“We’ll need to clear the field before rot and disease sets in,” Boudain said. “I want all recovered weapons and armour stockpiled, inventoried, and repaired where necessary. I’m granting an amnesty to any man who took up arms against me, ranked banneret or lower, so long as they agree to serve in the Royal Army until I have no more need of them. Any man of noble birth, I will review personally before deciding. Get to it.”
There was a chorus of assent and the king’s officers set off to go about their orders. That left Boudain alone with Gill and the Count of Savin.
“Well, gentlemen,” the king said. “We have an army to build and a usurper to topple. Shall we?” He gestured back to the village where their temporary headquarters was, and Gill knew there was no question of refusing.
Pharadon hovered over the peak containing the knot in the Fount. In many respects, there was nothing unusual about it—snowcapped, with jagged grey faces, it looked much the same as the others around it. However, there was a void within it, and in that void, Pharadon was certain, the Cups were waiting for him.
His certainty was built upon the decaying magic he could sense in the peak, with the Cups at its centre, like a gem in a rotting jewellery box. Someone had cast a spell of concealment here, and time had done its work, leaving only the shadow of what it had been.
There was something else, though. Something that stirred a memory in Pharadon, which came only slowly out of the recesses of his mind. His heart sank when he connected the reality to the reminiscence. Venori.
At first he was sure he must have been mistaken, but as he hovered there, the trace of them grew more distinct, and he came to accept that dragonkind were not the only ancient creatures to have returned to the world. Of all things, why did it have to be the Venori? The last of them was thought to have been killed when Pharadon had still been a young dragon. The last of a ferocious, and some would say evil, race that had warred against dragonkind since the beginning of remembered time.
The extermination of the Venori had created a stain on the collective conscience of dragonkind and had inspired much of their approach to dealing with humans—engage with them, show them the way to enlightenment, never again wipe a race of creatures from existence. And here they were again, while dragonkind teetered on the balance, most likely to slide into oblivion.
Pharadon wondered how the Venori had found their way to this place, then realised all that mattered was they were here. If he could sense them through all that rock, and from so great a height, they were likely to be many. He had been too young to fight them himself, but had listened long to tales of the battles between his kind and theirs.
They were said to live in groups. Some of the tales he had heard involved dragons being drained of their store of Fount and killed. He would need to be careful, but he was powerful, and he didn’t intend to allow a few Venori to stand in his way. He might even be able to get in and retrieve the Cups without alerting them.
He spiralled down to get a closer look, gliding silently as he scanned the rocky peak for a way in. With dragons as large as they were, the cave would need a big entrance, or at least somewhere a dragon could set down and transform into a smaller creature. It didn’t take him long to find it, or at least where it had been. Once there had been a large cave in the side of the mountain, but the mouth had collapsed at some point in the distant past.
It took but a moment to determine that magic had caused the cave-in—and done a thorough job of it. The effort of getting through the rubble would be substantial, and would certainly earn the attention of the Venori. It bothered him that the Cups and the Venori found themselves in such proximity. Had the magic drawn them? The Venori fed on the Fount—preferably that freshly drawn from a living creature.
Dragons provided the flavour they liked best, the main reason the two species had found themselves at odds with one another. Ironically, human beings had proved the Venori’s second choice—it seemed to have something to do with the taste intelligence imparted. Their appetite and lack of compassion had made them the antithesis of the world enlightened dragonkind had envisaged. Who were the dragons, to have decided how the world should be shaped? Pharadon liked to think that were it not for the fact that the Venori sought to feed on his people any chance they got, they would have been left as nature intended.
He spotted a ledge and a small gap in the rubble. Pharadon landed and inspected the opening. There was no way he could get in while enjoying his natural form. It was big enough for him to enter as a man. However, his magical power would be so severely curtailed that facing down the Venori would be a foolish thing to do. He could feel them down there, lurking in the darkness. Worse, he could sense that they had already reacted to his presence.
The Fount might have grown strong enough to wake them, strong enough to sustain them indefinitely, but he could tell they hungered for that which was within him. They were working their way toward him through the passages hidden within the mountain, but if the stories were true, they wouldn’t dare venture out in daylight. It was hard to put much faith in the stories when they also spoke of Venori draining all the life energies out of dragons, leaving them withered husks. As with all beings of magic, the creatures were vulnerable to Telastrian steel, but Pharadon didn’t have any. In human form, there was no way he could go down there. Not on his own, at least.
The smith’s eyes nearly popped out of his head when a cart carrying a dozen Telastrian steel swords had turned up at the makeshift foundry beside the new dragon enclosure. Ysabeau thought he was going to throw up when she told him what she wanted done with them.
The swords themselves had been donated by noblemen now residing in the dungeons beneath the citadel on the Isle. There were a number of places an unfortunate could be incarcerated in Mirabay, but the citadel’s dungeons were by far the worst. Unlikely though it was for a prisoner to emerge alive from any of the others, the citadel was a confirmed death sentence, a place of forgetting.
Stripped of noble rank, neither they nor their children would have need for the heirloom blades. The weapons would now serve a greater purpose—to contain the greatest spectacle in the land.
The smith and his team set to smelting the blades and reforging the steel into long wires that could be welded to the metal bands of the cage. The process was well under way when one of the workmen sent for Ysabeau.
The workers were all terrified of the Prince Bishop—perhaps rightly so—and every request that came to her was flavoured with hesitation. On this occasion, there was none of that, something that instantly caused Ysabeau alarm. She knew only too well what the stakes were. If something happened to the beast, or it escaped … She didn’t want to consider the consequences, even if she wouldn’t be around to see them—everyone here would lose their lives. There was no question of that.
“What is it?” Ysabeau said. She could see that the men had downed tools, and were vacillating between their fear of the Prince Bishop, and their fear of what lay in the still-incomplete cage.
One of the men turned to face her, and scratched at his scraggy black beard. “It moved, my Lady.”
Ysabeau felt a chill run across her skin.
The dragon was curled up in much the same position in which it had been placed when they first lowered it into the old arena by crane. Its head rested on its foreclaws in an eerily similar fashion to a dog. Its nostrils flared gently and rhythmically as it breathed—there was nothing unusual about that. Ysabeau’s gaze was fixed elsewhere, and her jaw had dropped.
The dragon’s golden eyelids had retracted to reveal two crystal blue eyes that looked like great sparkling sapphires that reflected a flame. They held a captivating depth that made it hard to look away.