Whisper of Waves

5

9 Uktar, the Year of the Snow Winds (1335 DR)

THE SURMARSH, THAY

Marek had no interest in all the killing and sword-play. A simple spell rendered him invisible, so he could stand apart from the fray, watching his people dispatch one lizardman after another.

The lizardmen shone with slime and bog water. Their green-and-yellow scales twitched over tightly bunched muscles. Long snouts like a crocodile’s snapped at the Thayans, and unsettlingly humanlike hands tipped with terrible claws ripped and pawed. Marek couldn’t help but notice that when the lizardmen bled, their blood was as red as any human’s.

He’d been sent deep into the untamed marsh in the northern reaches of the realm on what he was certain was a suicide mission. Though since he hadn’t sent himself there, it was more properly a homicide mission, and he was the victim.

I’ve made as many enemies as friends, Marek Rymut told himself as a Thayan warrior died gurgling at the hands of one of the humanoid reptiles. I guess that means I’m doing something right.

With a mumbled incantation and a casual swipe of his hands in front of him, he stopped the lizardman in its tracks. The warrior’s blood dribbled into the brackish water, mingling with the green-yellow slime floating on the top. Little fish appeared from below the murk to gum the droplets of blood.

The lizardman’s breathing grew fast and shallow, and Marek was concerned that the thing might pass out. Having cast the spell, Marek could be seen, but there were so few of the lizardmen left, and enough of his own people still wading through them, that he was comfortable with his own safety.

The cold swamp water leaking into his boots, however, was quite a bit less than comfortable.

“If you understand me,” Rymut said to the lizardman, “say so now or I’ll kill you and find one of your kind that does.”

The lizardman thought about it for a few beats of its racing heart then said, “I … understand.”

Rymut smiled, remaining silent, and watching while one of his people-a young woman named Zhaera who was a promising little necromancer-was disemboweled by a lizardman’s ragged claws. The yellow-gray ropes that came out of her body splashed into the swamp water and glistened in the sunlight filtering through the trees above. Flies landed on them and took off again quickly, taking their little nibbles even as the guts sank into the swamp. It took her a few seconds to die, but Marek imagined she was happy to be able to see the lizardman who’d killed her fall before the blade of the strapping young sergeant who was ever so handy with a battle-axe.

“If not Thay,” Marek asked the paralyzed lizardman, “whom do you serve?”

The lizardman’s lips curved and Marek could see strips of human flesh festering between its triangular teeth.

“Speak, lizard,” Marek Rymut urged. “Whatever you fear from your new master, I can assure you will be tripled at the hands of the Red Wizards. Speak, then I will release you, you can go back to serving your proper masters in peace, and I can leave this stinking, insect-infested hell hole once and for all.”

“A dragon …” the lizardman hissed, reluctant to explain further.

Marek raised an eyebrow and said, “A dragon? Oh, do tell.”

The lizardman stood twitching silently for a moment.

“This dragon has a name, I take it?” Marek asked, noticing only in passing that the last of the lizardmen had fallen to a Thayan blade.

“Insithryllax,” a deep, powerful voice swept over the stagnant water.

Marek looked up at the source of the voice: a tall, thin man with skin the color of freshly turned soil. His head was shaved clean, and he was dressed in traveling clothes of thin oiled leather and fine shimmering silk. His eyes betrayed his nature, being a human’s eyes, save for the triangular irises.

“Insithryllax,” Marek said with a beaming smile. “It’s a lovely name, really.”

The dragon in his human form drew one side of his lips up in a thin, tight smile.

“Well,” Marek went on, “since I have you here, sir, I must inform you that I have been sent here by the Tharchion of Eltabbar to collect one thousand pieces of gold in lawfully levied taxes owed by the Swamp Scale Tribe. Am I to understand that you are holding that gold on their behalf?”

Insithryllax laughed, and Marek all but bathed in the sound of it, it was so beautiful.

“You aren’t afraid of me,” Insithryllax observed.

The dragon’s eyes twitched from side to side, noting the Thayans moving to surround him. The warriors had their weapons ready, and the few surviving mages were poised to cast spells.

“Aren’t they darling?” Marek said with a smile.

“Indeed,” replied the dragon. “Are they yours?”

“For the time being.”

The Thayan agents looked at each other, uncertain, waiting for orders, not understanding what they were hearing.

“You’re a black, aren’t you?” Marek asked.

Insithryllax shrugged in the affirmative.

“Show me?” asked Marek, his mouth beginning to water.

The dark-skinned man began to twitch, then he shook, then he spasmed. Loud popping noises assaulted Marek’s ears, and the man fell to all fours, his face dipping into the fetid water. When his head tipped up again to look at the Red Wizard, the human face was gone, and in its place was something that looked more like the lizardmen.

“Sir …” one of the warriors, the dashing young sergeant in fact, said.

He, like the others, was stepping back, the ring around the transforming thing growing larger and thinner with each step.

“Take no action without my direct command,” Marek ordered.

By the looks on more than one of their faces, he had some reason to doubt they’d all wait once the dragon fully revealed itself.

More cracking, popping, grunting, and shaking stretched across several increasingly tense moments, and soon a massive wyrm stood in the rippling swamp water. Insithryllax’s batlike wings stretched two dozen feet from tip to tip. On the end of a long, scaled neck was a head like a lizard’s, with forward-curving horns protruding from either side of his head. A tongue as long as Marek’s arm flicked from between teeth as wide and as sharp as kitchen knives.

Marek Rymut found that he could hardly breathe.

“You knew you would find me,” the dragon rumbled, his voice shaking the Red Wizard’s eardrums, “didn’t you, human?”

Marek smiled and bowed in answer.

“And you’ve readied yourself, I suppose?” the great wyrm asked.

Again, Marek smiled and bowed.

“We’ll speak again in a moment,” said the dragon.

It drew in a deep breath, its chest filling out, almost bulging.

“Sir!” the handsome sergeant shouted, the beginnings of a thin, almost feminine wail sullying his last word.

Two of the surviving wizards began to cast spells but never finished them.

The dragon opened his great jaws and poured a black mist from his throat into the air around him. Spinning, Insithryllax swept the mist across the Thayan agents. When the mist touched their flesh, it sizzled and popped. Some of them turned and tried to run, but they couldn’t get nearly far enough away. Exposed flesh began to slough off so that at least three of Marek’s people lived long enough to touch their own skulls with rapidly disintegrating fingers, their last screams rattling out through mouths devoid of tongue or lips.

Marek was barely able to finish his own spell for the gorge that rose in his throat, but by the time the dragon had come full circle and his team was dead, Marek Rymut was done with his casting, and the dragon presented a brief moment of vulnerability.

The wyrm’s eyes came around to meet Marek’s and the Red Wizard could see a change come over them. It was subtle. Only a trained few could spot it, but there it was.

Marek smiled and said to the dragon, “I guess that makes us even.”

“Yes,” the mighty creature said, his voice like thunder rolling across the Thaymount. “Even …”

Marek let his smile fade away.

“We can start fresh now, can’t we?” Marek said.

The dragon blinked once then said, “Fresh … yes.”

“We can be friends,” said Marek.

“Friends,” the dragon replied, his great head bobbing up and down.

Thanks to Marek’s spell, the dragon’s mind, though not quite enslaved to the Red Wizard, was open, vulnerable, and trusting.

Marek Rymut smiled again, managed to keep himself from laughing, swatted a mosquito that flew too close to his neck, and said, “Very best friends, forever and ever.”

The dragon nodded again and waited for instructions.