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“Let us go in peace.”
“So you can return them to that—traitor? Young Desthenae is being raised to lead her people under the title of governor. She promises to be beautiful enough to keep poets and songwriters inspired for generations to come. We would not like to let such grooming go to waste.”
“Then pay me the ransom promised or die.”
AuRon loosed his flame and the Red Queen vanished in a brief scream. Was she insane?
A burst of bluish light darted from the conflagration. It danced before his eyes like a lost firefly. Then it whirled up the stairs.
AuRon followed it, up and around turns, through the palace. Servants stared, not at the jumping light but at AuRon pounding up behind. Even as he panted from the chase, AuRon suspected that, like some hues of cave moss glow, the light could not be seen by human eyes.
They burst through the double doors at the back of the mountain’s head. The light raced up the ridge of the mountain to the tiny temple high on the mountainside.
He took off, circled the giant sculpture and looked down into the city. Perhaps he imagined it, or it was some trick of rain and wind, but it seemed that wings glided over the citadel.
He raced to the temple, burning its image into his eyes as the light faded.
Upon alighting, he listened, but only the mountain wind entered his ears.
He descended through graceful elvish sculpture built on stout dwarvish foundations, went down a wide, curving stair, and then squeezed through a crude blighter passage.
And so he came to the chamber.
The roots of the world itself held up its ceiling, or so it seemed.
AuRon had the strange feeling the mountain had grown up around this place. The rocks felt old, as if even they were tired and worn down by the ages.
A tree stood at the center, though it was an odd sort of tree, like two sets of roots joined at the trunk. One set of roots gripped the ceiling, the other the ground.
In places the roots bulged like diseased skin. Some of the perturbations were small, red, apple-like, others were as swollen as a bloated pig.
One of the swollen nodes moved, pulsing as though it were taking breaths. AuRon bent his head close. Its skin was stretched tight, reminding him of his own back before his wings broke through.
A face looked back at him.
The face of the Red Queen.
He recoiled in shock.
He had his flame. Would it be enough? He scored the trunk of the tree, and the pulpy wood gave way in sheets more in the manner of flesh than bark.
A hand punched out of the egg-node. Red webbing hung about it like a long veil.
The flame came out of fright. He spread it, concentrating on the tree. The bark hissed rather than burned as the flame lashed across it, like dragonflame vomited upon seawater.
He paid special attention to the nodes. They steamed, swelled, and exploded.
The air boiled with smoke, but he had to complete the destruction. He lashed out right and left, breaking and smashing the nodes. Not fast enough. He rolled, burning himself, smearing freshly grown blood all over himself.
Out out out! Out of air, out of hide, out of time.
He fled up the stairs, dragging flame behind, and out into the clean mountain air.
Horror awaited him in the citadel. Naf’s men hung from the walls, already being pecked by crows, with bloated vultures waiting beneath, evidently experienced enough in the ways of the Ghioz citadel to know that the bodies would fall eventually.
There was fighting outside the sloping tower at the center of the citadel. Those within the tower exchanged arrows with rocks fired by war-machines outside.
A green dragon, long and light-framed, circled above the tower, and above the green dragon two roc-riders circled higher.
