Page 17 of Master of Storms
She couldn’t allow him to speak again.
Not when her ears were already blistered and she could still hear “crawl, crawl, crawl” echoing through her veins.
Clearly Marduk had the same idea. “This way!” he yelled, grabbing her arm and wrenching her toward the nearest window.
“Now you want to run?”Incredible.
The pair of them leapt through the window, spraying glass all across the cobbles below. She hit the ground with a grunt, tumbling forward into a roll before Marduk hauled her to her feet.
* * *
“Elves,”Solveig hissed, pacing in front of the fire she’d made and scratching at her arms. Every hair on her body remained on end. “What in the name of Tiamat are they doing here?”
Thousands of years ago, thedrekiand the elves had fought a monstrous war, and although thedrekiwon the right to rule this world, exiling the elves back to their home world, the threat always remained that they might return.
Marduk shivered as he stared into the flames. They’d stolen a shirt and a pair of trousers off some poor washerwoman’s line, and he’d taken the trousers, courteously giving her his back while she buttoned herself into the itchy shirt. “’They came through the gates, laughing so brightly it pierced the ears; armed with voice and face and the desire to please….’ I’ve never understood that line of the saga until now.”
It was an uncomfortable moment to realize she agreed with him.
The night seemed to press in around them.
They’d taken to the skies and found a secluded glen to camp in for the night, but who knew whether the elves could even track them?
It was like discovering a long-lost myth had come to life—and it was armed to the hilt.
“How did they even get here? The gates to Álfheimr should have been locked,” she said.
It was how those long-agodrekihad defeated the elvish forces.
Hundreds ofdrekiChaos-wielders—those who could manipulate the wild, uncontrollable magic of Chaos that Tiamat had spawned—had forged a key that could unlock a portal to thealfarhome world. A daring band ofdrekiwarriors had invaded Álfheimr, captured the king’s queen, and then forced thealfarking to withdraw to his home world with his legions—or risk seeing her dead.
The king had agreed to the terms, no doubt assuming he could return with a vengeance.
But the Key of Chaos had been used again to close the portal and then had vanished into myth and legend. Some said it was destroyed. Others whispered it had been cast into a volcano or the deepest of oceans.
But Solveig—who knew her kind and their weaknesses best—knew that somewhere out there, adrekiguarded the key like a treasure in his horde.
“Someone has the key,” she whispered. “Someone used it.”
It took her a long moment to realize that Marduk wore a wincing expression.
“It’s not the key,” he admitted. “My sister, Ishtar, was born of pure Chaos. She cannot shift forms and fly, but she can perform seemingly impossible feats, and several months ago, she opened the portal at World’s End where thealfarstaged their invasion. Nothing came through the circle there, and we insisted she close it, but….”
But.
The world fell away from her.
Solveig’s mouth dropped open.
“You mean to tell me that the circle at World’s End—which abuts my father’s lands—was opened to Álfheimr, even for a second, and nobody saw fit to inform theSaduof this potential threat?”
The words came out flat and hard and incredulous, because surely nobody was that stupid?
“And what would you have done if you had been told?”
“Removed thethreat,” she burst out. “Placed guards at the circle. Ensured that none of these stinking elves came through—”
“Precisely.” He prowled toward her. “We were handling it. The queen of theIkkibucourt has placed watchers at the portal, and—”
