The Ruin (21 page)

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 dragonshaped 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 assumed 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 fletching 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 screwing 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 redgold 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. “l assume 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 butterfly 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 spaces 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 assailant moved fast, but in a hitching, jerking sort of way, and with a rattle and scrape 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 reassuring, 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 analogous to vital organs. He might well need to break it into a number of pieces, and had no hope of accomplishing 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 accumulating 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 lashing, 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 lashing, 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 mass 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 bloody 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 passage broad and high enough that that the elves would have had little difficulty moving great quantities 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 masses 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 kinship 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.