Bladesinger - Keith Francis Strohm [30]
Yulda chuckled at her foolishness as she gathered the length of a black robe around her and surveyed the parchment laid out on the rickety desk before her. The broad, confident strokes of the cartographer stood out in the light of her room, and the witch could clearly see the path her army would take as it began to challenge the wychlaran for dominion over Rashemen. She and the priestess Durakh had spent several months crafting and birthing their plans. The forces at her command slumbered restlessly in the dungeons and caverns beneath the citadel, and each day she stayed their hand made it more difficult to control them.
Her army couldn't win in open rebellion. She found that fact as deeply frustrating as it was true. The Iron Lord and his damned warlords controlled too many forces eager to shed their blood in defense of Rashemen, so she hunkered down within the ruins of Citadel Rashemar, biding her time, consolidating her power, and waiting for the right moment to unveil her strength.
That moment had finally come.
The secret, of course, was not to focus on the martial power of the Iron Lord. He and his band of thick-headed louts would find plenty of humiliation at her hands. It was the combined might of both the wychlaran and the vremyonni that posed the single biggest threat to her plans. The only way to defeat them, Yulda knew, was to separate them-to cause a division where there had never been any before.
She thought of the Old One, wasting away in her mountain demesne, and smiled. The old fool had not revealed a single secret to her, yet she had forced him to give her something far more precious-the very essence of his power. Using forbidden lore taken from the heart of the abyss, she had managed to forge a link to the core of the vremyonni's being. Even now, the wizard's power flowed through her, a slow wave of energy that surged, crested, and surged again, supplementing her own arcane strength and fueling her spells with eldritch might.
By attacking and overpowering him, the witch had broken a bond forged centuries ago. That would certainly have an effect on the arcane protectors of Rashemen. Already she could feel their spells of divination and their oracular gifts searching the land for her. They pressed against the mystic screens both she and Durakh had erected to conceal their location-pressed but did not penetrate.
And would not penetrate so long as the vremyonni and the wychlaran were not working in concert. Beneath their combined power, not even Yulda's own heightened gifts could deceive them.
A loud knock from behind the thick stone door of the chamber brought her attention to the present.
"Chaul," she heard a husky, feminine voice say from the hallway beyond. "Are you there?"
Yulda moved aside the thick rolls of parchment and picked up a clear crystal about the size of an egg sitting on the corner of the desk. She blew on it once, and as her breath touched the crystal, its surface shimmered with milky incandescence. The light from the crystal soon faded, leaving the image of a shadowy stone hallway and a single figure standing before a door.
Durakh.
Voluminous folds of earth-brown robes covered the broad expanse of the figure's shoulders and back but hung open in the front to reveal a suit of unmarred jet-black plate mail and plate leggings. Yulda could see that the priestess's left hand still touched the haft of her mace as she stood before the door. Red runes spilled down its length, pulsating hotly in the darkness of the hallway. A thick metal bracer with four wicked-looking metal claws covered the length of Durakh's other hand, from her wrist to beyond her fingertips.
The witch trusted Durakh, as far as