Spine of the Dragon

by Kevin J. Anderson

  The white landscape was interjected with stark rocks. This was the realm Onn ruled, a cold expanse with additional wreth fortresses, walled settlements, and redoubts where her people had gone to ground as they rebuilt their race. For centuries of alternating spellsleep and years of wakefulness, she had fostered her race, helped build their defenses and their weapons. Onn was hungry for a war to destroy the hated sandwreths so they would not be redeemed by Kur when he returned. She touched the scar on her cheek, remembering how she had almost killed Queen Voo long ago. She would be victorious this time.

  Onn felt the cold sting her bare face as the drones hauled the sled faster. Ice crystals sparkled on the white bear fur. She could never forget the most important command Kur had given his children before he disappeared, that they must destroy the dragon, the embodiment of all that was evil, hateful, and violent. Such darkness poisoned not only the wreths, but the world itself. Onn was not yet convinced they were strong enough to wake the dragon, but her people grew stronger each day.

  The wreth mages in the adjacent sleds were wrapped in thick blue robes; their heads bare and bald, their sunken eyes ice-blue and determined. The humorless mages were poor company, but she needed them for their power. If they could hammer magic into the black-walled mountain, the resonance might be enough to shake the world.

  The drones stumbled to a halt on the uneven snow, which made the whispering runners of her sled grind into silence. The pale, slow-witted creatures stared at a wide crevasse that yawned before them. Unable to cross the deep blue-walled canyon, they turned to her with blank and incurious faces.

  Impatient, Onn swung herself out of the sled and walked across the snow. The mages also emerged to stand at the edge of the deep crevasse. When they made no move, she snapped, “Do I have to do this myself?”

  “No, my queen,” said one of the mages. The four of them stood at the edge of the drop-off, their blue robes flapping in the wind, animated by the power they evoked. The snow trembled beneath Onn’s feet, and the crevasse began to close, its edges grinding together like a door slowly shutting.

  “We don’t need to reshape the entire landscape—we just need to cross over,” she scolded the mages. Onn raised her hands, called upon her own magic, and manipulated the ice. Its component water melted and re-formed the walls of the crevasse like putty. She filled in the gap, formed an ice bridge solid enough to bear the weight of the sleds, and climbed back into her seat. When she was nestled among her furs, she told the drones to start moving again.

  The hissing of the sled runners changed to a loud scrape across the hard, clean ice she had formed. The mages’ sleds followed as the drones staggered across the windy plain, their bowed heads shrouded in furs.

  Queen Onn shaded her eyes and gazed at the looming black mountain ahead. The pristine covering of ice and snow inspired her, making her imagine what the world would be like after Kur remade it in a perfect form. But Onn could not have her final victory if the dragon still slept beneath the world, and she knew that rousing Ossus would require a titanic effort. She and her mages needed to practice, after so much time of lethargy.

  When all three sleds stopped and the drones stood exhausted before the black buttresses, Onn faced the mountain as if it were an arrogant barrier that defied her. Her ivory hair blew about like a wild thing, but she summoned heat from inside herself, calling the magic in her blood. She smiled at the wreth mages beside her. “This will take all of us. Together we can shake the world.”

  The mages crackled with cold, their blue robes swirling. Onn shrugged out of the bear pelt and stood in only a thin, silken gown that was little more than woven wind. “We have to touch the power ourselves. Let there be nothing between us.” She stripped off her gown, tossed it aside. The breezes caught it, and somehow the garment drifted back into the sled. The drones watched without emotion. Queen Onn stood bare-skinned in the frigid air and threw back her head. Her breasts were high, her hands spread as she reveled in the cold.

  Likewise, the wreth mages shrugged out of their blue robes and stood facing the glaciers. Without their garments they didn’t look less powerful, but rather more majestic.

  “This is how Kur created us,” Onn said. “This is how we must show him that we will do as he commanded us.”

  The mages raised their arms over their heads, squeezing doubled fists. Onn took her place in the middle and raised her hands. When she clasped them into fists, she felt the magic crackle.

  Beneath her, the thick glacier shivered, as if afraid. They called the deep magic, united as the spell built and swirled around them, and then in unison, they swung their fists down as if to smash the ground with an imaginary hammer.

  The magical impact sent concentrated force into the ice, pummeling the black mountain with seismic blows. The ground shook and roared. Onn braced herself. The glaciers covering the mountain shifted, broke apart, and fell away. Great bastions of blue and white slid down the rock wall in deafening rumbles, relieving the mountain of its burden.

  Without flinching, the drones stared vacuously at the immense power that had just been unleashed into the world.

  When the mountain was nearly as naked as Onn and her mages, they raised their hands, clasped their fists, and summoned the walls of force once more.

  “Again—and deeper!” Onn said. “Until all the mountains feel it.”

  They brought their hands down in a second furious blow that resonated deep, deep into the earth.

  Onn watched the ripples shudder across the arctic landscape, and the shock waves continued to build all the way to the horizon, as if she had thrown a stone into a pond. Glacial debris tumbled from the side of the mountain with a sound as loud as the roar of a dragon.

  Onn smiled.

  50

  TOGETHER, Elliel and Thon traveled the mountain roads, passing supply trains, ox-drawn ore carts, and pack mules following a familiar route from town to town along the Dragonspine Mountains.

  Thon followed the road, trending generally toward Norterra, but he wasn’t sure where he needed to go. Elliel watched him gaze off into the distance with a lost but curious expression in his crushed-sapphire eyes. The enigma surrounded him like an aura, and she sensed that this stranger had a deep importance. They also had a unique connection because of their similar situations, both of them with a lost past. What if he did have an important destiny? What if, by being at Thon’s side and helping him accomplish his own quest, she built a legacy of her own that was strong enough to wipe out the dark stain in her past? Though it wasn’t a formal arrangement, as it had been with others she had served, she considered herself bonded to the wreth man, doing what she had been bred to do. Elliel began to feel like a Brava again.

  They followed the mountains for two days after the hot springs. Because of the shape of the rugged peaks, she could imagine early settlers telling stories about the huge world dragon buried there. With its persistent plume of smoke, Mount Vada was the largest peak in the range, and its conical silhouette was prominent behind them each morning when Elliel looked back the way they had come.

  She led the way, studying Thon, watching his reactions. Because her companion was a wreth, his expressions were often opaque to her, not normal human reactions, but she tried to interpret them as she learned his personality. Though she felt an undeniable attraction to him, he had made no attempt to seduce her, though he had ample opportunities. When Thon gazed into her green eyes, did he find her pretty, or was he just studying her tattoo?

  She was just as fascinated with the rune on his face, especially the loop that formed the locking element. Someone or something had purged him of his memories, sealed him in a quartz-lined grotto deep in the mountain, and he didn’t even have a damning letter to give him explanations, like the one Utho had written for her. He was a complete cipher.

  She couldn’t believe him guilty of some horrific crime like her own, but preserving Thon in a crystal cave seemed far too extravagant a process for mere punishment. Why had they not just execut
ed him, or exiled him, rather than sealing him inside a mountain for eternity? What possible crime could have warranted that? Or was it a crime at all? Maybe it wasn’t a punishment. What if Thon had been sealed away there for his own protection, to keep him safe? What if he was being hidden for some purpose? There had to be something more to him, and she was determined to discover what it was.

  Observing his soft voice, his kind curiosity, and his calm demeanor, she was convinced that for all his strangeness, Thon must be an honorable man, someone she could respect. In her heart, Elliel considered herself a good person, too … yet she had murdered those children and their teacher. Thanks to the rune of forgetting, she would never know exactly why she had flown into an unbridled, murderous rage. She had read Utho’s letter so many times, she’d memorized every word, but it sounded like it was written about a stranger, not her. It had to be!

  She touched her cheek and walked purposefully along the stony pathway. Next to her, Thon said, “I am glad for your company. We have a long way to go.”

  Elliel climbed the steep path without losing her breath. “We don’t even know where we’re going.”

  He kept up with her, showing no sign of a limp even though his leg had been broken only a few days earlier. “Yes, but I know it is far away. I can sense the call, where I am supposed to be. This way.” He gestured toward the top of the ridge. “Maybe by the end of our quest, you and I will both know who we are.” Smiling, he reached out to touch her. Elliel felt a chill, as if he were using magic, a glamour that trickled into her skin from his fingers.

  Suddenly, he recoiled and his mouth dropped open. “Can you feel it?” He clutched his chest. “It goes deep.”

  “Thon!” She grabbed him, held him steady. “What is it? I don’t feel—”

  The ground thrummed beneath her feet, a vibration that bubbled up from the core of the mountain range. She heard a louder sound as the peaks shook, and another sharp shock knocked her to her knees. Thon dropped to the ground beside her, paralyzed.

  Up and down the ridge, the tall silver pines swayed as if stirred by a storm underground. Several trees toppled and slid down the slopes along with rocks and displaced dirt. This was immeasurably worse than any of the quakes she had felt inside the mines. It went on and on.

  She held Thon, offering comfort and needing his touch in return. He clutched her, his face twisted in a rictus of pain. “The world is tearing itself apart!”

  Rocks sloughed down the shelf that held the narrow road, and part of the mountainside came down behind them. Another pine crashed next to them as the tremors increased. Seeing that the top of the ridge ahead was clear of trees, Elliel grabbed Thon’s arm. “Quick, up there! It’s safer.”

  They ran, panting and stumbling to keep their balance as the earth rocked like a wild horse. They staggered to the ridge top, where they were above the trees and falling rocks. Shuddering, Elliel and Thon turned back to look at Mount Vada.

  The huge mountain had exploded, its symmetrical cone blasted away, leaving a raw wound from which boiled a fountain of ash and smoke that rose in an anvil shape higher than even the winds could reach.

  “The mountain…” she said.

  For many days she had watched the curl of listless smoke far above Scrabbleton, thinking little of it. Now, a river of orange fire dripped like candle wax down the nearer slope, and Elliel feared the lava would engulf the town. Like an angry, violent cough, another expanding ball of ash and smoke vomited out from Mount Vada.

  “All the miners!” she cried. “My friends. If they were in the tunnels…”

  Thon’s pale skin had grown even whiter as he stared at the continuing eruption. “Ossus is awakening.”

  Elliel grabbed his hand. “We have to go back, see if we can help. I know that’s what a Brava would do. We can’t just run away.”

  “Yes,” he said, in a bleak voice. “If the dragon is stirring, we must go there.”

  51

  VIEWED from the bluff high above the river confluence, the sky seemed to be on fire. At sunset, copper and crimson clouds rose above the distant Dragonspine, and the air stank with a lingering pall of smoke. From the castle walls, Conndur watched the colors grow more violent, and he sensed that something wasn’t right. A spreading gray pillar of smoke rose like a thunderhead above the mountain range.

  Prince Mandan stood beside him, looking to his father for answers. “Remember ten years ago when the grass hills burned? The smoke made the sunsets look like that. Is it a forest fire?”

  Conn swallowed hard, tasting ashes. “If that is a forest fire, then half of Osterra must be burning. Something enormous has happened.”

  At first, he had viewed the smoke as a curiosity, then a worry, and now the sunset intensified his feeling of dread. Within the next day or two, travelers or eyewitnesses would come from the distant mountains and report. In light of the unbelievable warnings from Adan and Koll, though, what if this strange phenomenon had something to do with the wreths and their terrible magic? If true, that would be worse than any Isharan coastal raid.…

  Wearing black, Utho climbed the wooden stairs up the stone wall to join the konag and the prince on their high vantage. He stared westward, grim. “It’s a grave portent, Sire.”

  The Brava looked down and saw a pale gray fleck land on his black sleeve, standing out like a snowflake. He brushed it away, but three more drifted down on him. Curious, he picked one up between his fingers and rubbed the tips together.

  “Is it snowing?” Mandan asked. “It isn’t even cold.”

  “Not snow, my prince. It is ash.”

  * * *

  By the next morning, the sky over Convera was choked with clouds that were not clouds. A blizzard of ash drifted down to cover the streets, and gray-white flecks caught on the walls, the roofs, and the banners of Osterra. Uneasy merchants shook out their awnings; families swept and reswept their doorways. People tied scarves over their mouths and noses.

  Conndur and the prince joined Utho in the stable yard as he saddled his mount. He had packed blankets and supplies. The konag thought of devastated wreth battlefields, firestorms of magic unleashed as the factions of the ancient race tried to destroy each other. What if Adan and Koll were right about the wreths? About the dragon?

  The konag said, “I can offer a military escort.”

  “I’ll ride faster alone, Sire. Light and fast.” Utho’s black cloak was dusted with smears of pale gray. By now the air smelled of sulfur and burning, and the ashfall came down even more thickly.

  One of the city guards, flushed and breathing hard, found them in the stable courtyard. “Sire, the Crickyeth River has changed. I just came running from the lowtown. It’s a disaster!”

  With Utho and Mandan following, Conn hurried to the castle wall and looked down to the river far below. The Crickyeth normally ran swift and clear out of the Dragonspine Mountains, but the nature of the current had dramatically changed overnight. The usual swift flow had become sluggish, clotted. The water was gray and brown, as if uncounted tons of silt had poured into the headwaters. Broken pine trunks floated down the river like splintered sticks, so many at once that they tangled, crashed, and scraped against the banks like battering rams.

  Along the river, flatboat pilots and fishermen frantically tied their boats to the docks, then scrambled back onto the bank as broken branches and tree trunks plowed through. A huge tumbling silver pine, its boughs still thick with dark needles, swept along like a brush, scouring anything in its way, crashing into the narrow bridges that spanned the river, knocking out small docks.

  Warning bells clanged from the lower city’s watchtowers. On the other side of the wedge of land, people on the calmer Bluewater bank stayed close to their homes. At the point of the Confluence, the clogged waters of the Crickyeth rolled into the Joined River, spilling a stain of mud, silt, and ash.

  As Utho mounted his horse, ready to ride out immediately, a second group of riders galloped into the stable yard. On their saddles in front of them t
hey carried bedraggled refugees: a mother and father, two children dressed in rags. Their feet were bleeding and their faces were even grayer than the ash. The guard captain’s red rank sash was also streaked with gray powder. “Sire, these people come from the foothills east of Mount Vada.”

  The refugee father slid off the saddle and barely kept his balance as he bowed before the konag. “Sire, we had one horse for the whole family! When the mountain exploded, we all climbed on and rode away so fast that it killed the horse. Then we kept running on foot. We made it to the city at dawn.” The man coughed until he could speak no more. His two children were sniffling and crying.

  Conn came closer. “The mountain exploded? Tell me what you saw. What happened?”

  The mother wiped the back of her hand over her crusted lips. “Mount Vada shook and then broke open with a great raging fire. The whole eastern side of the mountain is gone. It … bled fire.”

  “Smoke everywhere,” the father said.

  The young boy looked astonished, shaking his head. “It was the dragon! Ossus is trying to break out of the mountains.”

  “Dragons breathe fire,” said the little girl. “We saw it.”

  Utho turned to Conndur, clearly off balance. “This is not possible, Sire.”

  “Aye, but it happened,” insisted the man. “The ground shook, the forests fell.”

  “Everything devastated,” his wife echoed. “Everything.”

  “This is exactly what Adan and Koll warned us about,” Conn said. “This is what the wreths intended to do.”

  The Brava set his jaw and turned to his horse. “I’ll ride out now and see the truth of this with my own eyes. I will bring back my report of what really happened as soon as I can.”