Shaella, the Dragon Queen of Westland, daughter of the recently deceased demon-wizard Pael, carefully tipped the vial she held until a single drop of glistening crimson fell from it. The blood landed with a ‘plop’ in the clear water basin cradled in her lap. She stirred the concoction with a finger, sucked the liquid, then sat perfectly still until the swirling calmed.
On the surface of the stuff in her bowl she saw her reflection first. Her dark eyes contrasted with the angry pinkish-red burn scar that started at her temple and ran back over her ear, leaving one side of her head hairless. The rest of her thick, black mane could be laid over the ugliness so that it didn’t show, but she chose to let the ruined flesh be seen. A dragon had made that scar, the dragon that she tricked and enslaved, and then used to take over the biggest kingdom in the realm. Another scar, from a knife fight that had happened long ago in a Dakaneese tavern, ran down her cheek like a permanent teardrop. The scars were nothing to be ashamed of. Though they marred her beauty, they reminded those who came before her of her violent past, and her vast capabilities. The scars made it easier for her to be taken seriously, and she displayed them like badges of honor.
The people of her new kingdom, the struggling humans, the slithery zard-men, and the huge hairy breed beasts, all thought that the dragon was still hers to command. They didn’t know that she had lost her controlling collar, and thus the ability to command the great red wyrm. She didn’t discourage the notion that she could call it forth on a whim, though, and her appearance kept questions from being asked.
She mumbled a few words in a musical hum and the face in the water’s surface shimmered into that of another woman. This woman’s features were rounder: slightly chubby cheeks, framed by blonde curly ringlets, pale blue eyes speckled with green and gold, and a smile that spoke of true innocence. She looked stunning for the hundred and twenty year old marsh witch that she really was. Shaella remembered the woman’s ample bosom and wide curving hips from the visions they regularly shared together. All of Queen Willa’s Xwardian court had been, and was still, completely fooled by the powerful illusion that had changed the old witch’s appearance. In fact General Spyra, the aging head of the entire Highwander Blacksword army, was in love with her.
“What does our General have to say today, Mandary?” Shaella asked.
“Mastress, the hawk-man departed the palace here at Xwarda yesterday on his quest for the pirate treasure,” the plump woman said in a girlish voice.
“Did you place the finding stone?” Shaella asked.
“Yes Mastress. A boy-an apprentice-travels with them. The stone is hidden among his things. Queen Willa has an odd interest in the youth’s safety. So I doubt he’ll be abandoned or thrown overboard. And none of those seamen will dare to rummage through his duffels.”
“Good, good, Mandary. What else?”
“King Jarrek is still rigorously preparing his men to try and free his people from King Ra’Gren’s slave pens. The General told me that they will all be leaving soon.”
“And the High King?” Shaella interrupted. “When will he attack?”
“There has still been no talk of attacking Westland, my Mastress,” the witch woman said. “I have wheedled the General’s mind well. If it is to happen, as you fear it will, then General Spyra knows nothing about it.”
“What is it that he is waiting for?” Shaella asked aloud, but rhetorically. Before her spy could answer, she asked another question.
“What does the young king do? He has the power of Ironspike at his hip. Is he daft?”
“He is far from daft. Apparently he is trying to unite all of the Eastern Kingdoms.” The woman in the reflection looked away quickly. The alarm that came across her face faded as she continued. “As you know, Queen Willa and King Jarrek have bowed to him. Now King Broderick of Valleya is supposed to join them, and as soon as High King Mikahl weds Princess Rosa, her mother, Queen Rachel, and all of Seaward will no doubt do the same.” The plump woman looked away again; this time the alarm stayed in her expression. In a quick whisper she went on: “He seems content to leave you be while they rebuild what your father destroyed.” The last was spoken almost inaudibly, and before Shaella could respond, the woman’s face backed away from the reflection and a pair of plump hands came reaching in to disturb the surface of the liquid in Shaella’s bowl. As the vision shimmered away with the ripples, Shaella could still hear her spy’s girlish voice talking to the intruder.
“Oh, Marial dear, you startled me. You really shouldn’t enter unannounc…” Then the spell was completely broken.
My father, thought Shaella, the mighty wizard Pael. He had spent Shaella’s whole lifetime molding Prince Glendar into his puppet. To him, she had been nothing but an afterthought, or so it had seemed until he more or less handed her Westland on a silver platter. All of his bribing and scheming had been so that they might take over the realm together. It was a shame all that planning had gone over the sill when part of the demon Shokin had found its way into him. Pael’s thirst for power had caused him to rush into Highwander seeking the magic stored in the Wardstone bedrock of the place. Had he been patient and content with his original plan, he might not have been killed.
Shaella learned from her father’s mistakes, though. She’d learned that lust and greed and power could spoil a near perfect plan. She was just glad that she had followed through with her end of things. Love had nearly led her conquest into ruin, but now that her hold on Westland was secure, she had the time, and the means, to communicate with her beloved Gerard. It was time that she might not have had if she’d done things differently. It was only a temporary inconvenience that Gerard was sealed in the Nethers with all of demon kind. At least she kept telling herself that. Together they would find a way to breach the magical bonds that held him in that dark place. It was that hope that drove her, the very reason that she spent nearly every waking hour in Pael’s tower scouring his books in search of another way in and out of the Nethers.
There was another way. She knew this for certain. Long before Pavreal had created the Seal that he used to banish the demons back to their home, there had been a way. How else could there have been demons loose for him to banish? They had to have gotten out somehow.
The demon Shokin had breached the Nethers in those ancient days when he was just a man. He had wrought so much pain, destruction, and death in the world that the Abbadon, the Dark Lord himself, had turned him into a demon as his reward. Shokin had then terrorized demon kind until he rose above them all. Somehow he escaped the Nethers and brought his dark hordes with him. The great hero Pavreal eventually sent Shokin back to the Nethers through the Seal he carved into the Dragon’s Tooth Spire with the sword Ironspike. That Seal was destroyed by Hyden Hawk Skyler and the dragon, but there was another way. There had to be.
Pael had recently used Pavreal’s Seal to call Shokin back into the world, but something had gone wrong. Shokin was torn in half when Pael’s sacrifice wouldn’t die. Shaella’s lover, Gerard, had been that sacrifice. He crawled down into the Nethers with half of Shokin’s essence clinging to existence inside his mind. The other half of the demon filled Pael with the very power that eventually brought about his demise. Gerard’s older brother, had somehow forced the demon out of Pael and back into the Seal, thus condemning his sibling to the horror of the darkness forever. Or had he? Now both halves of Shokin had rejoined in Gerard. Gerard held them apart, and kept them from taking over his mind with the fiery will that burned deep inside him. When he had been at death’s door, alone and in the Nethers, he had eaten the yolk of one of the dragon’s eggs he had stolen. It changed him completely. More dragon-beast than man now, and with the two powerful halves of Shokin bickering in his brain constantly, he fought every day to stay alive, trapped in the demon-filled darkness.
Gerard was still weak, but he was growing stronger and was starting to tap Shokin’s power and knowledge. He had gleaned from the demon that Shokin had once used the Silver Skull of Zorellin to breach the Nethers. Shaella found an entry in a diary from her father’s library about the artifact. A raving mad man who’d been abandoned on an island by the brutal pirate Barnacle Bones had spouted on and on about a silver skull that conjured forth a demon wind that would carry the pirate anywhere he wanted to go. After leaving the man, Barnacle Bones was never seen or heard from again. He never made port with his treasure. Shaella had searched and searched for a clue to its location, but she found nothing. The fact that Gerard’s brother, Hyden Hawk, was going on a mysterious quest for pirate treasure could mean only one thing, though. He too was after the Silver Skull.
Already, Flick was manning a party and a ship to track down Hyden’s group and take the skull. With the finding stone hidden on Hyden Hawk’s ship it would be impossible for them to get away. With a few words and a sparrow’s heart she, or Flick, could cast a spell that would reveal the exact location of the finding stone.
Flick was a capable wizard. Once one of her father’s apprentices, he was loyal to Shaella’s cause and always eager to please her. The two breed giants he had chosen to accompany him on his mission, Drolz and Varch were both fierce fighters. The zard called Slake was a most competent captain. He had pirated several barges full of weapons and supplies that had been instrumental in Shaella’s taking of Westland. He was highly feared and regarded among his kind. The mixed crew of his sleek ship, Slither, were loyal and tested. As soon as Hyden Hawk found the skull, they would help Flick take it from him.
With those thoughts on her mind she rang a bell to summon her zardess attendant, Fslandra. A moment later the door to her chamber crept open and the young lizard-girl stepped in and bowed with a hiss.
“How may I serves yous?” she asked.
“Find Cole, and have him meet me by the turn of a glass in the old gathering hall, the one with the map table in it.” As she gave the order she rose to her feet, went to a closet and began searching for a particular garment. “And Fslandra,” she called out as the lizard-girl’s tail flitted out the door. “Have Lady Able fetch me up a hot bath immediately.”
“Yes Mastress,” came the fading reply.
It entertained Shaella deeply to watch the Lady Able carrying bucket after bucket of hot water up all those stairs. It thrilled her even more when she made the high born woman wash her naked body. It wasn’t the sexuality of it. It was the disgust and contempt that radiated off the woman as she lathered the rags with scented soap, and the way Lady Able had to clinch her bottom lip in her teeth to remind herself not to scrub too hard; the way her entire upper body glowed red with a mixture of embarrassment, anger and shame as she toweled Shaella dry.
Before Shaella took Westland, Lady Able had been waited on hand and foot in the luxury of her husband’s stronghold. She’d been the ruler of her roost, so to speak, and had never kept less than three personal attendants. In her day she had humiliated, overworked, and disrespected at least half a hundred young servant girls. She’d made the mistake of demanding that she be treated like a high born lady in front of Queen Shaella’s entire court.
“I will treat you exactly how you treated all those ladies that served you,” Shaella said. Then she added, “Now go fetch me a tray of fruit from the kitchens and be sure not to meet the master chef’s eyes.”
As a queen, Shaella was merciless, cleverly ruthless in her punishments, and more than a little dark in her deeds, but no one could say that she was unjust. She showed no favoritism to the zard-men, the breed giants, or the humans. High born, or low, covered in scales and hatched from an egg, or birthed from a mother’s womb meant nothing to her. A person was judged and rewarded or punished by their actions alone. The common folk had seemingly accepted her after she’d flown on her dragon’s back over Portsmouth and Crossington and driven the savage breed giants out of the streets and back into line. Little did those people know that she had sent the breed to terrorize them in the first place. When she began knocking the Westland nobles, who hadn’t escaped, off of their pedestals, some of the commoners began to really like her.
During King Glendar’s short and brutal stint as the king of Westland, he had rounded up nearly every able bodied man and boy and marched them off to their eventual deaths. Before he’d done that, he had decorated the bailey yards of Lakeside Castle with the piked heads of hundreds of men-Westland men. Suspected conspirators, men so loyal to his father that they tried to oppose his succession to the throne, even the common gossipers who whispered the wrong thing in the wrong ear, ended up with their heads displayed on pikes. The good people of Westland had been scared to death, and rightly so.
None of the people knew that Pael was Shaella’s father. Had they, they might not have been so accepting of her rule. The belief that it was Queen Willa’s Blacksword army, the Valleyans, and King Glendar’s evil that had taken away their husbands and sons was now prevalent. This played perfectly into Shaella’s hands because she had forbidden all trade with the Eastern Kingdoms, save for Dakahn. With all borders closed, the people were starting to feel safe again, especially since Queen Shaella was now publicly punishing the zard, and the breed, when they attacked any of the humans.
As she made her way to the map-room to meet Cole, Shaella passed a group of young merchant-men in an open corridor. They all bowed graciously to her.
“You’re looking radiant today, my queen,” one of them said as she moved past.
When the men were long behind them, Shaella spoke. “Fslandra, do you think I look radiant?”
The lizard-girl knew that Queen Shaella was mocking the young man, and she made a gurgling sound that passed for zardian laughter.
Cole was waiting for her in the map room with a silver goblet in his hand. Cole was Flick’s brother, and both of them emulated Pael just a little too much. Shaella’s father had been their mentor and teacher, and they both kept their heads free of hair and their skin as ghostly white as Pael had. Cole was the eldest. He was taller and thinner than Flick, but not by much on either count. From a distance they could easily pass as twins. They had been instrumental in the taking of Westland, and in her heart Shaella considered them as her dearest friends.
Cole started to bow to her but she waved it off. “We’re not in public, Cole. You know better.”
“Just showing my queen her proper respect,” he replied evenly.
“That’s enough, Cole.” She motioned for Fslandra to go. The lizard-girl shut the door behind her, leaving Shaella and Cole to themselves.
The room was paneled in deeply varnished oak. Along one wall there were wine-rack shelves holding hundreds of rolled maps. The opposite wall was glazed and a grand view of Lion Lake spread out before them. Expertly etched into the surface of the great oval table that filled the room was a map of the continent and its kingdoms. Shaella deftly plucked the goblet from Cole’s hand and sipped from it. She made a sour face then circled the map-table, studying it as she went.
“I hope I didn’t disturb your day,” she said, “but the idea that struck me was too marvelous to contain.”
“I’ve been dealing with reports about your Lord of Locar. It seems that Bzorch is bringing in Wildermont slaves to help build his watchtowers along the river.” Cole heaved a sigh of exasperation. “I’ve gone over seventeen different grievances concerning your pet breed giant’s conduct. Truthfully, I’m glad to be away from the mess.”
“Seventeen is too many to ignore. I’ll set out for Locar myself with a troop of zard on the morrow and settle the matter. I don’t want slaves in Westland. Bzorch can pay his laborers like everyone else.”
“You are the nicest evil sorceress queen I’ve ever met,” Cole jested. He was glad that the words Dragon Queen hadn’t slipped out of his mouth. Since she’d lost her dragon, Shaella hated the term. “Now what is this idea you can’t keep to yourself?”
“I’m driving myself crazy waiting on the High King to attack us. He has to try to get his father’s kingdom back or no one will really follow him. What good is a king who cannot hold his own kingdom? The problem is that every day he waits, he gathers more allies.” Shaella hopped up, sat on the map-table and tapped Seaward City. “I want to provoke him, force him to come at us, before he gains too much.”
“How do you want to do that?” Cole asked, his curiosity piqued.
“He’s going to marry Princess Rosa soon,” Shaella grinned. “I say we find out if High King Mikahl has enough honor to come rescue a damsel in distress. I’d like you to go to Seaward and invite Princess Rosa here for a visit.” She gave Cole a sinister wink and chuckled deviously. “Well, maybe invite wasn’t quite the word I was looking for.”