Forsaken House by Richard Baker Read Free Book Online Page A

palace proper. A thin crust of snow lay on the uneven ground within the white walls, and most of the halls and corridors were open to the sky above. It struck Nurthel as supremely ironic that the very palace of Myth Glaurach’s grand mage should serve as the hidden citadel of she who had once been the most dangerous enemy of the realm of Eaerlann.
    He came to a broken white tower and entered. That place at least still had intact floors above, so the ceiling kept out the rain and the snow, but its broad windows were blank and empty, the old theurglass that once covered them long since gone. The chamber possessed a magnificent view of forest-covered hills and snowy mountain peaks beyond Comfortable furnishings—elegant divans, credenzas, and bookshelves, with a gorgeous tapestry secured on one wall—stood carefully placed in the room’s interior so as not to be exposed to the weather.
    “My lady!” he cried. “I have returned!”
    “So I see, Nurthel.” A sinuously graceful figure turned from the wide, empty window. “You took care to conceal your retreat?”
    “Yes, my lady. We used the ring gate to return to the ruins of Ascalhorn.”
    Ascalhorn, the city later known as Hellgate Keep, and later still nothing but a windswept ruin, was almost thirty
    miles away. The fey’ri lord went to one knee, bowing in the presence of his mistress.
    Like the fey’ri who served her, Sarya Dlardrageth possessed both demon and elf blood. But in her case, she was a true daemonfey, and her demonic bloodline was pronounced indeed. The demonspawned sun elves known as fey’ri were descended through several generations from the mating of elf and demon, but Sarya was a princess of House Dlardrageth. Her father was a balor, a great and terrible demon lord. Sarya’s skin was deep red and her hair a blazing orange-gold as bright as a flame. She favored gold-embroidered robes of black that overlapped like plates of dark armor, carefully crafted to incorporate powerful defensive enchantments and leave her adequate room to flex her wings in flight or wield the sinister spells at her command.
    “You may rise.” Sarya said.
    She turned her back on the windows and came closer, moving with the restless grace of a predatory animal kept in a space too small for her. Nurthel knew that she used the tower for her own quarters because of the numerous windows and open spaces beyond, since she strongly disliked confining spaces.
    “Well, Lord Floshin, let me see my prize,” she said.
    Nurthel lifted his eyes to his queen’s face and stood. Despite her fiendish heritage, she was seductively beautiful, with classic elf features and the figure of a winsome girl. At a glance one might think her no more than twenty years of age … but her eyes were cold and malevolent with an ageless evil. Sarya Dlardrageth had first walked the world more than five thousand years past.
    “As you command, my lady,” he said. He reached beneath his tunic of scale mail and drew out the broken crystal in its pouch, offering it to her. “The paleblood elves and their rabble were careless, as you said they would be. They were not expecting an attack, and we slew dozens before they remembered how to fight.”
    “No one remembers how to fight, in this diminished age,” Sarya replied. “How many did you lose?”
    She did not place any great value on her servants’ lives, but she didn’t have many fey’ri at her command. Each life was a resource not to be wasted lightly.
    “Five fey’ri fell to the Tower defenders, my lady. We were careful to carry off the dead. Most of the yugoloths and demons died too, but of course they were summoned and bound for that purpose, and we expected to spend them in battle.”
    “You have done well, Nurthel. Very well indeed.”
    Sarya took the bundle from his hand and quickly unwrapped the crystal, discarding the cover. She caressed the device with her taloned hands. The stone was a pale, milky white, perhaps six inches long and