Spine of the Dragon

by Kevin J. Anderson

  “Dreams are only good so long as they stay dreams. Reality isn’t the same,” Cemi admitted. “No one would accept a scamp from the streets with no noble blood, no experience. I’m nothing.” She ran her finger down the list of names, tapped on several of them. “But if I can help, I’ll help. I don’t want the responsibility of what you do.”

  Iluris pushed aside her half-eaten dinner and bent close so they could both look at the names. The empra said in a conspiratorial voice, “The one who truly wants the power is not the one who should have it. In that respect, you’d be very high on the list of contenders.”

  Cemi made a rude noise and scrutinized the names again. “I like several of these, and another one here.” She flipped the pages, indicated more candidates.

  Iluris had an idea. “Then here is your assignment. Consider these and then tell me why each one of them is a better choice than you. What skills do they have that you don’t?”

  “You aren’t serious?”

  “I’m very serious. Those names have merit, or Nerev would not have written them down. So, tell me why they have merit. Compare them.” She hardened her voice. “And tell me why they are better than you. What do you lack?”

  “The list will be long,” Cemi said.

  “We aren’t in a hurry.” Iluris began to appreciate the ingenuity of her scheme. Cemi would define the advantages of these other men and women and with respect to the specific skills or knowledge she herself didn’t have. With such a list in hand, Iluris could identify exactly how to focus Cemi’s education henceforth, to make her the best possible candidate so that she really could become the next empra of Ishara.

  47

  SIX days after leaving Dr. Severn and the town of Thule’s Orchard, Shadri spotted the crumbling wreth ruins out in an empty valley. In the low afternoon sun, the ancient abandoned city seemed to beckon her, and Shadri answered that call, already excited about all the mysteries she would find there.

  With her big pack on her shoulders, she hiked out of the hills toward the ruins, humming to herself and content with her own company. Her baggy tunic, dusty skirts, and patched cloak hid her stocky frame and showed that she was obviously not a person with any wealth or power.

  Shadri knew that few people ventured into the ancient wreth cities. Even after so much time, they considered the places cursed, or at least dangerous. She found them intriguing, however—an opportunity to gain knowledge that few people would seek.

  Reaching the gateway to the crumbling ruins, she stopped humming, feeling the weight of silence and history. She saw countless questions, and more questions beyond those questions. When there were no people around to ask, then she asked the questions herself. She hoped this fallen wreth metropolis would answer her.

  The ruins were full of shadows and strange curves, doorways that went nowhere, bridges that cut off abruptly in midair. Craning her neck, she faced a graceful stone tower with curved sides that tapered to what would have been a majestic point, but the apex had fallen into rubble. Shards of colored crystal from windows lay scattered on the ground.

  Though the fine detail had been erased by time and weather, the tower wall was covered with stone faces sculpted by wreth artisans. Each face bore the distinctive almond eyes, angular cheekbones, and pointed chin of the wreth; expressions varied from contented to heroic to horrified. The realistic depiction of the long-lost race was unsettling, yet fascinating.

  The moss-covered remnants of high walls were cracked from centuries of rain and frost. Fluted, corkscrewing pillars held up nothing but birds’ nests. She nudged the rubble with her boot, imagining this great metropolis in its glory. So much to see! It seemed a cruel joke to arrive here so late in the day.

  An ornamental frieze wall rose in front of her, carved with dozens of detailed figures, two wreth armies engaged in battle. The wreth warriors wore extravagant armor and carried fierce-looking spears with twisted hafts, spiraling clubs with hooked spikes, triangular embossed shields. This stone mural likely memorialized some historic event in which the descendants of Suth had fought the descendants of Raan, since the two factions had warred constantly for the right to wake the dragon and destroy the world. Although the wreths used their human slaves as shock troops, Shadri saw no humans in the mural, only wreths with fury on their faces.

  One army sat astride thick-legged reptiles, while the others rode shaggy horses with clawed paws instead of hooves. The opposing captains held their weapons high. The carved scene was pregnant with violence.

  When Shadri moved forward for a closer look, she stepped onto a raised flagstone and felt a click. A humming glow throbbed through her body. The mural sculptures shifted, the stone figures rumbling as they slowly came alive, like a puppet show. The battle groups surged together. Reptile mounts careened into the wolf horses. Wreth soldiers slashed with their swords, plunged spears into their stone opponents.

  The animated violence grew worse as she watched, the battle more horrific. Stone blood spilled from stone figures. A wreth battle commander skewered his opponent with a jagged spear, then moved forward to chop off his enemy’s head. Victorious, he held up his grim trophy and turned toward Shadri. His gray, petrified eyes looked directly at her.

  With a gasp, she stumbled back off the flagstone, and all movement in the mural ceased. The figures did not reset to their original positions, but remained frozen in the bloody aftermath of the ancient battle.

  She stared at the silent tableau and chuckled. “Interesting. I did not know any of that.” She would have to write down the details in her journal as soon as she settled down by a campfire.

  As dusk deepened, Shadri hummed to herself again and began to look for a place to spend the night, so that she could continue exploring the next morning. Most sensible people would have fled the haunted ruins before darkness fell, but her questions were stronger than her fears.

  “Superstition is the enemy of knowledge,” she reminded herself. Spending so much time alone, Shadri often spoke aloud to keep herself company, although she avoided the practice when she was in a town, so that people wouldn’t think her addled.

  In an overgrown plaza Shadri found a raised rectangular platform, like a stage that had been silent for millennia, and decided it would make a good place to bed down. She shrugged off her unwieldy pack, glad to be relieved of the burden. She rolled her shoulders to loosen them, then gathered branches, fallen twigs, and dry leaves, with which she built a crackling campfire against the darkness. She decided to gather a bit more wood to make sure she had enough to keep the flames going throughout the night.

  When she uprooted a dead bush from the flagstones, it came loose with a musical tinkle of crystal. The branches had wrapped around a fallen relic, like a tree made of silver and iron. Blue crystal shards lay around the fallen object.

  Only one of the flat, triangular crystals was still intact, the smooth surface covered with wreth markings. After she scrubbed away the caked dirt with her palm, she found a second layer of writing on the opposite side. Holding the fascinating crystal up to the flicker of the campfire, she tried to read it, but the symbols were indecipherable. Shadri wanted to learn the wreth language someday.

  She spread out her cloak, propped her pack behind her so she could lean against it, and sat cross-legged near the cheery fire. She puzzled over the triangular crystal, tilting it back and forth in the firelight, but the elusive questions tantalized her.

  Her campfire was the only light in the ancient city. If she let her imagination wander, she might have envisioned watchers in the shadows, echoes of the lost race that resented her for trespassing there. But if some wreth were to lurch out of a tomb and stand before her, Shadri would stand up and defiantly demand answers. How she longed for that!

  Ready to sleep, she lay with her head against her pack and stared up at the stars—all those other perfect worlds created by the wreth gods—and she imagined the ancient race. What had the wreth been thinking when they created humans? When she and Dr. Severn dissected th
e corpse together, they had marveled at the intricacies of organs, muscles, blood vessels, looking for where the missing soul might be hiding. How complex humans were! She could feel her heart beating, the blood flowing, the air moving in and out of her lungs, the thoughts spinning through her mind.

  Yet humans were only a secondary race created to serve as slaves or tools. Neither Kur nor any of the other gods around the myriad other stars paid attention to humans. Their race was on its own.

  She placed her palm against her breastbone and felt her heartbeat. She was alive; she could think; she could dream. What more did she need? Shadri wondered what it would feel like to have a soul.…

  The idea incensed her. Why were the wreths superior? If Kur had abandoned them, how did the ancient race even know they were so special? “What made you feel different from how I feel?” she demanded aloud, in case any wreth ghosts happened to be listening. “How do you know Kur pays no attention to humans, just because you created us rather than him?” Her forehead wrinkled, drawing her dark brows together, and she lowered her voice to a whisper because the question was so ominous. “How do you even know Kur is there at all?”

  She had heard that magic was much stronger in Ishara, where people created their own godlings. If so, why couldn’t citizens of the Commonwealth create beings as well? Was magic too weak here? Surely their beliefs could be just as strong! Should people in the Commonwealth be ashamed of this failing? Or was “creation” something they could figure out how to do if they just tried hard enough?

  Or was it the other way around? Had the Isharans done something monstrous and terrible when they generated their godlings?

  Shadri’s questions multiplied, as always, and each mystery spawned another mystery. That was what made life fascinating and worthwhile, but each question mark denoted an empty spot in her knowledge, and Shadri was determined to spend her life filling that emptiness.

  Humming to herself again, she curled up in her cloak and pressed the triangular crystal against her heart. Maybe as she slept the answers would come to her in dreams, but she didn’t expect it. Answers were usually harder to obtain than that.

  The ruins loomed around her, mysterious and protective. She would stay here and find her own answers, poking and prodding until she figured it out.

  48

  ROCK pinnacles rose out of the ocean of sand deep in the Furnace wastes. The stone monoliths looked like a gateway at the end of the striated gray mountains that pierced the desert.

  Queen Voo and her sandwreths were thriving here. The stark heat reminded her of the blasted battlefields from the wars, after she had slashed her rival Onn’s face, after her people dragged her away from the boiling landscape under a shield of defensive lightning. The world’s magic had been so strong then …

  The wreth factions had almost destroyed each other in the centuries of warfare, but that war was not finished yet.

  Voo hoped that Kur was watching so that he could see her anger, how she and her sandwreth comrades were trying to do exactly as he commanded, in spite of how poorly his lover Raan had been used. The evil Suth had poisoned her own sister and nearly torn the world apart with her jealousy. As the descendant of Raan, Queen Voo would continue that generations-long war of vengeance against the frostwreths.

  She shifted the triangular green shield on her arm. No matter what her rivals were doing far to the north, the sandwreths were stronger, and they would wake the dragon—as Kur demanded. It would take time, and first they needed to test their magic, but the sandwreths would be Kur’s chosen people.

  Ten of her loyal companions rode augas under the shimmering heat, including her brother Quo and the mage Axus. They had left their sand-and-stone fortresses behind in the deep desert, heading toward the mountains. The reptiles thundered along, leaving deep three-toed imprints in the sand. Voo looked behind her at the swirling sand they had crossed, seeing the line of their tracks.

  Wearing brown leather and golden scales, they followed the fault line, seeking the resonance point at the far southern end of the mountains. No humans had ever been this deep into the Furnace, because humans could not survive in such a harsh environment. That was why, as a benevolent queen, Voo protected and sheltered her special human servants, kept them alive so they could continue to work and build. That way, only a few of them died, rather than all of them.

  Her brother rode up to her and squinted his amber eyes into the heat ripples that blurred the jagged mountain range. “We will use our magic here, Sister? Unleash all of it?”

  Her auga lurched along. “I want to see what we can achieve. Let us hit these mountains, prod the dragon. It is only the first step, but I believe we can make him stir.”

  Quo’s smile showed perfectly even teeth. His long hair hung like a mane behind him. “We could level these mountains and break the desert if we wanted to.”

  Voo shook her head, jingling the gold bangles woven into her hair. “We will not break the desert, but we will shake the mountains. Our magic will run deep.”

  As the queen slowed her auga, the other wreth mages and nobles joined her, squinting their sparkling eyes across the empty sands. The party rode to the first line of black slabs that rose out of the sand and built upon one another into a ridge that extended to the distant Dragonspine Mountains.

  All the remaining magic in the land was connected, all the lines of power that had fed wreth armies for centuries as they systematically destroyed the continent. This mountain range extended into the Furnace like a raw nerve. Voo and her companions would pulse it and jar the entire land.

  Having reached her destination, she gracefully slid off the hardened leather saddle. The large-eyed beast flicked out a black, forked tongue. The rest of the wreths dismounted and stood with their queen to study the imposing mountains. The dry dust smelled clean to her, full of potential. She set aside her dragon-scale shield and knelt with her bare knees in the hot sand. She pressed her palms against an angled slab of volcanic rock. The heat burned her skin, but she washed it away with a thought, then pushed her magic into the rock.

  “I can feel it. This rock goes deep to touch the mountain, and that mountain goes deep to touch the heart of the world, where the dragon sleeps.” Flashing a grin, she looked at Quo and the wreth mages and nobles. “Together we can thrust our magic like a knife into that heart, and twist.”

  Voo felt the clinging leather of her garment, which still held tendrils of life and magic. Her boots and shoulder patches were made from finely scaled auga hides, but the rest of the leather was cured human skin, which was soft and comfortable.

  The queen leaned against the slab, extending her arms to cover as much stone with her skin as possible. She drank in the throbbing heat, the energy, the magic. Her brother did the same, tearing off his leather jerkin and pressing his bare chest against another slab of stone, embracing it like a lover.

  The wreth mages and nobles peeled off their clothes, and every member of her party touched the rock at the root of the black mountains. Queen Voo laid her cheek against the rough stone and whispered to the mages, “Summon it now. Call the magic. Send a wave of force deep into the world, touch the raw nerve, and jar the sleeping dragon.”

  The mages intoned deep-throated spells, called up frayed remnants of magic, mere scraps that remained in the ground, and intensified them.

  Energy surged into Voo’s spine, tingled in her solar plexus, sparkled in her heart. It warmed her empty womb and drew upon her source of life, increasing it. Nearby, her brother laughed, and the mages and nobles exhibited the same exhilaration as they summoned more power.

  They formed a combined hammer and hurled it deep into the rock, producing a tremor that penetrated the earth. It resonated and rippled along the entire range. The sharp cracks of the mountains shook huge boulders loose from unstable positions. An avalanche slid down the cliffsides into washes and arroyos.

  Queen Voo and her companions struck again, throwing a hammer of magic in among the dunes. The sand erupted in towering
geysers, and dust swirled like a whirlwind. The shock went deeper.

  “We will be ready! We will be strong.” Voo poured her concentrated force into the mountain. “Our combined power will wake the dragon.”

  A final wave struck hard, jolting the nerve at the root of the mountains. The shock rippled all along the range, traveling for uncounted miles into the heart of the Commonwealth.

  Spent but exhilarated, Voo slid down the slab of rock and landed in the soft sand. The stone felt cold now. Her naked body was bursting with sweat.

  The wreth mages had collapsed. Her brother crawled closer, walking on hands and knees to reach her. “Shall we do it again?”

  “We will.” Voo hugged him. “But not yet. We must eradicate the vile frostwreths first. We need to save some fun for when the real war starts.”

  49

  AFTER Rokk departed again for the new fortress at Lake Bakal, Queen Onn guided a group of wreths northward. She had work to do in the snowy mountains.

  Wrapped in a cape lined with white bear fur, Onn lounged in the curved seat of her sled. Four small, muscular drones, clad in tattered furs and harnessed to chains, plodded through the snow. Their spiked boots found enough purchase to drag her sled north. Alongside her, two more sleds carrying frostwreth mages crossed the landscape toward the dominant black mountain that rose out of the wasteland.

  The mountain, which Onn had not bothered to name, was weighed down by tons of ice and snow, but it was a resonance point. Its bones went deep to the root of this range that extended into the lower continent to join with the Dragonspine Mountains, beneath which Ossus lay. The dragon slumbered, hidden for millennia … but it was no longer safe, now that the wreths were strong and ready to awaken it.

  She was glad she had not brought the little boy Birch along, since the human child would never have survived the rigors of this journey. She wasn’t even certain the fragile thing would last back at Lake Bakal, where Rokk had taken him for the time being, nor did she have confidence the drones would know how to care for him. She sniffed, making up her mind to devote more attention to the boy. Maybe she would summon him back, but later. Her work here at the black-walled mountain was far more important.