but Kerrigan had labored under the impression that he

was little more than a beast. Part of that mistake had been because 01 common legend that said male urZrethi driven from the mountains slowly went insane without the company of their own kind. The urZrethi matriarchy portrayed males as feebleminded, and during his time in Bokagul, Kerrigan had seen little

to contradict this depiction.

Bok, or more correctly Loktu-bok Jex, turned out to be centuries old, very well educated and traveled, and quite capable of working formidable magick. His spells had animated the puppet in which Rymramoch’s consciousness had resided and Kerrigan had never detected a thing. And as if Bok’s going from beast to civilized savant was not enough of a shock, Bok had told Kerrigan that

he was Chytrine’s father.

“Your mind is wandering, Adept Reese.” Rymramoch, resplendent in a crimson robe embroidered in golden serpentine designs, nodded. The puppet pointed a gloved hand at the globe. “Focus on the globe. Divine its secrets.”

Kerrigan nodded and cleared his mind of everything but the globe. He cast his diagnostic spell again, with much the same results. He had confirmed that the globe was magickal in some manner, but got nothing else useful in that regard. What he did notice, however, was that his spell was shredded differently this time, the energy swirling away in another pattern.

It flowed, much as urZrethi magick flows. He shifted his approach and, instead of casting a human diagnostic spell, went for one he had learned from an urZrethi instructor. It flowed from his hands and covered the globe with a dark coat. Occasionally little lines of silver, like lightning, would flash here and there,

then the spell evaporated.

The results of the urZrethi magick did not tell Kerrigan much, other than that Bok had cast a spell on it. That spell seemed suited to little more than masking other magick. He knew that to peel that spell away would take a lot of hard work and many hours, and he did not feel he had time to waste. Moreover, he had an idea.

Kerrigan began to shape a spell in the urZrethi style, imagining it to be smoke rising from an extinguished candle. He poured energy into it, giving the wisp of the spell life, then sank the slender thread of it into the shield spell. Kerrigan’s new spell flowed with Bok’s magick—at first on the surface, then down through the protective layer. The trickle of energy he expended on the spell was insufficient to trigger a reaction by Bok’s spell, so little by slowly his thread drifted on and in and finally reached the globe itself.

The flowing sensation of his spell had pleased Kerrigan, and had tickled the palm of his right hand. When the spell touched the globe, however, that tickle became a stab of agony that felt as if the ball had sprouted a spike and driven it straight through Kerrigan’s hand. A wave of fatigue washed over him and the world dimmed for a moment. Kerrigan wavered and slumped to his right as the globe rolled from his hand and onto the floor.

Kerrigan watched the ball jump and twist, then flatten into a thick disk,

stretch into a tall cylinder, and finally gather itself into a roiling thundercloud. All motion froze for a second and a keening wail sounded, then the silver ball expanded and resolved itself into the shape of a warrior. Though only a foot high, the model had been worked with exquisite detail, right down to the way the man’s long hair moved against his shoulders.

It shouldn’t be moving. Kerrigan shook his head to clear it, and the figure’s details faded for a moment, then became sharp again as Kerrigan concentrated. The figure actually looked familiar and after a moment’s reflection Kerrigan realized it was modeled on a statue of Prince Kirill of Okrannel, Alexia’s father, that Kerrigan had seen at Fortress Draconis.

The little figure bowed to him, then melted back into the silver sphere.

Kerrigan levered himself up into a sitting position again. “What is that?”

Rymramoch’s head canted to the side, then the puppet gestured and the globe floated to his outstretched hand. “It is little more than a toy we use to train ourselves in magick. Bok did layer it with a protective spell, but you worked through that quickly enough. The device may have seemed greedy to you, but dragons use it and barely notice the demands.”