There was a trail if you could call it such. It looked like someone had scraped the soil with shovels and flattened out two thin areas with the middle higher and pebbled with rocks and spare grass.
Something huge and heavy had made the tracks many years before we trod upon them. Hallway down, we came up on two huge metal monsters that were piles of rust, just barely enough left to let us know that these must have been earthmoving machines. It had a huge blade in front that must once have raised and lowered, it was sunk into the ground and was the color of the soil around it.
Once we were down off the mountain slope, the road became solid ribbons of concrete that still remained as flat and pristine as the day they were laid. The shoulders were another story. Weather and the elements had chewed them back making deep ravines and gullies.
The horses’ hooves slipped on the smooth surface and I wouldn’t dare to run if we had to save our lives. I remembered the pictures in the book that showed the carriages without horses and surmised that these roads had been made for them.
Coming into the outskirts of the city was eerie. Up close, we could see that the buildings were not in the pristine shape we had expected. Glass was broken, doors hung askew and there was nature encroaching on its domains. Trees growing inside the houses and towers, vines covering up store fronts and facades. There was nothing alive in this place, it was a city of ghosts. We traveled deeper into its heart, following the lanes towards the center and the twin black towers. There, Arianell said, we would find answers.
It started with an intense sensation just under my skin and then, a heaviness in my limbs. My breathing deepened, I just could not seem to bring in more air no matter how hard I sucked it in.
I felt ill. Not a craving for hunger but almost as if I had been poisoned. Something told me to turn around and run. Run back to the underground as fast as Diomed’s legs could carry us.
“Arianell,” I started and she stopped Beau to look at me. From out of the buildings, things descended on thin lines that zipped as they ringed us. Diomed reared and bolted even as Arianell drew her blades.
Tall creatures dressed in gray cloaks that moved like stealthy assassins flew out and towards us. I was busy controlling Diomed and reaching for my own weapons when I realized that my rifle, father’s pistol and sword were gone.
I used my feet to kick two of them away and Diomed smashed another. I could hear Arianell screaming and the sound of her blades singing as they wove a dance of death behind me. There were scores of them and they circled us, throwing silken lines that drifted through the air and were spun from the rods I had seen hanging from the belts of Averon’s soldiers. As they met in the air over our heads, they merged and joined. Drifting until I was enmeshed in a web of them.
They tugged and I fell off the stallion to land on the cold ground. Strands of the stuff clung to my eyes, nose, mouth and my entire body until not one inch of me could move. I couldn’t even see if Arianell was in the same predicament. I couldn’t speak but I could open my mouth and my teeth slashed the threads free. I roared and someone stood over me, impossibly tall and slender, throwing a shadow on my face and calling my name.
“Sleep, my blood prince,” my mother’s grandfather said and touched his wand to my forehead. My entire body froze as a massive surge, an electrical storm raced through me and stole my memories, my awareness and I thought, my life.
I felt it when we went through the Wall. Fire claimed my body, made me scream for mercy, made me wish for death. I thought that it was because once I crossed, the curse was reversing but when I surfaced with my eyes open days later, I was lying in a dark cell, chained by all four limbs and ravenous.
Lunging to my feet, I strained to reach what I could smell was a source of blood. A voice laughed at me and slowly slid the goblet closer. “Eat your fill, Prionsa Tiobhan,” Averon mocked me. “It will hold you but not satisfy you. After all, you nearly died trying to save their lives.” I stopped and stood back, staring at him and the cup. “Go ahead. Your dearly beloved horses wouldn’t want you to starve, would they?” He held up the cup and slowly poured thick equine blood onto the stone floor.
Sickened, I backed up until I hit the wall of the cell. “You killed my horses?”
“No, you did. Offered a choice between the Ranger and the horses, you chose the horses. You tore them apart in your eagerness to feed. Quite fascinating to watch, really.”
“Arianell? What have you done to her?”
“Tobias, if you want her to survive, you will obey me and bow, give me your allegiance or I will send the blood lust on you so strong that you will drain anything I place in front of you. Which will be the foolish Ranger.”
“You can’t make me do this,” I said and he shook his head.
“I can do that and more.” He gestured and the pain of my craving need became so powerful that I was on the ground on my knees, lapping up the spilled blood even as I was crying over the loss of Diomed and Beau.
He held the cup out to me and crawling, I approached him, my face smeared with blood and dirt. “Vow to me your obeisance, Tobias Spencer,” he said gently.
I placed my hands on the hem of his robe when I wanted to squeeze them around his neck. I bowed my head when I wanted to spit in his eyes. I pulled the hem of his robes for all I was worth, hoping to catch him off-guard. Instead, his hand came down with the cup and smashed the back of my neck, laying me flat on my belly. My teeth ground into the dirt on the floor and broke, blood filling my mouth.
“I am the Lyr of all Lyrs, Tobias. I have ruled this land for a thousand years. I have tamed the wild creatures over the Border Wall and even a Dracule or two before your time. You are only an untried boy, not exposed to the magic that we were born understanding. You are only a Newlander and a weak one at that. You do not and cannot stand against me.
“Since you will not give me your obedience, I will take it.”
He spoke and a harsh mist wrapped me in threads that I could feel but not see. My body rose of its own accord, knelt and bowed before the King. I heard my own voice state,
“I give you my fealty, loyalty and service, Lyr Averon, on my bond and my blood.”
“I take your bond, my grandson Tobias Tiobhan Spencer. Rise and walk behind your king.” I obeyed him and although I was seething inside my mind, the rest of me followed meekly behind him back up from the cells to the palace and it was like a re-birth. I found myself back in one of those tree rooms and they didn’t bother to lock the door or post guards.
I sat in my chair and waited. Was waited on, ate and drank what they put in front of me and was paraded before the High Court of the King.
Dressed as befit a prince and introduced to many lovely maidens. He could force me to dance attendance on them but he could not make me like any of them.
Weeks passed. I tried desperately to gain control of my own body but could not. I was desperate to find out what had happened to Arianell and skirted the thoughts of the horses. I’d even asked Averon but he had told me that I had no need to worry over trivia when the war was more important.
Every time I voiced a complaint or a protest, I was knocked down onto my knees and punished with the rods. They could do a number of things, cause pain, entangle one, produce light and heat and whip the skin off your back.
My food was strange. It looked and tasted like real food but something in it was lacking. When I asked him if he had reversed the curse, he only smiled and said, ‘maybe’.
I thought often about throwing myself out of the window of the treehouse cell, I knew I was high enough to not survive the fall. Until I saw the very thing happen to a child some four trees over and was stopped by an invisible force just about halfway down.
Laughing, the child waited until a Condorla and Klese pair soared by and retrieved the youngster to the scolding of the guard and her parents.
I wasn’t left alone, someone was always coming up to visit. Councilors, Ministers and other important personages from Averon’s government council. They told me everything from how the palace was run to the actual numbers of troops in the field and how the war was waging. As if I were to be the one to lead it.
The only respite I had from his control was in my mind, the only way I could escape so I went away when they came and that was worse because when I came back, I had no idea what my body had done while I was gone.
Sometimes, I would wake in the middle of sleep and looked wildly around to find myself cradled in bed covered with the finest sheets. Others, to wake and be in some fancy ballroom dancing with a beautiful girl. Once, I woke in the bath with several men scrubbing me until it felt as if my skin would flay off at their touch.
I had become a second passenger in the envelope I called my skin and my mind could not take it. Madness became something I both welcomed and feared.
“Averon,” a familiar voice jarred me out of the place I had made my bolt hole. It was enough to drag me into the present. “What have you done?” My grandfather sounded frightened. “He looks…fragmented. Insane.”
“He is quite mad,” Lyr Averon told him and I made music with his words.
“He sits there like a puppet without its strings, smiles, and answers me but there is nothing left of his mind.”
“Oh, his mind is still there, in turmoil because his will has not given in to my forced geas. I made him vow loyalty to me but it was not freely given.”
“And the girl, the Ranger? Is she dead?”
“No. She was too good of a warrior. She took down seven of my men before she was captured. I sent her to the Southern Border to fight.”
“Won’t she escape the Wall? Return here and rescue the boy? You said they were lovers.” He sounded disgusted at the thought of us.
“The minute she leaves the Border, a curse will hit her, rebound and leave the prince in the same blood lust you observed him in and she will watch him slowly starve to death. It is not a pretty thing to watch a Dracule die.”
“He is still cursed?”
“Half. Halfway stuck between both states. He can eat food but it leaves him wanting more so we lace it with blood from prisoners who are fed a diet of special herbs and silver. This keeps him quiet and vulnerable. Weak. The Dracule nature is powerful and progressive. The more he remains in it, the stronger he grows and the harder he will be to direct. Even with my magic and power.”
“The books say he must be wholly changed before he can recreate the Forgotten Ways.”
“He has already found the dearmad wedi colli and the Lost City,” Averon stated.
“But you knew of it already!” said my grandfather.
“We knew of where it lay, yes. But we were never able to step foot in it until he opened the old road to it. My men have been exploring the tower where they were headed. Already, they have found artifacts that defy the imagination. Soon, we will have all we need to open up the world and bring it under one rule, one magic, and one kingdom!”
Great, another megalomaniac who wanted to rule the world. I went back into my skull and lost myself in my madness.