be the diversion, so please don’t risk too many lives. Ja’al, I need a dozen monks to come with me. We’re going another way. Maybe we’ll surprise Ra’aba.”
They lined up in the rooms opposite the stairs, dozens of monks and Fra’aniorian soldiers grimly clutching their oil gourds.
Lia nodded, remembering their battle cry from Ya’arriol Island. “For the Dragon!”
The monks all shouted as one, “For the Dragon!”
“Light up … go!”
Shouting their battle cries, Lia and her group burst through the doorway and across the twenty feet of open space leading to the stairway. Flicker shot ahead, already above the mercenaries. He dropped his deadly load. Lia flung her own gourd, scoring a direct hit on their shields. Flame sheeted toward the ceiling. Black smoke and terrible screams filled the hallways.
Oh well. King Chalcion would have to put up with a few of the kingdom’s treasures being burned.
“Go!” she screamed.
Crying, “For the Dragon!” the mixed group of soldiers and monks charged the stairs.
A few arrows winged their way, but mostly the mercenaries were rolling on the ground, helplessly trying to put out the oil fires as they burned alive. Lia knew that she would hear their agonised shrieks in her nightmares forever after. The monks dived through the leaping flames, charging into the halls beyond, clashing violently with the squads of Ra’aba’s mercenaries waiting there. More gourds flew. More treasures burned, but Lia cared little for them. Each life lost wounded her afresh.
Lia broke to her left, past a blazing tapestry. “Follow me!” Ja’al and Flicker paced her, the other monks a step or two behind. Sprinting through a series of richly furnished reception rooms, they came to the western wall of the palace building. “Through the windows,” said Lia, fighting with the window locks.
“Oh, Islands’ sakes,” said Hallon, shouldering her aside. With a swing of his war hammer, he shattered the priceless, stained crysglass panels. “After you, Princess.”
Hualiama leaped out almost onto the back of a Royal Guard. Flicker was already all over the man, razor sharp talons slicing any exposed flesh. Lia despatched the soldier with a thrust of her blade, while the giant twins leaped past her, closing with a further couple of Royal Guards. The purple robes fell.
“Around here,” Lia panted, leading the charge through the ornate formal gardens, called the Queen’s Joy. “The Great Hall’s just above us. There’s a balcony… some vines on the wall … played here as a child.”
“Give me that,” said Ja’al, helping himself to a throwing knife from her wristlet. He hurled it into the throat of a guard running toward them.
“Up here,” Lia pointed.
Without a word, the monks began to climb the dark walls. Meanwhile, the royal ward plucked a couple of poisoned darts from her bodice and flicked them at a pair of mercenaries who seemed to think that she presented an attractive target. They fell, convulsing uncontrollably.
Now it was her turn. Lia swarmed up the linger-vines which covered most of this wall of the palace. Up past the senior servants’ recreation rooms, up past her old tutor’s chambers, she climbed the three floors to the balcony outside the Great Hall. Glancing over her shoulder, she saw the King’s forces beset by Dragons, fighting at a standstill just a few hundred feet from the palace gates.
Then she was up and over the protective wall of the balcony, whipping out her Nuyallith blades to join the fray. Ja’al and his monks hammered into a squad of four or five dozen Royal Guards.
“For the true King of Fra’anior!” she screamed. “Are you with us?”
The soldiers laughed.
At last she had the space to truly fight, and fight she did, in that curious mental state where rational thought was suspended by the imperative of the battle-song raging in her veins, the roaring between her ears and the clash of metal against metal.
Whirling the ultra-sharp Nuyallith blades about her spinning body, Hualiama sliced into the squad of soldiers, causing even the veterans to fall back with alarmed cries. She was fire. She was the dance-step before death. She breezed between their clumsy blows. Lia was appalled to hear her own laughter rise over the clash of battle, hungry and fierce, all bloodthirsty passion and a Dragoness’ delight in the kill. She skidded to a halt beyond the soldiers, confronting a second squad of purple-clad Royal Guards pouring out of the hall.
What was she doing? What had she become?
“With me!” cried Ja’al.
Thrusting with his hands, the young monk impelled a number of the soldiers out of