The Ruin Part 13

"I saw a dragon," she said. Obviously, while scouting the countryside as he'd ordered.

"d.a.m.n it!" Divided into several companies, the Sossrim army was preparing to march south, and it was vital that the enemy not locate any portion of it prematurely. The commanders were exploiting every advantage of cover and terrain, while the druids and wizards did their best to shroud their comrades in spells of concealment, but even so, everyone conceded that if a dragon came too close, it was likely to notice them. "How far away?"

"Close," she said, "and on the ground." The feathers melted into weather-beaten skin, and the golden owl eyes dwindled into gray human ones, revealing a face that might have been fetching if she didn't always look so somber and severe.

"But-"

Stival heaved himself to his feet. "We're lucky in that regard, anyhow, but I doubt we can kill a wyrm by ourselves. We're too few. We'll have to pray it stays put long enough for us to sneak back to camp ..." He realized she was frowning. "I cut you off. What else did you want to say?"

"It's not the usual kind of wyrm. It's about as long as my arm from its snout to the tip of its tail."

"A very young one, then." A dragon they probably could kill. He picked up his coat of white dragon-scale armor and started pulling and buckling it on.

"I don't know. There's something funny about the shape of its wings, but even though it was asleep, I didn't feel like flying close enough to figure out exactly what."

"You were wise. A wyrm's senses are keen enough that you might have woken it, and then it might have been able to tell you weren't an ordinary owl."

"There's more you should know. It's got two companions sleeping alongside it, one a full-grown man, one that's either a child or a member of a small race."

"One of Iyraclea's dwarves."

She shrugged. "Could be. As I said, I kept my distance."

"Right. Eat something while I rouse the others."

The patrol consisted of highly competent warriors, their martial skills sharpened by the perils and hards.h.i.+ps of the past two months. They only needed a short time to ready themselves for action. Stival explained the situation, and they moved out.

Everything was a little brighter once they exited the copse of oaks where they'd spent the night, but even then, it was hard to make out men just yards away. Their white garments blended with the snow, and they all stalked along with commendable stealth.

None more so than Natali, even though she was the one who'd gone without rest to scout by night. Stival gave her an admiring glance. If they both survived, if a day came when she was no longer a warrior under his command-but no. It was a stupid fancy. She was too sensible and prudish to lie with him simply for the pleasure of it, and too bereft of gold or land for a fellow with his aspirations to court in a serious way.

She led the patrol up a rise, and the two of them peeked over the top. In a depression on the other side lay the little dragon and its two companions, just as she'd described. The dwarf, if that was what he was, lay mostly concealed beneath the cloak he was using for a blanket. But from what Stival could make out, he seemed slighter of frame than the general run of arctic dwarves, while the hair on his head was black, not white.

"What do you think?" Natali whispered.

Stival didn't know. The little drake was no ordinary white, he was certain of that much. Even in the feeble light, its scales gleamed like silver, or a mirror. If the dwarf hailed from the Great Glacier, he was a member of a clan the Sossrim had never before encountered. Of the three, the human with his lanky frame and straw-colored hair was the least remarkable, but even in his case, his boots and other details of his filthy attire made him appear different from the common ice-dwelling barbarian.

It would be a foul deed to attack strangers if they meant no harm. If they weren't members of the Ice Queen's army. Yet what else could they be?

Stival decided that the wyrm at least must die while it lay vulnerable. Permit it to wake, and it might well strike at them with sorcery, or at least use magic to evade them. Then it could wing its way back to the dracolich and report where it had encountered Sossrim warriors.

So Stival and his comrades would pierce it full of arrows, but try to take the man and dwarf alive for questioning. If they turned out to be innocent travelers, he'd do his best to make amends.

He used hand signals to convey his orders. Silent and spectral in their white cloaks, his warriors rose, nocked arrows, and aimed them at the drake.

Taegan had neither glimpsed nor felt the attack that killed him, and as a result, it took him a while to realize he was dead. That he was a bodiless mote of awareness suspended alone in emptiness. A malignancy gnawed at him. In time it would extinguish him altogether, or at least drive him mad with the threat of it. Surely this was punishment for a life ill-spent, his own strange little oubliette tucked away in one of the hundreds of nightmare worlds comprising the Abyss.

Once the terror of that realization abated a little, he tried to comprehend what he'd done to deliver his soul into darkness. Certainly he'd committed an abundance of what one faith or another considered sins. He'd l.u.s.ted after women and relished every sort of luxury and pleasure. He'd killed in anger, and when it wasn't strictly necessary. Perhaps he'd even been a trifle vain.

Yet if that had been sufficient to d.a.m.n him, every rake in Lyrabar likewise stood condemned, and somehow, he couldn't believe that. His true offense lay elsewhere, and eventually he realized what it was.

Disloyalty. Coldness of heart. When he'd come to feel ashamed of his tribe, when he turned his back on those who loved him and his own nature, too, that was the moment he'd transgressed beyond hope of forgiveness.

But such a judgment wasn't fair! He'd been free to live life on his own terms, hadn't he? To choose an existence that fulfilled him?

No one and nothing responded to his protestations, or rather, nothing but his deeper self, and its answer was a paradox: He'd had every right to be selfish, and yet no right at all.

That bitter, irrational insight was as far as his wisdom could take him, and once he reached it, he had little to distract him from the endless aching misery of his condition. He wondered what would happen if he simply yielded to the power grinding away at his essential ident.i.ty. How badly would extinction hurt? Was it remotely possible it would bring his punishment to an end, or would the unseen fiend overseeing it simply reconst.i.tute his psyche and begin again?

He decided he had little to lose by attempting the experiment, but after a lifetime spent on the path of the sword, he found it difficult to drop his guard and surrender himself to extinction. Finally, though-after hours, days, years, centuries?-he mustered the courage, and heard Kara singing.

Or sensed it, rather, as he registered his own thoughts. Without ears, one couldn't hear anything. Yet he was certain the music was real, and equally sure he hadn't died and gone to perdition after all. It was plausible that a rascal like himself might land in the Abyss, but the dragon bard, never! No, they were alive but trapped in some peculiar predicament, and she was surely attempting to free them. Hoping she could perceive it as he could discern her song, he urged her on.

The s.h.i.+fting void blinked, giving way, for an instant, to a murky chamber or cavern paved with dark hexagonal stones, each inscribed with a glowing symbol. In that same moment, he had a body again, limbs, eyes, and lungs that tried to gasp in a breath before substance and a detailed, coherent world dissolved once more.

Kara sang more fiercely and insistently. The void and the chamber flickered back and forth, until abruptly, the transitions stopped, dumping Taegan finally and unambiguously into the realm of solid, stable matter. Across the floor, a number of the cobbles cracked and shattered, and all the runes stopped glowing, deepening the darkness. A trace of light still leaked in from somewhere, but even so, a human wouldn't have been able to see anything at all.

It felt wonderful to have flesh again, but unpleasant, too. The air was cold, and Taegan felt puny and brittle, as if just beginning his recovery from some disease. His magical imprisonment had taken a toll on him.

He stumbled a step, spread his wings to help him balance, and observed Raryn, Kara, and Brimstone gathered around him. They all looked dazed and ill, too, even the vampire.

"What happened to us?" Taegan croaked, addressing the question primarily to Kara. She seemed the person likeliest to know. "What is this place?"

She jumped away from him. "Stay back!" she said. "I can't-it's too strong here!"

"You mean the Rage?" he asked, and something dragon-shaped and dragon-huge lunged out of the gloom. It rattled and clinked, and its talons clicked on the floor.

Sprinting down the trail as fast as his mismatched legs could carry him, Dorn caught occasional glimpses of the white-clad men skulking toward Will, Pavel, and Jivex. For the most part, though, trees, brush, and higher ground cut off the view, leaving him to wonder just how close the strangers had gotten.

He'd a.s.sumed his friends would be all right slumbering unguarded for just a short while, then the imminence of sunrise would wake Pavel as it always did. But when he'd looked back from the top of the rise, and by the luckiest of chances spotted a dozen warriors emerging from a stand of trees, he'd realized just how stupid and negligent he'd been. It was clear from the way they moved and the direction they took that the men in white somehow knew about his comrades, and if they slaughtered them in their sleep, it would be his fault.

He reached the rim of the higher ground above the depression where he and his exhausted companions had flopped down to rest, and there he felt a jolt of horror. The warriors in white had arrived before him, and were aiming arrows down into the bowl. Their captain, a stocky fellow in a brigandine of ivory-colored dragon-hide, raised his hand to give the signal to shoot.

Dorn nocked a shaft of his own and drew the fletchings back to his ear. "Stop!" he bellowed to the captain. "If anybody shoots, I'll kill you!"

Startled, people spun around to look at him, sometimes goggling or s.c.r.e.w.i.n.g up their faces at his freakish appearance. Meanwhile, he observed that, judging by their more-or-less civilized attire, these moon-blond, fair-skinned folk were Sossrim, not glacier tribesmen bound to Zethrindor's service. That was good as far as it went. It meant they had no legitimate quarrel with the travelers, if only Dorn could convince them of it.

Down on the low ground, roused by Dorn's call, Pavel, Will, and Jivex jerked awake. The faerie dragon spread his wings. Will, realizing that if Jivex took to the air, it would precipitate a volley of arrows, shouted, "No!" The reptile froze.

The captain gave Dorn a level stare. "You have one arrow," the officer said. "We have many."

"True," said Dorn. "But if you people attack, my one is going straight into your chest."

"Why would you want to hurt us anyway?" Pavel asked. "You're Sossrim, aren't you, which means your enemies are our enemies. We just escaped from the same folk who've invaded your homeland. Look." Moving slowly, he fished his sun amulet out from under his grubby, twisted mantle and set it aglow with red-gold light. "I'm a priest of the Morninglord. Is it likely I've made common cause with people who offer to the Frostmaiden?"

The captain frowned. "Ordinarily, I'd say no. But you lie down and sleep beside a dragon. In Sossal, wyrms have always been a scourge, and never more so than this year."

Jivex sniffed. "I a.s.sume the only drakes living hereabouts are those brutish whites. But surely you can see I'm a more splendid sort of creature altogether." He raised his gleaming b.u.t.terfly wings. Despite the still-dim light, rainbows rippled up and down his argent flanks. Dorn suspected he'd used his powers of illusion to heighten the effect. "I'm Jivex, lord of the Gray Forest, slayer of demons and dracoliches, and a friend to men, even when they're too dense to realize it."

The captain grunted. "Maybe so. But if you folk aren't part of the Ice Queen's army, what are you doing here? How did you even get here? Zethrindor's forces control the southern part of the realm."

"We came from the west," said Pavel, "off the glacier, with tidings that are sure to interest you. We'll be happy to explain, but the conversation will be more pleasant if no one's aiming an arrow at anybody else."

The man in the dragon-scale armor waved his hand. The warriors eased the tension on their bowstrings, and Dorn did the same.

Taegan froze at the recognition that the thing lunging out of the dark was skeletal. He could see the spindly angularity of it, the s.p.a.ces between its ribs. It was a dracolich, and he and his companions were in no shape to contend with such a horror.

But when it struck at him, its vertebrae rasping and clinking together, reflex spurred him into motion, and he wrenched himself aside. Once his body was in motion, his mind likewise resumed its functioning, and he observed details that had eluded him before.

His huge a.s.sailant moved fast, but in a hitching, jerking sort of way, and with a rattle and sc.r.a.pe as its bare bones knocked together. It had no odor. Dracoliches moved fluidly, without any such racket, and reeked of corruption. This thing-Sammaster's watchdog, surely-was something more akin to the animated skeletons he'd left behind in Northkeep.

The discovery was rea.s.suring, but only mildly so. Whatever the creature was, a single snap of its fangs or swipe of its talons would still suffice to tear Taegan to shreds.

Huge, curved claws leaped at him. He dodged onto the wyrm-thing's flank, and clattering, its fleshless tail swept around at him. With a beat of his wings, he sprang over the attack and continued in the air. Rather resembling the naked, forking branch of a tree in winter, a skeletal wing hammered down at him. He sped out from under and riposted.

Rilitar's sword splintered bone, but of course that one stroke didn't stop a colossus that, as best Taegan could judge, no longer even possessed anything a.n.a.logous to vital organs. He might well need to break it into a number of pieces, and had no hope of accomplis.h.i.+ng such a thing alone.

"Help me!" he cried.

The wyrm-thing spun to strike at him. He dodged high, swooped low, and chopped at its hind leg.

His flint axe lifted in a high guard, Raryn advanced on the skeleton. Glaring at the thing, ember eyes glowing, Brimstone whispered the opening words of an incantation. Kara, however, crouched by the wall, eyes closed, crooning a melody. It was almost certainly a spell, but Taegan suspected its purpose was to quell the madness seething in her mind, not to smite their current adversary.

Taegan whirled around the skeleton drake, and Raryn darted in and out, sometimes scrambling underneath it. Each fought defensively when their foe oriented on him, and struck hard when it focused on his comrade. The elven blade sheared through a rib, hacked loose a length of wing vane, cut deep into a vertebra midway down the serpentine neck. Even without the advantage of an enchanted weapon, Raryn's phenomenal strength and skill likewise inflicted a measure of harm. But none of the damage crippled the wyrm-thing or even slowed it down.

Taegan felt the stinging touch of power acc.u.mulating in the air. Patches of shadow swirled like water spinning down a drain. Brimstone's spell was nearing completion, and it occurred to him that, if the vampire deemed it expedient, he was entirely capable of creating a destructive effect that would engulf the skeletal dragon and his allies too.

"Get clear!" he cried, and, pinions las.h.i.+ng, distanced himself from the foe.

Raryn scrambled back. The wyrm-thing pivoted to pursue the dwarf, and a bright, booming blast of fire, expanding outward from a point in midair like a flower blooming, shrouded it. Taegan flinched at the searing heat.

The blaze, however, left the wyrm-thing intact, seemingly not even singed. The only effect was to make it orient on Brimstone. It pounced, caught the smoke drake's neck in its jaws, and wrenched him off his feet. It crouched on top of him, pinning him, biting and clawing.

Taegan expected Brimstone to escape by turning to a cloud of smoke and sparks, but he didn't. Perhaps his confinement in the void had left him too weak to invoke that particular ability.

Taegan flew at the enemy, and Raryn charged. They attacked, bone crunched, and chips of it flew, one striking Taegan just above the eye. The skeleton rounded on him, struck, lunged, drove him backward toward against a wall. He tried to dodge down his adversary's flank, and the wyrm spread its enormous wings, making a barrier to pen him in.

A battle anthem filled the air. Kara sprang onto the skeleton's back, bore it down, but failed to pin it. Coiled together, rolling back and forth, they tore at one another.

For the first time-everything was happening too cursed fast-Taegan noticed the song dragon's deep and gory wounds, sustained, evidently, during the battle back in the plaza. In her present condition, she wouldn't last long before the skeleton wyrm overwhelmed her.

He set down on the ground and cut at Sammaster's sentinel. Raryn dashed in and did the same. They were trying to draw the thing away from Kara. But the tactic wasn't working.

Taegan flew onto the wyrm-thing's las.h.i.+ng, heaving neck, spread his pinions to aid his balance, and cut repeatedly at the vertebra he'd already damaged. It was about as hazardous a perch as he could imagine. If Kara and her adversary rolled again, and he failed to spring into the air quickly enough, the prodigious tangled ma.s.s of them could flip over right on top of him. He tried not to think of that, or of anything but cutting at precisely the right spot.

With his target in furious motion, he missed as often as not. But he gradually enlarged the breach he'd made before, until finally the vertebra shattered into several pieces. With a crash and a clatter, the huge, wedge-shaped skull dropped away from the rest of the skeleton, and the thing stopped moving. Panting, Taegan offered a silent prayer of thanks to sweet Lady Firehair.

"Kara," he said, "are you all right?"

"Yes," she said, extricating herself from the clinking remains of her adversary. "I've stifled the frenzy for the moment, anyway."

"I rejoice to hear it, but I was referring to your wounds."

"Oh." She sounded surprised, as if she'd forgotten the punctures and gashes, though that scarcely seemed possible. "They'll be all right, I suppose."

"No doubt," whispered Brimstone, irony in his tone, "you'll all be delighted to learn that I'll survive as well." His wounds closing, but more sluggishly than usual, he turned his smoldering gaze onto the remains of their foe. "It was a sort of golem and thus more or less impervious to sorcery. With my mind still muddled from our imprisonment, I didn't realize that."

"So the only creatures your fire magic might have hurt," Taegan said, "were Raryn and me. Pray forgive my candor, but I've seen you make cleverer plays."

The vampire bared his fangs. "We were in desperate straits, and I trusted the two of you to scurry out of the way."

"As we did," Raryn said, "so let's not squabble about it. I'd rather hear what's happened to us, if anybody knows."

"I do," Kara said, and offered an explanation that was, Taegan supposed, no madder than all the other mad things they'd experienced. "Perhaps I panicked, but I was certain that if we didn't get away, we were going to die."

"Considering the magic Zethrindor unleashed at the end," Taegan said, "I daresay you were right. But I wish you could have brought the rest of our comrades along. Failing that, I wish we at least knew what happened to them."

"Perhaps I can scry for them," Brimstone said. "Or perhaps not. The same wards that keep anyone from finding this place by such methods may well prevent me from looking out. But in any case, we have more important matters to address. Didn't you understand what Karasendrieth told us? At last, we truly have reached the source of the Rage."

"I do understand," Taegan said, "and in some measure, I share your enthusiasm. I simply wish I didn't feel so frail and accordingly ill-equipped to contend with whatever additional surprises Sammaster emplaced to greet us."

"So do I," Raryn said, "but it doesn't matter if we're sick, or if we can't travel back the way we came. Somehow, we made it here, and we've got to go on with our work. Unless the heart of the magic is sitting right in front of us, and I just don't have the wit to see it, that means exploring."

"You're right." Kara dwindled back into the form of a woman, and Taegan suppressed a wince. It was even more troubling to see her cut and b.l.o.o.d.y in that slender, vulnerable shape. "Perhaps someone could help me with some bandages, and then we'll begin."

On further inspection, the chamber proved to be as wide as the plaza back in the Novularonds. But this place appeared to be a natural cavern, which the elves had shaped to suit their purposes.

A single tunnel led away, a pa.s.sage broad and high enough that that the elves would have had little difficulty moving great quant.i.ties of material through it. At the end was a valley ringed by dark, snow-dappled peaks and domed by a black sky, and at the center rose a gigantic castle. Something about it reminded Taegan of the fortress the Cult of the Dragon had raised in the Gray Forest. It seemed sculpted from ma.s.ses of living rock, not built of blocks of quarried stone. But where the madmen's stronghold had been a crude and graceless thing, the citadel before him, even though crumbling into ruin, battlements eroded and spires fallen, was as magnificent as the city Amra had shown him in their shared dream.

He realized he was gawking, and made haste to recover his composure. "It's a pity," he drawled, "that the gateway didn't deposit us in the castle itself. After all we've endured to come this far, the builders might have spared us a final hike over stone and ice."

"The separation," Kara breathed, "was yet another layer of defense, and they needed it." Her hand trembling, she pointed. "Look."

Taegan peered, then felt a fresh pang of amazement. At first glance, he'd failed to pick them out from among the snow drifts, rocks, and shadows, but bones littered the floor of the valley. Some were immense, and even broken and scattered by wind, freezing temperatures, and time, still bore a noticeable kins.h.i.+p to the wyrm-thing he and his companions had just defeated. Others were smaller, impossible to identify at a distance, but he didn't need to identify them to comprehend the essence of what had happened.

"The rebels," he said, "believed no dragon king would ever find their citadel, or bring an army against even if it did. But they were mistaken. At some point, their foes laid siege to the place."

Near the castle's ma.s.sive barbican, a ragged blackness leaped upward like a tongue of flame from a bonfire. Pain stabbed through Taegan's temples, and he reflexively raised his sword.

"It's all right," Brimstone whispered, a sneer in his voice, "no one's attacking us. That was just a vestige."

"Thank you," Taegan said, "that's profoundly comforting. A vestige of what, precisely?"