When Dragons Rage

11

I’m dead. Erlestoke harbored no illusions about his chances for survival. For over a month the remnants of the Fortress Draconis garrison had fought running battles with the Aurolani horde. Control of the ruins varied depending upon the time of day. The invaders held sway during daylight and the defenders at night. Sporadic reports of draconette shots and the screams of the wounded filled the darkness as ragged bands of defenders ambushed their enemies.

Erlestoke knew that their strikes at the Aurolani troops were little more than flea bites. The most they could do was pick off patrols, destroy supplies, and otherwise make the occupation of the fortress unpleasant. By day the defenders hid in the warrens beneath the city, and repeated attempts by Chytrine’s troops to flush them out had ended badly for the Aurolani.

Chytrine’s troops never recoiled from employing even the most blasphemous methods to force the defenders from their sanctuaries. Fortress Draconis’ tallest tower still stood. The Crown Tower had been decorated with the skull of a dragon that had died there decades before. To that skull had been tied the body of Dothan Cavarre, the late Draconis Baron, and day by day-carrion birds had feasted upon him.

At least two resistance squads had attacked the tower in futile attempts to rescue the baron’s remains. They had been cut down ruthlessly, and now their bodies hung from the remaining sections of walls. Chytrine meant for that display to intimidate the remaining defenders, but instead the survivors just took it as a challenge.

Erlestoke had stopped his own squad from making a similar rescue attempt by pointing out that their jobs at Fortress Draconis had not changed. The reasons they had been stationed there—men, elves, meckanshü, and urZrethi alike—was to protect the Southlands from invasion and to safeguard the fragments of the DragonCrown. “The best way we show respect for the Draconis Baron is not in saving his bones, but in continuing to perform the task to which he had devoted his life.”

The others had agreed, and their dedication to that mission had resulted in Erlestoke’s current predicament—one that was likely to cost him his life. Prior to its fall, Fortress Draconis had been positioned to prevent Aurolani troops from heading south. The garrison might not have been large enough to destroy any army itself, but cutting off the lines of supply would have been simple. Chytrine had to eliminate Fortress Draconis before any southern invasion could take place.

She had, and her troops streamed southward day and night. Erlestoke’s company watched the troop movements, tallied the information, then relayed it south via arcanslata—a magical slate that would send to its twin any information written upon it. Erlestoke had no idea where the twin of his unit’s arcanslata was—though Jilandessa was leaning toward Alcida or Valicia based on some of the brief replies to their information. His squad only sent troop information and had not let anyone know he lived, for fear that information might cause Chytrine to hunt him down for use against his father.

Two days earlier Erlestoke’s people had taken up one of their usual vantage points to watch troop movements and had seen new banners appearing within the ranks of the Aurolani hosts heading south. They’d gotten used to the large banners proclaiming the identity of a unit, but of late smaller pennants had flown above these. As they were studying the units, a storm had rolled in from the north, bringing with it a quantity of snow, which drove the troops into Fortress Draconis for shelter and sent Erlestoke’s people down into the warm bowels of the earth.

When the storm let up a day and a half later, passing to the south with its fury unabated, Erlestoke had led Ryswin and Pack Castleton up to scout things out, entering a nearby ruin they used as a lookout. As was common, a patrol of gibberers came through. All would have been fine, except that they paused to use the building Erlestoke sheltered in to protect them from a rising breeze.

Even their waiting there would not have been a problem, for the gibberers often lingered until the coming dawn signaled the change of a watch. The man-sized beasts had jutting muzzles and stout fangs, with mottled-fur coats of tan and black that served them poorly for hiding in the snow. Their tufted ears rose from thick skulls and flicked forward and back, though they seemed to rely on their sense of smell more than sight or hearing. The way they snorted in the room below him suggested to Erlestoke that the falling temperature was hard on the delicate tissues, helping to hide his scent from them.

He expected them to move on while it would be dark enough to get his men to safety, and their enthused yips seemed to indicate they would be doing that. But then a harsh bark that echoed down the street cut them off.

Their gibbering died quickly, and Erlestoke chanced to look out, barely peering around the corner of a shattered window casement. He saw a tall, slender creature stalking down the center of a snow-choked avenue. The wind swirled around it, dancing snowflakes curling its wake. It wore a white cloak that matched its snow-white fur. The being stalked forward slowly, turning its head side to side. While the strong jaw gave it the illusion of a muzzle, the creature’s face appeared far less bestial than that of the gibberers.

And the eyes. Erlestoke knew he’d seen their like before because they had no color to them. They were akin to a Vorquelf’s eyes, with no whites, no discernible pupil, but in this case they were entirely black. Even as he made that determination, however, he caught movement in those eyes, as if some malevolent force were trapped in their inky depths.

The creature’s head came up and Erlestoke jerked back, but he knew he’d been seen. As the creature hissed a command, Erlestoke blew on the slow-match of his four-barreled draconette. In response to the order, the gibberkin snarled and started up the snow-strewn steps to the building’s second floor. Carrying an unsheathed longknife in its right hand, the lead beast came up and around the corner, charging straight at him.

Erlestoke pulled the trigger on the quadnel and the weapon belched flame and lead. A ball the size of an olive shot from the thick cloud of grey smoke and smashed into the gibberer’s belly. The impact spun the creature around and the longknife flew from its hand. Red blood splashed over white snow, then the creature crashed against the second gibberer.

The Oriosan Prince rose from his crouch and drew the saber he’d worn strapped across his back. The blade came easily to hand and weighed far less than it appeared because it once had belonged to one of Chytrine’s sullanciri and had been enchanted. Erlestoke cast the quadnel aside and engaged the onrushing gibberers.

The blade’s magick made fighting the gibberers all too simple. In his sight, color drained from the world, save where a golden glow, or red or blue, suggested the flow of energy. As a gibberer drew a longknife back before a thrust, red power would gather in the muscles needed to make the attack. Forewarned by the shift of color, Erlestoke could counterattack.

And counterattacking, or just attacking, was something the blade made easy. The edge did not seem sharp, and the blade’s light weight would have suggested it could not deliver a heavy blow, but it sheared through thick limbs as if they were bundled straw. A quick cut would sever a wrist, flicking the paw and longknife away, and a blow with the saber’s handguard would crush a face.

His first slash spun a gibberer away with its face half-cloven, then a return cut stroked open another gibberer’s belly. It pitched through an open hole in the floor, crashing below while another leaped up the stairs at him. That gibberer had a two-handed grip on its longknife, looking to use it like an ax.

Erlestoke moved in toward the gibberer and ducked down so that the blow carried the creature over his back. It crashed down hard, but bounced up quickly, regaining its feet on his left with its back at the window. As he flicked his saber out to the right, the sword cut bit deep into another gibberer’s hip, dropping him to slide back down the stairs and ball up at the first snowy landing.

The prince turned toward the unharmed gibberer, but remained low, with his right foot actually a step down the stairs. The saber told him that a quick slice as the beast attacked would cut its legs from under it and send it through the hole in the floor. There was a chance he would be wounded, but the sword’s sense of the matter was that his foe would be dead, so personal injury was immaterial.

Erlestoke’s resistance to that last idea stayed his hand for a moment, but it did not matter. Starting far to the left and working right, little blasts suddenly opened holes in the wall, one after the other. Plaster and lath cracked and sprayed from four of the holes, and smoke rose from their blackened edges.

The fifth hole did not burn through the wall. Whatever magick had caused it had flown through the window and smashed the gibberer square in the back, lifting the creature from the floor. Erlestoke ducked as the gibberkin flew forward, one of its feet catching his left shoulder. The gibberer spun in the air, then its chest exploded, filling the air with a vapor of viscera, blood, and bone.

As his head came up, gibberer blood still running down his skin, Erlestoke caught sight of the white creature. From beneath the cloak it had produced a wand. The creature’s gaze locked with his for a moment, then the wand came up and, his sword abandoned, Erlestoke dove low for his quadnel.

The prince scooped the weapon up and quickly worked the lever that rotated the barrels, seating a loaded one against the firing mechanism. Above the metallic clicks and clanks of the gears, the report of another draconette rang out, then a terrific explosion shook the building. What little wall there had been a dozen feet away had vanished, carrying away the stairs, the landing, and splashing the wounded gibberer into a red stain over the debris.

With the automatic motions that had been trained into him through hours of drilling, Erlestoke primed the new barrel and rolled to his knees at the window. He drew a bead on the slender figure, noting already that its left shoulder was matted with blood, and that more ran in rivulets down its useless left arm.

Its right arm came up, however, and a fiery blue dart shot from the wand. It hit the snowy street three feet in front of Castleton, who had dropped into a crouch and was priming his quadnel. The explosion lifted the soldier and whirled him loose-limbed into the air. He crashed down into the snow twenty feet away, disappearing in a cloud of drifting powder snow.

Erlestoke shot and hit the creature high in the chest. A sharp jet of arterial blood squirted into the cold air, then the thing flopped back into the snow. It shook heavily and its limbs twitched violently. Then Ryswin reached it and beheaded it with a short stroke of a gibberer longknife.

The prince leaped from the window and landed in the snow with a crouch. “Ryswin, bring that thing with you!”

“Yes, sir.”

Erlestoke ran to where Castleton lay and turned him over. The blast had torn the Oriosan’s mask off and had taken with it most of his face. The man’s lipless mouth worked for a second, but produced only bloody froth, not words. His back bowed, then he slackened.

The prince reached down and closed the one remaining eye, then searched for the man’s quadnel. He slung the draconette over his shoulder, then returned to his fallen comrade and dragged his body off. Ryswin joined him quickly, and the two of them descended through hidden passages that opened before them and closed after, to reach their haven.

Erlestoke gave the two quadnels to their weapons-master, Verum. A couple of other people had taken Castleton’s body from him and, off in a corner, were busy washing him and sewing him into a shroud. Across the room, on a table that had seen many a use in their campaign, the raven-haired Harquelf Jilan-dessa and the meckanshü colonel from Murosa, Jancis Ironside, had stretched out the creature. Even without its head, it was tall enough that its feet hung off the edge.

The prince crossed to them. “What is it?”

The elf shook her head. “I’ve not seen its like before, nor have I heard of anything similar. I could make guesses, but I like them not at all.”

Erlestoke rested a hand on her shoulder. “It wields magick more capably than a vylaen. It took two quadnel shots and still did not cease moving until beheaded. It gave orders to gibberers and they obeyed instantly. It’s bad enough as it is. Your guessing can’t make it worse.”

The elf healer nodded, then ran her hand over the creature’s belly, rucking up its fur. Beneath the white fur she exposed pink flesh and then a dark tattoo of some arcane symbol. “Do you recognize that?”

“Not really, though I’ve seen similar on Vorquelves.”

“Exactly.” She pointed to the creature’s head. “I worked magick on the body, just a simple diagnostic spell to get a sense of it. There is vylaen there, clearly, but also elf. Elves don’t really differentiate in sense depending upon their homeland, but if one is talented, you can pick up slight variations. This creature has a Vorquellyn taint to it.”

The prince nodded. “I noticed the eyes.”

Jancis Ironside reached over with her left hand and pried one of the thing’s eyes open. Being a meckanshü—one of the warriors whose useless limbs had been replaced with mechanical parts—her left hand only had two fingers and a thumb, yet moved with a singular delicacy. “Very hard to miss, these eyes. The look of them sends a shiver through even my metal limbs.”

The creature’s eyes had begun to cloud in death, but Erlestoke could still imagine something lurking in their depths. He looked at the elf again. “You think these things come from Vorquellyn?”

She nodded. “You know that Yrulph Kirun, centuries ago, forcefully crossbred araftü with elves to create the Gyrkyme. I fear that Chytrine honors her master once more in creating these things. They feel as if they are a cross between vylaens and Vorquelves, born on Vorquellyn. She took the homeland, now she uses it to breed a population of warmages to lead her gibberers against us.”

That idea sent a chill down the prince’s spine. “Is there any way we can tell for certain?”

“I will make measurements, map the tattoos, look for other clues. If we had more of them, it might help.”

Erlestoke nodded. “I’ll see what we can do.”

Jancis hugged her flesh-and-blood hand to her mechanical shoulder. “Highness, we know Chytrine left a week ago, maybe twelve days, and we assumed she had found and carried away all the pieces of the DragonCrown.”

“Yes, that’s what we concluded. And we decided she kept troops here to prevent anyone from reoccupying the fortress and threatening her lines of supply.”

“Both logical assumptions. But why, then, would she bring creatures so adept at magick here?”

The prince adjusted his mask. “I see your point. If she has a reason for bringing them, it must be an important one. Perhaps she’s missing a piece of the Crown, or there is something else of value here. So, just as vital as learning what they are will be learning why they are here. Good thinking, Colonel Ironside; I would have missed that.”

Ryswin walked over and nodded to the prince. “Highness, Castleton is in his shroud. Nygal and I shall carry him deep into the tunnels and find a spot to wall him up.”

“Ryswin, come quick!” Nygal Tymtas, the young soldier from Savarre, shouted from the corner where Castleton had been laid. “Something very strange is going on.”

The elf and the prince dashed toward the corner, then stopped. The stones in the floor upon which Castleton’s body rested had begun to glow; heat pulsed out from them. Nygal leaped back and the tips of his boots smoked, though oddly the white canvas of the shroud showed not a scorch or wisp of vapor. The rock became fluid and a thin crust crumbled, revealing a red-gold puddle of stone. The body floated there for a moment, then began to sink, starting at the head and shoulders, then gradually settling in at the feet. His toes were the last to go and when they disappeared, a small golden wave of rock lapped over them, then the stone darkened and cooled.

Erlestoke stared at the flat stone where his comrade’s body had lain. “No one here did anything? Said anything? Somehow invoked magick?”

A chorus of negative answers echoed through the chamber.

“Okay, I believe that, which means I don’t know what just happened. Inside the hour we’re vacating this place. Pack up everything we can. We’re going deeper.” He turned and studied all of their faces. “I don’t know if what just happened was for good or ill, but until we know, it’s reason enough for us to keep moving.”