Lord's Fall
Page 32
Even as she wondered, a hurricane of wind howled through the valley.
Out of nowhere, a colossal force slammed into them. Graydon coughed and clawed at the air as he struggled to remain upright. Pia screamed, clutching him with both arms and legs, as Eva grunted and slid down his back.
The wind was vicious, like a living creature. It tore at her hold on Graydon and raked at the skin of her face. Between her legs, she felt the gryphon’s powerful body straining against a force that literally shoved him sideways. The ground tilted and raced up to meet them.
As Linwe had said, the most Powerful among the Elves could take an affinity to air and create a storm the size of Hurricane Rita.
And those ancients who were especially gifted had an affinity to more than one element that tended to be compatible with each other.
Like fire and air. That sort of thing.
Ancient and adept, Gaeleval was nothing if not gifted.
At the last moment, Graydon managed to yank up straight enough so that he took the brunt of the impact with the ground. He plowed into the rocky path, and as he struck, the landing knocked both Eva and Pia off his back.
It could be worse, it could be worse, it could be worse, Pia chanted in her head, even as she tumbled head over heels. She struck the trunk of a tree bruisingly along her left shoulder. It knocked the breath out of her, and her arm went numb. Cursing, Eva skidded on the ground beside her.
It could be worse.
Graydon had been cautious. He had flown low over the path. They hadn’t been that high off the ground.
Not like Dragos and Calondir.
Pia dragged air back into her aching lungs and screamed again as she scrambled onto her hands and knees. She raked the sky with a frantic gaze.
A rotation of air had formed around the dragon, a visible dark funnel cloud constructed with hurricane force winds. Dragos’s long body stretched, tail lashing as he fought to gain purchase.
Elsewhere, the gale had flattened everyone else. The bluff was cleared of any climbing Numenlaurians. Elven and Wyr fighters at the top of the bluff were crawling away from the edge. Sharp cracks of sound, like the percussion of modern artillery, sounded as trees snapped at the trunk.
Graydon lunged for Pia and covered her with his massive lion’s body.
Are you all right? he asked telepathically.
Yes. She grabbed for Eva’s arm and dragged the other woman underneath the gryphon’s protection. Are you? Can you fly?
Not in this, cupcake. None of us can get off the ground and hope to stay aloft.
She could feel Graydon’s lungs working like bellows and the tension in his muscles as the gale threatened to send him crashing into the trees. On the high ground of the path, they were exposed to the worst of the wind that howled with an eerie sound like a thousand banshees. He crouched lower over the two women, his huge claws digging into the rocky ground for purchase.
Eyes streaming with tears, her terrified gaze went back to Dragos. This gods-damned gale threatened to flatten Graydon while he was on the ground. She couldn’t imagine how Dragos had managed to stay in the air.
Even as she wondered, the funnel cloud took hold of the dragon and spun him in a circle.
A gleaming sliver of silver fell from his back. The dragon lunged to grab at it and missed. The bright silver streaked toward the earth like the fall of a god’s tear.
Calondir.
She saw the very moment Dragos lost control. It looked as if an invisible hand lifted him up and flipped him over so that he turned completely upside down. He twisted in midair, like a gigantic cat trying to land on its feet.
One of his massive, powerful wings snapped like a twig. Suddenly he plunged downward in an escalating spiral.
Then the sound of the dragon’s body as it struck the valley floor rolled through the air like thunder.
SEVENTEEN
No, nothing did shine forever.
Everything, even the universe itself, would end eventually.
The wind died down as suddenly as it had sprung up. It was no longer needed.
Dragos sprawled on the valley floor. Calondir lay nearby. The Elf Lord’s head angled toward him, one arm flung out. The fingers of his hand curled over his palm as if he cupped something immeasurably precious. His face appeared young and peaceful, wiped clean of grief and stress. He looked like he had fallen asleep.
Dragos tried to move, and jagged pain tore through him. He felt as if someone had embedded shards of glass throughout his body. Mentally he assessed the damage. Broken neck and back, shattered ribs, and one broken wing.
It would take a lot more than a fall like that to kill him.
It would probably take all of the enthralled Elves who gathered around to gaze at him with empty eyes. He flexed the talons of one paw, but he lacked the ability to lift his front leg. His ribs had punctured one of his lungs, and he couldn’t draw in a deep enough breath to spit fire. He needed time to recover, time to whisper a beguilement to combat Gaeleval’s control over the Elves that drew close. Time that he didn’t have.
Beluviel walked into his line of sight. She was filthy and wore a torn, silken nightgown, and she carried a sword encrusted with dried blood. Barefoot, she left tracks of bright red in the snow, and long, tangled dark hair fell about her blank face like a shroud.
She knelt on one knee beside his head. “You should have listened to me when I warned you, Beast,” she said. “I really am the Bringer of the End of Days.” She stroked his snout gently, then braced one hand on him while she raised the sword over her head, angling the sharp tip toward one of his eyes.
A mountain fell out of the sky, and agony exploded as pieces of it landed on him. A second later, his mind processed what he had actually seen and spat out the information.
Graydon had plummeted with killing speed, shapeshifting into his human form even as he slammed into Beluviel and knocked her away from Dragos’s head. The tip of her sword sliced the corner of Dragos’s eyelid as it flew out of her hand. Pia and Eva, who had been riding on the gryphon’s back, tumbled onto Dragos in an uncontrolled tangle of arms and legs.
A steaming trickle of blood from the cut slid down the side of his face. More agony, as Eva unceremoniously rolled off of him and leaped to the ground, drawing both swords that had been strapped to her back. She lunged to engage the Elves that crowded close, her dark features lit with ferocity.
Pia scrambled over the mound of his shoulder and slithered on her stomach headfirst to land in an awkward heap on the ground just under his chin. She wore her armor, he noticed with satisfaction, and she carried her crossbow slung over one shoulder along with a belt of bolts.
Dragging herself to her knees, she screamed at him, “Where are you hurt?”
He coughed, and that was agonizing too. He told her telepathically, Neck, back, ribs, wing.
“Goddammit,” she said. “The only other two times I did this there was an actual wound.”
What did she mean, the other two times? She had healed him once when they had run from the Goblin army. Who else had she healed?
I am actually wounded, he told her, bemused.
“That’s not what I meant,” she snarled. “I meant the wounds were on the surface and visible.”
She looked and sounded demented. She yanked a crossbow bolt out of the belt and raked the tip of it down one of her forearms, from elbow to wrist. Blood and Power poured from the deep cut. Then she turned and jammed her entire arm into his mouth.
He gagged as her elbow hit the back of his tongue. I am overwhelmed by your bedside manner.
She glared at him, wild-eyed. “You’re not in a bed, and it’s all I can think of to do, SO JUST SUCK IT UP, BABY.”
It hurt too much to laugh. Besides, if he did he was afraid one of his long, razor sharp teeth would slice into her delicate flesh. As wetness trickled into his mouth, more mountains fell out of the sky to batter the ground around him.
The gryphons called to each other in their wild eagle voices as they lunged and struck at Gaeleval’s army. Rune’s mate Carling ran over to kneel on the other side of Dragos’s head. The Vampyre wore a spell of protection against the light of day like an invisible cloak. She chanted one long, continuous incantation. As the words spilled from her mouth, hieroglyphs of Power hung in the air and glowed like lava in his mind’s eye.
Others arrived. An enormous black panther coughed a hoarse scream as it leaped from the back of a pegasus that soared down. When the pegasus touched all four hooves to the ground, it transformed into a tall dark man who leaped to join the panther.
Then with a laugh Aryal winged into sight, and the harpy whirled into action. She was at her most charming when she went into battle.
There was Grym too, hovering in the sky over all of the others, with his batlike wings and demonic face. Wait a minute, that couldn’t be true. Grym had stayed behind in New York. This was the other gargoyle, from Pia’s guards. Monroe. As Dragos watched, Monroe dove into the fight and then rose up again in the air almost immediately. In his arms he held a wriggling, filthy Elven child, and he wheeled to fly away.
The strange thing, Dragos noticed, was that Pia’s blood didn’t taste like blood. He had seen more than he had ever wanted to of her blood when she had been wounded last year. He certainly knew that it looked red enough, but the trickle that flowed down his throat did not have the heavy, rich taste of normal blood. Instead, it was like liquid moonlight.
Or maybe that was her Power flowing into his body. It cooled the hot agony that glazed his mind. He gasped as his shattered ribs eased back into place, and he was able to take in his first full breath since he had crashed. His neck fused into one long, sinuous unbroken line again, and his back straightened. The last thing to heal was his wing, partly because he had been lying on it. He rolled to pull it out from underneath his weight, and the bones and cartilage flared into seamless alignment. Rightness vibrated in his bones.
Most healing was just as messy as any wound or sickness, and healing spells and potions hurt like a bastard. This didn’t. This was Pia gazing at him with eyes the color of midnight, as she laid cool fingers against his face and said, “I love you.”
She was his best teacher, and the most Powerful force in his universe, and everything hinged on it, on her. Everything.
She watched him so worriedly. She still had her arm jammed in his mouth, which still made him want to laugh. Her face was dirty and bruised, and the battle rang out all around them, but somehow the viciousness never touched them.
They existed somewhere else, somewhere sacred, apart from it all.
That was until Carling rapped on his snout with her knuckles. Since you’re getting better, you ought to know that my protection spell against the sun doesn’t last as long as it used to, said the witch. I need to get out of the sun, and you need to take over this incantation. People are going to keep dying if we don’t figure out how to make some headway against this.
Dragos’s attention snapped back to what was happening all around him.
Not ten feet away, Graydon had wrestled Beluviel to the ground. He held the Elven woman pinned from behind, his arms wrapped around her as he gripped her wrists. Her body strained convulsively to break his hold until the tendons in her arms and legs showed white like bone against her skin. All the while she stared blankly into space through the tangled curtain of her hair.
Even though violence churned all around them, Graydon talked to her. His voice was gentle as he said, “You’re all right. You’re going to be all right.”
But while Monroe rescued children and Graydon held on to Beluviel, no one else had the luxury of picking just one person to save. He noticed that they tried to knock the Elves back without inflicting harm, but gradually they were both taking and inflicting damage as they were surrounded by an army that would not stop advancing.
Not until Gaeleval himself was stopped.
He focused on Carling’s incantation. Analyzing, he realized that she was acting as a focal point for the other magic users. Her incantation took their individual spells and wove them together in a patchwork defense against Gaeleval and the God Machine.
They were holding together a bubble of shelter around the sentinels and other fighters who had managed to reach him, while not twenty feet away, a hurricane force had picked up once again and battered against their shields. They were cut off from the rest of their troops, including Ferion and the other Wyr. Nobody else could fly in or out.
Even as he studied them, one of the magic users faltered and fell out of the pattern. Carling repaired the hole quickly by reweaving the other spells together, but Dragos could hear the strain in her voice. She wouldn’t be able to hold the spells together for much longer, and when she lost control of the pattern, all the rest would fall apart.
Dragos gently pushed Pia’s arm out of his mouth and shapeshifted, rolling onto his hands and knees. He straightened and put his hand on Pia’s shoulder, squeezing, as he asked Carling, “Can you hold for a little while longer?”
Not far away, Rune glanced over his shoulder as he batted several Elves away with one wide swipe of his giant paw. Carling’s face twisted but she nodded. The Vampyre wrapped her cloak tightly around her body and pulled the hood over her head, still chanting.
Pia said hoarsely, “I need to go to Calondir.”
There was nothing anybody could do for Calondir, but he did not tell her that. Instead he let go of her shoulder and said, “Go.”
Pia wobbled to her feet and, cradling her arm against her side, she limped toward the Elf Lord’s still form. Eva noticed and pulled back from the fighting. As soon as those on either side of her filled the gap that she left, she jogged after Pia.
He could no longer act in partnership with a dead man. Freed from his oath to the High Lord, Dragos turned his attention back to the sole reason why he had come.
To Gaeleval, who couldn’t seem to leave his mate alone, and who couldn’t seem to go off and be a maniacal despot in a pocket of Other land somewhere else that had nothing to do with Dragos or the Wyr.
Out of nowhere, a colossal force slammed into them. Graydon coughed and clawed at the air as he struggled to remain upright. Pia screamed, clutching him with both arms and legs, as Eva grunted and slid down his back.
The wind was vicious, like a living creature. It tore at her hold on Graydon and raked at the skin of her face. Between her legs, she felt the gryphon’s powerful body straining against a force that literally shoved him sideways. The ground tilted and raced up to meet them.
As Linwe had said, the most Powerful among the Elves could take an affinity to air and create a storm the size of Hurricane Rita.
And those ancients who were especially gifted had an affinity to more than one element that tended to be compatible with each other.
Like fire and air. That sort of thing.
Ancient and adept, Gaeleval was nothing if not gifted.
At the last moment, Graydon managed to yank up straight enough so that he took the brunt of the impact with the ground. He plowed into the rocky path, and as he struck, the landing knocked both Eva and Pia off his back.
It could be worse, it could be worse, it could be worse, Pia chanted in her head, even as she tumbled head over heels. She struck the trunk of a tree bruisingly along her left shoulder. It knocked the breath out of her, and her arm went numb. Cursing, Eva skidded on the ground beside her.
It could be worse.
Graydon had been cautious. He had flown low over the path. They hadn’t been that high off the ground.
Not like Dragos and Calondir.
Pia dragged air back into her aching lungs and screamed again as she scrambled onto her hands and knees. She raked the sky with a frantic gaze.
A rotation of air had formed around the dragon, a visible dark funnel cloud constructed with hurricane force winds. Dragos’s long body stretched, tail lashing as he fought to gain purchase.
Elsewhere, the gale had flattened everyone else. The bluff was cleared of any climbing Numenlaurians. Elven and Wyr fighters at the top of the bluff were crawling away from the edge. Sharp cracks of sound, like the percussion of modern artillery, sounded as trees snapped at the trunk.
Graydon lunged for Pia and covered her with his massive lion’s body.
Are you all right? he asked telepathically.
Yes. She grabbed for Eva’s arm and dragged the other woman underneath the gryphon’s protection. Are you? Can you fly?
Not in this, cupcake. None of us can get off the ground and hope to stay aloft.
She could feel Graydon’s lungs working like bellows and the tension in his muscles as the gale threatened to send him crashing into the trees. On the high ground of the path, they were exposed to the worst of the wind that howled with an eerie sound like a thousand banshees. He crouched lower over the two women, his huge claws digging into the rocky ground for purchase.
Eyes streaming with tears, her terrified gaze went back to Dragos. This gods-damned gale threatened to flatten Graydon while he was on the ground. She couldn’t imagine how Dragos had managed to stay in the air.
Even as she wondered, the funnel cloud took hold of the dragon and spun him in a circle.
A gleaming sliver of silver fell from his back. The dragon lunged to grab at it and missed. The bright silver streaked toward the earth like the fall of a god’s tear.
Calondir.
She saw the very moment Dragos lost control. It looked as if an invisible hand lifted him up and flipped him over so that he turned completely upside down. He twisted in midair, like a gigantic cat trying to land on its feet.
One of his massive, powerful wings snapped like a twig. Suddenly he plunged downward in an escalating spiral.
Then the sound of the dragon’s body as it struck the valley floor rolled through the air like thunder.
SEVENTEEN
No, nothing did shine forever.
Everything, even the universe itself, would end eventually.
The wind died down as suddenly as it had sprung up. It was no longer needed.
Dragos sprawled on the valley floor. Calondir lay nearby. The Elf Lord’s head angled toward him, one arm flung out. The fingers of his hand curled over his palm as if he cupped something immeasurably precious. His face appeared young and peaceful, wiped clean of grief and stress. He looked like he had fallen asleep.
Dragos tried to move, and jagged pain tore through him. He felt as if someone had embedded shards of glass throughout his body. Mentally he assessed the damage. Broken neck and back, shattered ribs, and one broken wing.
It would take a lot more than a fall like that to kill him.
It would probably take all of the enthralled Elves who gathered around to gaze at him with empty eyes. He flexed the talons of one paw, but he lacked the ability to lift his front leg. His ribs had punctured one of his lungs, and he couldn’t draw in a deep enough breath to spit fire. He needed time to recover, time to whisper a beguilement to combat Gaeleval’s control over the Elves that drew close. Time that he didn’t have.
Beluviel walked into his line of sight. She was filthy and wore a torn, silken nightgown, and she carried a sword encrusted with dried blood. Barefoot, she left tracks of bright red in the snow, and long, tangled dark hair fell about her blank face like a shroud.
She knelt on one knee beside his head. “You should have listened to me when I warned you, Beast,” she said. “I really am the Bringer of the End of Days.” She stroked his snout gently, then braced one hand on him while she raised the sword over her head, angling the sharp tip toward one of his eyes.
A mountain fell out of the sky, and agony exploded as pieces of it landed on him. A second later, his mind processed what he had actually seen and spat out the information.
Graydon had plummeted with killing speed, shapeshifting into his human form even as he slammed into Beluviel and knocked her away from Dragos’s head. The tip of her sword sliced the corner of Dragos’s eyelid as it flew out of her hand. Pia and Eva, who had been riding on the gryphon’s back, tumbled onto Dragos in an uncontrolled tangle of arms and legs.
A steaming trickle of blood from the cut slid down the side of his face. More agony, as Eva unceremoniously rolled off of him and leaped to the ground, drawing both swords that had been strapped to her back. She lunged to engage the Elves that crowded close, her dark features lit with ferocity.
Pia scrambled over the mound of his shoulder and slithered on her stomach headfirst to land in an awkward heap on the ground just under his chin. She wore her armor, he noticed with satisfaction, and she carried her crossbow slung over one shoulder along with a belt of bolts.
Dragging herself to her knees, she screamed at him, “Where are you hurt?”
He coughed, and that was agonizing too. He told her telepathically, Neck, back, ribs, wing.
“Goddammit,” she said. “The only other two times I did this there was an actual wound.”
What did she mean, the other two times? She had healed him once when they had run from the Goblin army. Who else had she healed?
I am actually wounded, he told her, bemused.
“That’s not what I meant,” she snarled. “I meant the wounds were on the surface and visible.”
She looked and sounded demented. She yanked a crossbow bolt out of the belt and raked the tip of it down one of her forearms, from elbow to wrist. Blood and Power poured from the deep cut. Then she turned and jammed her entire arm into his mouth.
He gagged as her elbow hit the back of his tongue. I am overwhelmed by your bedside manner.
She glared at him, wild-eyed. “You’re not in a bed, and it’s all I can think of to do, SO JUST SUCK IT UP, BABY.”
It hurt too much to laugh. Besides, if he did he was afraid one of his long, razor sharp teeth would slice into her delicate flesh. As wetness trickled into his mouth, more mountains fell out of the sky to batter the ground around him.
The gryphons called to each other in their wild eagle voices as they lunged and struck at Gaeleval’s army. Rune’s mate Carling ran over to kneel on the other side of Dragos’s head. The Vampyre wore a spell of protection against the light of day like an invisible cloak. She chanted one long, continuous incantation. As the words spilled from her mouth, hieroglyphs of Power hung in the air and glowed like lava in his mind’s eye.
Others arrived. An enormous black panther coughed a hoarse scream as it leaped from the back of a pegasus that soared down. When the pegasus touched all four hooves to the ground, it transformed into a tall dark man who leaped to join the panther.
Then with a laugh Aryal winged into sight, and the harpy whirled into action. She was at her most charming when she went into battle.
There was Grym too, hovering in the sky over all of the others, with his batlike wings and demonic face. Wait a minute, that couldn’t be true. Grym had stayed behind in New York. This was the other gargoyle, from Pia’s guards. Monroe. As Dragos watched, Monroe dove into the fight and then rose up again in the air almost immediately. In his arms he held a wriggling, filthy Elven child, and he wheeled to fly away.
The strange thing, Dragos noticed, was that Pia’s blood didn’t taste like blood. He had seen more than he had ever wanted to of her blood when she had been wounded last year. He certainly knew that it looked red enough, but the trickle that flowed down his throat did not have the heavy, rich taste of normal blood. Instead, it was like liquid moonlight.
Or maybe that was her Power flowing into his body. It cooled the hot agony that glazed his mind. He gasped as his shattered ribs eased back into place, and he was able to take in his first full breath since he had crashed. His neck fused into one long, sinuous unbroken line again, and his back straightened. The last thing to heal was his wing, partly because he had been lying on it. He rolled to pull it out from underneath his weight, and the bones and cartilage flared into seamless alignment. Rightness vibrated in his bones.
Most healing was just as messy as any wound or sickness, and healing spells and potions hurt like a bastard. This didn’t. This was Pia gazing at him with eyes the color of midnight, as she laid cool fingers against his face and said, “I love you.”
She was his best teacher, and the most Powerful force in his universe, and everything hinged on it, on her. Everything.
She watched him so worriedly. She still had her arm jammed in his mouth, which still made him want to laugh. Her face was dirty and bruised, and the battle rang out all around them, but somehow the viciousness never touched them.
They existed somewhere else, somewhere sacred, apart from it all.
That was until Carling rapped on his snout with her knuckles. Since you’re getting better, you ought to know that my protection spell against the sun doesn’t last as long as it used to, said the witch. I need to get out of the sun, and you need to take over this incantation. People are going to keep dying if we don’t figure out how to make some headway against this.
Dragos’s attention snapped back to what was happening all around him.
Not ten feet away, Graydon had wrestled Beluviel to the ground. He held the Elven woman pinned from behind, his arms wrapped around her as he gripped her wrists. Her body strained convulsively to break his hold until the tendons in her arms and legs showed white like bone against her skin. All the while she stared blankly into space through the tangled curtain of her hair.
Even though violence churned all around them, Graydon talked to her. His voice was gentle as he said, “You’re all right. You’re going to be all right.”
But while Monroe rescued children and Graydon held on to Beluviel, no one else had the luxury of picking just one person to save. He noticed that they tried to knock the Elves back without inflicting harm, but gradually they were both taking and inflicting damage as they were surrounded by an army that would not stop advancing.
Not until Gaeleval himself was stopped.
He focused on Carling’s incantation. Analyzing, he realized that she was acting as a focal point for the other magic users. Her incantation took their individual spells and wove them together in a patchwork defense against Gaeleval and the God Machine.
They were holding together a bubble of shelter around the sentinels and other fighters who had managed to reach him, while not twenty feet away, a hurricane force had picked up once again and battered against their shields. They were cut off from the rest of their troops, including Ferion and the other Wyr. Nobody else could fly in or out.
Even as he studied them, one of the magic users faltered and fell out of the pattern. Carling repaired the hole quickly by reweaving the other spells together, but Dragos could hear the strain in her voice. She wouldn’t be able to hold the spells together for much longer, and when she lost control of the pattern, all the rest would fall apart.
Dragos gently pushed Pia’s arm out of his mouth and shapeshifted, rolling onto his hands and knees. He straightened and put his hand on Pia’s shoulder, squeezing, as he asked Carling, “Can you hold for a little while longer?”
Not far away, Rune glanced over his shoulder as he batted several Elves away with one wide swipe of his giant paw. Carling’s face twisted but she nodded. The Vampyre wrapped her cloak tightly around her body and pulled the hood over her head, still chanting.
Pia said hoarsely, “I need to go to Calondir.”
There was nothing anybody could do for Calondir, but he did not tell her that. Instead he let go of her shoulder and said, “Go.”
Pia wobbled to her feet and, cradling her arm against her side, she limped toward the Elf Lord’s still form. Eva noticed and pulled back from the fighting. As soon as those on either side of her filled the gap that she left, she jogged after Pia.
He could no longer act in partnership with a dead man. Freed from his oath to the High Lord, Dragos turned his attention back to the sole reason why he had come.
To Gaeleval, who couldn’t seem to leave his mate alone, and who couldn’t seem to go off and be a maniacal despot in a pocket of Other land somewhere else that had nothing to do with Dragos or the Wyr.
