“Majesty!” the lord chamberlain burst into the queen mother’s chambers without preamble, chest heaving with exertion.
Interrupted at her entertainments, Mim, the Queen mother of Shelador, ruler of half the known world, raised a hand to flay the skin from his bones, but he hadn’t paused.
“Majesty,” he panted, ignoring her spectacular nakedness and the grunting courtier beneath her. “The strange magic makes itself known!”
“When?” she demanded, arm poised.
“Now, Majesty! It exerts itself now!”
She was up in a flash, taking the lord chamberlain’s breath away, snatching at a diaphanous robe more suited to sexual liaison than decorum, and running through the still open door.
The halls were all but deserted at this predawn hour, but not completely so. There was no hour of the day or night when guards weren’t on duty in the royal palace, so several of these found themselves frozen to immobility at the sight of the naked queen sprinting between them.
She slammed through the door of the pool chamber, robe agape, breasts heaving. The pool master goggled, but she didn’t even see him. Her eyes were only for the pool. Even from the platform of the door, even without the calling spell, she couldn’t help but see the long white streak in the black liquid.
It was one of Them! It reeked of Them!
Their ships– those impossibly rickety ships that should crumble at the slightest jar and yet destroyed the finest dreadnaughts ever constructed and outraced all but the fastest of the Hreen vessels — those ships had that same flavor about them.
An inarticulate howl tore itself from her throat and clawed hands stabbed towards the pool. The flimsy robe flashed into charred powder and fell away from her body.
Full blown, the scene leapt into the air, with none of the wavering of a typical calling, and the pool master fell backward onto his rump, jaw going slack.
A figure lay along the neck of a horse, features hidden as the horse ran like nothing living should be able to run. Far behind and falling further back by the moment, the great dragon fought with all its vast power, twin hearts near to bursting, to catch the puny quarry.
Clawed hands working intricate patterns in the air, the naked queen strode purposefully toward the pool, screeching out inhuman syllables in a tongue no human should be able to form. All in the chamber watched aghast as she stepped without hesitation into the pool. Rather than being consumed, she seemed to glow blue-black, her features writhing into something totally monstrous. She waded out to the running horse, the level of the pool rising until it lapped at her waist, the oily liquid seeming to crawl up her torso and along her limbs until she appeared a part of the pool come to life.
Something else was happening, and one of the eighth year apprentices began to whimper softly. Something new had entered the room. Used to dealing with the otherworldly, still those in the room knew instinctively that this was something else. Something vast, that mortals were not meant to know. The queen’s voice changed, timbre altering to that of a harmony coming from a thousand throats, and she seemed to grow larger. Her arms appeared to split along their lengths, becoming four wildly gesturing appendages with too many joints.
The whimpering eighth year apprentice fainted and another lost his water. The pool master had begun a quiet and deliberate inching backward. He’d never been meant to see this, and he knew with the certainty of a man who dealt daily with the impossible that he would not be allowed to live to recount it. Unless he was elsewhere by a good margin when the queen returned to herself.
Out on the plain, clearly visible in the strange calling, massive storm clouds formed on the instant, and bolts of lightning lanced like spears for the tiny figures. The dragon was forced to dodge and weave as the curtain of blazing electric light shattered the night. But the horse ran on, oblivious. Fires sprang up wherever the lightning struck, spreading quickly beyond the scope of the calling. Rain slashed down, then, in torrents to rival waterfalls. And now the dragon was falling rapidly behind. But the horse ran on.
The pool master was almost to the secret escape panel behind the shelves of magical powders and liquids, but he paused for just a moment more, eyes riveted on the strange sight in the calling. The horse ran within a bubble. Lightning struck and was absorbed, flashing across its surface in a rainbow shower. Water crackled against it, turning to ice and cascading free.
The ground trembled and split wide in the horse’s path, but it raced on as though the earth were still there. The queen’s rage was building and the pool master had seen enough. He slipped through the panel, leaving the apprentices to their fates. He had some gold stashed away and a spell hanging that would, with only a single additional component and a short incantation, see him on a hillside of one of the southernmost of the Freebooter Isles and a long life of lesser excitements.
Before the horse, a giant hand made of stone and dirt rose up in a smiting fist that mimicked the upraised claw of the creature in the pool, but the horse blasted through before the fist could coalesce.
The queen screeched her frustration in a thousand deafening voices, roiling the surface of the pool into a boiling foam. Incoherent with rage, she brought all four arms down upon the shining bubble. The chamber vanished in an expanding ball of released energy, walls exploding outward in a wave of rock dust and flame! All over the city of Elion people and animals alike started awake at the thunderous boom. Guards all over the city gaped as the highest tower of the palace Niediel transformed itself into another sun for the briefest of moments. Then they dived for cover as pieces of the tower rained down.
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When the smoke and noise had cleared, the pool chamber was gone. The uppermost reaches of the tower were gone. The suffocating presence of the all was gone. Only the sobbing figure of a naked woman remained, standing knee deep in rubble, washed by the suddenly falling rain.
* * *
Forces intruded into the void, but Storm had no attention for them. His entire concentration, the whole of his life energy, was focused into a needle-like beam that he poured into Sandahl’s run. Vaguely, he could sense moving lights and tremors, feel heat and cold, but those things couldn’t touch him. He was Sandahl’s heart. He was Sandahl’s lungs. He was the blood racing through thick veins and he was the spring steel of corded muscles. Nothing would stop them, nothing would slow them, nothing would catch them. The run was everything! The run was life!
The void sundered and just for an instant, he beheld a vast panorama of blue-black, sweeping down from above. But the run was everything. The run was life. The needle of his energy became a spear, emerald green, pulsing to blue, with Sandahl’s legs and a head of his focused will.
They struck the blackness with unslackened pace and everything shattered. Sandahl stumbled and Storm reared back in the saddle, struggling to maintain his seat. External sounds intruded, and the world was shaking, great rents tearing themselves into the surface of the plain. Lightning flashed constantly, bringing every hair on both bodies fully erect.
Sandahl was leaping great, growing chasms from floating platforms, his rider unconsciously mimicking the body twists that would carry them along. Foam covered them both, thick and rank, sliding free to be borne away as ice. The man’s breath was coming in tearing gasps that echoed the horse’s, his own sweat just as rank and pouring from him in streams. And they were slowing.
With a final heave, the exhausted stud spanned the last plunging crevasse and scrabbled onto the slippery mud of the plain, staggering a drunken course now more southerly than eastward. Steam rose from the pair of them in the torrential downpour as the man rose slowly from the new place, through the cold place and back into the normal world.
Behind them, mud and turf were still falling, the earth still shaking as it struggled to resume a shape it could tolerate. Drenched, shaken, battered, exhausted, neither looked back.
* * *
The dragon was far back and turning angrily for its lair high up in the Skalderichabskipat mountains, called Falhirst by the children of man. The evil sow had broken the bargain! She had sent the rain to hinder him, and he didn’t like it. If she wanted his aid again, she’d damn well strike a new bargain and pay a dearer price.
* * *
Belius felt the earth tremors in a detached sort of way, wondering with a small part of his mind what might be going on and where. But it was only a fleeting thought. The largest part of his mind was fully occupied in trying to revive the sylvans.
Near to half a hand gone, they’d cried out as though stricken. The first trooper through their door had found them as he now saw them, rigid as though rigor mortis had set in, eyes wide, muscles cramped. They were obviously caught in some sort of magical field, but he couldn’t for the life of him figure out what sort. He’d tried several spells already with no effect, and was wracking his brain to come up with anything else that might free them.
All at once, both sylvans went limp, like parchment dropped in water. Belius pressed a hand to Swallow Courting’s forehead, feeling the heat radiating out from it. Her face was grey and drawn, her breathing a ragged staccato of wheezing and coughing. Thrush neither looked nor sounded any better, but her eyes opened first.
“Water,” she croaked. “And food. Quickly.”
Belius turned, but the new corporal was already plunging down the stairs for the kitchen and the beleaguered dealicus
“What happened?” the mage asked quietly.
“Brae,” Thrush gasped. “He has... he was....” Her eyes closed and she struggled for breath.
When they opened, the corporal was at the door, two other troopers behind him, loaded down with whatever they’d been able to ransack the kitchen for. Burly passed a leathern mug of apple juice gently into her hands, guiding it comically to her lips, an almost paternal expression on his ugly face.
“Brae was in danger,” Thrush managed after a long draught. “He went to the cold place...” She paused as though to reassure herself that what she was about to say was the truth, “and he came out the other side!”
Swallow was coming around, and Burly cradled her head like a babe’s, bringing the juice mug to her quivering lips.
Belius was having difficulty with the concept Thrush was conveying. “The other side?”
“I do not know how else to put it,” Thrush took a chunk of half-cooked meat from a plate one of the troopers held out, chewing noisily. “But,” she continued with her mouth full,” that is what it felt like. We felt him go, just like this afternoon, but all at once. And then he was back, but not back.”
The old man shook his head slowly. “I still don’t understand.”
Thrush reached for another piece of meat, as she searched for words, but Swallow answered for her. “When he’s in this world with us,” she told the mage, “we can feel him all around us, but mostly here,” she put a shaking hand over her heart. “When he goes to the cold place, it’s like he’s been snuffed out; we cannot feel him at all. But this new thing is different. He went away and then we could feel him again, but he hadn’t come back. It was like feeling him through a wall of ice.”
“There was a dragon!” Thrush suddenly blurted, spitting bits of bloody meat out onto the bedcovers.
The troopers cringed and made religious signs, but didn’t run screaming from the room. They were becoming hardier by association with the others. Belius didn’t quite cringe, but his eyes shot wide.
“How—?”
“In this other place,” it was coming back to Thrush as she spoke. “We can see somewhat, and we can feel. We can know his thinking if he concentrates hard enough on a subject or if he calls.”
“And he was thinking very hard on two subjects, Belius.” Swallow finished for her sister. “He was thinking run, and he was thinking dragon.”
“Is he—?”
“He is alive,” Thrush assured him and herself. “He is alive and back in this world. But it was a near thing, and we very nearly perished.”
“We?”
“We were with him, somehow,” Swallow explained. I don’t know how, but when he called, we were carried along.”
“He was using our energy as well as his own at the end,” Thrush spoke around a mouth full of food, remembering the spear with Sandahl’s legs and Brae’s head and the foul black thing they had crashed through.