Mercedes Lackey - Crown of Vengeance

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To all of those who have accompanied me on this journey: my dear coauthor, Mercedes Lackey; our mutual agent, Russ Galen; our skilled and long-suffering editor, Melissa Singer (without whom this book could not have been what it has become); my dear Dennis, always the ready gadfly; and of course, my beloved Diogenes, faithful friend and companion, this volume is respectfully dedicated. And to Rafal Gibek and Terry McGarry, princes among copyeditors, my deepest thanks for your yeoman labors on my behalf.

James Mallory

Acknowledgments

Many thanks to our tireless, unbelievably good copyeditors, Terry and Rafal. Authors rant when copyeditors are bad and never say a peep when they are outstanding.

Well, were changing that. Thank you, Terry McGarry and Rafal Gibek. Without you this book literally would not have been possible.

PROLOGUE

POWER AND PAIN

The Endarkened cannot make, they can only mar.

Thurion Pathfinder,

The Scroll of Darkness

Before Time itself came to be, He Who Is had been: changeless, eternal, perfect. And all was Darkness, and He Who Is ruled over all there was.

Then came the Light, dancing through the perfection of the Dark, separating it into Dark and not-Dark. Making it a finite, a bounded thing. Where there had been silence, and Void, and infinity, there came music, and not-Void, and Time

A world.

At first, He Who Is did nothing, for it was only by the creation of that which was not he, not his, that He Who Is was able to perceive Himself, and He was spellbound by the discovery of His own beauty.

But the Light was not perfection. The Light was change, a change as infinite as the changelessness of He Who Is. Time was swift to One Who had only known timelessness, and by the time He Who Is became aware of the danger, it was too late to avert it.

But it could yet be repaired. And so He Who Is turned the Lights weaving against it, for by its very nature, the Light implied the Dark. All things in its World possessed opposites, for no thing could be named if it did not possess an antithesis. Fire and water, time and eternity, leaf and star

Life and death.

The first life raised up by the Light was green: leaf and branch, bud and seed, flower and fruit to sweep over the face of the land. It changed the harsh stone, beautifying it with a thousand living shapes. It flourished for a time, until He Who Is conjured plague and blight and rot that swept across the land, devouring the green life down to bare rock, making the land stark and sterile once more. But plague and blight and rot were merely tools, and they did not slay all. The green life was reborn, and with it came red life: beasts of earth and air and water. Red life took on a thousand shapes and filled the land, until there was no corner of it that did not hold red life and green.

And once more He Who Is woke from the contemplation of His perfection and rose up out of the deep darkness. He kindled the forests to flame, slaughtered the schools and flocks and herds, set red life to feed upon itself just as it fed upon green life, set green life to poison red. Hunger fed upon hunger until green ocean and green earth were red, and all the work of the Light was undone.

But in the destruction of the red life, the Light realized He Who Is meant to take the world from them, the beautiful world of shape and form and time and boundary they had created. Light could not destroy the Darkness without destroying itself, but it could bring life to flourish again where destruction had walked.

And to this life, it would give weapons.

Once again, life was reborn from death. The new life was neither green nor red. It was as silver as the Light itself. Rot did not extinguish it nor did death destroy it. It was as changeable as He Who Is was changeless. It grew and changed and spread to all the places red life and green life had been, and then it spread farther still. Light itself coursed through the veins of silver life, and Light fell in love with silver life. Light left the high vault of heaven and scattered itself across the land, and silver life traveled to the places of the Light to rejoice in it.

But He Who Is vowed He would win in the end. This time, He did not strike at once. This time He bound His war into time, to let His tools learn from the enemy He would ultimately destroy. To all the things of the Light, He Who Is held up a dark mirror. For the Bright World, a World Without Sun. For life and love, death and pain. For trust, treachery. For kindness, power.

For skill magic.

He Who Is created thirteen instruments as eternal and changeless as He Himself, instruments whose sole purpose was the destruction of the Light and all the Light had made. And when His Endarkened had completed their task, the world would once more be what it had been before the Light had come. Changeless. Eternal.

Perfect.

Virulan was First among the Thirteen, king of the Endarkened. He had always been king. He always would behow not? His subjects were loyal to him, and to He Who Is, who had planted the Tree of Night, who had set the Shadow Throne in the Heart of Darkness, who had placed the Crown of Pain upon Virulans brow.

Who had set him his task.

At first, it had seemed that to accomplish the task they had been set would be a simple matter, for they could not die, and the Brightworlders could. And so Virulan and the Twelve took to the sky each night, slaughtering without cease until the terrible bright light by which the Brightworlders marked time came again.

And time passed, and Virulan soon saw that this was not enough. The Brightworlders were too many. Slay a hundred, and a thousand sprung up in their place. Again and again, the Endarkened had scoured a place of life, only to return and find it fecund once more. No spells that Virulan and his Twelve could cast were terrible enough to do the bidding of He Who Is.

If he had been capable of it, Virulan would have despaired.

But he was not, and so he sought counsel.

He Who Is had granted them the boon of eternity, but all gifts must be paid for. The Endarkened did not sleep, just as they did not age, but an Endarkened who did not regularly seek a period of silence and contemplation would enter eternity in truthnot death, for they could not die, but the inability to perceive Time.

Such an Endarkened would be useless to He Who Is and it would be his fate to be forever sealed away in a chamber in the Deep Earth. Virulan had no desire to lose the favor of