Death of the Dragon

36

“Is this all that’s left of us?” Kortyl Rowanmantle almost squeaked, looking around at the grim gaggle of men crowded among the trees. “Two hundred men, maybe less?”

At their center rose a great, gnarl-rooted stump, taller in its ruin than the tallest man there-and atop it stood the Steel Princess, her hands on her dragonfire-blackened hips, and most of her once-magnificent, unruly mane of hair now a scorched ruin.

“Evidently so, Kortyl,” she replied almost cheerfully. “All the more goblins for the rest of us.”

An uneasy silence greeted her words. Squalling earfangs were neither glamorous nor all that easy to slay, when they came rushing in their swarms-and come in swarms they did, endless streaming tides that overwhelmed weary sword arms and butchered all too well… leaving too few survivors here, panting, in the forest.

On the other hand, goblins weren’t nearly as glamorous-or as deadly-as the Devil Dragon. More than a few of the Cormyreans glanced up through the green gloom at the branches overhead, seeking a gap large enough for a huge red dragon-gliding along just above the treetops, as she’d met with them not so long ago-to see them through.

The wyrm had burst upon the nobles with such sudden fury that many had been scorched to ash before they’d had time to do more than see their doom, and scream. The trees around them had burned like torches, and not a few had toppled, crushing those beneath them and showering everyone else with sparks. The forest had been their cloak and salvation, though, the crackling topfires hiding the terrified men in their smoke. The deeper, unburnt green depths gave them a vast lair to scatter in and hide.

It had taken a grim Steel Princess, sword drawn and so much soot caking her that more than one man thought her some sort of black-hided monster at first glance, to find and gather them. Sword drawn and only her eyes and teeth bright, she looked like something out of a horror-tale whispered to scare children. Her doffed helm had been lost in that first burst of dragonfire, its hiphook-straps burnt away as she twisted and rolled, and her shield was gone too-hurled down in half-melted, red-hot ruin after it had saved her from the direct stream of dragonfire that had been the wyrm’s attempt to cook a princess.

A frown crept back onto Alusair’s face as she came back to that thought, for perhaps the tenth time. The dragon had seemed to be looking for her…

Enough reflection. “This is the harshest test Cormyr has faced in centuries,” Alusair said abruptly, looking around to meet the eyes of man after man, “and the lives of those you hold dear, whether they be within the walls of Suzail or in manors all over this realm, now depend on your swords. We are the realm’s best… and now it’s time to prove it. I’m going back to find that dragon, and hack it down. If I die, I’ll go down knowing I did what I could for Cormyr and did not cower and hide, waiting for goblin blades to find me in the night. Whatever happens, I stood forth to defend the people of Cormyr.”

She looked around, in a silence as sharp as a sword point. They were listening hard, their burning eyes on her, seeking hope. She gave it to them.

The Steel Princess calmly unbuckled her breastplate and swung it open. Her bodice beneath was a sweat-soaked mess of fresh bloodstains and shredded quilting, and fresh blood was glistening among the older, darker gore. More than one man murmured as he guessed at the wounds that must lie beneath, but Alusair unconcernedly thumped her breasts with a fist and announced matter-of-factly, “This still beats. As long as it does, I shall be hunting that dragon. So much is my duty.”

She turned slowly, pointing at man after man with her drawn sword, and added softly, “As nobles of the realm, only you can determine your own duty. Your families have always been the backbone of the realm-because your mothers and fathers and grandsires knew their duty, and did it. You know your duty too. When I leave this place, I’ll not look back to see who skulks away into the trees, and who strides with me. I won’t have to, because I know who-and what-you are. You are the very best and the bright hope of Cormyr’s future.”

She smiled, slid her sword into the crook of her arm, and buckled up her breastplate again. “We just have a little task before us, that’s all. We must ensure that Cormyr has a future.”

There were some grim chuckles at that.

The Steel Princess looked up from her buckles with that wry, lopsided, come-hither grin that her men knew so well, and asked softly, “Are you with me, men of Cormyr?”

“Aye!” Kortyl Rowanmantle shouted. “Aye!”

“Aye!” three men said together, raising their swords. “For the Steel Princess!”

“For Alusair, and Cormyr!”

Alusair sprang down from the stump and raised her own blade. “Then follow me-but save your shouts for when our blades cut deep into the dragon. No war cries!”

She turned and sprang away, to begin her usual swift lope-only to stagger, wince, and almost fall as one leg failed her. Swift hands shot out for her to grasp, and she leaned on them gratefully for a moment, stamped her injured leg down hard, winced again, then set off at a limping run, her men following.

It seemed only a short time before the trees thinned, and Alusair spun around and held up her hands for a halt. As panting noblemen gathered around her, she said, “The hills beyond are alive with goblins and their scouts, and the dragon has been landing on the hilltops beyond. We can’t avoid being seen, but magic will only bring our foes and darkness confuses our eyes, but not theirs. Moreover, the lives of many Cormyreans may be lost if we delay. So it’s time to be fools, I’m afraid, and just rush out to be slain. Let’s see if we can’t draw the dragon down to us in the process.”

She turned, blade flashing, ducked between two trees, and was gone.

After a startled moment, the noble sons of Cormyr-the expectation of looming death now clear upon their faces-charged after her.

Where the woods ended, farm fields began. It was rolling pastureland for the most part, with rubble-and-stump boundary fences, and goblins. The humanoids were camped in little clumps here and there, gathering on distant hills and sure to see the rushing human band, unless

A curious wall or hump of mist filled a low spot not far off on their right. It was a bank of fog that by rights should not have been there, unless the little creek that meandered along beneath it had suddenly spouted hot springs.

Alusair peered at it, as suspicious as any warrior who knows the countryside well and sees something strange in it, then shrugged, pointed at the mist with her drawn sword, and veered toward it. The men trotting behind her followed her into the whirlwind of mist, peering and keeping their blades ready in case this fog should prove to hold the dragon or another deadly beast.

They found no such hidden peril before Kortyl gasped to the princess, “How far do you think this extends, then, Highness?”

Alusair turned to answer, her face making it clear that “I don’t know” was going to feature in her utterance to come-then the world changed.

Everything was suddenly a deep, bubbling blue, and the ground was gone from beneath their feet. They were upright, and yet falling endlessly, or perhaps Faerun was falling away from them… then there was suddenly bare rock under their boots, without any sense of landing or jarring, and the deep blue radiance was fading, into deeper darkness.

“Torches!” Alusair commanded, stripping off one of her boots and plucking up the inner sole to shake a tiny glowpebble out of a hollow heel. “Use this to light them by.”

Those without torches or lanterns waited tensely in the darkness, listening with blades drawn until the torches flared up. Nothing rushed at them.

The flickering flames showed them a large, dank cavern on all sides-a very large cavern, with tunnel mouths opening like dark eyes in every wall.

“Where,” Kortyl Rowanmantle cursed, looking around in astonished dismay, “by all the dark pits of the Underdark and the fiends that dance in them, are we?”

His commander came up behind him and put a reassuring arm around his shoulders, bringing with her a smell of scorched hair and leather and smooth, muscled curves that awakened a sudden stirring in the noble knight as they pressed against him.

“Wherever we are,” Alusair told him calmly, “our work is clear. We slay the foes of Cormyr wherever we find them, until we see that dragon dead and the realm saved.”

“And where in all this murk are the hills of goblins and the dragon?”

Princess Alusair Obarskyr gave him a wolfish smile and replied sweetly, “And how by all the dark pits of the Underdark and the fiends that dance in them should I know?”

Azoun groaned, and his body spasmed, seeming to bound off the bed as it arched, and dragging astonished underpriests with it. They clung to the royal limbs and turned pale, frightened faces up to their superiors.

Aldeth Ironsar, Faithful Hammer of Tyr, rose from his knees with a face as grim as it was puzzled. “So it is with my healing, too. What do you make of it, my holy lords? I cannot believe this valiant king is cursed of all our gods!”

“Perhaps,” the Loremaster of Deneir said slowly, “the wounds given him by the dragon are no ordinary hurts but something different than what the healing prayers we’ve employed are intended to treat.”

“We’ve done this before, all of us,” snapped the high huntmaster of Vaunted Malar, gesturing down at the unconscious king. “Azoun Obarskyr has hazarded much, and received much healing, down the long years. Perhaps a body-any body-can only receive so much healing ere it has tasted enough, and the magic must fail.”

Several faces turned sharply to regard the Malarite, wearing fresh frowns of their own. If there was any truth to that thought, many more folk than the king of Cormyr stood in imminent peril… not a few high priests among them.

“I have heard,” the Lord High Priest of Tymora said heavily, “of persons who desired death-husbands who’d held their slain wives in their arms, and wives who’d beheld their dead husbands-taking no benefit from even the strongest healing spells. As if they willed the magic to pass away from them, and do them no good.”

He strode a few slow paces away, then told the nearest tent pole, “The lantern of the king’s mirth, so far as I could see, went out in his face when he heard of the death of the Steel Princess.”

“Whatever the reason,” Battlemaster Ilnbright said from the entrance to the tent, “we dare not try more healing now. A ghazneth is come upon us.”

The priests looked up at him, only too ready to sneer at a mere warrior-even if he was a nobleman, and regardless of the sense of his words-but their denunciations died in their throats at the sounds that came from behind Haliver Ilnbright then.

Outside the tent-just outside the tent-they heard a startled shout, thudding footfalls, the clang of a sword ringing off a shield, and the heavy fall of a body. Then they heard a wet, grisly sound. It was a sound of rending flesh, accompanied by a rising, choked-off, disbelieving shriek.

It was the sound of a man being torn apart, and it was followed, after a sudden soft rain that could only be the spraying of much blood, with cold laughter. It was mad laughter, high and shrill, that faded into the distance as the throat it was issuing from ascended into the air, and flew away.

The laugh was followed by the groan of a disbelieving veteran Purple Dragon starting to be sick.

After a moment, several of the priests in the tent echoed that last sound with an enthusiasm none of them wanted to feel.