Elana and Rennin gave no warning battle cry as they charged the guards who stood outside the great doors to the throne room. Rennin hit the first Heart’s Guard full force with the Blade of Xadaer, cutting him in two with a single stroke. Elana was only a step behind, running the Solirium soldier next to him through the neck with her rapier. I raised my fist, bloodied it, and hit the other two guards with a wall of force that sent them flying through the doorway with a scream and a crash.
We rounded the corner together, stepping into the throne room with arms raised, prepared to kill or die.
Aemillian Solirius, the great Usurper, sat on the gleaming black glass edifice of the Rorgoth Throne, itself on a dais a full step above the court gathered at his feet. Utterly ridiculous: the man was even taller than Derrek, he needed no further elevation. He was every bit as angular as the portraits I had seen: his long, diamond-shaped face, the narrow aquiline nose, his columnar neck and his lush black hair that hung halfway down his chest. What those portraits had not conveyed was his elegance, beauty, and charisma. Nor had they conveyed what only an elven sorceress or perhaps a wonder-working priest might see: the blue-black corona of power he wore, opposite to and even greater than Derrek’s golden one. The sheer force of his presence stopped us in our tracks, three paces into the throne room.
The emperor’s corona was so vast and dark that it dimmed the very light of the sun, despite its best efforts to pour in from the huge windows and skylights. More than that, the miasma of the Shadow Realm pooled here even more thickly than it had even in his private chambers. It stained the walls and dripped from the ceiling, like rain through a badly patched roof. It pooled ankle-deep on the floor around the throne.
A dozen nobles and courtiers hovered in circles around the Usurper, richly dressed and looking vaguely absurd compared to the minimalist elegance of his red-trimmed black robes of elven spidersilk. A handful did appear to have brought guards with them. Those armsmen moved to help the two I had thrown, and to form a wall between us and the emperor. Each and every one of them was stained with the shadowy miasma that poured from the emperor and his magic throne.
“Derrek,” the Usurper said in a low, rich voice. He sounded pleased. He did not deign to acknowledge the rest of us.
“Aemillian,” Derrek answered from behind me. He sounded tired and sad.
“I’m so glad that you finally made it,” said the Usurper.
“That makes one of us,” Derrek said. “I always hoped that it wouldn’t come to this.”
“Do you not even see us,” Elana demanded. “Do you not know who we are?”
“Of course I know who you are, Elana Traiana,” he said. “You are merely beneath my notice.”
That insult broke the spell of his charisma. Elana and Rennin charged, screaming.
“For my father!” she cried.
“For House Traianum!” shouted Rennin.
The Usurper’s defenders charged to meet them. The Usurper, himself, made a gesture, flinging two bolts of blue-black force at our companions. I raised a shield that blocked one, cursing as the force of his will reverberated through me and punched the second bolt through my shield toward Elana. Thank the gods, Derrek’s shouted shield blocked that one.
Two against eight were not good odds, but Elana and Rennin worked to even them quickly. Elana ran one man through at first contact, then spun out of the way of two others in a move that she had clearly learned from Veralar. Rennin swung the mighty Blade of Xadaer like it weighed nothing, cutting one guard in two and opening the belly of another with a single stroke, then spinning to block – and break! – the blade of a third while dodging a fourth.
I wanted to help even the odds for them, but Aemillian flung another pair of shadowy levin bolts, this time at me and Derrek, who had drawn his knife and stepped up beside me. This time I was able – barely – to block both bolts, freeing Derrek to take a turn flinging walls of force, using his to drive back the nobles who had gathered around their emperor.
The personal attention of our Great Wizard but not their own was more than the Usurper’s advisors and petitioners could handle. They fled the dais – some to the back of the room, some circling widely around us to flee the chamber, one going so far in his panic as to throw himself from the third-story window.
Derrek’s strategy – and the flight of his court – startled Aemillian enough that I had a moment to fling another wall of force of my own, hurtling a pair of soldiers out the same window the courtier had taken and reducing the fighters’ odds to more than even enough. Elana left her sword in the first man’s neck and drew a dagger and spun, slicing through the jugular of another to release a stunning fountain of blood. In the same amount of time, Rennin spun with the inhuman speed granted him by his magic sword, taking one guard’s arm off, and then the last guard’s head.
“Delightful,” Aemillian deadpanned as the disarmed guard’s screams filled the room and gallons of blood poured across the polished marble floor. The reek of blood and piss and shit filled the throne room, as did the spiritual miasma of death, mingling with the miasma of the Shadow Realm.
Rennin rounded on the Usurper, then. He screamed as he charged, the Blade of Xadaer raised above his head. The Usurper just smiled. Three paces across bloody ground, almost too fast to see, then a prodigious leap across the remaining two yards brought Rennin and the magic sword down on the smug wizard. The Blade of Xadaer struck home. There was a flash of brilliant white light and a sound like a great bronze bell.
When the light cleared, Rennin was skidding across the floor toward my feet, the Blade clutched desperately in his hands. The Usurper stood before his throne, unharmed, his face split by a cruel, thin-lipped smile.
Just past Rennin, Elana stood staring, her mouth and eyes wide open with shock. Derrek walked casually around them, his chisel-pointed knife held loose at his side. His face was blank, but I already knew.
We had been right to suspect him. Songlover had warned me that Derrek Rowan acted only in his own interests. The dragon had warned us all that one of us was a traitor. She had known not to let us cross the Eastern Veil. Derrek had only promised life and freedom to me, not Elana or Rennin. Now I knew why … and how he had been so confident that such a promise was his to make.
The Usurper stepped down from the dais and faced us, standing in the blood of his retainer’s guards.
“Ah,” the Usurper said as Derrek took his place at his right hand. “The long charade is over at last. Welcome home, Derrek.”
Elana fell to her knees even as Rennin struggled to rise to his. Some terrible desperate sound escaped my throat.
“Bastard,” Rennin cursed. “You demon-spawned fucking bastard.”
Derrek sighed.
“I asked you, Elana,” he said, looking down at her from his place at Aemillian Solirius’ right hand. “At the very beginning, I asked you why I should help throw this man from the throne that I helped him to take. I took you beyond the mortal realm and back again and you never did provide a convincing answer.”
His tone was cold and distant. His eyes were colder still. His gaze passed over each of us, utterly inscrutable.
Then Derrek’s neck bulged as his shoulder flexed and his left arm, half hidden, surged. The Usurper’s eyes bulged. The emperor’s back arched and he gurgled out a scream as the smell of fresh blood redoubled in the air and a glistening wet spot bloomed on his skin-tight robes, just above his low-slung belt.
“You, beloved,” Derrek said as the blue-black light around the Usurper flickered and vanished, “you provided that answer for them.”
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