The Element of Fire, Martha Wells [books for new readers .txt] 📗

corner, half-surrounded by a dozen or so of the sickly emaciated fay. The servants were fighting the creatures off with torches and makeshift clubs and whatever else they had been able to find. The fay rushed their new attackers as they entered the room. The first leapt at them, waving its sword over its head, and was disemboweled by Thomas’s rapier. A bronze sword swung at him from the side and he swept it away and punctured the owner’s chest.

One of the fay kicked over a lamp, sending the room into near darkness. Obviously the creatures can see in the dark, Thomas thought, parrying another thrust. Pity we can’t.

Dubell shouted something and clapped his hands. Immediately a small bright ball of pure light appeared over his head and hovered there, flooding the room with a stark white illumination.

From behind, something grabbed Thomas’s arm and swung him around. The strength was astonishing for a creature so apparently delicate. He slammed the rapier’s heavy hilt into its face and it fell away from him with a shriek.

As he turned, Thomas saw that three more fay had come at them from the door to the passageway. Hell, they must have been following us up the stairs. One had attacked the wounded Treville from behind, and he was now sprawled bleeding on the floor. Martin leapt over his wounded friend to knock the creature away from him; as it staggered back he drove his rapier through it.

Nearby another fay was grappling with Dubell, trying to plunge its sword toward his face, but the old sorcerer was holding it off. Dubell managed to shift his weight and shove the creature up against the wall. Thomas stepped up behind Dubell, said “Pardon me, Doctor,” and finished off the creature.

All the other fay in the room were down. The spell light above Dubell’s head died away as the servants relit their lamps, and the strange unwavering white light was replaced by the familiar flickering yellow.

“Captain,” someone gasped at his side, and Thomas turned and saw Berham. The servant had armed himself with a crude but effective iron club. “Captain, there’s fighting in the hall by the round stair. We could hear the shots. That’s where we was making for.”

“Good.” As an afterthought, Thomas asked, “Do you know what’s happened?”

“No, Sir, I couldn’t say that.” Bertram’s story was like their own. He had been visiting nearby when the explosion had occurred. As a veteran of the last war, his instincts had taken over and he had gathered survivors, armed both men and women with what was available, and set off to join the organized resistance.

Martin came up to them as Berham finished, saying bitterly, “Dr. Dubell said Treville’s gone, Sir. The bastards go for the wounded like wolves.”

“Aye,” Berham said softly, looking back toward the bodies of his companions who had not survived the ambush. “I noticed that.”

“Take his sword and give it to Dr. Dubell. Let Berham use the pistols. We’ll come back for the bodies when we’ve secured the palace,” Thomas told him, and thought, I sound like a bloody idiot of an optimist.

But it was what the other two men wanted to hear. As they moved to obey, Thomas went to where Dubell was still kneeling beside Treville. Dubell looked up at Thomas and said, “I’m sorry.”

“It wasn’t your fault,” Thomas said automatically.

Dubell’s face was drawn. “The fay are attacking in force. This is no raid. It’s another damned war, Captain.”

Another damned war, Thomas thought. But the Bisran army fought us for two decades and they never got as close as this.

As they returned to the others, Baserat was leaning over the fay that Thomas had disemboweled, poking the entrails experimentally with the tip of his sword. “See, it looks human to me.”

“You’re right. I wish I had my glasses.” Dubell peered down at the creature, then said, “As I thought. The Unseelie Court, or the Host, as they are more commonly called. On their nightly rampages they seize human captives whom they will use to attack their fellows.” He paused as Martin came up and handed him Treville’s rapier. Dubell looked at the weapon as if he wasn’t sure what it was, then said, “Yes, of course.”

“What makes men turn into that?” Thomas nudged the corpse with the toe of his boot. He couldn’t believe it, though he knew Dubell must be right.

“Prolonged exposure to the influence of the Host. Their captives become like them. Iron becomes poison to them. They gain some powers of the fay, but they lose their souls in the process.”

The room had grown silent as the others listened. The servants were watching them with white bruised faces and apprehensive eyes.

Something bumped his elbow and Thomas looked down to see the servant boy who had somehow managed to survive so far, peering interestedly down at the fay’s corpse.

“Berham,” Thomas said. “Keep this one with your lot.”

“Yes, Sir,” Berham said, gesturing sharply to the boy. “Come away from there, boy, before you get in the way.”

There would be far too many people wandering about without Berhams to organize them. Unarmed retainers and servants, children who could not fend for or protect themselves, women who would not think to pick up a weapon. “We have to get moving,” Thomas muttered.

*

Kade was on the stairs in the King’s Bastion when the explosion shook the Old Palace. She held onto the balustrade as the walls trembled in sympathy with the adjoining building. A stiff breeze poured up the stairwell; the stink it carried made her wince. The shaking stopped and the beams supporting the stairs gave an uneasy creak before deciding to hold. Kade started down again, stumbling occasionally because her legs were trembling for some reason. The inexplicable wind had ceased with the reverberations of the explosion, but it had left the air smelling of mud, stale water, and death.

It can’t be the wards, Kade told herself uneasily. It can’t be.

She found the bottom of the stairway blocked by a panic-stricken crowd of palacefolk and servants and she had to go back up a flight to work her way around by back passages. She could smell smoke now, from fires that had caught when candles and lamps were knocked over.

When she reached the long gallery that connected the bastion to the Old Palace, it was badly lit and in chaos.

Albon knights were milling around the doors and Renier was shouting orders. Over the noise, someone was yelling, “If you don’t send them to help us fight the fire, they won’t have anywhere to retreat!”

Kade ducked into the crowd, slipping past a mailed arm before it could stop her. She emerged onto the wide balcony of the great spiral staircase that led down into the main hall of the Old Palace.

It was a pitched battle.

The main hall was on two levels and the wide sweep of steps leading down to the lower portion of it was where the battle line had been drawn. Furniture, boxes, and other debris had been piled up at the top as cover for the defenders. Queen’s guards and a few Albon knights and Cisternans were manning the barricades along with disheveled courtiers, retainers, and servants who had either taken up weapons or were crouching back behind the defenders and reloading pistols. The lower half of the hall was walled away by a palpable unnatural darkness. Missiles flew out of that darkness, bronze-tipped bolts of a deadly effectiveness demonstrated by the number of corpses sprawled on the floor.

Kade started down the staircase, one hand on its wide banister. The zoomorphs carved on the stair’s central column leered out of the shadows as they were briefly illuminated by torches, adding to the nightmare quality of the scene. Refugees struggled past her, palacefolk and wounded guards.

As she fought her way closer, she began to see past the curtain of shadow in a way the others defending the barricade below could not. There was movement in that darkness, mangled faces, shifting forms, distorted or partly human. The wards must be gone, at least over the Old Palace and the Gallery Wing; that’s how this mess got in, Kade thought, and forced herself to keep moving down the stairs toward that chaotic darkness stretched across the hall. But what drove them here? It was the Unseelie Court, the rulers of the dark fay and the other creatures who fed on blood and terror, who rode the night in the form of the Host, preying on humans and destroying every living thing in their path. They traveled the sky on dark windy nights accompanied, the church priests claimed, by the souls of the dead and wreaking havoc wherever they went.

At the bottom of the stair, Kade started toward the barricade, dodging running forms, ignoring startled glances of recognition. As she reached the hastily erected wall of broken furniture and tried to peer through it, she heard, “If it isn’t the Queen of Air and Darkness.”

The voice was sibilant and soft and came to her quite clearly over the noise. She looked down slowly and saw the face through a gap in the barricade. It was Evadne, one of the princes of the Unseelie Court. His narrow features might have been called handsome by someone less picky about character, even if his skin was powder blue. But though his expression was that of a wistful fay child, his eyes were gloating and entirely adult. Kade said, “Your eyesight is as bad as your sense of humor.” She had never truly accepted her mother’s title, which Evadne must know.

He grinned up at her, revealing pointed teeth. “Why don’t you join us, my sister? What has the Seelie Court ever given you that you should risk your life to side with them and battle us?”

Kade ignored the growing knot of coldness in her stomach and laughed at him. The Seelie Court was the highest court of the Otherworld. Titania and Oberon ruled it, but spent little time in governing the fay who swore allegiance to them, and occupied most of their days in fetes, rades, contests, or other unreal pastimes of Fayre. The fay loosely attached to the Seelie Court loved daylight and music but were often dangerous to humans, either through acts of mischief or simple lack of concern over human frailties.

The Queen of Air and Darkness was not truly a member of either court, and Kade did not like to think about what would happen to the balances of power in the Otherworld, which she only vaguely understood herself, if this were to change. Evadne must be very confident to risk making that offer. She said, “The Seelie Court has given me nothing, which is far better than the trouble you’ve given me. What makes you think I’d throw my fortune in with either of you?”

His features drew into a pinched sneer. “The Host grows in power by the moment. The mortals’ pitiful protections are scattered and you can’t stop us. I’ll destroy you myself.”

“Promises, promises. Who’s your master? Is it Urbain Grandier?”

The eyes hardened. “We have no master.”

“I’ll tell him you said that when I meet him.”

Evadne stepped back, fading away into a darkness even Kade’s sight couldn’t penetrate. “I expect,” he whispered, “that you will…”

Kade dropped to the floor and used the hem of her dress to wipe a clear spot. Evadne had given her an idea. Those were powerful wards; they couldn’t simply dissolve. They must be about somewhere. If she could find one…

“Hey, come away from there.” She looked up to see a man in a Cisternan officer’s colors, who started back when he recognized her.

Kade said, “I need