Jenna Helland: The Fanged Crown

“Verran!” Harp screamed.

Shristisanti held his prize up to the sunlight flooding through the jagged hole in the roof. As he peered at the blood elixir, the red light coming through the glass vial stained the guardian’s haughty, self-satisfied face. Harp knew that as soon as the guardian slithered back into the chamber with the Torque, they would be powerless against him. Staring at Verran’s body slumped on the ground, his head twisted wrong on his neck, Harp was struck by an overwhelming sense of hopelessness—evil always won, and there was nothing he could do to change it. A flood of images filled his mind: Majida lying dead by Verran’s hand, Tresco smugly leading Ysabel down the aisle of a cathedral to marry Cardew, Anais’s palace in flames. Harp heard Liel calling his name and looked up to see Shristisanti moving toward him. Harp was overcome by a sense of desperation. He’d failed, yet again.

Boult screamed in Dwarvish and sprinted to the pile of rubble. In the instant that Harp understood what Boult planned to do, his hopelessness evaporated, and his survival instincts kicked him into action. Across the hall, Liel immediately grasped the dwarf’s plan as well. She grabbed Kitto’s hand, and everyone scattered away from the guardian.

Still holding the vial of elixir above his head, Shristisanti stared in surprise as they ran like frightened bunnies. With his loaded crossbow in his arms, Boult charged up the debris pile like he was being chased by a pack of flaming hellbeasts. Liel and Kitto dashed under the gallery and dived behind one of the marble statues. Since the guardian was between him and the debris pile, Harp bolted for the Torque chamber. Scrambling through the door, he skidded past the blackened screen, slid feet first onto the glassy floor, and smacked into the stone wall.

When he reached the top of the rubble, Boult leaped high into the air, fired his crossbow at the apex of his jump, and rolled down the far side of the pile.

“You missed,” Shristisanti boomed as he watched the bolt soar harmlessly over his head.

The bolt struck the wall above the pearl door, precisely in the center of the mosaic depicting the Captive in the last moments of his life. The impact of the bolt against the hard tile snapped the wooden shaft in half, and the splintered pieces fell to the floor. In the heartbeat of silence that followed, Kitto sucked in his breath, Liel laid her hand on Kitto’s arm, and the sound of a wire snapping echoed across the hall.

The mosaic swelled outward from the wall, like a giant hand was pushing it from behind. Licks of fire burned between the gaps in the tile. A flaming piece of ceramic blasted out of the mosaic, ricocheted and sank deep into the stone pillar near Liel and Kitto. With increasing speed and frequency, fragments of tile snapped off the wall, shot through the air with a whine, and peppered the cavernous hall with flaming projectiles. Most of them sailed over Shristisanti’s head, but one shard winged him, piercing his flesh and carving out a circular hole all the way through his shoulder.

The remainder of the mosaic tiles exploded from the blackened stones of the wall behind them. The flames blinked out, and deafening noise, like the sound of a tidal wave crashing into a forest, swept across the hall. The mosaic exploded in a maelstrom of knifelike shards and choking dust. The torrent of blistering hot shards engulfed Shristisanti, slicing through his scales and shredding his body. The bloody remains of his body dropped to the floor with a wet thud while the shards continued on their trajectory. They sailed through the air until they hit the debris pile and stuck into the rubble like colorful spikes.

“Everyone all right?” Harp yelled from inside the chamber. When the gritty dust cleared, he saw the fleshy chunks of Shristisanti heaped on the floor.

Hearing his friends’ voices call back in assent, Harp stood up and brushed himself off, every muscle in his back and neck complaining of misuse. The glassy floor gave off a faint red glow, but not as brightly as it had done before. At the far end of the chamber, the Torque lay unceremoniously on the floor. Harp leaned over and tentatively touched the band of metal. It felt cool and harmless against his fingertips. When Shristisanti died, the barrier around the city that had prevented their easy entry must have fallen, leaving the Torque unprotected.

Harp turned the Torque over in his hand and wondered at all the machinations that had gone on for a simple piece of tarnished metal, a shackle that had once bound the giant Captive. Had the plan already been in progress when Captain Predeau kidnapped Liel? When Cardew snapped his fingers and had Tresco torture Harp at Vankila? Was Boult right that everything was part of a larger order of events, and when Verran stole the blood elixir, he was acting in someone else’s theater? Who was getting revenge on whom? And had it been the Captive’s day of vengeance, above all else that had transpired during their tenday in the jungle? Harp shook his head. A man could go crazy thinking such thoughts.

“Harp!” He heard Liel calling to him. There was a tension in her voice that made him hurry out of the chamber to see what was wrong. As he crossed through the pearl door into the great hall, he saw ropes dangling down from the hole in the roof. Several masked archers perched on the side of the hole with arrows notched and pointed down at his friends.

Liel, Boult, and Kitto stood in the center of the hall with their hands on their heads, surrounded by a dozen men in leather armor and dark tunics. A handsome, square-jawed man stood off to one side talking to a hooded man in a dark cloak. As Harp emerged from the chamber holding the Torque, the man pushed back his hood revealing long gray hair and a knowing smile. At the sight of the man’s face, Harp’s stomach clenched. The last time he’d seen the gray-haired man, Harp had been strapped to a chair in the Vankila Slab watching parts of his body die piece by piece.

“Master Harp,” Tresco sounded pleased, as if he were seeing a friend after a long absence. “It’s been so long.”

Harp kept his mouth closed. If Tresco was here, that must mean the soldiers were husks and the man beside him was Cardew. Harp had never met Liel’s husband before. Involuntarily, he glanced at Liel and saw that she was looking at him already. When their eyes met, Liel gave Harp a gentle smile.

“You retrieved the Torque,” Tresco said, clasping his hands in delight. “I must say I’m grateful.”

Still, Harp didn’t speak. He avoided looking at Shristisanti’s oozing remains where he’d last seen the vial of elixir. Instead, Harp looked at Verran’s corpse with a strong sense of regret and sadness. Harp wasn’t angry with the boy for what he’d done. If Verran hadn’t stolen the blood, Kitto would still be cursed, maybe even dead. But then, Majida wouldn’t have been hurt, or maybe even dead.

“Does anything happen for a reason?” asked Harp, looking past Tresco’s archers at the blue of the sky. “Or is it just random events ramming into each other in search of a purpose?”

“There’s a reason, Harp,” Liel assured him, earning a dark glance from Cardew.

“Such optimism from someone who should already be rotting in the ground,” Tresco sneered. “And yes, there is a reason. Apparently, you were meant to retrieve the Torque for me. With the barrier in place, there was no way through the ever-so-convenient hole in the ceiling that Cardew found. But once you killed the guardian, we were able to drop in, just like that.”

But Harp barely heard what Tresco said. He was thinking about each of his friends, what might be going on in their heads, and how they might react to the situation they now faced. Kitto would be all right—he wasn’t personally involved with Cardew or Tresco. Harp was concerned about Liel. Her husband had plotted to kill her, which was was bound to shake her sensibilities. But she had given Harp that serene smile, so he figured she was in control of herself. Harp swung his glance to Boult, who looked stoic on the surface. Yet Harp knew that the dwarf must be ready to explode.