"Like a fox," Turran replied, pushing his dark hair back. "Like a fox. I've already taken Iwa Skolovda. And without blood lost."
"Not yet!" A Councilman shuffled forward, sword ready.
Turran shook his head sadly, said, "Take care of the fool, Luxos. Don't hurt him."
Luxos stepped up, smiling confidently. His opponent's certainty wavered. Then he made a lunge that should have slain. But Luxos brushed his blade aside, launched his own attack. Steel rang on steel three times. The Iwa Skolovdan stared at his empty hand.
The lesson wasn't lost on the others.
Turran chuckled. "Like I said, we're taking over. We'll do it without bloodshed if we can. But we can hold a festival for the Dark Lady if you want it that way. You there. Look out the window."
A sullen fat man did so. "Soldiers!" he growled. "What're you doing?"
"I told you, taking the city."
Deep-throated rage sounds came from the Councilmen. They started forward...
"Tower's secure, Milord," said a bass voice from beyond the doorway. The red-bearded captain led a squad into the chamber. He glanced at the bewildered Councilmen, laughed, asked, "What should I do with them?"
"Lock them in their own dungeon till Nepanthe's secure. Where's Valther?"
"You want me?" Valther entered, panting from the climb up the stair. His face was flushed with excitement.
"Yes. Collect your revolutionaries. I want to start organizing the new administration tonight. And get our troops out of sight as soon as we can."
Valther departed.
Turran continued, "Ridyeh, take a squad and get Nepanthe. I want her moved in here before sunup."
Ridyeh nodded, left.
Turran's captain led the Councilmen off to their cells. Then the Storm Kings sat down with the King of Iwa Skolovda and dictated his abdication announcement.
Nepanthe came. The men from the cellars brought their sharpened swords. She became their Princess and they her army and police-though no Storm King trusted them. They had proven treacherous already.
Nepanthe took to her role, played it better than her brothers expected. She didn't approve of the conquest, had risked much to prevent it, yet, when forced, plunged into the act with a will. This was a squalid, festering city unlike any in her dreams-she feared there were none that marvelous-but, at least, Iwa Skolovda provided a shadow of an answer to her needs. She would take what she could from her stolen moment of glory.
The deposed King announced his abdication formally at noon next day, though the city already knew and seemed disinclined to resist. People seemed to think nothing could be worse than the fallen government, so corrupt had it been.
Because he didn't want to flaunt his power, to aggravate historically based animosities, Turran led his soldiers back to Ravenkrak, leaving just one platoon, commanded by Grimnason's lieutenant, Rolf Preshka, to be Nepanthe's bodyguard. The other Storm Kings remained, to help their sister establish her administration, but they worked impatiently, looking forward to their next easy conquest.
Nepanthe stood at a window in a dark chamber of the Tower of the Moon, alone. She looked out on a garden bathed in moonlight. It was almost morning. Her black hair, flowing over her shoulders, shone from recent brushing. Her dark eyes danced, searching the garden. Her lips, full and red when she smiled (so rarely), were pulled into a tight, pale line as she pondered something unpleasant. An almost permanent frown-crease rose between her brows. Suddenly she drew out of her slouch, turned, began pacing. Her walk was graceful but asexual. Despite her beauty, she seemed unfeminine, perhaps because she had lived too long in the company of hard men, perhaps because she was always afraid. The evil dreams came to her every night now. But Ravenkrak, not her dreams, haunted her at the moment.
They were, she thought, making a game of conquest, just as they had during childhood. But they were grown up and it was a real world now, a world they hardly knew. They had lived too long in droll, dead Ravenkrak. It had done things to their minds. A mad castle, she thought, up there on the highest of the high peaks, brooding in a land of knife-backed ridges and permanent winter. It just sat there crumbling away, its inmates occasionally attacking Iwa Skolovda. Poor city! Yet there was the old score to be settled.... Their ancestors, the Empire's viceroys in Iwa Skolovda, had been driven into the Kratchnodians when the Empire fell apart, and nearly every generation since had taken its stab at reestablishing the family suzerainty over the former Imperial province of Cis-Kratchnodia. Fools' dreams took the longest to die.
Turran, as always, played the general. But what had he for armies? Ha! A few hundred men, of whom only Redbeard Grimnason's renegade Guildsmen were fit for combat. Yet she pitied the cities of the west. They would fight, and Turran would smash their ancient walls and venerable castles with the Werewind. Never before had there been such command of the Power in the family. A way of life would end. A microcosmic culture, Raven-krak's, would fall because its people had to play their game. She grew increasingly angry as she considered the yet-to-die.
Without realizing it, she was making the same arrogant assumptions she despised in her brothers. She hated their bold confidence, yet could not herself conceive of anything but victory on the battlefield of witchcraft.
"Will the idiocy never end?" she asked the night.
Certainly it would, someday, if only when Lady Death's couriers called her name. There would be an end: victory or defeat. Yet in either she could see no escape from the cramped, exclusive society of her home. Death seemed the only path to real freedom.
Oh, so terribly, she wanted done with this wearisome business of life. Her brothers didn't understand. They were little fishes happy in the waters of their little happenings. They didn't recognize the frightened child, the wondering, eager, world-curious child, hiding in Nepanthe's mind. But Nepanthe didn't understand Nepanthe either-least of all those fears that by day hid behind her fiery temper and by night ruled her dreams.
The dreams had changed during her stay in Iwa Skolovda. The pleasant part remained fixed, but, as she reached a tremulous hand for the emerald spire... Tower dissolves, dragon rises, she runs into strange land. Into the forest of spears, but no longer alone. On every hand, in graceful thousands, cats, twisting and dodging; spears leap from the earth and stab. Struck, cats accept the shafts with joy. Most make only token attempts to escape. Horrified, Nepanthe runs. To her sorrow, she always escapes alone.
Alone. She was always alone, even in the center of a city, at the heart of a kingdom.
Her dreams so troubled her that she fought sleep. Now, thinking of the horror, there was nothing she wanted more than to be able to cry. She couldn't. Ravenkrak had weathered her tenderer emotions; even anger and hatred were growing pale. Soon she'd have nothing but the terror of her lonely nights.
Slowly, methodically, she cursed. Across her lips passed every abomination, every blasphemy, every obscenity heard during a life spent in the company of hard men. The moon passed the western horizon. Stars faded. Dawn came before she finished. And when she was done she was left with nothing. Nothing but fear.
But, for just a moment, childhood memory stirred. The daydream about the strange knight who would come to rescue her from the Candareen.
That memory was as bad as the dreams. It made her question what that innocent child had become; almost a harlot, letting her brothers prostitute her for the advancement of their game. Daily she was forced to endure the indignity of being ravaged by the eyes of the human trash her brothers had given her to rule. A curse on them all, and especially on her brothers for being too lazy to handle their own administration.
When she finally surrendered herself to her bed, she whispered a formal prayer:
"May the Gods Above, or the Gods Below, or any Powers here present, cast down, disperse, and render unto destruction the agents of destruction, the Storm Kings of Ravenkrak."