Dragon Sacrifice (The First Realm Book 3) (22 page)

Chapter 20

Back in my room I dipped a finger into the tobacco. Nothing happened, so I filled my pipe, then snapped my fingers and produced a flame.

I leaned back. The stuff was as strong as I remembered. The buzz from the party was almost gone. A glass of brandy would have done nicely but I remembered Pan’s warning against taking alcohol with his blend. The pipe was also his, or it used to be. It was half axe, half smoking pipe.

“Give that here.”

“Sure,” I said.

Dinendal took a pull and handed it back.

“That’s good stuff,” he said.

I blinked. “Aren’t you dead?”

“In your timeline, maybe.”

Right. This Dinendal was from a reality where he never died and I never lived. In that world he had become king of Brandish. Tyrant of Brandish, more like. The man delighted in bloody conflict.

We were still in my room. “I hope that you’re in the Northlands for peaceful reasons,” I said.

“Oh, ho ho ho, Roddy. You
optimist
. Do you think I wear this armour every day?” He thumped his breastplate. From the neck down he was encased in gilded steel. Blood was drying here and there.

“Fit for a king, but hardly loungewear,” he said. “Why don’t you come with me?”

The courtyard was a great deal bigger than I remembered. There were hardly any buildings left standing. The ground was cratered. The circular walls were riddled with holes. One of the huge bronze doors was embedded in the hall behind us.

“What are walls to a wizard?” Dinendal asked. “An insult, merely! I could have teleported troops into the fort, or flooded it with scalding water. Instead I showed them just how useless their gates were.”

We walked and I saw bodies. King Garvel, joined in death by his bodyguards. His two sons were by the south wall. Ardel had stood over his brother’s body and defended it against the soldiers who now lay mangled all around him.

“As last stands go, it was quite a good one,” Dinendal said. “Those two were the last to fall.

Killed some of my best men before could I face them myself.”

I tried to look away. Instead I saw Elsa. She’d been shot with so many arrows that they were probably the only thing keeping her corpse together. Her face was untouched. It stared lifelessly at the sky,

“... why?” I said, when I recovered my voice. “Why did you do all this?”

“For the same reason lesser men climb mountains. Because it’s good exercise.”

“You conquered an entire country just for a workout?”

He examined his nails. “A nation that does not grow must stagnate. Do you think our ancestors walked the path of empire for no reason?”

He waved a hand over his soldiers. “Look at them. Have you ever seen our people so proud and full of energy?”

The soldiers were planting a flag in the centre of the fort. They were also sticking spears in the few surviving Northlanders.

“It’s monstrous,” I said.

“And how are the elves doing in your reality?” Dinendal asked. “Has anything good happened, or does Brandish still resemble a sick old man? A sick,
senile
old man, with his glories far behind and his death approaching fast.”

I didn’t know what to say to that.

“When you are a leader, Roddy, you need to look out for your people. Sometimes that means giving them challenges. But only so they can learn and grow.”

“It’s a wonder you’re not dribbling at the seams,” I said. “Because you’re so full of shit.”

His eyes grew hard, but then he puffed on the pipe and handed it back. “It’s been a while since someone dared talk back to me. Didn’t know that I missed it. Would you like to see what I did to the city?”

The battlements gave us a a good view of the rubble. Heorot was still burning. There’s always smoke rising from a city, but these plumes weren’t from cooking fires. Too thick, too black, too full of ash. There were buildings burning down there in the city. Bodies too. The sky was a dirty smudge.

“Beautiful, isn’t it?” Dinendal asked.

“I’m not seeing it,” I said. We were the only ones on the walls.

“You don’t have my aesthetic sensibilities. You see, Roddy—”

I punched him. I used my right arm, the silver one, so his jaw broke on the first try. He stared at me in shock. I flicked the ash out of my pipe and swung it at his neck. It was an axe, after all. He jerked away. The axe blade skidded on his breastplate. I was already stepping close. My uppercut caved in his breastplate and mashed the ribs underneath. My axe took off an ear.

I hated how easy this was, but he was the worst kind or tyrant. Hallucination or not, I had to try.

He attempted to gather his will and cast a spell. I rang his skull and swung my axe. He had enough focus to block my falling arm but not the silver hand that went through his armour. Fingertips knifed into his belly. I could hear Dinendal’s soldiers rushing up the stairs for us. I had to kill him now.

Cold metal fingers dug into his hair. I pulled his head to one side, exposing his neck. I raised the axe. I brought it down.

—and the axe thudded into the table in my room.

I was alone.

“Huh,” I said.

I looked at my fingers. No blood. But my mouth was dry and my heart was pounding. I felt like jogging around the longhouse, the adrenaline was still there.

There was a knock on the door. I jumped.

“Who is it?”

“It’s Elsa.”

“Oh! Whew. For a moment there...”

“You going to open the door?”

She was as lovely as I remembered from the party. “Elsa!” I said. “I’m so glad to see you alive. I mean, I’m so glad to see you. What are you doing here?”

She shifted her weight and peeled off the door-frame. “You never answered my question.”

“What question?”

I was shorter than she was. Somehow she was looking up at me. “Would you like to find out how they make love in my country?”

Hertha was standing behind her. The bison-girl looked softer, somehow. Her expression was half-eager, half-afraid.

“Hertha has never had an elf before,” Elsa said. “I thought I’d bring her along. For educational purposes, of course.”

“For educational purposes,” I said. “Of course.”

The monster crept toward the lights of the city. The scent of the killers led that way.

It was smart. It could have spoken, had anyone been around to teach it language. Instead it thought in images and sensations.

It remembered its mother, the huge, comforting presence that had been in its life since it broke out of its egg. It remembered being carried in its mother’s mouth, of being taught to hunt and to fly. It remembered the day it realized it was bigger than its mother—that was the day it found its own lair.

It had still spent time with its mother. Their bond had been a comfort as the monster ventured beyond its territory and into the lands of men. The small, soft-skinned creatures were fascinating, but entirely too fragile.

The creature snuffled toward the city. It remembered its mother, broken and mutilated, the scents of many man-creatures all around it. The monster did not know words, but it understood revenge. So did its brother.

Meerwen downed her drink. “They got good beer in the Northlands.”

“I have to agree,” Mina said. They clinked their glasses together.

“Where have all the men gone?” Tamril asked.

“Some private thing,” Dianne said. “We weren’t invited.”

“Isn’t that just like them?” Mina said. “We pull at least as much weight as they do and still we aren’t good enough.”

“Looks like it’s just us girls,” Serrato said.

They all looked at him.

“This is nice though, isn’t it?” His dress had slipped off one shoulder. “It’s not every day that I get a girl’s night out.”

“Um...” Dianne said.

“ know what I am, dear,” Serrato said. “At my age I just don’t care.”

“How old are you?” Mina asked.

“It’s rude to ask a lady, but I remember the last days of the Empire. The Elven Empire.”