Crucible knew full well his danger. “I will travel at night and stay to the east of Shrentak. I will be gone from her realm before she knows I am there.”
Crouching down, he thrust out a foreleg. Still cold and wet, Linsha gratefully climbed up his leg and shoulder and seated herself on the dragon’s warm back in a spot in front of his wing joints and just where his neck ridge ended. He didn’t like to carry riders usually-complained it interfered with his wings-and refused any who dared ask. But he had made an exception for her once years ago in Sanction and since then he had grown quite comfortable with her on his back. A favor Linsha thoroughly enjoyed.
She vividly remembered riding the brass Iyesta once into the desert to pay a call on another dragonlord, Thunder. Iyesta, however, had been over three hundred feet long and wider than a masted ship. When Linsha tried to sit astride the great brass, her legs stuck out in both directions. All she could do was hang on to Iyesta’s back like a cowbird perched on an oxen. One shrug of Iyesta’s shoulders had been enough to send her into a free fall over the Plains of Dust. It was not an experience Linsha cared to repeat.
Crucible was different. Not only was he shorter and more streamlined, his shoulders were narrower and offered a place at the base of his neck where his back-ridge ended that suited Linsha well. They had fought together, bled together, and worked together for almost three months now and formed a bond as affectionate as many dragonriders and their life-long mounts.
Yet Linsha shut her mind to all of that. As close as Crucible was to her, his first loyalty was to Sanction and Lord Bight. She had to respect that or she would not be worthy of his friendship-or of her status as a Rose Knight in the Solamnic Orders. She knew all too well the necessities of responsibility and loyalty to one’s chosen cause.
“Ready?” he called.
Linsha held on with hands and knees as Crucible sprang into the wind and with a powerful thrust of his wings, he rose above the bleak land and angled north toward the eroded banks and sandbars of Barddeath Creek. To the west, the sun touched the purple horizon and began its descent into darkness.
They flew without speaking in the gathering dusk until Crucible tilted his long wings to brake his descent and touched neatly down. Linsha swung a leg around, grabbed his wing, and lowered herself to the ground.
They had landed at the mouth of the deep, winding canyon called Scorpion Wadi where the remnants of Iyesta’s proud militia and survivors of the Missing City had taken refuge after the Tarmaks invaded the city. Linsha knew there were sentries hidden in the rocks and along the high walls, and eyes watched her carefully. But the militia knew her and Crucible and would leave her alone.
The bronze dragon lowered his head and curved his neck around to enclose Linsha in the circle of his neck and body. Unable to trust her voice, she gazed up at him and gently touched her fingers to his long nose.
“Do you still wear the scales?” he asked.
She tugged a gold chain out from under her soggy tunic and showed him the two disks that hung around her neck. One was brass-colored and gleamed in the fading light-a gift from the dragonlord Iyesta. The second was slightly larger, edged with gold, and darker in color. It had been given to her by Crucible and had saved her life at least once.
“Keep them near,” he told her. “Magic is dying around us, but there is a little of our power inherent in our scales. It may protect you.”
Linsha knew it was why he had given her his scale three years ago in Sanction. She always wore them.
She tucked the scales back under her clothes. They were a pact of friendship and reassurance to them both, and a way to say good-bye.
“Give my regards to Lord Bight,” she said.
He straightened and lifted his head to scent the wind.
Linsha moved away. Sadly she watched him crouch and spring upward. His great wings caught the air and lifted him above the bonds of the earth.
The downdraft of his first beat nearly knocked her off her feet. Ducking down, she shielded her eyes against the dust and the grit until the draft passed, then she lifted her eyes to the north. Rising high on a wind from the sea, the bronze dragon caught the last rays of the setting sun. His scales flared with golden light, and he glowed like a comet against the darkening sky. Moments later he passed out of sight, and the fire winked out. The sun vanished. Night settled over the plains.
3
The Messenger
“Lady Linsha!” Her name rang down the canyon and echoed off the high rock walls.
Linsha looked up from the stone and the sword in her lap, cocked her head for a moment, and went hack to work. The Scorpion Wadi was a deep, curving canyon with a complicated maze of caves, tunnels, washed-out gullies, and eroded stone walls. Voices carried in odd ways through the Wadi, so it was often difficult to tell where the caller was located.
Not that Linsha bothered to find out. She had finally managed to steal another few minutes away from the crowded, noisy camp, and she was in no mood to help someone find her and ruin a rare moment of sulking.
“Lady Linsha!”
She continued to ignore the call while she ran the honing stone along the edge of the sword blade. Her name bounced off the rock walls and went unheeded.
“It might be important, you know,” a raspy voice said from the shaded ledge of a nearby outcropping.
“They’ll find me,” Linsha replied in a tone as hard and uninterested as the whetstone in her hand. She flipped the weapon over and began to sharpen the opposite edge.
“It sounds like young Leonidas,” prompted the voice.
Linsha’s clear green eyes narrowed and her lips tightened to a thin line. Couldn’t she enjoy a bad mood alone for just a little while?
“All right, all right,” she grumbled. “Go get him.”
An owl, brown and creamy in color, hopped off the ledge and glided silently out of the side gully and into the main canyon.
Linsha paid scant attention. The whetstone in her hand continued its raspy journey along the length of the sword blade. From guard to tip. Again and again. Slow. Steady. With even pressure and fierce concentration. The stone evened out the inevitable nicks and honed its edge to a killing line.
If only, Linsha thought wearily, there was a whetstone somewhere to take the nicks and bluntness off her soul. She felt as battered and worn as the sword in her calloused hands, and there wasn’t anything she could do about it in this place.
Hooves thudded in the canyon close by then clattered into the dry gully where she had chosen to retreat. She didn’t bother to look up. Varia had been right. The one who called her name was the centaur, Leonidas. She could recognize those hoofbeats anywhere. Feeling perverse, she ignored the new arrival and bent over her sword.
“Lady,” a male voice said, then she heard an audible intake of breath.
Leonidas may have been a gangly buckskin stallion barely out of colthood, but he had been a friend to Linsha through the long, bloody summer, and he had learned early to recognize many of her moods, including her occasional bouts of temper. Although she normally kept them in check, once in a while something would slip loose and she would erupt like Mount Thunder-horn. Since Crucible left two days ago, even the lowliest camp potscrubber stayed out of her way.
“Before you throw that sword at me, I have a message. Lanther sent me to tell you we have captured a prisoner who has news of the eggs.”
Something twisted in the pit of Linsha’s stomach. Her hand fell still.
The eggs. In the name of Kiri-Jolith, why had Iyesta left those eggs in her care? They had been the bane of her summer. The great brass dragonlord had meant well, Linsha supposed, when she’d made a human promise to look after the clutch of brass dragon eggs that she’d left to incubate in the hot sands in a labyrinth under the city. Linsha assumed at the time that vow was simply a gesture of respect. None of them, including the sleeping mother dragon, had ever suspected Iyesta would be dead only a few days later. Then the mother brass was murdered, the eggs disappeared,
and the promise made by a Rose Knight of Solamnia became a matter of honor.
Linsha suspected the Tarmaks had the eggs, for reasons known only to them, and she had tried everything she could think of to learn their whereabouts, only to be thwarted at every step. As far as she knew, the eggs had vanished. But what if they hadn’t? What if the Tarmaks had hidden them somewhere and someone else knew about it? It was a chance she could not ignore.
“Lady, did you hear me?”
The sudden, insistent voice jolted Linsha’s attention back to her surroundings. She hadn’t realized she was staring blankly at the ground. For an answer, she slid the sword into its battered scabbard and rose to her feet.
“I heard you.” She sighed and raised her arm, wrist straight out, in an invitation. There was a flutter of wings and the owl, Varia, came to land on her forearm. Sidestepping delicately, the bird made her way up to Linsha’s shoulder and settled comfortably close to the woman’s head of auburn curls.
Linsha turned her face to let the owl’s soft feathers brush her skin. The scent of owl, mingled with cedar, desert wind, and dust filled her nostrils. A bit of down tickled her nose, causing her to sneeze a gust of air that fluffed out the owl’s feathers across her chest.
Varia gave a throaty chuckle. She was a rare bird-one of a kind as far as Linsha knew-who had appeared in the forested mountains outside Sanction and adopted Linsha as her own. They had been inseparable for years and were very familiar with each other’s personalities.
“Are you through sulking?” Varia asked.
Linsha smiled. “Not yet, but I’ll work on it.”
She could never remain sullen for long. It was too much work. Her temperament was naturally optimistic. Like her parents and her grandparents, she was a fighter who sought to find the positive in any situation-even one as dire as the circumstances she found herself in now. As long as there was a scrap of hope, the Majeres managed to find it.
Her bad mood ebbed a little, and instead of nurturing it as she had since Crucible left, she let it go. She really needed about two months of sleep, steady meals, and easy duty to feel normal again, but she could at least do herself a favor and let her better nature take over.
She saw Leonidas watching her dubiously, like a man watches a cobra from a distance, and she offered him a faint smile as an apology. “Thank you for bringing Lanther’s message. Where are they?”
The young centaur swished his black tail and stamped a hind foot as if to say, “about time!” What he said aloud was, “They’re on the way to the Post.”
She looked at him closely and saw for the first time the dark patches of sweat on his sandy-colored hide and the dust on his legs. He had traveled hard and fast to reach her.
Without wasting more time, they hurried down the trail through the Wadi, wending a way between high stone walls tinted with late afternoon shadow. Smoke and smells from the cooking fires wafted down the canyon on a capricious wind. Voices bounced off the rock walls. A mile from Linsha’s chosen retreat they came to the edges of the camp that had sprung up in the canyon that summer after the death of Iyesta and the fall of the Missing City to the Tarmaks.
In the open plains that surrounded the port city, the Wadi was the only defensible position large enough to provide sanctuary for more than a few people, and in desperation, they had come in the hundreds. Someone had made a complete head-count shortly after the fall of the city and numbered 892 men, women, children, centaurs, elves, kender, and miscellaneous sorts living in the canyon. That number had changed often as more refugees and escaped slaves arrived, as a few displaced families left to seek shelter on the Plains of Dust with relatives and clans, and as people succumbed to wounds, disease, and conflict. It was a population mostly of fighting men and centaurs made up of remnants of the dragonlord’s once-proud militia, the City Watch, the Legion of Steel, and a few tenacious survivors of the Knights of Solamnia. No one knew exactly how many people remained in the Wadi, and most people were too tired to care.
As Linsha and Leonidas walked the narrow paths of the camp, they passed corrals and pens that were nearly empty, tents and huts and caves where people slept, clearings where a few children played, and groups of people bending to a myriad of tasks. Everyone was busy, for there was always work to be done. No one sat and did nothing, except the wounded. A few people nodded or waved to the Lady Knight and her escort, but most paid little heed. They concentrated on their work with the joyless weariness of people who knew they had nowhere else to go.
They were a disreputable looking bunch, Linsha observed. The mercenaries she had met two days before looked better equipped and certainly better fed. The people she saw now were dirty, lean from thin rations, and hollow-eyed from exhaustion that went bone-deep. Living in a strong, defensible sanctuary was well and good if there was enough food and water to go around, but here there usually wasn’t. The refugees didn’t have the means to grow crops, and any hunting party or scavenging patrol ran the risk of being caught by the Tarmaks or mercenaries. Several patrols had disappeared without a trace while too many others were found slaughtered.
Food was not the only thing that had become hard to replace. Weapons, clothing, saddles, horseshoes, tools, medicine, armor, rope, and blankets were all in short shrift. Everyone made do the best they could with makeshift repairs and crude replacements. The dead of the enemy were stripped whenever possible, and a few supplies had come in from the barbarian tribes to the east and the centaur clans to the north. But it was not enough. It was never enough. And no one knew what would happen when winter set in. Winters on the southern edge of the Plains of Dust received the brunt of the fierce winds and cold from the southern glaciers. They were long and hard and difficult enough to deal with when there were snug walls, warm fires, and plenty of food.
Linsha wished for the thousandth time that Crucible had not left. Crucible had provided a valuable service by tracking down and killing cattle from Iyesta’s scattered herds to feed the hungry in the camp. He also served as a powerful guardian to the encampment.
“I miss him, too, you know.”
Linsha started at the voice beside her ear. She had been so deep in thought she’d forgotten the owl on her shoulder. Sometimes, she swore, Varia could read her mind.
“Who? Crucible?” Leonidas snorted. “We will all miss him. Especially at meal time.” He shook his shaggy head and looked around the camp. “I wonder how long it will be before the Tarmaks know he is gone.”
Linsha had wondered the same thing. And what would the Tarmaks do about it?
Shortly the activity of the camp fell behind them and they passed through a fortified earthen wall recently completed. Sentries stepped out, saluted the Lady Knight and the centaur, then faded back out of sight. The camp was nearly two miles from the mouth of the Wadi and could be reached only along a narrow path that hugged the canyon floor between towering walls pockmarked with caves and scarred with gullies, washouts, and dead ends. It was a perfect place for an ambush.
At the mouth of the Wadi, Crucible had triggered a landslide that blocked all but a pathway barely wide enough for two horsemen to ride through abreast. There, cleverly disguised at the juncture of the massive slide and the canyon wall was a small complex of stone shelters and holding cells that represented the headquarters of the beleaguered force. The refugees simply called it the Post.
When Linsha and Leonidas approached, they saw three men and a centaur standing around a rough table laden with maps. The men, bent over the table, were talking and gesturing all at once. The centaur stood slightly apart, his arms crossed over his chest and his face impassive as he listened. He was a stranger to Linsha-a tall, rangy horse-man with a reddish-blond beard and mane and a coat the color of polished cedar.
“Who is that?” Linsha asked her companion.
“I don’t know,” Leonidas replied, curious himself. “From the look of the harness he wears and the white color of his arrows, I’d guess he’s from Willik.”
Willik. Linsha tracked
through her memories for that name and found it. Willik was a centaur settlement in Duntollik, the free human-centaur realm pressed precariously between four dragon realms. Until recently the harried people of Duntollik had maintained a mutual protection pact to help defend their lands from the green dragon, Beryl, to the west, the blue Thunder to the south, and black Sable to the north. Only Iyesta to the east had given them any aid and support. Now that two of the four dragons were dead, Linsha considered what was happening in that land that would bring a messenger so far from home.
The group around the table glanced up when they heard Linsha and the centaur. Pausing in their discussion, the three men waited for the two newcomers to arrive.
These three men, Linsha knew, were the reason the small fighting force in the Wadi had held together as long as it had. They were the backbone, the spirit, and the strength of everyone who sought refuge in the canyon.
By sheer weight of seniority and forceful presence, Falaius Taneek, the commander of the Legion of Steel, had assumed overall command. Bluff, blunt General Dockett of Iyesta’s once-proud militia became his second-in-command. Knight Commander Jamis uth Remmik of the Solamnic Order grudgingly filled in as third ranking officer.
Although the Solamnic commander would have preferred to keep his Knights separate, he was realistic enough to know they had nowhere else to go. He could not pull them out, for their small numbers could not easily strike off across the vast Plains of Dust on their own without supplies, horses, or support, nor could he withdraw in good conscience. He had not received orders to retire the Solamnic Circle from of the Missing City, and Lord Knight Remmik based his life on the strict adherence to the Law. Instead he curbed his feelings and stayed with the eighteen Knights who were left from his garrison of seventy-five and lent his considerable talents to scrounging supplies and building defensive fortifications.
Flight of the Fallen l-2 Page 2