Crown of Vengeance

INTERLUDE TWO

KNOWLEDGE AND TREACHERY

To discover how the Elfling had managed to escape into death in the heart of the World Without Sun became King Virulan’s obsession. He gave Uralesse command of the Dark Guard and sent it forth to hunt—this time not for sport nor for food, but for knowledge.

First Uralesse scoured the Goldengrass, and found it empty from the Winnowing Sea in the east to the shores of Graythunder Glairyrill. West of the Glairyrill, he found those creatures he was accustomed to find: Centaur and Minotaur, Bearward and Faun, Hippogriff and Aesalion and Gryphon. All of these were of the Silver, and to each of them had been given some spark of Light. Many of them had fanned that spark into magic, though no sorcery they possessed was so much as a guttering ember by comparison to that with which He Who Is had blessed His most glorious creation. The merest touch of the Endarkened had always been enough to drain their power to nothing.

Uralesse went next to the cities and great castels of the Teeth of the Moon, and found them deserted, crumbling away to dust.

There were no answers there. And so he sought his answers in the only place that remained.

The Elfling died in silence. Every scream, every whimper, every tear had been taken from him during the moonturns of his agony. Uralesse gazed into the sightless eyes, already clouding in death.

He was no closer to an answer.

He had discovered the silver cord that linked the Elven spellcrafters to the source of their power. He had traced that cord back to its wellspring, summoned Lesser Endarkened to the World Above and drove them with whips and threats into each one. Sometimes the Lesser Endarkened died. Sometimes the Flower Forest died. Uralesse was no closer to the answer King Virulan had demanded of him. That the Elflings wielded any magic at all was nothing more than a mockery of the Endarkened. Once the Elflings had possessed no magic. Then they did.

Some unknown enemy challenged the inevitable victory of the Endarkened.

“We must attack now, my liege,” Uralesse said. “We are many and powerful. Surely victory will be ours.”

“Do you say so, dear Uralesse?” King Virulan answered. “Then tell me this: who gave to the Elflings the sorcery that courses through their veins?”

“It is but weak…” Uralesse said, daring to protest.

“You do not answer me, my dear brother,” Virulan said. He cupped Uralesse’s face in his taloned hand caressingly—then clamped his hand tight, his talons shearing through scarlet flesh. Golden ichor welled over his fingers, his claws grated over bone and fang. Uralesse did not dare even to whimper in pain.

Virulan released his grip with a shove that sent Uralesse sprawling to the blood-sanctified floor of the Heart of Darkness.

“Find my answers,” Virulan said softly, beginning to lick his fingers clean.

Uralesse came no more to the Audience Chamber, nor was he to be found anywhere within the World Without Sun, and Virulan came to believe he had chosen exile over confession of failure. Virulan sought him in the Obsidian Mirror and discovered there were now places he could not see. It had been a long time—hundreds of centuries, as the Brightworlders reckoned time—since he had gazed into the Mirror, and now there were places of … blankness.

A Brightworlder would have said they were dark, but there was no darkness to those who lived in the World Without Sun. The blankness spread, he discovered, from those places where the Elfling Mages drew their power. Some, Virulan’s sorcery permitted him to penetrate, allowing the Obsidian Mirror to show him vague and misty shadows. Others remained blank no matter his efforts.

If Uralesse seeks to hide in such a place, that is nearly punishment enough, Virulan thought. But he cannot conceal himself in such stinking precincts forever. And when he emerges …

Then Virulan would teach Uralesse the true cost of disappointing his king.

But that was a pleasure he was willing to defer for a time, for there were other matters to concern him. The Endarkened continued to hunt the Elflings for sport, but now, the hunting parties began to report failure where they had once only boasted of success. They had become used to tracking their quarry by the stink of Brightworld sorcery flowing through its veins, for the stench was unmistakable and penetrating. But now, fewer and fewer of the Elvenkind reeked of magic. It was another change in creatures that already changed far too fast for Virulan’s taste. He distrusted it.

And at last, Uralesse returned to Shadow Mountain.

Virulan had him dragged to the foot of the Shadow Throne in iron chains heated red-hot by magic. The stink of Uralesse’s eternally burning eternally regenerating flesh was sweet incense in his nostrils.

“You left me, my brother,” Virulan said, pouting. “You left me for a long time.”

“I … sought to fulfill your command, my liege, my master, my king,” Uralesse answered, gasping with pain. “I have discovered what you seek. I have found that power which granted magic to the Elflings.”

Virulan raised his lambent gaze from the sweet spectacle of Uralesse’s suffering, frowning in thought. There was no power in the universe as great as the power He Who Is had given to the Endarkened … but it was not any part of Virulan’s plans to provide his subjects with every sharp stick and large stone of the Brightworlders’ armory. He inspected the avidly curious expressions of his courtiers’ faces for a long moment before coming to a decision.

“Leave us,” he commanded.

His court obeyed him reluctantly. Uralesse was not the first of the Endarkened to be erased from existence by their king’s wrath, nor even the first of the Thirteen to suffer his fury. But Uralesse was surely the greatest of them to be brought low, and all the Endarkened wished to relish his pain and his punishment.

“Now,” Virulan said, when they were alone. “Speak.”

“I cannot—” Uralesse began, his words strangled by agony as a gesture from Virulan caused the chains to tighten around him, their heat kindling from red to orange. His skin split from the heat and the pressure; drops of golden ichor welled up to be charred to ash instantly. “I must— The Mirror! The Mirror!”

Virulan permitted the chains to loosen, to cool. “What of the Mirror, my beloved?” he purred.

“I must—I must show you,” Uralesse gasped. “In the Mirror! Then you will see—I have never betrayed you, my liege! My heart beats as yours, my only desire the scouring of the Bright World!”

“Truly?” Virulan said, as if he had been suddenly convinced. He rose to his feet, and as he did, the chains loosened further and fell from Uralesse’s body. “Then let us go at once.”

And if Uralesse’s information disappointed him, there was another chamber, beneath that of the Obsidian Mirror, that would be Uralesse’s last sight in the world of Time and Matter.

The Mirror Chamber was just as it had been in the long ago time when Virulan first forged it. Walls, ceiling, and floor were all of mirror-bright obsidian, so that even within its lightless compass, Virulan and Uralesse seemed to walk through an infinite realm, in which they, too, became infinite.

Both brighter and darker than that which contained it was the Obsidian Mirror itself. It seemed to draw into its polished surface even the memory and possibility of light, radiating the breath of the Void as a forge might radiate heat.

“It is … beautiful,” Uralesse said softly. He, like the rest of the Endarkened, had known of the Mirror—for Virulan made no secret of his greatest weapon—but until this moment, none save their king had been privileged to gaze upon it.

“You have but to think of what you wish to see, and it will appear,” Virulan said proudly.

“And so I shall, my master,” Uralesse vowed. He knew that to disappoint his liege here would mean his death; there would be no second chance to prove his loyalty. “But first I must tell you why I hid. It was not from you, my king. Never that. But from that which I knew to be my quarry. It took me a year of Bright World time to weave about me such spells as would utterly disguise my true nature.”

He saw King Virulan frown. A sorcery such as he had just described was unheard-of among the Endarkened. More to the point, it was unnecessary, for the Endarkened were the greatest sorcerers Above or Below.

“It was needed,” he said quickly. “We had never suspected the existence of that which I came to hunt, for it always fled before we sensed it. Had we done so … we would have seen the source of Elfling Magery at once.”

“Enough of your babble,” Virulan growled. “Show me—and then tell me why you did not slay it and bring me its body to prove your claim.”

Uralesse bowed his head in quick submission. He turned to the Mirror and concentrated.

The Bright World appeared. The whole sweep of it was held in the curve of the Obsidian Mirror, bounded by high crags to the north, burning desert to the south, trackless water on either side. Patches of numinous blankness dotted the image.

“Some are Wardings,” Uralesse said. “Some are strongholds of the Light.”

“Do not show me what I have already seen and tell me it is my answer,” Virulan said dangerously.

“I do not, my king!” Uralesse protested. “Only, see—here—”

The image changed, the patches of blankness vanishing as Uralesse focused on what he meant to show: a high meadow, where a waterfall spilled from the height into a crystal pool. The meadow was edged by dense forest, whose misty seeming showed it was a wellspring of the Light.

From the edge of the forest, a Unicorn stepped.

The Obsidian Mirror began to whine, as faintly as crystal, at what it was forced to display. A Brightworlder would have called it glorious, beauty incarnate. The two Endarkened did not. Virulan hissed, spreading his wings. Uralesse shuddered. In that instant, he knew his king had seen what he himself had seen: the Unicorn was not merely a creature of the Light. It was Light Incarnate.

With every fiber of his being, Uralesse yearned to debase it.

The Unicorn seemed to realize it was being watched. It threw up its head, and for an instant, gazed directly into the Obsidian Mirror.

And in that moment, the Obsidian Mirror exploded.