those who betrayed him. He would stretch out his cold metal hand, and a suitable vengeance would be wreaked. There was nothing more certain in this life.
No, even if he wanted to give up this life, he could not. There was no escape. There was nothing to do but make the best of it.
chapter fourteen
Prince Sardriane looked up. The face he saw was beautiful and reassuring. It was that of a lovely elf woman, his mother. He was surprised but he could not quite remember why. He felt as if he were awakening from a deep, languorous sleep and had not quite woken fully yet. He tried sitting up, but he could not. He tried moving his arms, but he could not. Something seemed to be restraining his hands and his legs and when he tried to lift his head something bit into his throat.
‘What is going on?’ he asked.
‘Hush,’ said his mother. ‘There is nothing to worry about.’
Why was she naked? Why did she caress him so lasciviously?
There was something odd about her voice. It sounded like mother, or rather it sounded as she would have if she were in great pain while she spoke. There appeared to be something wrong with her head. Two small curling horns grew out of the side of her brow. Her mouth looked a little distorted too, as did her face.
Sardriane sniffed. There was a hideous stench in the air of burned meat, mingled with charred wood. He turned his head to one side, as far as whatever was restraining him allowed, and he saw that he was in his home, or what was left of it.
The roof had crashed in, and the walls looked burned through. A few of the more intricate carvings, of which his dead father had been so proud, were still intact, but they were soot-blackened in some places and the colour of ash in others. There was something else in the air, a strange sickly perfume that was cloying and yet thrilling at the same time. It smelled of musk and rot and hinted at other things that he did not want to think about.
‘I remember,’ he said, for he suddenly did. He remembered the fall of Tor Annan, the way the howling daemonic horde had come racing towards the walls, some falling to elf shafts, the daemons ignoring arrows that had not been enchanted by a mage.
The winged things had flapped down from the sky and attacked first the siege machines and then the archers. Death had come so very close to him in the opening moments of the battle. The winged furies had struck down the elves on either side of him. Daemons had smashed through the gates and clambered onto the walls, killing everybody they encountered. One had loomed over him, been about to strike and then at the last second, at the shouted command of what might have been a leader, had struck down Alfrik instead. Mad cultists had come swarming through the broken gateway, howling and chanting ecstatically as they slew.
At first the elves of Tor Annan had fought bravely. Archers had died where they stood, still unleashing their arrows at targets that ignored them. Warriors had tried to halt the monstrous red-skinned daemons. But as the fight went on it became obvious they could not overcome their foes. Some had fled. Some had tried to surrender. And some, seeing the daemonic leader of their enemies, had been overcome by a strange madness and had started throwing themselves at its feet and grovelling in ecstatic communion.
Sardriane had been one of the ones who had fled. He had raced through the streets to the ancestral home he shared with his mother and a few ageing retainers. He had told them to bar the door and to make ready to withstand a siege. Some of them, feeling that death was preferable to falling into the hands of their enemy, had taken their own lives using poisons preserved for that purpose. Sardriane had urged his mother to do so, for he feared what might happen if she were to fall into the taloned claws of the besiegers. She had refused, saying that while he lived, she would. She had as much pride as he. After all, she too was of the Blood of Aenarion.
For a while they had huddled in their chambers while the town burned around them and screams echoed down the streets. It sounded as if some hideous carnival of torture and wickedness were