Whisper of Waves

18

16 Alturiak, the Year of Maidens (1361 DR)

SECOND QUARTER, INNARLITH

With the aid of half a dozen unseen servants, Marek Rymut played midwife to a hundred hatchling firedrakes.

Hour after blood- and slime-soaked hour they came, one egg after another opening with a wet crack to reveal the writhing, already snarling form of the mutant dragon inside it. The babies were hatched with teeth and were born hungry. Marek ran out of piglets only three hours into the day. He’d brought a hundred of them, one for each egg he expected to hatch that day, but he was surprised to find that even the newborn firedrakes could eat more than one piglet. In fact, the black lizard-beasts, their fine scales shining in the torchlight like black patent leather, could take one piglet in three bites.

“Better get more pigs, my friend,” the great black wyrm Insithryllax chided around a rumbling laugh, “before they turn on you.”

“Well,” Marek replied, panting, dragging another newborn firedrake out of the remains of its broken egg, “perhaps I’ll get lucky and they’ll turn on their parents first.”

The black dragon laughed again and said, “Trust me, Marek, that wouldn’t be lucky for anyone here.”

To emphasize his point, Insithryllax let a drop of his caustic spittle fall to the floor at his feet. The acid ate through a thick piece of broken egg shell, then the flagstone floor and the rock underneath, in less time than it took for Marek to blink once.

Though he would have enjoyed a bout of banter with the dragon, Marek went back to his work. A great deal of effort had been put into accelerating his breeding program, and the black firedrakes needed time to mature, and time for training, before they could be delivered. He had no time, and no firedrakes, to lose.

The older generations of black firedrakes packed along the walls of the great underground chamber and looked on while their little brothers and sisters were born. Marek did his best to ignore the hungry looks in their eyes. One of the reasons he’d begun to breed so many at a time, augmenting the black dragon’s potency and the egg-laying capabilities of the firedrake females with spells, was that he knew he’d lose a few in the first tenday or so. The firedrakes would eat one or two, then the older blacks would take as many as a dozen of the runts. Blood would fill the room long after the last egg hatched.

Having run out of food for the newborns, Marek knew he had only one recourse and that was to accelerate that natural process as well.

The black firedrake he pulled out of its egg was heavy, and it looked at the Red Wizard with a dangerous gleam in its eye, so Marek knew that one would live. He cast about him, eggs pressing in on all sides, and scooped up a handful of the slimy yellow tissue that wrapped the growing reptiles inside their shells. He pressed the handful of slime into the newborn’s mouth and it took the protein in hungrily. As Marek searched the floor around him for a more substantial meal, he instructed the unseen servants to do the same. All around him handfuls of yolk sacs were offered up by invisible hands to eagerly snapping jaws.

The adult female drakes, their red scales shining with the vile-smelling moisture that filled the air, hissed and snapped from the periphery. The smell was starting to excite them and was having the same effect on their black offspring.

Marek finally found what he was looking for and quickly rattled off a simple spell that sent bolts of blue-violet energy ripping into the still-soft scales of a smallish newborn, one he thought looked weak enough to do without. The spell killed the black firedrake, and Marek dragged it to the creature he’d just delivered. Four others of the stronger newborns fell on their slain sister and fought over every last strip of bloody flesh.

The same began to happen all over the chamber and Marek, for the first time in a while, felt the icy tendrils of fear tickling at the edges of his consciousness. It wasn’t a feeling he relished.

“Insithryllax….” he said, looking up at the dragon and at the same time calling to mind a spell.

“Go,” the dragon said. “I will settle things, but you’ll lose more than I know you’re hoping to.”

Marek looked around at the hellish birthing chamber, the older black and adult red firedrakes were moving in slowly, but he could see in the corded muscles of their powerful legs the inevitability of dozens and dozens of feral pounces.

“This won’t do,” the Red Wizard said, frustration holding the fear at bay at least for the moment.

“It’s too crowded in here,” the great black rumbled.

Marek nodded, looked Insithryllax in the eye, and said, “I’ll send for you when I’ve found a bigger lair.”

The dragon nodded and Marek cast a spell that got him out of there half a heartbeat before all hell broke loose.