Fistanadantilus Reborn

CHAPTER 25

First Majetog, Reapember

374 AC

Danyal pulled on the pole, saw the trout break the surface in a ripple of droplets and gleaming silver scales. He tugged gently, but then it was a violent force, and he ripped the hook from the fish's mouth. The pole felt stiff and heavy in his hands.

Then he heard the fish scream, a sound so full of suffering that his heart nearly broke.

And then he was the fish, and the water closed over his head, but he couldn't swim! He was badly injured, torn and bleeding, and held by the unbreakable strands of a long, tethering line.

He awakened, thrashing in panic, finally sitting upright and blinking through the smoky shadows of the cave. His garments were soaked with sweat, his hair plastered to his forehead by the clammy perspiration. Danyal had to draw several deep, gasping breaths, reassuring himself that it had been a nightmare. Even so, only slowly did the sensation of drowning recede.

And he was still bound by the long tether-that part had not been a dream. The rope bit into his wrists, and the loss of circulation stung his hands, deadened his fingers. The other end of the twisted braid of tough leather was wrapped securely around a massive wooden stake that had been driven into the ground within the cave some time before their arrival.

He saw Foryth Teel, blinking slowly, stirring from slumber, and Dan guessed that his own thrashing had awakened the historian, who had been busily writing when the youth had drifted off to sleep.

But what was that scream? Danyal sensed that the sound had been a part of the real world. As he came to that conclusion, he heard an angry shout, then a man's voice that broke into sobs, broken by desperate pleading. "No-leave me here! Just go on without me. I'll stay out of sight till I can-"

"Get it over with, Zack!"

The last words, spoken in the voice of Kelryn Dare-wind, cut off the objections, though the sounds of soft sobbing still burbled through the cave.

Danyal crept forward, to the limits of the rope, and looked toward the entryway. He saw Gnar, the bandit with the broken knee, crawling slowly backward across the ground, while Zack advanced on him with his face split into a menacing leer. In the one-eyed bandit's hand was the gleaming knife.

"Yer too slow, old Gnar," cackled Zack. "Ya never were good for much, and now with that knee, yer just an anchor holding back the rest of us!"

"By all the gods, leave me here!" begged the injured man.

Abruptly Zack thrust. Gnar tried to roll away, but the blade snicked through his throat with a whiplike slice.

Danyal was horrified to hear the rush of air, the gurgling noise of death as the crippled bandit, his wrapped knee holding his leg unnaturally stiff, thrashed across the ground. Back arching, Gnar's hands scraped to either side for a long moment. Then, with a reflexive shudder, his struggles ceased and he lay still.

Kelryn Darewind turned away, and his eyes met Danyal's. The youth was frightened by the look he saw there-an expression of deep, unquenched hunger-but he found that he couldn't tear his gaze away. Instead, he imagined the bandit leader attacking, consuming him.

"His wound was infected," declared Kelryn. "He was doomed, and he was slowing the rest of us down. I merely gave the order to hasten the inevitable."

Zack was busy cleaning his blade on the dead man's cloak. His one eye gleamed as he cackled at Danyal. "And I am the inevitable!"

Shrinking back against the wall, Danyal tried to vanish into the shadows. He was startled to realize that he was shaking, and his mind echoed relentlessly with the horrid gulping slurp that had been Gnar's dying sound. Creeping as far back as he could, Dan tried to will himself to disappear. Memories of the bandits' stories, of the murder of Sir Harold, of spitting his baby on a sword, of the awful things they had done to his wife, chilled the lad. He found himself remembering the girl he had heard about and hoped that she was safe.

Foryth Teel, the lad was not surprised to see, busied himself copying down some notes. The historian had certainly seen the grim scene enacted before them, but his face gave no clue to any distress that he might have been feeling.

Trying to disappear into his corner, Danyal let his hands settle protectively over his belt buckle. He pulled on his shirt, insuring that the material drooped over the metal bracket. He had left behind his fishing pole and creel when he was captured, and the bandits had taken his knife, but he was determined to keep secret the existence of the silver heirloom.

Some time later Zack came toward them. Danyal was certain they were going to be killed, but Foryth merely held up his hands, allowing the man to cut the leather thong that had bound the historian to the stake. Hesitantly Danyal did the same, recoiling as the butcher wheezed a waft of putrid breath in his face.

The lad's tether was cut, and soon he and Foryth were standing, flexing their muscles, allowing circulation to reach into the previously deadened parts of their bodies. Their hands remained tightly bound together at the wrists, but at least they could move around, stretching their legs and working the kinks out of their backs.

"Hurry up there," snapped Kelryn Darewind, striding farther into the cave to address his two captives. "We've got to get started. It'll take us all night to get to our next shelter, and I want to be inside by the dawn."

Danyal thought the bandit leader seemed jumpy and anxious; he looked over his shoulder for a moment, then stared intently into the shadows at the edges of the cave.

"Tsk — it'll take a minute just to be able to move again," Foryth said, limping forward, leaning against the cave wall to help him balance. Kelryn glared at the man, and Danyal had a glimmer of terrible fear.

"I'll give you a hand," the lad offered, stepping to the historian's other side and taking his arm. Together, still hobbling, they made their way to the entrance of the cave.

Two of the bandits had already dragged Gnar's corpse away, but the place where he had died was marked by a great smear of blood, and Danyal found his eyes drawn to the place with magnetic inevitability.

"Lot of blood in a man — or boy, for that matter!" hissed Zack, his breath hot in Danyal's ear as the murderer cackled gleefully.

"Let's go!" snapped Kelryn, and Zack flipped an angry look at his leader before leading the party out of the cave.

Fortunately Foryth had restored the feeling to his legs by the time they reached the rutted road. Under the pale light of a half-full Solinari, they started northward again, climbing along the edge of one of the steep-sided valleys that cut into the heights of the Kharolis Mountains.

For several hours, they marched in grim silence. The bandits seemed surly and suspicious, cursing at the unexpected sound of a clattering stone or softly griping at each other about inconsequential matters. Danyal kept quiet, wishing he could just be forgotten, left to himself in this rugged wilderness.

Kelryn, who had been leading the band, eventually ambled to the side of the road and waited for the two captives to reach him. He fell into step beside Foryth Teel, regarding the historian with a pensive expression that seemed darkly sinister in the moonlight.

"I can't help noticing that it seems you have started out on your quest with a rather ill-suited selection of companions and weaponry. What, in fact, do you know of the dangers that might be encountered in these mountains?"

"Tsk," Foryth replied dismissively. "It is the historian's job to record the details of those dangers where they are discovered. It is not my place to do battle, to change the face of Krynn through actions of my own."

"Yet you very nearly didn't survive to record that history," replied the bandit. "And you should know that I am not the only thing you need to fear in these heights." "And what other manner of danger might we encounter?" Foryth reached for his book, then, apparently deciding that the complications of writing and walking outweighed the need for immediate accuracy, dropped the tome back into his pack.

"There's a dragon." Danyal spoke boldly, forgetting himself enough that he wanted to contribute to the conversation.

"Ah, the squire speaks. And he is correct." Kelryn addressed Foryth Teel. "I assume that you caught sight of the wyrm in the days before our meeting?"

"No!" Foryth objected. "I would certainly have remembered such an occurrence."

"Um, you were asleep," Danyal said, giving the historian a nudge with his elbow. "I saw the dragon fly over, but I didn't want to wake you."

"What?" Foryth scowled at the lad, and for a moment Danyal had a glimpse of what a real squire might feel like after he had displeased his master. "You should always wake me up for a dragon!"

"Yes, sir. I–I'll make sure I do that," Dan replied, uncertain as to whether the historian was really making a point or simply going along with the youth's story.

"And was there enough light that you could see the nature of this serpent?" asked Kelryn, turning his own attention to the youth.

"Yes. It was red-and huge," Danyal said, his voice thickening as he recalled the monster.

He wanted to say that it had destroyed his village, flown from the sky to bring ruin and death to innocent Waterton. But he dared say no more, or he would risk revealing the charade of his relationship to Foryth Teel, the utterly fictional relationship with its promise of ransom that seemed to be the only thing currently keeping Danyal alive.

"You felt the awe?"

The lad nodded mutely, remembering the way his guts had seemed to liquefy in his belly at the sight of the monster, hating the tears that welled in his eyes with the memory. Fortunately Kelryn seemed to take his emotions as nothing more than the normal reaction in one who had encountered such an awe-inspiring beast.

"I suspect you saw the red dragon known as Flayze," the bandit lord declared. "He is the bane of these mountains, a bully and predator against elf, dwarf, and man. Wicked to the core, he relishes nothing so much as the slow death of one of his enemies, unless it is gorging himself on a haunch of charred meat."

"You know him?" Danyal was amazed to hear the man speak of the serpent with such familiarity.

"Indeed. He has something that I cherish, that I want very much. Yet even more, I have had cause to hate him for many long years."

"What does he have?" asked the youth, only to recoil as Kelryn's eyes went blank and his face lost every hint of emotion.

Any thoughts of obtaining further information about that history were blocked by the forbidding expression on Kelryn's face.

"Always wake me up for a dragon!" Foryth insisted once more, as if distressed that the conversation had proceeded so far without him.

"Why?" snapped the lad peevishly. "Would you try to kill it?"

"Of course not!" Foryth was horrified. "Why, such an act would completely shatter any historian's pretense of neutrality! It's hard to think of anything that could be more disruptive of the proper observer's role."

"Not to mention that killing a dragon is far from an easy thing to do," Kelryn noted. Once again his tone was light, and in spite of himself, Danyal felt a flash of relief that the bandit lord's aloof mood had passed so quickly.

"How can a dragon be slain?" asked the youth. He had a vague memory of his intentions when he had started up the valley from Waterton. From the vantage of a few days' distance, his goal of killing the monstrous serpent seemed laughably unattainable, not to mention suicidal.

"The best way has always been to get a bigger, stronger dragon to do it for you," Kelryn said with a bitter laugh. "It's how the Dark Queen was defeated during the last war."

"But this dragon wasn't killed."

"No." The bandit lord shook his head seriously, considering his reply. "If you live long enough, you will find that many dragons, wyrms of all the clans of metal and color, still dwell in many of the hidden corners of Ansa-lon."

"Why don't they rule the world, then?" Danyal couldn't think of any way that a serpent such as Flayze could be stopped, if the monster took it into his head to claim any kind of realm for himself.

"That's a good question. What does our historian have to say on the matter?"

Foryth scowled, tsking a few times as he pondered the subject. "The best reason seems to be that they don't want to," he said finally. "Gilean knows that any one of them could wreak a great deal of havoc if it decided to do so. But they fight among themselves all the time-at least, all the time when they're not sleeping. And a big dragon sleeps a lot, sometimes for ten or twenty years at a stretch. Each dragon is more concerned with its own comfort than with other matters."

"Don't the Knights of Solamnia hold them in check, sort of?" Dan asked. Remembering the gleaming armor, the brawny size, and easy, capable grace of the few such armored horsemen that he had seen, the lad tried to picture a human fighter competing with the massive killing force of a red dragon. Even that picture was scary, as Danyal was forced to conclude that the would-be drag-onslayer would truly be facing a hopeless task.

Both Kelryn and Foryth were shaking their heads.

"Bah!" the bandit lord said with a curse. "The knights are old women now, weaklings who are afraid of their own shadows. There are none of the bold lancers left from the days of the war."

"That is open to debate," the historian disputed. "But you should know, lad, that the tales of a knight on horseback killing a dragon, no matter how courageous he is, how pure his heart and steady his hand, are merely the stuff of legend and fiction. No, a mighty dragon has very little to fear from anything except another mighty dragon."

"But there has to be some way!" insisted Danyal, so intently that both men turned to regard him with interest. "I mean, it's hard to believe all those stories, all the legends of dragonslayers and heroes and stuff, were just made up," he concluded lamely.

"Remember the old saying: "Never underestimate the imagination, nor the thirst, of a bard,' " Foryth noted with a benign chuckle. "Most of those tales you're recalling were invented by a traveling minstrel who needed a good tale in order to sing himself a supper and a pitcher or two of fine ale. Such poets and artists should not be confused with the true student of history-that is, the dispassionate historian."

"Ssst!"

The warning came from the darkness ahead. Danyal stiffened, watching the hunched figure of Zack slip off the road. The other men of the band, too, shrank into the shadows.

Then he heard whistling, melodic notes rising through the night air.

And he knew that the bandits had found another victim.