Spine of the Dragon

by Kevin J. Anderson

  On visits, he would sit with his grandsons out on the wooden dock. Fishermen rowed out into the deep lake for the biggest fish, while Koll and the grandsons dangled their lines to catch the bass and sunfish that flitted under the dock. Tomko and Birch had been more interested in threading fat worms onto the hooks than in actually catching fish. When the lines went taut, he had helped them pull in their catch. Afterward, they would all have a delicious, if scant, dinner of the small fish they had caught.

  When he blinked his tears away again, Kollanan was surprised to see that he had reached the city walls and open gates of Fellstaff, the tall buildings, and the fortified citadel on the most defensible hill within the walls. He could make out the patchwork of new winter shingles on the roof of the main keep. Slumped in the saddle, he rode through the northern gates. The guards recognized him and called out a greeting, but Koll could not answer. Seeing his bleak expression, their voices faltered. He rode directly to the main castle. It was late afternoon, but he didn’t know of which day.

  Finding his way home, Storm trotted into the courtyard, where a stable boy hurried to take the reins. Koll slid out of the saddle and steadied himself on uncertain legs. He had ridden so long he could barely straighten his knees.

  Tafira emerged from the kitchens of the keep, her lush black hair tied back with a red ribbon. “I’d welcome you home anytime, Husband.” She came close to kiss him, then froze as she read his eyes, his drawn face. “No…”

  Two of the kitchen staff watched from the doorway, eyes filled with questions, but Kollanan’s thoughts were only for his wife. He opened his mouth to explain, but his throat had frozen solid with unspeakable news. Instead, he just gathered her in his arms and held her close. Resting his bearded chin on her shoulder, he sobbed.

  * * *

  Sipping a goblet of mulled wine, Koll needed half an hour to tell Tafira the entire story. The words kept catching in his throat. “All frozen … everyone in town. Drifts of snow through the streets, the whole lake … solid ice. The people didn’t have a chance, didn’t even have time to understand what was happening.”

  Tafira coaxed the details from him, but he wasn’t sure he could convey the piercing, unnatural cold, the ominous frostwreths, the heart-wrenching certainty upon seeing the buried boy’s frozen hand wrapped around a carved wooden pig.

  When Lasis heard the report, he was angry and determined. Standing in his full black leather outfit, his finemail shirt, his black cloak, the Brava looked determined to take on the entire ancient race. “I should have gone with you, Sire. The two of us could have fought those wreths. With my Brava magic, my ramer—”

  “We would have been killed.” Koll felt the hollow in his heart. “And Jhaqi and her family would still be dead. This way, at least we know.”

  Lasis remained stolid, ready to do whatever needed to be done. “How will we respond to this? And how many wreths are there? They haven’t been seen in thousands of years, that we know of. Do we gather an army, ride north to Lake Bakal?” The Brava’s loyalty to Kollanan and Norterra was without question.

  “We’ll get our revenge, don’t doubt that,” Koll said. “Right now, I am weary to my bones.…”

  Silently, the stricken Tafira led him to their bedchamber because neither wanted to be with anyone but each other. In public, Tafira often maintained an emotional distance from the people, building an invisible wall that she only let down for a close few, but now she shuddered against Koll, and he held her tight. He lied to her that it would be all right, because he knew she needed to hear the soothing words.

  When Tafira finally fell asleep, he extricated himself from her embrace and stood naked near the fire, staring at the embers of the charred logs. After a while, he pulled on a fur-lined robe and quietly left the chamber.

  In his private study, the hearth was dark and cold, and white breath curled out of his mouth and nostrils in the chill air. He lit a candle on his writing desk, found paper and ink, and struggled to chronicle the terrible things he had seen. He gripped the quill and willed sentences to come. Tonight, he had many important letters to write.

  The first was to his brother, the konag. If what the destructive frostwreths claimed was true, then some great war was coming to the Commonwealth. As Koll began to write, his fingers were cold and stiff. The ink smeared, and he scratched out several words, started again. The ink blotches looked like black tears on the page, and the words were no better. In a halting and convoluted recounting, he laid down the events, leaving nothing out. Conndur had to know everything, but how could he respond? Would the konag call all the armies of the three kingdoms to prepare for a war unlike anything they had ever seen?

  Yes, that was what Koll wanted.

  After he sealed the letter to his brother, he took more sheets of paper and wrote brief missives to his vassal lords. Tomorrow, he and Lasis would spend hours discussing strategic alternatives. He hoped the Brava might know something more than mere legends about the ancient wreths.

  Koll glanced at the wall above the cold fireplace, where he had mounted his old war hammer, hoping he would never need to use it again. Koll the Hammer … If the frostwreth Rokk stood before him now, Koll would swing the heavy weapon and smash that evil face.

  He finished letters to be dispatched to the eight counties in Norterra, commanding his vassal lords to prepare to defend the northern kingdom, to reinforce their own strongholds as a precaution. He encouraged them to tear down the varied wreth ruins and use the stones to build up their castles. It was only fitting.

  They would all face a new enemy now, one they had never expected to return from the mists of history.

  * * *

  As soon as Kollanan left their bedroom, Tafira sat up in bed. She had not been asleep, but managed to lie still, her breath little more than a feather’s touch. She had suppressed her own weeping for her husband’s sake, but now that he was gone, she let the tears flow without brushing them away.

  In her hometown of Sarcen, the people believed that tears drained the sadness out of a person’s body. But Tafira did not feel purged of her sorrow, no matter how much she wept.

  On a shelf near her bedside sat a clay figurine no larger than her hand, the local godling in Sarcen. It was a frog with human hands and a shield on its shoulder, its appearance based on the summer frogs that made droning, cheerful music after the rains. The villagers had built a small temple to the frog godling, asking for good crops and happiness.

  Many Isharan towns had similar rudimentary temples and local godlings, weaker than the primary entities in each district’s main temple. With quiet days and a content existence, the villagers had not maintained their temple very well, and the frog godling became weak as it received few prayers and fewer sacrifices.

  Thus, her village had been woefully unprepared when the Commonwealth invaders came into town. The panicked people tried to awaken their lethargic godling and make it strong, but to do so would require a great cost in blood. In desperation, they had seized the young girl Tafira, choosing her as the most expendable sacrifice among them.

  Tafira had been scorned by the locals as the bastard daughter of a wealthy farmer, and although the farmer acknowledged his daughter and adopted her as his own when her real mother died in childbirth, his wife resented the girl as a constant reminder of her husband’s infidelity. When Tafira’s father died, he left her with nothing. When the people of Sarcen needed a sacrificial victim, her stepmother volunteered the girl without a second thought.

  Despite her lowly birth, Tafira had been liked in the village, and many opposed the choice, but the ransacking soldiers were approaching. Filled with stories of Commonwealth bloodshed, fire, and rape, the Sarcen villagers agreed to sacrifice Tafira, but the raiders arrived before they could do so, and Sarcen’s godling never manifested to defend its people.

  In the end, the town’s only true defender had been Kollanan himself, who brought his blood-maddened soldiers under control and saved much of the village. Koll had also rescued Tafi
ra from her own people, taking the trembling young woman away with him.

  As his exotic, foreign wife, Tafira had been accepted here in Norterra for decades. She had built a new life for herself with him based on love, not superstition and treachery. Their daughter Jhaqi had been a living reminder of that love, and she had found love, too. But now Jhaqi was dead, along with her husband, their two beautiful boys.…

  Kollanan let Tafira keep reminders of her Isharan heritage, accepting that she still had the frog godling figurine as a token of her past life, even though it also reminded her of how her own village had turned on her. It was not a fond token of her lost home, but a symbol of the terrible things that people could commit.

  Tonight, when she looked at the figurine, it was just an impotent decoration. It could not protect her, or her daughter, or her grandchildren. Here in Norterra, the thing was useless against the frostwreths. It would never have defended her, and it could not bring her loved ones back.

  Tafira didn’t need the reminder; she needed only herself and her husband. And she knew they could be formidable.

  Before she could control herself, Tafira hurled the clay figure at the fieldstone wall around the fireplace. The frog statuette shattered into powdery fragments.

  19

  IN the pristine, snowy waste beyond the boundaries of Norterra, the frostwreth palace rose like an outburst of crystals from the glacier. The labyrinthine walls were built from blocks of ice solidified so quickly that glimmers of ancient sunlight were trapped inside.

  The blizzard wall whipped around the towers, whistling hypnotic music through the holes and crenellations. The palace was a city unto itself, a warren of private chambers and huge gathering halls. Drawing upon the reservoir of ice to reconstruct the glacier as needed, mages continued to reshape, extend, and grow the outer walls. Ice and stone buildings rose around the perimeter as more wreths awakened from their long, periodic hibernation.

  Now that most of the noble frostwreths had finally awakened from spellsleep, their race was rejuvenated. The royal caste had the largest chambers in the towers, while mages occupied ornate laboratories deep inside the ice. Wreth warriors practiced and fought out on the snowfields, longing for the day when they would face their mortal enemies again in the final war. They would wipe out the sandwreths and then wake the dragon Ossus. That would bring back the god Kur, who would remake the world, with them as his chosen.

  In her shimmering throne hall at the heart of the palace, Queen Onn lounged in her ice-hard chair, tapping long fingers on the translucent throne. One sharp nail carved a gouge in the ice, peeling up a curl of frost that evaporated into the chill air. Her skin was pale, her hair sumptuous and the color of bone; it hung down to her waist, for it had continued to grow, albeit slowly, throughout her centuries of spellsleep and recovery. Her eyes were just a shade darker than pure water. Her smile held little warmth even as she greeted her lover.

  Chief Warrior Rokk presented himself to her clad in sparkling armor and boots lined with thick white fur from the enormous bears that frostwreth children killed for sport. A crystal knife hung at his waist, but he had left his long spiraled spear at the arched doorway of the throne room.

  Even as he bowed, he kept his ice-blue eyes locked on hers, in flirtation rather than defiance. “It is good to be back, my queen. The clean white cold makes me feel at home after enduring the lands to the south.” He rose into a relaxed stance. “I realize that war preparations are necessary, but I would rather stay at your side.”

  “You have always been lazy, Rokk,” she said.

  He looked scandalized. “Merely waiting for the appropriate time.” He tossed his pale hair behind his shoulders. “My scouting team descended out of the cold to the fringes of the main continent. We established a distant beachhead at Lake Bakal, but there was a human infestation. In the thousands of years since we left them, our slaves managed to eke out some kind of existence without us.”

  She raised her pale eyebrows. “Some of them survived after the wars? How industrious.”

  Rokk came closer, though she hadn’t invited him to do so. “They built many rudimentary structures, but we easily disposed of them. For now, I left the mage Eres in charge to build our new fortress from ice, wood, and stone.”

  Onn considered. “Such survivors would be hardy, I suppose. You killed them all? You should have captured and conscripted them because they could serve us again as slaves. We might have put them to work, as in the old days. Humans were much better than the clumsy drones we have now.”

  Rokk sniffed. “That seemed too troublesome. We simply wiped out the town. The people were frozen before they knew what was coming, but I believe there are plenty more elsewhere, if you decide you need them, my queen. One man did arrive to investigate after we had erased the town. He even had the audacity to call himself a king.” He laughed.

  “They imitate us,” Onn said. “That means they still remember the majesty of the wreth empire, before it was torn apart.”

  The chief warrior paused and smiled. “But I did capture one human child as a gift for you. A little boy. I brought him with us on the ride back here. I thought you might be curious.”

  Intrigued, she raised her eyebrows. “What would I do with a weakling child?”

  He shrugged. “Throw him out in the snow and watch him freeze, if that is what you wish. He is yours. Once we warmed him up, he said his name was Birch. He was shivering too hard to tell us much else.”

  She sighed. “Bring him in, and I will have a look.” As Rokk shouted into the ice corridors, Onn ran a fingertip across her pale lips.

  Two wreth warriors entered with a very small human between them, a boy of no more than five years, hunched under a heavy blanket that had been draped over him. The child had a mop of dark hair, and his eyes were red rimmed. The warriors nudged him across the ice floor.

  Onn looked at him curiously, wondering if the boy would know to bow before her. “He looks very weak. I am surprised he survived the journey here.”

  “Humans are tougher than I expected,” Rokk said. “I should have brought an older one, though. This boy can’t tell you anything.”

  Onn mused, “On the other hand, he is a blank slate. Maybe he can learn to be useful.” She spoke in a sharp voice. “Boy! Do you know where you are?”

  The child sniffled and shook his head.

  “What is your name?”

  He trembled for a moment before answering. “Birch. It’s a tree … pretty, with white bark.” He pulled the blanket tighter around his shoulders.

  “You will see enough white up here.” Onn indicated the far corner of her dais. “Go sit there until I decide what to do with you. Hope that I find you interesting enough to keep.”

  As the child shuffled over to the step, Rokk climbed the dais to stand next to Onn’s frozen throne. A sharp spear hung on the wall behind her. The relic from ages past had a barbed tip stained with an ancient varnish of rusty blood from when the queen’s great-grandmother Dar had wounded the dragon in a furious battle. Onn intended to use that same spear when Ossus emerged from the mountains again.

  Rokk said, “I accomplished what you asked, my queen. Now you may show me your gratitude. It will be an enjoyable experience for both of us.” His lips curved in an annoyingly confident smile.

  Uninterested in his attentions at the moment, Onn stroked the thin line of a scar across her left cheek, a wound inflicted by her treacherous cousin, Voo. “We have waited thousands of years for the right time. We must take our plans seriously.” She flashed a quick glance at the huddled little boy. “Watch this, Birch! Learn your history.”

  She gestured. A delicious cool tingle flowed through her fingertips, and the mirror-smooth floor of the throne room rippled as she manipulated the ice like soft wax, forming figures from old wreth legends. “Our god Kur left very clear instructions of what we must do before we can be saved.”

  The boy watched, his tear-swollen eyes going wide in fascination.

  The sh
ape of a monstrous reptilian head rose out of the ice floor and opened its fang-jagged jaws. Birch backed up the dais stairs, getting as far away as possible. When he bumped into her cold blocky chair, she let the dragon’s head sink back into the rippling floor.

  “Once we prove our worth to Kur by killing the dragon, then we—and not the sandwreths—will be his chosen creations and join him in a new, perfect world.” Out of the ice, she fashioned the head and shoulders of an exquisite male with handsome features that only a deity could imagine: Kur, the god who had shaped this world and created wreths. She imagined touching him, pleasing him. “We have waited a very long time.”

  The queen had slept off and on for centuries, placing herself and most of the wreth royalty into spellsleep, which made them functionally immortal. The great warriors and mages had also gone into stasis, though they awakened frequently to keep building their resurrected empire.

  Onn herself revived only every century or two to assess how her race was healing and to see how much of the land’s strained magic had returned. For two thousand years, she had been disappointed, but now the frostwreths were nearly recovered. As, no doubt, were their rivals from the desert. She eagerly anticipated the war to end all things, so their god would come back.

  Birch crouched near the throne, shivering under his blanket, and she found she did not detest having him nearby. In fact, she was beginning to find his non-wrethness interesting. “Watch this, boy, so you understand! Let me start at the beginning.” Every wreth knew the story, but the captive boy did not.

  “There were many gods and they created many worlds, one for each star in the night sky, but this was the first world Kur had ever fashioned, and he was fond of it. Next, he created wreths to populate the land, and he became fiercely attached to what he had made. The other gods scolded him, because they considered their creations to be disposable, but Kur loved us too much.”