Crown of Crystal Flame
Page 31

Sebourne went down on one knee, his sword clattering to the courtyard’s paving stones.
Breathing heavily, Cann circled back around, kicked Dervas’s fallen sword across the courtyard, and thrust his sword under Sebourne’s chin. “You traitorous rultshart. I should kill you now.”
“Then why don’t you?” The defeated Great Lord hugged his injured hand to his chest and curled his lip in a sneer.
“Because you don’t deserve a quick death, Dervas. Our new king, whose father you slew, will want you punished as the traitor you are.” Cann nodded to the King’s Guard, then stepped back and sheathed his sword. “May the gods have mercy on your Shadowed soul.” Abruptly feeling drained and hollow, Cann turned to rejoin his sons.
“I won’t need that mercy, Barrial,” Sebourne called after him. Then his voice took on a Dark edge, and he added, “But you will.”
Cann saw Sev’s eyes widen. He heard Parsis shout, “Da! ‘Ware!” just as Sev raised his father’s Elfbow, arrow nocked and drawn. Cann spun and dropped to one knee, blade in hand, to see Sebourne lift his uninjured arm. The cuff of Sebourne’s sleeve had fallen back to reveal a small bow strapped to his wrist.
Cann’s sword, Sev’s arrow, and the King’s Guards’ swords all pierced Great Lord Sebourne in an instant. The poison dart from the wristbow bounced off the wall behind Cann’s head and fell harmlessly to the stone pavers.
Mortally wounded, Dervas Sebourne, the last of his Great House, cried, “Gamorraz!” then toppled to the paving stones. Bright streamers of blood spilled from his nose and mouth as his pierced heart pumped the final moments of his life away.
On Seborne’s chest the round moonstone in his necklace began to glow.
“What the—?” One of the King’s Guard bent down to examine the pendant. The white stone grew brighter.
Cann had no idea what the thing was, but he knew magic when he saw it. And if the magic was Dervas’s dying gift to them, it couldn’t be good.
“Put it down!” he cried. “Get back! Everyone get back!”
His warning came too late for the guard holding the necklace.
Bright light gave way to rapidly expanding darkness. The guard screamed in helpless terror as the growing blackness consumed his hand and arm and half his torso. The smoldering remains of his body dropped to the ground and convulsed. Howling shadows fell upon his twitching corpse with ravening hunger.
“Demons!” someone cried, and the Celierians scattered.
Screams erupted from all corners of the castle.
“Attack! We’re under attack!”
“Da! Look!” Severn pointed back towards the open portal behind them.
Cann looked in time to see a great, tawny cat leap from the well, a brightly garbed and veiled Feraz warrior on its back. The warrior carried a strange urn on a chain that he spun in circles over his head. Some sort of liquid sprayed forth, the fine droplets settling on the fleeing Celierians. The Celierians cried out, some slapping themselves where the droplets had landed on their skin. They slowed, stumbled a bit as if they were disoriented. Several of them shook their heads and rubbed at their eyes. But then, one by one, they straightened and drew their swords.
“The king! Save the king!” they cried.
And they fell upon their fellow countrymen, hacking and slashing their own people.
“Krekk,” Cann swore. They were in trouble. If the Eld took the castle from the inside, all the allies encamped around Kreppes would be geese plump for the plucking. “Sev, Parsi—to the gate!” he cried to his sons. “We’ve got to open the gate! We can’t let them take the castle.”
They raced up towards the outer courtyard and the main fortress gates, but before they could reach it, a mob of magiccrazed Celierians blocked their way.
Blades flashed and whirled. Cann and his sons were all gifted swordsmen, trained from birth by the dahl’reisen who guarded Barrial land. Blood spewed—none of it theirs—but as the droplets splattered on Cann’s face, his eyes and skin began to burn and a strange, disorienting fog came over him.
“Da?” Parsis grabbed his arm.
Parsis’s face went in and out of focus. He blinked, rubbing at his eyes with bloody hands. A strange scent filled his nostrils, warm and exotic, intoxicating. On the heels of the scent came fervor. Bloodlust. Courage and determination.
The face hovering before him changed. Shadows played across the features, twisting and reshaping them into the face of the enemy. Pale, skin untouched by sunlight, hellish black pits for eyes, evil oozing from its pores.
“The king!” he cried. “Save the king!” And he thrust his sword into the monster.
In Kreppes’s west wing, outside the suite occupied by Ellysetta and Rain, the door and half of the corridor-facing wall dissolved into nothingness as a portal to the Well of Souls appeared where the brass hall sconce had been.
Twenty Primages, led by Primage Soros, leaped out of the Well, globes of blue-white Mage Fire spinning in their hands, ready for launch. But the sight of the empty room drew them up short.
“Check the bedchamber!” Soros commanded.
Mages and Black Guard flung open the connecting doors to the adjoining bedchamber and flooded inside, arrows nocked, swords drawn, Mage Fire blazing. Soros rushed in behind them to claim the High Mage’s prize. But instead of gloating with victory, his expression darkened to thunderous rage.
The room was empty. The bed still neatly made. “Sebourne!” he cried. “You worthless jaffing rultshart!” Ellysetta Baristani and the Tairen Soul were gone.