Chapter 4
TAAR
Only Elydark’s song sustains me now.
I kneel in a darkened dakath, trapped in a state of numbness.
Though my licorneir stands just outside, his song a constant resonance surrounding my soul, I cannot respond to it, cannot offer anything in return.
He might as well sing to a corpse—a corpse in which my soul remains trapped and useless.
But without that song, I know I would crumble entirely.
My once-proud strength is reduced to rubble. I don’t know how I will go on.
My hand rests against my heart. Even now, despite everything, I can almost convince myself I feel some faint thread of connection: still alive, still stretched across unimaginable distances, between me and my lost wife.
It’s impossible, of course.
She’s dead.
Slain by my own hand.
How am I supposed to live with myself? How am I supposed to endure my own existence? I close my eyes, bow my head, and wish for death.
You are luinar of the Licornyn, Elydark sings, his voice ringing with truths I cannot bear to face. Your people need their king. Now more than ever. Without you, what will become of them?
That terrible weight of responsibility anchors me to a world I would rather reject.
Everything in me fights against that song, urging me to take a last dose of virulium and return to the walls of Evisar.
To hurl myself against the barriers until my heart bursts with blackness.
It would be a worthy end to this despicable life I’ve lived, and the craving runs deep.
But Elydark’s song never ceases. Like chains of light and fire, it wraps around my very soul, binding me to him. Hold onto me, Vellar. And if you haven’t the strength, let me hold onto you.
The door flap of my dakath sweeps open suddenly, admitting a burst of daylight.
It’s strange to see—somehow I expect the world outside to be as dark as my own shrouded heart.
But the days continue to turn, sun and moon and stars and sun again.
There has been no onset of the vardimnar since our inglorious retreat.
A pity. If given half a chance I would gladly cast myself beyond the song-barriers and let hell embrace me.
Turning my head, I look up into the backlit face of the man standing in the doorway.
A man with silvery hair, clad in long, blue robes, elegantly cut to fit his majestic frame.
The picture of beauty, swathed in many layers of glamour, though some of those glamours now fray at the edges, revealing half-glimpses of the true face hidden behind them.
But those glimpses are there and gone again so quickly, I might well be imagining them in my not-quite-right state of mind.
“Taarthalor,” Prince Ruvaen says. “May I enter?”
I do not speak. Do not move. The prince takes this as invitation enough and steps inside, allowing the flap to fall behind him, sheltering us once more in shadow.
He stalks the perimeter of the enclosed space as though searching for something, then finally stands before me.
I sit cross-legged on a low pallet bed, elbows resting on my bent knees, staring at the ground.
But my peripheral vision is sharply aware of his every movement and gesture.
Ruvaen breathes out a curse. “You look terrible, my friend.” He sighs and passes a hand across his brow.
“Well, that did not go as hoped.” Crouching in front of me, he tilts his head, trying to make eye-contact.
“We gave it our best effort though, did we not? No one can say otherwise. But the Shadow King turned the tide in the end. I always feared it would be so.”
I flick my gaze, meeting his eyes briefly before dropping my lids once more.
“I lost a full three-quarters of my men,” Ruvaen continues relentlessly.
“The rest have fled. Only my personal entourage remains at my side, about twenty souls in all, for better or for worse. Dogs the lot of them, but they know they’ll be rewarded for their loyalty.
” He curses again, very softly. “The rest, unfortunately, are scattered across Cruor. Some still rabid on virulium, some broken down in the aftershocks. Fear not, though, good king—no doubt your wicked black lightning will return any day and pick them off. They’ll not remain to plague your world for long.
The hobgoblins I cannot vouch for. Hell itself doesn’t seem to bother them.
I wish I could scoop them out and bear them back with me, but I cannot manage hobgoblins with only twenty men at my disposal. You understand, I’m sure.”
I continue to offer only silence. Ruvaen studies me a little while, his quick eyes reading the lines of my face.
Finally he stands and rests a hand on my shoulder.
“It’s unfortunate, what happened to the girl,” he says, his voice uncharacteristically gentle.
“But you knew it could never work. The mingling of the races rarely does, your own ibrildian species notwithstanding. She would never have—”
Whatever he may have said cuts off in a surprised cry when I catch hold of his wrist, wrench hard, and yank him down to the ground.
The next instant I am on top of him, my forearm pressed against his throat, my eyes staring into his.
For the first time I see real fear flash across his face, and in that instant, his glamour fails entirely, revealing a visage wracked with a disease, once-beautiful features emaciated, disfigured with twisting pain.
One cheekbone is sunken, the nose nearly lost, and one eye all but disappears within its hollowed socket.
It’s a gruesome sight, and would shock me to the core were I not burning with rage.
“Give me to drink,” the voice whispers in the back of my mind, rising from the depths and growing louder. “Give me to drink, to drink, to drink . . .”
I want to kill this man. I want to kill . . . all of them. I want death, I want carnage. I want something, anything, to alleviate this pain.
But even here, on the very brink of violence, Elydark’s song pulls me back. Vellar, I am here. I am with you. Do not go where I cannot follow.
I bow my head, exhale slowly. Then, with a rough shake of my whole body, I release the Noxaurian prince and back away.
Rising, I turn from him and stare into the shadows in the corner of my dakath.
Behind me, I hear Ruvaen pick himself up.
He breathes heavily, composing himself, no doubt pulling every glamour carefully back into place.
“I’m sorry,” he says at last. “Truly, Taar, I am. But this alliance is at an end. I am going to pursue other means of achieving my goals. Thus I release you from your vows.”
He is silent again for some while, and I begin to hope he will leave without saying more.
But, damnably, he continues: “I wish you the best, luinar. I hope you will have another go at the citadel now that the Shadow King has gone. I would dearly love to see those Miphates skewered on unicorn horns.”
He steps close behind me and drops something at my feet.
It rolls into my line of vision, and I look down to see the talisman: the mage-wrought instrument I’d taken off Artoris back in the Temple of Lamruil, what feels like a lifetime ago.
Magic fire has burnt it black, and the spellwork once inscribed on the rotating sphere in its center is all but indiscernible.
Useless, no doubt. As useless as every other aspect of this pitiful venture.
“I’m sorry, Taar,” Ruvaen says again.
Then he leaves my dakath. While the door flap is swept back to let him through, sounds of a makeshift camp clamor in my ears. The flap closes behind him, however, and I am once more cut off from the world, back in my blessed darkness, with only Elydark’s song to sustain me.
I close my eyes, let my soul sink deep. “Ilsevel,” I whisper.
Far away, from an impossible distance, beyond all the Unformed Lands and in some remote heaven, I could almost swear I hear her voice reply in that insolent, indomitable tone of hers: “Well, warlord? What have you to say for yourself?”
I cannot weep. That would be too great a relief, far more than I deserve.
Instead I draw a knife from my belt. The very knife with the gold jewel at its hilt which is a match to the blade I once gifted to my warbride for her protection.
I study it a moment, hefting its weight in my palm.
Then, with a flick of my wrist, I angle the sharp point against my sternum.
One swift plunge and I can send it up under bone, straight to my heart.
Vellar, Elydark sings, his voice more real in my mind than anything else in all this world. Vellar, I know you suffer. But have you no love left for me? Would you abandon me to velrhoar?
A sharp breath rips through my teeth, down into my lungs. “Damn,” I whisper. “Damn me to the depths of hell.”
But the blade falls insensibly from my hands, landing with a thud at my feet.