The Curse of the Phoenix Crown

by C. L. Werner

  No, there was something more than a simple beast behind Ranuld’s death. Morek scratched at his beard, wondering if he dared to draw a connection between his master’s strange death and something else that had been nagging at him for some time.

  The thane Drogor. Morek had only seen him a few times since his return from Barak Varr. Indeed, it struck the runelord that the thane went out of his way to keep clear of Morek and any other runesmith. He was reminded of the same furtive air when Drogor had first arrived at Karaz-a-Karak and become the friend and confidant of Prince Snorri. Despite his many years with Snorri, Drogor had managed to always be absent whenever Morek called upon the prince.

  Now he was back, this time as one of Morgrim’s closest companions. It could be simple political expediency on Drogor’s part, of course, currying favour with those in power. After all, Snorri had raised him from a nameless adventurer from Karak Zorn to a thane of Karaz-a-Karak. Perhaps Drogor simply sought further advancement by renewing his friendship with Morgrim.

  If he could be certain it was so simple a matter as shameless opportunism, Morek would actually be relieved. Such tawdry politicking would be wholesome beside the things he feared.

  Maybe it was being so near to Ranuld and recalling his master’s frequent talk of ‘old magic’ that set Morek’s mind to thinking about the ancient past. Enemies that were as old as the magic Ranuld had sought to restore. Enemies terrible and malignant beyond the worst outrages of elgi and urk. The old enemies. The eternal enemies.

  The undying enemies.

  Morek stared about the darkened vault, studying the massive rune forge and the great war-shield lying against the wall. One of the dokbar, the fabulously ancient ‘windows of seeing’ that the runelords of yore had used to commune with their fellows. Ranuld had been one of the few who still knew the secret to evoking the dokbar’s rune magic and sending his voice and image to the other dokbars. It was an example of the old magic, just as the gronti-duraz were. Relics of an art that was being lost to the dawi.

  As the old magic faded, Morek wondered if the things it had once held at bay might be creeping back into the world. Things endowed with magic of their own. Things with intelligence beyond that of beast and urk. Things that might hide themselves in shapes that weren’t their own.

  Morek looked at the empty throne. How he wished he could discuss his suspicions with his master. Would the High Runelord dismiss them as baseless or would he find them worthy of concern? And if they were worthy of concern, what would he advise Morek to do?

  Morek looked to the slumbering gronti-duraz and shook his head. There were no answers for him here, only the secrets of the dead.

  ‘You should appreciate the abomination of what Lord Ilendril is seeking to accomplish.’ Liandra was in such a temper that she refused to stay in her seat. Instead she prowled like a lioness through the parlour, her boots clattering as they moved from rug to tile and back again.

  Thoriol leaned back in his chair overlooking the window and shook his head. ‘I should, but I fear that I can’t,’ he said.

  Liandra rounded on him. ‘Your father was the Master of Dragons. He knew them better than any asur alive. He would know at once the horror of this thing.’ She balled her hands into fists. ‘I suspected… I knew from the first that Ilendril was going to try something like this. The moment I saw him call a merwyrm from the sea, I knew this was what he intended. This was why the dragons left Barak Varr. This is why they returned to Ulthuan.’

  ‘If they hadn’t left us,’ Thoriol said, ‘then no one would be listening to Ilendril. He wouldn’t have Lady Kelsei’s ear.’

  ‘You are excusing this?’ Liandra couldn’t keep the disgust from her tone.

  ‘I’m not excusing anything or anyone,’ Thoriol told her. ‘What I am trying to do is explain why…’

  ‘Do you know that is what the druchii do?’ Liandra snarled back. ‘I have seen it. They take a dragon and they break him. They torture and mutilate until all that is left is a twisted, tormented thing, and then they force that abomination to their will. Ilendril is no better than a druchii to even suggest we do the same. But he’s gone far beyond merely suggesting. He’s done it. He wants to prove it to–’

  ‘The dragons have left Tor Alessi,’ Thoriol reminded her. ‘They have left us on our own. Do you understand the panic that has left the people in? They live in dread of the day the dwarfs return to lay siege to the city and there are no dragons to stop them. The people in Sith Rionnasc and Athel Toralien and all the other settlements, they know if they are attacked there will be no dragons flying to their rescue. The people are frightened, and frightened people will grasp at anything and anyone who offers an end to their fear.’

  ‘The mages can conjure phantasms to deceive the dwarfs,’ Liandra said.

  ‘How long do you think illusions will be enough to hold them back?’ Thoriol asked. ‘I was here when they marched on Tor Alessi. I saw them marching out against real dragons, marching out even as whole regiments were reduced to ash. No, the dwarfs are too stubborn to meekly turn tail. Once they are committed, they have to be decimated before they will relent. Against that kind of determination, illusions are not enough.’

  ‘Then you are saying we should embrace this?’ Liandra cried.

  Thoriol caught something in Liandra’s eye as she raged about the despicable magics Ilendril had harnessed. It was only there for an instant, but he saw it just the same. It was a look of guilt and shame. He remembered that Liandra wasn’t simply a dragon rider; she was a dragon rider without a dragon.

  ‘What worries you more?’ Thoriol asked. ‘That we will embrace this new magic or that you will embrace it?’

  Liandra turned on him, her face so filled with outrage that he thought she would come at him with her fists. Then the rage collapsed, sinking beneath the weight of self-loathing. She turned from him, shaking her head.

  ‘You don’t know what it’s like,’ she said. ‘You can’t imagine the temptation to have that again. To soar above the clouds, to feel the awesome might of a dragon beneath you. That is being alive – everything else is just shadows and echoes. To share your heart and mind with something older than the mountains and the seas… There is nothing else to compare.’ She looked back at Thoriol, her body trembling with the violence of the emotion that gripped her. ‘I yearn for that, to reclaim it for myself. That is what Ilendril dangles before me, the promise that I could be again what I once was.’

  Liandra’s eyes hardened. ‘But it is all a lie. What he promises isn’t communion but enslavement. It isn’t sharing the power of a dragon but dominating it, commanding it like a huntsman commands his dog. It’s a violation of the ancient pacts between asur and dragon, an abandonment of the grace and glory that is the heritage of Caledor Dragontamer. It is… immoral.’

  Thoriol nodded slowly. He could appreciate the temptation that drove Liandra’s disgust, but she had to understand that it wasn’t simply a question of morality, of right and wrong. The war made it so much more than that. ‘Without dragons to protect them, many asur will suffer,’ he said. ‘We can argue all night about whether the colonies should be abandoned or if the king should offer the dwarfs peace on their terms, but the reality is that our people are here now. If they aren’t protected, a lot of them are going to die.’

  Liandra scowled. ‘If we abandon principle, if we forsake the ideals that make us who we are, then what is it that we’re fighting for?’

  ‘It is the wyrms of Elthin Arvan that Ilendril proposes to harness,’ Thoriol said, trying to soothe her. ‘The dragons of this land have no compact with the asur.’

  ‘Do you really think it will stop here?’ Liandra challenged. ‘Can you really believe Ilendril’s ambitions are so small? Do you think the king won’t be watching?’ She pointed to the window, out to the bay where Draukhain’s island stood. ‘How long before it is the drakes of Ulthuan that Ilendril’s supporters de
cide to harness? Why should the asur ask when they can take?’

  The question gave Thoriol pause. Not for the first time he wished Caradryel were with him. The diplomat was far more versed in politics than he was, far more capable of seeing the implications of something like this. Even after all his years at his uncle’s court, Thoriol still considered himself a novice when it came to intrigue and deception.

  ‘How would you stop it now?’ Thoriol asked. ‘Even if you wanted to, how would you stop it? He already has the attention of Lady Kelsei and the Council of Five. You already know the king’s attitude when it comes to dragons. What would stop him?’

  Liandra came closer to where Thoriol was seated. She lowered her voice, not from fear that there were spies within the Tower of the Dragon but out of deference to the unsavoury suspicions her words would convey. ‘I have told you already that this magic of Ilendril’s seems similar to the sorcery which commanded the black dragon that destroyed Kor Vanaeth. If any evidence of such a connection could be found and presented to the loremasters in Hoeth…’

  ‘Even my uncle would be forced to condemn it as black magic,’ Thoriol said.

  ‘Lord Teranion shares my concerns,’ Liandra continued. ‘We have both had our agents watching Ilendril’s movements. Sooner or later we will discover the source of this monstrous magic of his.’

  ‘And when you do?’ Thoriol wondered.

  Liandra’s eyes were as cold as a glacier. ‘When we do, we will expose him.’ She turned her eyes back to the window, staring out into the harbour. ‘I only pray that when we do, it isn’t already too late.’

  Kazad Kro squatted upon its hill like some great stone snake. Its massive walls and parapets had been extended over time, coiling round and round until there was no visible trace of the rock upon which they stood. It was the last stronghold of the skarrenawi, the last bastion of a lost people. For centuries the hill dwarfs had toiled, ceaselessly hauling stone to their fortress, expanding its defences, trying to build a barrier strong and mighty enough to keep out the rest of the world. For centuries, it seemed, their strategy had worked. The war raging through the Old World had passed them by, washing around Kazad Kro as though it were a great boulder lying in the midst of a river of blood. Kazad Kro had been forgotten by elgi and dawi alike.

  Or so those who had buried themselves behind its walls desperately hoped. After the destruction of Kazad Thar and Kazad Mingol, a great exodus of the skarrenawi had taken place. Led by Rundin Torbansonn, they had renounced their loyalties to High King Skarnag Grum and returned to the mountains and their dawi cousins. Only those too proud and too stubborn to accept the doom of their people remained behind, clinging to their gold-mad king.

  Such was Kazad Kro, its once grand halls and bustling markets reduced to a squalor of misery and poverty. The hold was filled to bursting with the remains of the skarrenawi, refugees from across the lands who had once owed fealty to Skarnag Grum. The war, which had bypassed the city, had been more attentive to the surrounding lands. The armies of elf and dwarf alike had trampled the fields and pastures that once supported Kazad Kro. The dawi saw no shame in taking the food of their isolated cousins to feed their own warriors, for the skarrenawi would benefit once the elgi were driven back into the sea. The elgi, by turn, appreciated that anything which gave their enemies support must be destroyed and the fields of Kazad Kro had been razed, great rocks called down from the skies to spoil them and salt sown across what remained. Without crops and herds, the dwarfs within the hold had been reduced to subsisting entirely on the mushrooms they could grow down in their vaults and deeps. The cheese and milk from the few goats kept inside the walls became a precious treasure, and any dwarf who dared strike a goat was summarily and brutally executed by his kindred.

  Through it all, through all the squalid despair, High King Skarnag Grum kept himself to his treasure vault, tirelessly counting the gold he had hoarded during better times. His mind retreated back into the days of peace and prosperity, when the wealth of both dwarf and elf flowed through the forts and outposts of the skarrenawi. Sometimes, in the grip of his nostalgic madness, he would order his goldmasters to raise the tax on trade goods or increase the duties on wine and beer. Often he would demand to know why the inhabitants of some settlement burned to ash decades prior had failed to fulfil their monetary obligations to the High King. When such fits came upon Skarnag Grum, his goldmasters shook their heads and made their excuses, none of them willing to break the king’s delusions with the terrible reality around them.

  And so it sat, forsaken and forlorn – Kazad Kro, the lone citadel of the skarrenawi. Untouched by siege, unblemished by the havoc of attacking armies, the hold endured like its people, stubborn and defiant.

  In looking for a site to display the power now at his command, Lord Ilendril could have asked for no better place.

  In the chronicles of the asur, the day would be recorded as the Battle of Ilendril’s Hill.

  In the dwarfs’ Great Book of Grudges, it would be known as the Massacre of Malok.

  The wyrm circled above the dwarf fortress, its primordial roar smashing down upon Kazad Kro like a thunderclap. Smoke billowed from the dragon’s maw, little flashes of flame flickering from between its monstrous fangs. Each beat of the beast’s mighty wings sent its reptilian reek rushing into the halls of the skarrenawi.

  Again and again the great red dragon soared over the hill fort. The ballistae and rock throwers mounted in Kazad Kro’s towers hurled their missiles at the beast, but always the dragon was too high to be within their reach. The bellowing roar deepened into a serpentine hiss, a cachinnation rife with malignant mockery. It was the cruel laughter of a monster confident in its power and in the helplessness of its prey.

  Through the refugee-packed halls of Kazad Kro, terror flourished. The skarrenawi were just as capable of stubborn valour as their mountain cousins, but there was a difference between taking a stand against an enemy who could be fought, who at least promised a noble death in battle, and trying to oppose something elemental and ancient. Too many of the dwarfs packed into Kazad Kro had been there to see Kazad Thar razed, to watch the destruction visited upon Kazad Mingol before the conflagration. They knew what a dragon of such size and awful power could do. They had survived it once, and to go through such an experience again cracked such courage as they still possessed.

  A riot of fear swept through the fort. Refugees seeking to force their way through the gates, soldiers trying just as forcefully to keep them barred against the enemy. The shrieks of desperate rinns, the wailing of children, the fretful mutterings of elders as they pulled at their beards. Above it all, the loathsome hiss and roar of the dragon, persistent and inescapable.

  Then, with the same suddenness with which the monster had appeared over Kazad Kro, the dragon was gone. Lookouts in the towers shouted the news down the passageways, and from there the word was carried into the halls and corridors. The fear and strife of only minutes before dissolved into jubilant laughter and cheers. Prayers of gratitude to Valaya and Grungni rang out. The dragon was gone! The wyrm had fled!

  Immediately speculation ran rampant. Rumour quickly established that a dawi army had appeared and driven off the monster. The dragon had retreated when it caught the scent of Morgrim Elgidum, for the great hero of the dawi was prophesied to be a drengudrakk and the wyrm didn’t want to be the one from which he earned the title of ‘dragon slayer’. Then, too, some spoke of Rundin Torbansonn, the exiled hero of the skarrenawi, a dwarf who had already slain a dragon. It was Rundin, naked to the waist and with his head shaved, who the dragon had seen, and in seeing had flown off to find easier prey.

  The laughter, the cheers, the rumours and the prayers lasted nearly an hour. That was when the lookouts in the towers blew the great alarm horns, alerting all within Kazad Kro.

  The dragon was back.

  The wyrm came sweeping down upon the fort in a fierce dive. Its claws were wrap
ped around a great rock it had ripped from the side of some mountain. As it dived upon Kazad Kro, it released the enormous boulder. Tonnes of rock went hurtling down into the hold’s gates, its great velocity and momentum driving it into the iron-banded portals with the ferocity of a volcano. The gates were obliterated by the impact, smashing inwards in a blast of splintered wood and shattered stone. Hundreds of dwarfs, both the soldiers guarding the gate and the refugees who had sought to escape the hold, were pulverised by flying debris. Hundreds more were crushed as the mountain boulder went careening through the halls, grinding dwarfs beneath as though they were grain under a millstone.

  Overhead, the dragon reared up, a malefic roar erupting from its fanged maw. A few bolts were flung at it by those skarrenawi still able to answer the beast’s rampage, but their aim was too shaky to seriously threaten the reptile. The wyrm’s ophidian eyes glared at the most persistent bolt throwers. Uttering a savage hiss, the beast swept down upon their tower.

  The dragon crashed into the side of the building, the impact rattling the fortification with the fury of an earthquake. Powerful claws dug into the face of the tower. Like some titanic lizard, the dragon began to pull itself up the side of the fort. At each window and embrasure, the wyrm paused to send a blast of fiery death licking into the room beyond, immolating any dwarf too slow to throw himself down the stairwell.

  A few of those dwarfs saw the purple-cloaked rider seated in a golden saddle strapped to the wyrm’s back. They noted the callous, imperious cast of the elf lord’s face, the tall helm with its sculpted wings and the pearl-fangs that mocked the jaws of the beast he rode. Some few who understood the words of Eltharin and who heard Ilendril’s voice, recalled with rage the elgi’s vile commands.

  ‘Burn them,’ Ilendril snarled. ‘Burn the moles in their burrows!’

  The dragon obeyed with a spiteful pleasure. Enslaved by the puny creature on its back, the wyrm vented its frustration and rage against the puny creatures before its jaws. The screams of those it scorched, the shrieks of those it crushed, the moans of those it mutilated, these were a salve to its own misery.