All That Lives Must Die - Eric Nylund [196]
Louis got on with the others, and it rose into the air.
From this aerial vantage, Louis saw not hundreds, but thousands of soldiers and wobbling cannon and catapults and wagons piled high with soldier pieces struggling back toward the castle from every direction. Most of these ragtag lines came under attack from the darkness.
Louis heard their distant screams and futile shots.
Although if he hadn’t just walked through the killing fields himself, he would have sworn it all had an air of theater to it.
The crane lifted his platform over the ramparts.
A silk spider line brushed Louis’s face, and he absentmindedly brushed it away.
Louis then saw a pleasant surprise: the art of the Poppy Queen’s duplicity.
Within the outer walls surrounding the Tower of Whispering Lilacs, camped under tarps to shield their glow, were ten thousand knights—each with gleaming silver rifle-lances and phosphorescing fungus sprouting from their armor and flesh. There were lines of spore catapults, steam-powered missiles, and squadrons of hanging cluster bats. Firepower to not quite assault the Vaults of Heaven . . . but enough to have given them a run for their money should they dare.
Certainly equal to any force Mephistopheles could muster.
He glanced back at the devastated, deflowered Poppy Lands.
All a calculated lure? He didn’t quite think so.
Sealiah’s lands (much like herself) had admirable natural defenses, ones she would not have so casually abandoned. The fact that she had chosen this particular deception was telling.
It was also information that Louis could sell—perhaps so ingratiate himself with the Lord of the Mirrored Realms that he could learn something of his plans . . . and in turn sell that information to Sealiah for her most delectable favors.
All the while eroding any advantage either might have over the other, so when the final battle came, the victor would be weakened.
He licked his lips. So dangerous. But so tempting.
The crane set him and the other knights down and they limped toward the Tower of Nightshade, darkest among its fellow flowering structures.
Louis fell behind.
There were precious few shadows in the courtyards with all the pink and lime green and robin’s-egg blue light pulsing from the fungus that grew everywhere. He found a sliver of shade, however, entered its welcome depths, and slinked away unnoticed toward the Oaken Keeper of Secrets.
That was where Sealiah’s map room was (if he remembered correctly). All her plans would be laid out there for the taking.
He almost giggled. How easy this would be.
Of course, she would not expect such a skilled infiltrator—and not him of all her relations. Who was he? Lowly Louis? The earth under her feet? It would not be the first time others had fatally underestimated his cunning.
Louis passed the guards and triple-locked outer door of the keep without notice, and glided up the stairs.
The map room would be on the third floor, where her winged insect spies brought the latest intelligence from the field.
He set one finger on the living wood of the map room’s tiny door.
No pulse beyond. It was empty.
He then undid the puzzle knots that would have given any mathematician specializing in topology psychotic fits. He slipped inside and ever so carefully eased the door shut.
Louis was grateful for the cool darkness within. The only light twinkled from the map table in the center of the chamber. From the decided lack of echoes, he felt of the dimensions of this place were larger than he recalled.
No matter. He tiptoed closer and saw the snaking Laudanum River and the Valley of the Shadow of Death, smoldering jungle and patches of black silk draped over fields that marked the locations of Mephistopheles’ armies in the Poppy Lands.
He also noted with great interest that a game of Towers had been set up alongside the map table, white and black cubes stacked and arranged to fight, and a handful already removed from play.