Trail of the Black Wyrm - Chris Pierson

by Dragonlance

  Instead, his sword shattered.

  Hult had had the shuk since he was ten summers old. His father had given it to him, shortly before he died. He’d learned to fight with it, had carried it when he ventured into Panak on the hunt that would make him a man, had laid it at Chovuk’s feet—and thrown it aside when Chovuk died, only to have Forlo return it in a gesture of goodwill. It was the one thing he had left of his homeland. It had never failed him. But the moment it struck the huraj, the blade made a horrible sound and broke into glittering shards, which rained down upon the sands. He was left holding a jagged stump, shorter than his forearm.

  He stared at the broken weapon in disbelief, and the moment nearly cost him his life. The blow had knocked the huraj aside, but the creature quickly swung around again, pincers snapping. Hult twisted aside, barking a curse, and felt a hot line of pain in the side of his neck as one of the mandibles sliced through his flesh. Blood sprayed, and for a panicked moment he thought he had been slain, but then he realized it wasn’t enough blood. He batted the huraj with the edge of his hand, painfully. It was like striking solid steel. The creature flopped away, and Hult danced back, what remained of his shuk at the ready.

  He heard the laughter: the crowd, hooting and jeering, mocking him. He glanced around, understanding; the minotaurs had broken his blade, not him. They’d scored it, leaving it intact but so weak that it would snap the moment he hit anything. He cursed again. He wanted to jam the broken end of his shuk, his birthright, in the foul emperor’s eye. He wanted to bathe in bull-man blood.

  Another metallic snap rang out to his right. “Khot!” Forlo swore again.

  Hult didn’t have to look to know: now both of them were unarmed, and the hurajai were still unhurt. He lashed out with his foot, kicking his opponent and flipping the creature halfway over. As it writhed and flopped, trying to right itself, he lashed out with his broken blade. It struck the creature’s armor, but didn’t penetrate; instead it ground along the plates with a spine-jarring squeal, snipping off three legs, which lay twitching on the ground, oozing something that looked sickeningly like butter.

  The huraj tried for him again. Hult leaped over the creature, stumbled, and dropped the hilt of his sword. The crowd laughed louder still.

  He was casting about, searching for what was left of his saber, when Forlo let out a shrill cry. Hult glanced over and grimaced: the blue huraj had latched its pincers around the man’s right wrist and was sawing with them, back and forth. If he hadn’t been wearing armor, it would have cut off his hand in an instant; instead, it was grinding links of chainmail into his flesh. Blood darkened Forlo’s glove, and he shook his swordarm wildly, trying to throw off the creature. He started beating on its chitinous head with his left fist. He might as well have been punching solid iron.

  A hiss brought Hult’s eye back to his own huraj, just as it was scuttling toward him once more. He flexed his hands. Either he won the fight now, in this pass, or he was dead. He crouched low, watching, waiting. The huraj rose up to strike.

  He was quicker. With desperate speed, he reached out with both hands and grabbed it just below its head. Pincers snapped in midair, close enough to his face that he smelled the bitter tang of acid from its mouth and felt burning drops of the acid hit his skin. He hissed and spat right back. Then, probing, he got his fingers around the plate that covered its head and began to pry.

  The huraj screamed, its tail thrashing, throwing up great fans of sand. Clawed legs dug into his arms, ripping bloody furrows in his skin. Hult ignored the pain, concentrating on ripping the creature’s head off. It wasn’t easy: the edges of the shell were sharp and cut into his fingers. The carapace clung fiercely to the pink flesh beneath, but bit by bit, it began to work free. The monster bucked and thrashed, wrenching him left and right; he moved with the pressure, bracing himself and yanking again whenever it stopped. The muscles of his arms, his neck, and his back stood taut and trembling. The red mist settled over him, and this time he didn’t will it away. He bellowed a booming, wordless shout—and then, with a hideous ripping sound, the shell came free.

  White slime was everywhere, covering him. The huraj slipped out of his grasp, the shell-plate dangling from the side of its head. It fell to the ground and thrashed some more, trying to escape. His teeth bared in a feral grin, Hult ran after the creature, raised his foot, and stomped on its naked, oozing head.

  The huraj’s screams stopped at once. Its back continued to twitch and squirm, but it was only reflex. The beast was dead. Hult hurt all over. But there was still another creature left. He turned and saw it was still latched around Forlo’s wrist. It had driven the man to his knees, with blood darkening the sand all around him. But he fought it still, hitting it again and again, trying vainly to break free.

  Hult ran to him. The remains of Forlo’s sword lay half-buried in the sand; he grabbed it up, the hilt unfamiliar in his hand, and tried to stab the huraj between the plates on its side. He missed, hitting only shell.

  Forlo was extremely pale. His chainmail was torn, hanging. The huraj’s mandibles were grinding against bone now. Hult met Forlo’s gaze, then nodded toward the creature’s jaws. The other man nodded back, understanding.

  Together, they grabbed the pincers—Forlo seizing one half with his free hand, Hult the other with both of his own. For good measure, Hult planted his foot against the creature’s neck. Pulling hard, they eased the pressure off Forlo’s arm, then pulled the pincers wider and wider apart. Forlo wriggled free, and the mandibles came together again with a snap.

  Hult felt something like a tug, but didn’t think anything was wrong until he glanced down and saw two fingers lying in the dust. He looked at his left hand in shock: it was covered in blood, his first and middle fingers gone at the first knuckle. He gaped, amazed—and the huraj’s mandibles closed around his ankle.

  The crowd was jumping up and down, excited for the kill. Hult howled as the monster began to slice through his leg. In fury, he slammed the stub of Forlo’s sword into the creature’s eye, turning the orb into a jellied ruin. The huraj squealed but held on, intent on ripping off his foot.

  Forlo yelled, grabbing the pincers again. But he didn’t have much strength anymore. Neither did Hult. They grunted and strained, and black ghosts danced in front of Hult’s eyes as his consciousness began to fray. He struggled against the pain, but it was too much. He had only moments left. The huraj was going to cripple him … and then he would die, for the bull-men’s twisted pleasure.

  Jijin, he prayed. Not now. I have much still to do.

  A wind passed his ear. There was a solid sound, a chunk. The huraj tensed … then let go with a gurgle, an arrow thrumming at the top of its neck, between two plates. An arrow with black fletching, and a nock carved like a dragon’s head.

  Hult looked up, into the stands. He saw Eldako there. He thought: how?

  Then he saw the rest.

  Chapter

  9

  KRISTOPHAN, THE IMPERIAL LEAGUE

  The spell will be impregnable for two hours,” Nalaran explained. “Then it will begin to weaken. After that, the moment you strike a blow against anyone, the magic will fail.”

  Shedara nodded—she already knew this—and glanced at Eldako to make sure he understood. The merkitsa’s face was pinched, his eyes narrow. He didn’t like the idea of trusting magic, particularly from a wizard he didn’t know. Shedara knew Nalaran, though. He had been Armach’s greatest archmage, before doom fell upon the kingdom. His magic had served the Voice—but it hadn’t saved the Voice, or many other Silvanaes, and Eldako had confessed that failure worried him. To be honest, it had worried Shedara as well.

  But Quivris had told her that Nalaran hadn’t been with Thalaniya when the shadows attacked. The survivors had found him a week later, hiding in the wilds, hungry and exhausted. Since then, the wizard had proven his worth again and again. Quivris swore on his sword that Nalaran was reliable.

  Besides, there weren’t many ways to infiltrate a minotaur city
without being noticed, if you were an elf. And they were running out of time.

  They had traveled west through the woods, avoiding the shadows, until they came to the shore: Eldako, Shedara, Quivris, Nalaran, and thirty other elves, half of those who dwelt in Quivris’s secret caves. There, in a sheltered, rocky cove, they had found three small boats, left there in case the Silvanaes had to flee Armach. They took one of them up the coast, nearly a hundred leagues, moving at night and finding places to hide during the day. This, and a few judicious spells to make the vessel invisible, let them slip past the formidable minotaur navy and make landfall a few leagues south of what remained of Kristophan.

  Shedara knew the fabled city of the bull-men well: its tremendous sprawl of white marble, once home to half a million people. Its bustling markets sold goods from all over Taladas, its thriving harbor used to be a forest of masts flying sails of every color imaginable, and the streets of Kristophan were packed with humans and minotaurs, all jostling and bumping to get somewhere else. What she hadn’t yet seen, however, was that half of that grand metropolis was gone, smashed to rubble and sunk beneath the sea by an earthquake earlier that year. The emperor’s palace, the grand halls of the senate, and the mighty temples to Sargas, Jolith, and Zai were all gone, swallowed by the great rift that had opened beneath the city. Its walls ended in jagged stubs atop cliffs of raw, rough stone. Mourning-fires still burned in great, bronze bowls atop the jagged islands where Kristophan’s northern half had been. They would keep burning for years to come.

  Now the League was recovering. A new throne had been made. A new emperor sat upon it, a warlord unloved by the people: Rekhaz. Soldiers were everywhere. It would make things even more difficult than they imagined.

  They hid in a grotto along the seashore, four miles from the city. The moons were not in the same phase now, so their shelter stayed dry even in high tide. Nalaran went into the city alone, hidden by magic, to find out what he could. He was gone a long time, long enough for both Quivris and Shedara to worry. But he returned, his face pale and grim, and told them what he’d discovered: Forlo and Hult were being held at the gladiatorial arena. They were to fight for their freedom—or, rather, Forlo’s; Hult’s life was forfeit either way. It would happen tomorrow.

  Shedara saw the grim look on Eldako’s face and knew hers held the same expression. “We’re out of options,” she said. “Now we have to act.”

  “We can’t take them from the arena!” Quivris protested. “There’ll be thousands of minotaurs there. There’ll be hundreds of guards!”

  Shedara shook her head. “You promised to do this, Brother. Are you afraid to keep your word?”

  Quivris fell silent, fuming: she had challenged him in front of his men. Shaking his head, he turned and walked away. Shedara closed her eyes, her mouth pinching with pain. She and Quivris had been friends as well as close siblings, but things had changed. Grief and need were driving a wedge between them. Their kinship would remain, but it would never be the same.

  She opened her eyes and saw Eldako looking at her—then his eyes shifted away, as if he believed she might think he just happened to be glancing in her direction for a moment. She knew better. She could feel the wild elf’s stare, even when she wasn’t looking at him. In truth, she wasn’t sure she minded.

  They made a plan. It was risky. Quivris insisted it wouldn’t work: it relied too much on sorcery, and he was a warrior. Those who couldn’t use the Art would never trust it, not fully. Eldako felt even worse about relying on magic—from the look on his face, he might have taken a bite of an unripe ishka-fruit. But both Shedara and Nalaran were confident that, if fortune smiled on them, they could rescue Forlo and Hult from the sands. And there was no time to devise anything better. They went ahead, the mages staying up all night to study their spells while the rest of the elves found what sleep they could. An hour before dawn, they gathered in the mouth of the grotto, and Nalaran cast the seeming spell upon them.

  “Once the magic is gone,” he explained, weaving his hands before Eldako and the Silvanaes, “it will not come back. You also will keep your own voice, and will not sound like one of them, a minotaur, so do not speak. Try not to stray too close to anyone who looks like a priest or a sorcerer, either. They might see through the guise, if they’re looking for trickery.”

  Quivris scowled. “But other than all that, don’t worry.”

  “Brother …” Shedara warned.

  Smiling slightly, Nalaran turned to Shedara and cast the spell. Though she understood the words he spoke, they still seemed to crawl like beetles across her mind. The air shimmered, and for a heartbeat every hair on her body stood erect—and then, with a rushing sensation that made her feel like her head was suddenly full of blood, her body changed. She grew almost two feet. Coarse, gray fur sprouted from limbs that writhed with iron-hard muscle. Her neck thickened, her face lengthened, and long horns burst from her forehead. She swayed on her feet, dizzy from the change, and shut her eyes to steady herself. When she opened them again, her heart lurched with instinctive alarm before reason slowed it down again. She was surrounded by minotaurs: huge, hulking brutes of many different colors, some in armor, others in the short robes commoners wore in Kristophan. Every single elf in the cave had changed shape—except Nalaran himself, who now leaned against the stone wall, looking at once pleased with himself and extremely frail. He wouldn’t be going with them; he had other things to do.

  Shedara’s gaze roved across the group, seeking out Eldako. There he was, rusty brown and battle-worn, a scar running from his snout to his left ear. He had a wide-eyed look on his face that made her want to laugh. She stifled the urge: she knew the merkitsa’s pride.

  Another minotaur, a towering, black-furred beast in segmented mail, stepped onto a stone outcrop and faced the rest. Quivris.

  “You know the plan,” Quivris said. In other, less grave circumstances his elf voice would have seemed hilarious, coming from that sharp-toothed snout. “Get into the arena. Find your places. Wait for Eldako to fire the first shot. Then move.”

  The minotaurs all nodded. And that was it. A few minutes later, they began to leave the cave—gradually, in ones and twos and threes. They split up, moving into the city, making their way to the arena. Shedara was one of the last to go, with Eldako. Quivris had already left, without a word to her. That hurt, but she thrust her feelings aside.

  “Do you think this will really work?” the wild elf whispered as they walked along the dusty, cobbled road toward the haze of Kristophan.

  She shrugged. “We have to make it work. No other choice, really.”

  A few minutes later, they met up with a larger group of bull-men and fell in with them. After that, they no longer spoke. When they’d passed through the city gates—where minotaurs and men alike were thronging—they made their way to the arena. Shedara felt at home, untroubled by the danger. This wasn’t the first time she’d entered Kristophan this way. Seeming spells were a primary tool of a moon-thief, second only to invisibility as a means of infiltration.

  Eldako, however, was clearly overwhelmed. He was trying not to stare at the looming marble buildings, towering on either side of him. Born and bred in the Dreaming Green, he had never seen a place like this. Shedara recalled her own awe, the first time she came to the metropolis—and she had seen paintings of it beforehand. She’d tried to describe it for Eldako, but that could accomplish only so much. Words were one thing; being crammed into crowded streets with thousands more people than dwelt in the largest merkitsa village was another. To his credit, though, Eldako stayed calm amid the press of bodies, the noise, the stink.

  The arena towered before them, huge, its fortified walls ringed with colorful banners and statues of minotaur heroes. Everyone was making their way toward it, and Shedara and Eldako followed the river of bodies until they reached the broad plaza surrounding the stadium. Then they broke away from the crowd and found a nearby street lined with taverns. The reek of the city was worse there, and became almost unbe
arable when they ducked behind one of the alehouses into an alley. Garbage was everywhere; a dog lay dead, swarming with flies.

  “Welcome to the city,” she murmured, flashing a crooked smile.

  Eldako shook his head, trying to blink away the stench’s sting. “I am trying to think of meadows and streams. I am trying to think of leaves.…”

  Fortunately, they didn’t have to wait long. The back door of a taproom swung open, and a pair of minotaur soldiers came staggering out, half-drunk and needing to piss. Shedara eyed their garb: it matched the armor worn by the archers who kept watch over the sands. This was where they came to drink, a run-down place called the Shivered Spar. It was a dive, but it had good ale, and didn’t water its wine. She’d known a few of the archers would be indulging when they should be on duty: not all minotaurs prized honor equally. Some had appetites.

  The bull-men weren’t completely inebriated, but they were tipsy enough that they didn’t realize they weren’t alone until it was too late. Eldako stepped toward them, swift as a panther, and crushed one archer’s throat with a swift chop from the side of his hand. The soldier dropped to his knees, choking and clutching, and Eldako drew a knife from his belt and plunged it into his neck, just behind his jaw. A jet of blood pierced the air, and the minotaur fell forward with a grunt.

  The second minotaur was too shocked to react. Wits numbed by beer, he stared as his partner collapsed—a moment too long. Shedara flicked her wrist, drawing a dagger and throwing it with a single motion. It hit the bull-man in the eye, and the creature died without ever realizing what was going on. She slid in, catching him so his mail didn’t clatter as he fell, and eased his dead weight to the ground.

  She felt the seeming spell waver, strained by the violence they’d just committed, and held her breath. It had been less than two hours since Nalaran cast it, though, and in the end it held. She breathed again.