When Dragons Rage

22

Nineteen days had passed since the advent of the new Aurolani troops in Fortress Draconis, yet for Erlestoke, it seemed as if the winter had already lasted a year. So many things were different. Since the fall, Fortress Draconis had changed, and well beyond anything ordinary.

Enemy activity had increased and discipline had gotten better. That was due to the new creations, which Ryswin had designated kryalniri based on some distant elven tale of when the world was young, winters were long, and fierce beasts hunted through the snows for game that was trapped or travelers who were lost. Jilandessa suggested that Chytrine might have modeled her new creatures on those legends, so the name fit. But the humans just called them “crawls” for ease of understanding, and the elves took that bastardization without umbrage.

The crawls had replaced vylaens as the leaders of gibberkin, and had proven very effective in tightening up on lax patrols and inattentive sentries. Patrols were doubled in size and frequency, which made setting ambushes very difficult. Erlestoke’s people had taken to setting snares and other traps to make the gibberkin cautious. While their kill rate dropped, the efforts did slow the enemy progress in their operations.

The Aurolani forces certainly seemed to have some very specific goals in mind. The vylaens had been reorganized into little cadres of magickers. Each one had a crawl in charge of things. The fortress’ ruins had been gridded off, as nearly as the prince could determine, and a full-scale magickal survey was under way.

He had to assume they were looking for a fragment of the DragonCrown.

Once their survey indicated there was something in the area, work crews of human captives and gibberkin were brought in to excavate. The digging would last for as little as a couple of hours to a maximum of two days. He’d inspected some of the abandoned digs, and the effort seemed to be pretty well focused at the start, then developed into a broader, more systematic approach that opened a hole in layers.

It did strike the prince as bizarre that their magickers were having trouble locating the fragment they wanted. While Erlestoke himself was completely unable to work magick of any sort, he did have an understanding of it. Somehow the search parties had something that allowed them to focus on the item they were searching for. They worked spells based on the link between that thing and the target, and the magick revealed a location to them.

The link between objects had been made quite apparent to him the first day he’d seen a crawl. In his haste to get to Castleton and to get the crawl’s body away for examination, he’d abandoned Malarkex’s sword in the ruins. They’d left their headquarters and plunged deeper into the undercity but, somehow, when he awoke the next morning, the saber was once again in his scabbard. Jilandessa had cast a couple of spells and detected some sort of a link between the blade and the scabbard, and while Erlestoke really didn’t like the sword, he could see the virtue of having a weapon that returned to him.

He’d smiled at her and extended his right hand. “Would be much nicer if it would come to my hand when I commanded.”

The elf had nodded. “It would, but do you really want to be linked to that blade that way?”

The prince agreed he did not.

The appearance of the crawls was not the only adjustment of Aurolani forces at Fortress Draconis. A sullanciri had been left in charge with Chytrine’s departure. Ferxigo had actually spent time at Fortress Draconis with the urZrethi garrison before she joined the Aurolani tyrant. Her knowledge of Fortress Draconis was dated, but having an urZrethi in charge of operations that involved excavating a mountain made perfect sense.

Between her and the crawls a new layer of leadership appeared. Erlestoke had seen one and Ryswin the other: two tall, humanoid creatures that wore thick woolen cloaks of red with massive hoods that hid their faces. No one who had seen them was sure what they were, but the bumps and spikes concealed rather poorly by their cloaks suggested that either they were very tall men wearing unusual armor, or yet another new concoction of creature. They had been seen giving orders to crawls at various digs, but nothing provided clues as to their true identities.

The mystery of what they were would doubtlessly have consumed Erlestoke’s time, save that Fortress Draconis itself was proving to be a challenging enigma. Erlestoke, in the five years he had spent in the garrison, had learned everything he could about the place. The Draconis Baron, Dothan Cavarre, had been quite generous in providing him with information. Erlestoke had even gone so far as to imagine that Cavarre might be grooming him as a replacement—though he also assumed that only death would sever the baron’s association with Fortress Draconis.

The prediction had proven true, and his body had been hung from the Crown Tower’s dragon skull until picked clean by carrion birds. Aside from the pangs of his friend’s death, Erlestoke regretted the loss of the Draconis Baron’s wealth of knowledge about the place. While the baron had told Erlestoke much of the fortress’ secrets, he clearly had not told him everything.

In vacating their hideout, Erlestoke and his people had moved deeper and discovered a variety of chambers, both worked and natural, where they could take refuge. They’d chosen a likely one that first night and the sentries reported nothing unusual on their watches. Erlestoke’s had passed uneventfully; but when they gathered to move on, they discovered that the passage they’d used to reach their haven had been cut off with huge blocks of stone.

Magick was the only explanation for how the stone had moved, but Jilandessa had a hard time identifying the spells used. “Shuffling blocks that big and so silently would take an incredible amount of power. I don’t know of a sorcerer capable of doing that.”

Ryswin smiled. “If there is, and he’s here, we have to hope he’ll be on our side.”

They left their sanctuary and explored along the other pathways that had opened up. In the depths they discovered a large amphitheater with a semicircular arrangement of stone terraces. In the center stood a raised circular platform. It clearly had once been a meeting place, and Erlestoke speculated that it had belonged to one of the various secret societies. That one or more had facilities at Fortress Draconis made sense, since the garrisons were drawn from all over the world.

This one, however, had been transformed. The terraces would normally have served as seating for the society’s members and, at six feet in width, could have accommodated a considerable crowd. As Erlestoke studied the place, he could easily imagine the hearty shout of assent to some proposal, or the bass murmur of a ritual invocation echoing through the place.

Now the terraces did, in fact, accommodate a crowd, but one of far different sort than intended. On each level, with their feet pointing inward, lay stone effigies of Fortress Draconis’ defenders. The images had been exquisitely crafted and showed each person in serene repose. Walking down the stairs Erlestoke saw a few individuals memorialized there whom he’d seen blown to bits by Chytrine’s thunderballs. On the side of the slabs upon which they lay their names had been inscribed in their native script.

The dead all lay together, unsegregated by nation or race. Ryswin knelt beside a comrade, laying a hand on her cold stone forehead and using the other to hood his eyes. Others spread out, finding comrades and weeping, or noting the presence of others just to confirm their fate.

Toward the top Erlestoke found Pack Castleton. His effigy showed him carrying a quadnel, which brought a smile to the prince’s face. He traced a finger over the man’s mask and along the stone representation of a ribbon Erlestoke himself had affixed to it. “Rest well, my friend. You have earned it.”

Jullagh-tse Seegg, a rust-red urZrethi, shifted her shape so a pair of long, slender legs let her step easily up the stairs to reach him. “I see many here, but not the Draconis Baron.”

Erlestoke shook his head. “Perhaps whoever has done this needs his bones.” He surveyed the room, estimating numbers, then frowned. “This place could hold four thousand, maybe, and it’s only three-quarters full. That means a lot more have survived.”

Ryswin joined them. “That, Highness, or the caretakers are behind in their work. If you are right, that would mean there are a thousand of us still lurking in little groups here in the fortress. That’s fewer than Chytrine’s troops, but far more than I would have ever imagined.”

“Highness, over here!” Jancis Ironside beckoned him with her mechanical left arm. She stood on the steps leading up to the central dais. “You have to see this.”

The whole of their company moved toward the center of the chamber and mounted the steps. As Erlestoke’s eyes came even with the platform, they widened, because where he expected a flat surface he found something entirely different. As he approached, the platform shifted, the flat disk suddenly developing lumps that slowly resolved themselves into walls and the ruins of buildings. Toward the center rose the Crown Tower. At various points the rock retreated to form pits and within a couple of minutes, a miniature model of the fortress had laid itself out.

Even more oddly, the stone took on a transparency that allowed the prince to look deep into the model’s foundations. There, far below, he found a simulacrum of the chamber in which he stood. And there, I can see tiny figures staring down at a model of this model and in it they would see tiny figures…

He shook his head, then glanced at Jancis. “Is this something you understand?”

She shook her head, too. “No more so than I understand the blocks moving. I’ve never seen anything like it.”

Jilandessa’s raven braid snaked over her left shoulder. “Actually you have. There are traces of arcanslata magick being worked here. Likewise in the spells that took Pack’s body and deposited it here beneath that effigy. They are probably urZrethi in nature, but there is something else. My knowledge is limited in that area.“

“Understood, Jilandessa, and not a concern.” Erlestoke frowned. “The magick was triggered when Jancis mounted the steps?”

“It would seem that way, but I have no way to be certain.”

“Highness, there, in the fortress.” Nygal pointed at a blue-green glow near the Crown Tower. “That’s near where the crawls are digging right now.”

As the prince moved closer, other details painted themselves on the model. Little red lines described paths snaking in and out of buildings. They connected large red dots with a white dot at the center. The dig site likewise had a red tinge to it, though it covered a larger area than one of the circles.

Suddenly the earth shook. The tremor was far from violent enough to topple them, but Erlestoke felt the short, sharp shock easily enough through his boots. On the model, a ruin near the site of the dig collapsed into nothing.

A heartbeat later the entire model wavered and vanished.

Erlestoke crouched and pressed his right hand to the platform’s smooth stone surface. It felt as cool as the effigies, and had Nygal and Jilandessa not been staring at the stone with surprise on their faces, he could have believed he imagined it.

He stood and folded his arms over his chest. “We agree we saw a map of the fortress, right?”

Ryswin nodded. “The red lines and spotted dots looked like patrol routes and garrisons.”

“Agreed.” The prince ran a hand over his jaw. “The glow at the dig would have been a DragonCrown fragment?”

“That would be likely.” Jancis frowned. “Were we only being shown one because we’re being given a mission, or is that the only one left in the Fortress?”

Nygal’s eyes widened further. “If there is only one here, then Chytrine has two.”

Erlestoke thought for a moment, then smiled. “I think time is long past when this sort of information about a fragment could do Chytrine good. Before her assault, another fragment was evacuated. If that is a fragment, then she’s only gotten one away from here. Jilandessa, any idea why the model went away?”

The Harquelf’s dark brows arrowed down over her slender nose. “A spell of that size would require a very powerful sorcerer to cast and a lot of energy to maintain. It could be that he got tired or it is possible that when that building collapsed, he was injured or killed.”

The prince nodded. “If I were to guess, I would say the Aurolani used firedirt to bring that building down. They would seem to be getting more desperate in their hunt for this fragment.”

Jancis walked up over to where the glow had been. “Here is the problem, Highness. They are digging here right now.” She took two steps to the left. “Two days ago, they finished digging here. And last week, they were digging over there.”

“You think the fragment is being moved?”

“It’s a logical conclusion to draw. Either it’s being moved, or something is making them dig in the wrong places.” The meckanshü shrugged her shoulders. “I think we have to ask if we can get to it before they do and then somehow get it out of Fortress Draconis. The difficulty is going to be that wherever it is, it will be defended. We’ll have as hard a time getting at it as they will, and then we have to get it away.”

Ryswin knitted his fingers together at his belt. “Perhaps we let them get it, then take it away from them.”

Erlestoke shook his head. “That plan has merit, save that they could give it to an araftü and have it flown away before we can crawl up from below.”

Nygal smiled. “We’ll just have to kill all the araftü. I’ve got plenty of shot and firedirt.”

The prince nodded. “Good idea, but what if a dragon is sent to get it?”

The Savarese soldier let his smile broaden. “They make bigger targets.”

Everyone laughed for a moment, then Erlestoke frowned. “I think the colonel is right, we have to find it first. If we can’t, then we have to fall back on Ryswin’s plan and make sure the Aurolani don’t haul it off.”

Verum, the grizzled meckanshü who served as their weapons-master, crouched at the edge of the platform. “Begging your pardon, Highness, but how do we know this model wasn’t a trick of Chytrine’s? If we plan based on it, we could be running into a trap.”

“That’s a good point, so we will have to be careful. I am inclined to trust it, though, because I don’t see the Aurolani venerating our dead like this. All the information given to us was such that it would help us and yet we have nothing that, if revealed to the enemy, would help her.” The prince nodded to him. “Your caution is laudable, though, so we will be careful. We can verify the patrol routes with some scouting and, if we are fortunate, we will find our way back here to learn more.”

Ryswin jerked his head at the tiers of effigies. “I think, Highness, we might all find our way back here, by one means or another.”

“I’m sure you’re right, but I hope that in one sense you are wrong.” Erlestoke looked around and sighed. “This is an august company, but I don’t want to join it. And if we can find that fragment and steal it away from Chytrine, I think our comrades here would be more than pleased to forgo our joining them.”