The Fifth Dawn (32 page)

Lyese looked like she’d been slapped. “On the authority that I was the only one awake? That I was the one that woke up and surprised that ogre with a knife to the palm that made it drop us? Maybe the authority granted to me by dragging your unconscious carcass all the way to this cave and finding the goblins, who were able to chase off the ogre, which chased me
all the way up this damned mountain?”

“Please, no fighting, huh?” Dwugget interrupted before Raksha could respond. “All friends now. Kha, we talk, you and Dwugget, huh? Give you all the details?”

The leonin composed himself and returned to the elf girl, his ear pointed forward in embarrassment. “We apologize, Lyese,” Raksha said. “We are grateful to be alive, and thank you for opening the negotiations.” He bowed deeply, which he did only rarely, and returned to the goblin, who shifted from foot to foot. Raksha supposed he would be nervous too, in Dwugget’s place. “Dwugget, your people attacked us. Is that how you negotiate?”

“Mistake, huh?” Dwugget said. “Have to defend my people.”

Raksha appraised the little creature before him. The leonin had been raised to think of goblins as inferior beings. Even Slobad, though a friend, had really been little more than a slave. But he could understand
this
goblin. He was a leader, like Raksha. Of course he had sent guards to meet them. What would the leonin have done if he had encountered a gang of well-armed goblins trying to enter Taj Nar?

“Dwugget of the Krark,” Raksha said, “is there a place we three negotiators may go to work out the details?”

Dwugget led Raksha and Lyese to a door the leonin had not noticed before. They followed the goblin through a short tunnel lit with flame-tubes. “We go eat, and talk, huh?” Dwugget said. “Food and negotiation.”

The meal, as it turned out, took longer than the negotiations themselves. Raksha had been out for almost a day and a half, and he was impressed to see how well Lyese had done in the interim. The Krark would prove to be valuable allies, now that the initial confusion was cleared up. He had seen them fight, and knew the goblins were fiercer than he’d once believed.

They spent one more night in Krark-Home. Dwugget threw a
banquet in their honor, which included as entertainment his own account of the tale of Krark, the legendary goblin hero who long ago discovered the world was hollow—a tale that had originally spurred Glissa to seek out Memnarch in the core. Raksha was struck by the story’s similarity, at points, to the myths and legends surrounding Great Dakan, his own leonin ancestor and the first to unite the leonin under a single Kha.

The next day, they set off down the path from Krark-Home for Taj Nar, accompanied by forty of Dwugget’s finest fighters. More would come later. This force was no more than a token, but would serve to convince the leonin army that the goblins would honor their commitment.

Raksha didn’t know it at the time, but Lyese was already dead.

“Already dead?” Glissa snapped. “It doesn’t sound like it.”

“I did not learn what really happened until much later,” Raksha said. “I told you it was confusing.”

“So when did you figure it out?” Glissa said.

“Two years after the treaty was signed,” Raksha said. “The day Taj Nar fell.”

Now they were getting somewhere. “Bruenna refused to talk about that,” the elf girl said. “But what does it have to do with Lyese?”

“She had become attached to Yshkar,” Raksha said. “Or so I thought. I had little time to give her, and thought she was doing all she could to fit in. Lyese asked to join the forces on the ground, and I could not deny her the right of combat. She’d already spent a year helping me co-ordinate with the goblins as an ambassador, which kept her clear of the fighting for the most part. I’d hoped it would be what you wanted. I still harbored hope that you lived, though no one had heard from you for so long. Bruenna had not given up hope, and spent much time trying to figure out a way into the Lumengrid. She thought there might be knowledge there that could free you.”

“There was,” Glissa said.

“Once Lyese took the field, it took only a few weeks for Yshkar to promote her,” Raksha said. “She proved to be an amazing fighter. Yshkar and Lyese soon became inseparable off the field
as well. I encouraged this, again in what I thought were your sister’s best interests. I could not watch over her all the time, the responsibility of the Kha did not allow it.”

“Makes sense,” Glissa said. “You gave her the best protector you could. Your own blood.”

“Yes, and I had to focus on the ultimate defense of Taj Nar, but my inattention ultimately led to the loss of the home den,” Raksha said. “The war had been raging relentlessly. Yshkar—perhaps under the influence of the false Lyese, perhaps through his own bullheadedness—made a grave tactical error that cost us the last outpost den in the ’void. I ordered him to pull all of our forces back home. He initially resisted, and cost us more men. When he finally called the retreat, the nim followed hot on his heels, and closed in on all sides.”

“What about the Krark?” Glissa asked.

“The Krark were under siege themselves. They spared us what fighters they could,” Raksha said. “Dwugget and I assigned them to protect the supply lines running between Taj Nar and Krark-Home. As it turned out, that’s the only reason the leonin survived at all.”

“The mana bomb,” Glissa said. “There was really a mana bomb, right?”

“Yes, though I certainly did not set it. There is no honor in such a death, despite the imposter’s convoluted explanations. Yshkar refused to hear my words. Taj Nar could have easily resisted a siege, under the plan we’d formulated,” Raksha said. “But not the enemy within.”

The Kha held a long-range spotting scope to one eye and looked out over the roiling mass of nim. Even with the magically
augmented lens, Raksha could not see where the nim ended and the horizon began. Silver aerophins circled in formation, almost too distant to make out against the golden sun. The constructs looked like scavengers waiting for carrion. The levelers had not been seen, and the scouts he’d sent to track them had not returned.

With a frustrated growl, he closed up the telescoping eyesight and hooked it onto his belt. Raksha didn’t need the scope to see that the nim would breach the wall soon. It was inevitable. The sheer volume of nim corpses was forming a natural ramp, and every one that died brought the grisly mounds of stinking corpses and chittering vanguard attackers that much closer to the top.

Raksha heard a reptilian screech, and tossed a wave at the skyhunter that flashed by. The skyhunters were always in the air now, beating back the attempts of clumsy flying nim. The slow-moving undead were no match for the pteron riders in a dogfight, but the tactic was successfully keeping the leonin flyers tied up. Had they been able to spare skyhunters to attack the nim on the ground …

They could not, so that was a futile train of thought. Raksha crouched and leaped from the lookout tower to the worn path atop the wall and landed silently next to his cousin. The top of the wall was a flurry of leonin warriors and a few goblin soldiers scrambling to ready the siege defenses.

“What did you see, my Kha?” Yshkar asked. “How long before they’re over the wall?”

“At the rate they’re piling up, we have no more than a few hours,” Raksha sighed. “We had to see it for ourselves. The scouts are right. There really is no end to them.”

“What of the construct armies?” Yshkar asked. “Why have we not seen them?”

“Aerophins circle on the horizon,” Raksha replied. “The levelers—”

Raksha was cut short by a crash of thunder that shook the wall beneath his feet. He grabbed the edge to steady himself, and caught Yshkar’s arm before his cousin tumbled onto the nim below. The two of them pulled themselves over the lip of the wall to see where the explosion had come from.

Thick black smoke stung his disbelieving eyes. Three gargantuan six-legged silver constructs had emerged from beneath the infinite carpet of nim that covered the Glimmervoid all around them. Each construct’s central body consisted of a huge globular power source that glowed an eerie blue through the haze. Their “heads” were massive cylinders, one of which was belching a misty blue fog.

Yshkar gasped, military formality lost in shock. “What in the name of Dakan are those?”

“Something new,” Raksha snarled. “It appears that only one has fired. We must expect another volley.”

“My Kha, you should let me take command of the defenses and get to the throne room.”

“Don’t be ridiculous, Yshkar,” Raksha said. “You’ve been listening to that elf girl too much. Our place is here with you. If we are to die we shall do it as the Kha, and our enemies shall regret the day they—”

Another cannon-construct fired at that moment, sending a house-sized ball of blazing blue energy into the wall below them. Before Raksha could react, a whole section of Taj Nar crumbled beneath his feet and gave way.

“My Kha!” Yshkar
bellowed.

Raksha plummeted into the pit that had just opened beneath him.

The Kha barely heard his cousin. He dropped through floor after floor as an entire section of Taj Nar gave way, but fortunately he collided with several outcroppings on the way down that
slowed his fall. Raksha landed with a crack of broken armor on a rough metal floor, and after a few seconds managed to scramble to cover beneath a stable block of rubble that had once formed part of the lookout tower upon which he’d recently stood.

The cave in continued for almost a minute, forcing Raksha to cover his ears as several tons of metal crashed down all around him. Only the overhanging block he’d chosen as cover kept the leonin from being crushed as the rain of debris poured in.

Raksha wiped iron dust from his eyes and took stock. He’d fallen all the way to a basement sublevel, which until recently served as the royal army but had been converted to temporary barracks only a week before. The main wall still stood, down here at least, and he could see sky far above. Light streamed into the dusty air above through two large holes that had been blasted through its side, but otherwise the main exterior wall had held almost all the way to top. The interior of Taj Nar was less well protected, and too many supports had been destroyed to hold up the weight where Raksha had been standing. He was extremely lucky.

Damnably lucky, for he feared he was about to see the end of his people. If Taj Nar fell, where else could they go? Krark-Home?

Raksha crawled out from his refuge and searched vainly for some path through the wreckage, a way to get out of this hole. As the haze cleared, the outlines of over a dozen leonin bodies littered the ground all around him, and he offered a bitter prayer for the dead.

From the corner of his eye, the leonin spotted movement in the rubble.

“Raksha!” Lyese called. “My leg’s pinned. Can you help me?”

“Don’t move!” he shouted. “We’re on our way!” Maybe he hadn’t been able to save Glissa from Memnarch. Maybe this
really was the end of Taj Nar. But as long as he lived, so would Glissa’s sister—he owed his lost friend that much. With as much caution as Raksha could spare, he navigated the maze of debris and death to the elf girl’s side.

Lyese’s leg was stuck beneath a rectangular chunk of inner wall and tangled in a mess of support cables. The elf girl sat upright, her back pressed up against a round hunk of debris that looked like something that might have been left over from the old armory. Her face bore a few minor cuts, but Lyese appeared more or less unharmed. Raksha dropped to one knee to get a closer look at her leg.

“It does not appear broken. Are you bleeding?” Raksha asked.

“I don’t think so,” the elf girl gasped. “I think it’s … ow … I think it’s just stuck. If you could pull on it—gently—I think I might be able to wriggle free.”

“Of course,” Raksha said. He dropped onto his belly, draping himself uncomfortably across the elf girl’s body, and reached in to take hold of Lyese’s leg. “Let us know when you’re ready, and we will pull together.”

“Ready,” Lyese said, and brought the knee of her free leg up into Raksha’s belly.