Chapter Eighteen The Villainess Meets the Beast of the West #2
Torhell Merac lived up to his sabretooth, almost as grand in stature as Lord Marius.
The bulk of his furs made him seem as big as a bear, and he shone beneath even more gold than the dowager countess.
His face was the picture of a likable young rogue.
Rae enjoyed characters with a little more bite and cynicism, but she understood the appeal of the blithe spirit bounding in for another adventure.
“We can’t fight yet,” said the Emperor, once more upon his throne. “Sorry.”
Count Merac spat, “Craven.”
His face shadowed, and the image twisted. Up close, the bright young warrior seemed tarnished. Rae couldn’t see him as he was in the books, whistling on his way to certain death.
The Emperor raised an eyebrow. “I’m not a noble who will defend my honour to the death. I have no honour to speak of, and I don’t care what insults you throw at me.” His voice sank to a murmur. “If you crave death, I can give it to you.”
The count turned his face away, a flush rising on his cheekbones. Rae suddenly understood why Count Merac had whistled on his way to his doom. This wasn’t the hero of a hundred adventures. Count Merac wanted only one big adventure. His last.
Rae should stay away from both these men.
“After we sign a peace treaty.” The Emperor’s smile was not that of a trustworthy individual. “Want to sign it now?”
Obviously, Count Merac couldn’t do that. It would be treason. Yet Count Merac actually looked tempted.
“Torhell!” his mother warned.
“No,” bit out Count Merac with a visible effort, then whirled and demanded: “Where’s the Golden Cobra?”
Everyone knew why a stranger would ask for the Cobra. The ministers looked politely shocked.
“Torhell!” His mother sounded more upset than she had about the treason. “We are royal envoys. Can you not wait before asking after the proprietor of the most famous pleasure house in this accursed land?”
“Obviously, I couldn’t wait, since I didn’t,” said Torhell. “The Cobra, if you please. I have urgent need of him.”
Key shrugged. “I’ve no doubt my dead will bring the Cobra to me shortly. You’re not to kill him with an axe.”
The young count looked offended. “I only wish to speak to the man. I believe he has information I want.”
The Golden Cobra had the largest network of spies in the country, but Rae couldn’t imagine what information might be of value to this heedless warrior. She figured his mother was probably right on the money, and the ladies available for the money.
“The Cobra will come soon,” Rae assured the count. “We’re all looking forward to seeing him, but let us speak now of peace.”
“Tagar did not break the peace,” said Lady Mab.
“Our princess sent us a letter from Eyam’s shores, warning our king Ivor would be killed.
We found poison in Ivor’s food. The information came from Eyam.
How would someone from Eyam know of a plot to poison our king, unless the plot and the poison were both from Eyam? ”
“I was the one who told the princess of the plot,” Rae said steadily. “Because the gods send me visions of the future.”
She felt the hatred of Eyam’s entire court, burning as though every eye upon her was a flame. She had passed on information that caused a war. How could anybody see her as anything but a traitor to Eyam, and a spy for the enemy?
Count Merac was chatting in a low voice to a bunch of young ministers, possibly about brothels, but he threw cheerfully over his shoulder, “Did your gods send you a vision of who the poisoner was?”
“Well,” Rae admitted. “No.”
That information wasn’t in the books. Nobody ever found out who poisoned the Ice King.
The count made a face. “Bad luck for you.”
“Those of west Tagar worship the only true gods, great animals pure in strength, who hate deception,” Lady Mab told the Emperor. Courtiers gasped at her sacrilege. The Emperor appeared unmoved. “We do not believe in delusions sent by false gods or wicked spirits. We demand satisfaction.”
“Good news,” the Emperor informed her. “If Eyam planned the assassination, the ruler at the time was King Octavianus. If it will bring you joy, you may have Octavian’s head. I removed it from his shoulders a few days ago. Does anyone have the head?”
Prime Minister Pio avoided the subject of the head. “Our divine Emperor did indeed but recently ascend his throne. His Imperial Majesty would never attempt to assassinate your king.”
The Emperor nodded. “I’m disgusted by the accusation. I don’t make assassination attempts. When I assassinate, I succeed.”
Key sent Rae a conspiratorial look, a fire-edged invitation to wickedness that made Rae want to smile back. Except she feared the peace talks were going up in flames.
“When raiders set sail, we do not return empty-handed.” Lady Mab spread her richly ringed hands. “The princess’s letter condemns Eyam. What reparation will Eyam pay?”
Pio had warned them. These raiders, who take captives, take treasure, take everything and burn what they don’t steal, are baying at our walls for blood and gold. We must offer Tagar an incentive to leave our shores.
“I offer your lives in exchange for peace,” the Emperor said. “So you can kill ghouls? Every one of your raiders I kill, I will raise up as my own soldier. Surrender. In the end, the dead always win.”
How many on both sides would die, before they did? Maybe Key didn’t care.
Count Merac turned with a sweep of furs and clank of hidden weaponry. Lord Adel had to skip to avoid being hit by his cloak as if he were jumping rope.
“Surrender?” asked Count Merac. “It is not in my nature. You must break every bone in my body to break the hold of my jaws when they close on a throat. I was made to fight to the death, and hold on even past death. Try to make me one of your dead soldiers. I will be your first rebel.”
A terrified sound erupted from Torhell’s mother.
The Emperor’s smile went bright and beautiful and sinister, like flames rising behind a red stained-glass window. “Keep making threats; it amuses me. Do you think a god fears any man?”
In answer, Count Merac produced his axe.
His mother tensed. Key stayed relaxed. Light reflected by flames and green crystal wrapped about the shaft, but couldn’t eclipse or even impinge on the pure gold blade.
Two great curves, like two sharp halves of a sun, and the axe’s edge seemed to cut even the light.
“This is the Edge of Anguish. Only the gods’ chosen can lift it.”
Torhell’s powerfully muscled arms, showing bare through the luxuriant furs as he spun his axe, evinced no sign of strain.
“Your people are not my people, nor your gods my gods,” said Torhell Merac. “I don’t fear your divinity or your dead. The gods of west Tagar don’t take unclean, human shapes. My gods sent me my great cat. My gods are red in tooth and claw. My gods will see me safe in gold underground.”
Since he was talking burial customs, Rae remembered the future.
“Count Merac.” She made sure to sound every inch a witch queen. “I have read the book of fate. I see your death and what follows. After you die, you burn.”
Lady Mabeth gave a hiss of outrage at the very idea.
Count Merac’s blazing open face shut and darkened. “So claims the soothsayer harlot who might be our spy, or might marry your Emperor? Your own future seems most uncertain.”
Rae purred, “Do you want to know how you die?”
“Soon and bloody, witch.” Torhell Merac grinned. “But ladies first.”
He smiled when he spoke of his death with barely restrained eagerness. He laughed when the Emperor moved sharply forward in front of Rae. Darkness filled Rae’s vision: it was the Emperor’s cloak, the blue-on-black of a bruise. A shadow placed like a shield between Rae and all the world.
The Emperor warned, “Keep your axe, your mouth and your very thoughts off my lady. You want death? Be patient. I’ll give it to you. Unless you go near my lady. Then you live. Crawling, broken, begging for the mercy of death. I promise it. You will live for years.”
The sabretooth tiger Fatalis gave a long, rippling growl, a sound with deadly muscle in it. The Emperor made the same noise back, lips curling, though a human throat shouldn’t be able to replicate an animal growl.
But then, Rae thought, held safe from all harm in the shadow of a shadow, the Emperor wasn’t exactly human.
Torhell showed no fear, only wild exaltation.
“When I wield this axe with intent to kill, the intent becomes magic. If I change my mind, the Edge of Anguish does not. This weapon always claims a life. Do you want to know how much blood my axe has already drunk? Do you want to see whose blood my axe will drink in the future?”
“Do you want to see your kingdom of ice burn?”
The Emperor took the count by the throat in one dark, clawed gauntlet, lifting the bigger man off his feet. The court erupted into panic.
The count threw the Edge of Anguish.
Not at the Emperor. The golden arc of the axe smashed through the blue glass of the balcony doors, burying itself in the stone parapet.
Darkness followed. For an instant Rae believed the golden axe had summoned an eclipse. Then she realized it wasn’t the broken moon of Eyam blocking the sun. A sound came from above that all those around her must believe was the roar of an animal. Rae knew better.
What Rae heard was the whine and rush of a great metal vehicle hurtling through the air. Nobody at court knew what machines could do in Rae’s world. She couldn’t explain to anyone what a plane was, and besides, this wasn’t a plane. It wasn’t a bird.
It was a huge metal dragon.
Ivor the Heartless hadn’t died on the floor of his laboratory, with his twisted metallic monster lying on the slab by his corpse, neither of them ever to rise. The king did not die, and the king’s monster woke to life.
Only the ghouls remained silent. Every soul at court broke into whispers of helpless wonder.
Rae closed her eyes in horror. “Oh shit.”
This was bad. This was so bad. Shit got real in fantasy novels when a dragon arrived.
The Ice King’s dragon circled the Palace on the Edge, metal wings cutting the air with the ponderous weight of huge axes.
Rae watched the articulation in the joints, saw wheels turning inside the shining metal skull.
Fissures around its metal scales glowed from the white heat within.
On the dragon’s back was a vast black saddle and a rider in a bright helm – not circled by an ice crown, so the dragon’s rider was one of the king’s guards, not the king himself.
Smoke curled around the monster’s metal nostrils, reminding Rae of being a child and breathing out steam into winter air, playing at being a dragon. Now dragons were real.
Count Merac roared as loudly as his cat over the heavy slicing of dragon’s wings through the wind, and the inward drag of the dragon’s bellows-breath.
“Tagar comes to your shores with Merac might of tooth and claw, Starost sight and song, and our king’s science that can make a metal monster take flight. Think carefully, Emperor of corpses, before you threaten us again.”
Key’s red gaze followed the dragon’s flight, cool as a birdwatcher seeing a sparrow.
When the prime minister said they must offer Tagar an incentive to leave, the Emperor answered, Believe me, I will.
Far too late, it occurred to Rae that the Emperor did not make empty boasts.
Softly, the Emperor said to the peace envoys, “The princess’s message reached Ivor. The princess did not. Vasilisa of Tagar set out to meet her brother’s forces, but she never reached them. My dead intercepted the princess, dragged her back to the capital, and threw her in my dungeons.”
That was why Fabianus had fought the dead, and been clapped in chains. The princess and her suitor had tried to flee together, but Key had stopped them.
Aside from her vipers, Vasilisa of Tagar was the closest thing Rae had in this world to a friend.
“You threw Vasilisa in jail?” Rae demanded.
At the same time, Pio snapped, “You imprisoned the princess?” He breathed in so sharply that Rae thought his thready moustache might get sucked up his nostrils. “Sire, your devotion to the country is commendable, but you are clearly unversed in diplomacy—”
The Emperor’s cold tones silenced the court, as though his voice cut every throat.
“I will have peace. Or I will have the princess’s head removed from her shoulders.” His smile glittered like a sword. “See? Diplomacy.”
Disaster upon disaster, falling on Eyam like an avalanche. And Rae was the one who told Key to be a hero.
“You have made a deadly error.” Lady Mab’s voice shook with fury. “She is not only our princess. Vasilisa is to be my son’s bride. Our raiders will burn your palace to the ground to retrieve her.”
“Then you will not retrieve her alive,” the Emperor promised. “Surrender and retreat, and she is yours. Marry her or murder her, I don’t care. Get out of Eyam. I will grant you three days. Consider the matter well. You may have your dragon, but I have your princess.”