When Dragons Rage

by Michael A. Stackpole

  And he had repeated the ritual each morning for the last five days. Heading down into the chamber beneath the palace the day he was to ride out with Princess Alexia and her force toward Navval, he felt the need for the ritual especially keenly. While he had never felt cleansed, he did draw a certain amount of calm from it.

  In a small alcove he stripped himself naked and looked down. Because of his girth he’d never been comfortable naked. While he’d not had much contact with others his own age as he grew up on Vilwan, he could still hear sniggers and laughs when he wandered past. No one dared confront him directly, since they knew enough about his power to be afraid, but children still will be cruel to those who are different. Never having a chance to befriend them or change their minds, he had lived with his shame.

  And to console himself, he ate.

  He smiled to himself. He had learned, very early on, that his tutors would spend a lot of time with him, including at meals. He would be indulged in whatever he desired as far as food was concerned, since it would be used to reward him, or its withholding to punish him. By learning what his mentors wanted, he could reward them for rewarding him by selecting that sort of food, all the while enjoying it himself. Food became power for him, and his girth became a reason he needed more food.

  Fat also gave his enemies an obvious target. Kerrigan had inured himself to criticism about his size—at least he hid the pain from his face, so no one outside could see they stung him. Such an obvious target satisfied most folks, however, so they did not probe any deeper for other vulnerabilities—ones with which he had not come to grips.

  He ran his hands down his chest and confirmed again that some hair was growing in on it. He wasn’t going to be as furry as Crow or Dranae, but no longer would he be as bare as a baby. While on Vilwan he had continually been treated as a child, but once away, once traveling with others, he had been accorded more adult status. And my body agrees.

  Hair growing in on his chest was not the only change. He had indeed lost weight. He couldn’t tell how much, but he did know he was smaller. By no means could he see his toes all the time, but he did catch glimpses of them a lot more often, and the belt on his trousers had been tightened a couple of notches.

  Kerrigan moved from the alcove into the first of the ritual stations. The Caledo Academy, he had noticed, was fond of blending things in their spells and rituals. He knelt in a small box roughly a yard by a yard, and six inches deep. The sand and ash it contained crunched ever so slightly as he dropped to his knees. He scraped up huge handfuls of the gritty black mixture—the ash and sand representing the elements of earth and fire—and began to scrub it over his body. It packed dark beneath his fingernails and stained his flesh a light grey. He worked it into his hair and all over his body, dusting what he couldn’t reach and working it into what he could until his skin tingled.

  He smeared the last of it on his thighs, then stood in a tiny cloud of dust. There was no doubt about it; he definitely felt dirty and in dire need of a cleansing. He twisted his feet, burying them to the ankles just to make sure they were covered, then stepped from the box and moved to the next station.

  Ahead of him lay a steaming pool of water, which had stepping-stones arranged in a spiral pattern. Four trails, each beginning from a spot designed with a rune for an element, curled out, the stones getting larger as they went. A central stone stood a step away from the final stone on each spiral. Steam licked up in vaporous tongues and Kerrigan could easily feel the heat as he approached.

  Steam: air, fire, and water. With the stones, we get earth, too. He started on the fire spiral just because he’d not walked it before. With each of the eight steps he took a deep breath and called to mind a specific thought. On the first stone he was supposed to recall his last meal, which he did with great ease, though it was not pleasing. Caledo had already begun to ration food, so he’d not been given much.

  Once he recalled it, he sought to put it out of his mind. When he accomplished that, he moved to the next step, and the next, remembering things that went from the mundane to the exotic, physical to emotional to philosophical. Each time he put something out of his mind and moved forward, he shed concerns and let his mind become quiet.

  At the penultimate stone, the largest on the fire path, he lowered himself to his knees. The stone was not soft, but as he sank back onto his heels and settled in, it did not feel all that hard on his knees and shins. He let his arms hang limply at his sides and closed his eyes. As he shut out the visual world, he could feel wisps of steam caressing and teasing him. In their wake came cooler air, which sent a chill through him, but soon the heat and steam coaxed a sweat from him.

  When he knelt on the fire stone, Kerrigan’s overwhelming sensation was that of being filthy. He wanted to be clean. He wanted his skin to stop itching. As he broke into a sweat and as the moisture began to ooze out of him, it eroded the dust and dirt. He could feel it dripping down him, dropping from his chin to his chest, running down his neck and collecting beneath the fold of fat that covered his lap. Sweat stung his eyes and tasted salty on his lips. It flowed into his ears and burned in the abrasions he’d created by scouring himself with the sand.

  As the sweat ran, Kerrigan saw influences and evils, toxic thoughts and attitudes, the taint of the Dragon Crown, flowing out with it. In wanting to be clean physically, he created linkages with things he wanted to rid himself of mentally. He just let them pour out of him with the sweat. Not all of them made it all the way, but enough did that he felt a growing relief.

  Then, at some point, when he felt he had progressed far enough, he rose and stepped onto the central stone. It was the stone that Prince Murfin had called the birthstone. When Kerrigan had first stepped on it, the prince had told him to brace himself and Kerrigan wondered what for.

  Now he knew.

  He readied himself and raised his face toward the ceiling.

  The icy water began as a slow trickle that played over his face as softly as a spring rain. Kerrigan moved his face, letting it wash sweat and dust from his eyes, then brought his jaw down and hunched his shoulders defensively, for what had begun as a trickle became a torrent. Frigid water splashed down over him in breathtaking sheets. One after another, they washed away all traces of dirt and sweat, puckering his flesh and leaving him sputtering. His skin burned and tingled. A huge shiver shook him, and water droplets sprayed from his hair over the pool.

  Letting air hiss in through his teeth, he moved off along the earth spiral and reached another alcove, where he found a blanket that he wrapped around himself. Murfin had explained that the water used on the birthstone was cut as ice from Lake Calessa, then was melted by sunlight, so that Father Sun and Mother Lake would be the ones to welcome the newly cleansed back into life.

  He let his hair drip and seated himself. The symbology was not lost on him, but just seemed overkill. He felt clean, and the cold water had certainly revitalized him. In the wake of the ritual he also found some peace and, better yet, was able to identify some of the elements of taint the Dragon Crown fragment had left on him. They were certainly less than they had been when he had started the rituals, as if each cleansing eroded a bit more of it.

  Examining the taint, however, had started him thinking on ways to detect the presence of a DragonCrown fragment. If what Rym had suggested was true, then anyone attempting to hide a fragment would be looking to cancel or fool spells sent out to detect the fragment. The defending spell would either have to conceal the fragment from the seeking spell, or would have to overpower the seeking spell and report back negative results.

  The key thing to either of those approaches on the defensive side was that they had to recognize the seeking spell before they could defeat it. In his discussion with Rym, he had come up with all manner of dimensions to spells that would make them identifiable. The easiest one for a seeking spell would be its very nature. Seeking spells sought targets, then reported back with results. How long that took, and how good the results were, depended on a lot
of factors. Often it took time, and the resulting information was less than useful.

  Kerrigan had hoped that detection spells taught by the Caledo Academy would be significantly different from those on Vilwan, but they were almost identical. The spell created a general template that used information the caster put into it, then went out in the world and looked for something that matched. If Kerrigan wanted to find a cat, for example, he’d imagine a cat and would cast the spell. The more details he filled in, like age, name, hair color, scars, gender, and such, the more likely he’d get a perfect match.

  Casting that spell, though, would overwhelm him with cat reports, and even if the specific cat he wanted was located, the time it took to report back could well mean that the cat had moved away and could never be found without more spells and a lot of searching.

  Kerrigan noted an inherent flaw with detection spells and was pretty certain someone else must have noticed it before. If they had, however, they’d not fashioned a spell to take care of that problem. The flaw was this: the spells were slow and clumsy because they sought every object and checked it against the template, then evaluated how closely the thing matched. If it matched on enough of the parameters, the spell would report back that it had found the target. Thus, a statue of a black cat might fulfill the parameters of a search for a black cat, especially if the wizard forgot to include “alive” as an aspect he was searching for.

  What Kerrigan had in mind to develop was a search spell that moved more quickly. What he would do was order the parameters he was looking for, and reject items immediately when they failed to match a parameter. For a DragonCrown fragment he would start with rejecting anything that was not magickal in nature, then anything that did not include a gemstone, anything that was of insufficient weight, and anything that was less than seven centuries old. In effect he would be turning search spells inside out and he hoped that would allow him to find the hidden fragments because concealment spells would not recognize the nature of his spell and react to it.

  Even better than that, though, he decided to make the reporting back more exact. Once the spell had a match, it would trigger a secondary spell. The spell would shoot out two—Kerrigan wasn’t totally sure what to call them and wished Will was around because he’d have a good word for them—two heralds. Each herald would go a half mile north or south of the target, then vector in at him. Because they would travel at a known rate of speed, and each would include vector and time information when it reported back, Kerrigan would be able to calculate how far away the item was and the exact location. Best yet, since the heralds would not contain information about the target per se, any spells cast to prevent such information from getting out—such as a spell that overwhelmed the detection spells and made them report back a lack of detection—would be powerless to stop them.

  He didn’t yet have all the details worked out on the casting. The heralds were ready to go, but setting up the hierarchy of match parameters and making that work was difficult. He felt fairly certain he’d have it ready to go inside a week, and would cast it toward Oriosa to see if the red fragment was still there.

  Kerrigan smiled and sighed happily. He hoped Rym Ramoch would be pleased with his progress. It’s one step closer to stopping Chytrine, and if that does not make him happy, little else will.

  CHAPTER 55

  F or General Markus Adrogans, the battle made no sense. There, in the distance, barely a dozen miles away, lay Svarskya. He’d remembered it as a shining city of tall towers and stout walls, but now it sprawled broken and blackened, with smoke rising as if a siege had already shattered the defenders. In the harbor beyond it lay a fleet of ships, and he suspected they’d brought reinforcements.

  In pushing north along the river road to the capital, he had progressed cautiously. More troops came in from the Guranin Highlands to garrison the Three Brothers. The highlanders had greatly enjoyed that idea, and the clans negotiated hard to get the tower they thought the most storied. Once he had his rear secure and his troops rested, he headed north and sent General Caro with the Alcidese Horse Guards ahead for reconnaissance in force, while the elves and Beal mot Tsuvo’s people fanned out through the countryside.

  Between the Three Brothers and Svarskya itself there lay only one good battleground where the Aurolani could hope to stop him shy of the city. The valley that the river had cut through the mountains spread out into vast coastal plains. To avoid the marshlands to the east, the road crossed the Svar River over a massive bridge. Known as the Svar Bridge, it had been constructed with fortifications at either approach, which would make it easy to hold against attack.

  Caro and his heavy cavalry battalion arrived to find the bridge only lightly defended. Though infantry support would be days coming, Caro bravely took the bridge and made ready to hold it. Once word came back to the main body of troops that the Horse Guards were holding the bridge, the Alcidese King’s Heavy Guards infantry regiment requested and received permission to hurry ahead to support their countrymen.

  Gyrkyme scouts and messengers had continuously flown back and forth to keep Adrogans informed, but the majority of their messages indicated that nothing was happening. Then, when Adrogans and the main body of troops were but a day away, the Aurolani marched a light infantry regiment south and staged a first attack on the bridge.

  The Alcidese repulsed the attack easily. While they only did light damage to the enemy—estimated at less than a hundred killed or wounded—their casualties were even fewer. The Aurolani troops withdrew, then more troops headed south from the city, including a battalion of light cavalry on frostclaws and a regiment of heavy infantry including some hoargoun and the kryalniri.

  What surprised and amazed Adrogans was that the Aurolani had positioned themselves farther north than necessary and had let the sunken road split their east wing from the main body of their formation. The east wing was then trapped between the road and the river, seriously limiting their ability to do much at all. Moreover, the Aurolani position allowed Adrogans to send his own troops across the bridge and form them up in broad lines.

  The Aurolani were inviting him to engage in a set-piece battle, where he had the advantage in both numbers and terrain. The only way that would have made sense was if they had dragonels with them. That weapon’s destructive capability could have done serious damage to his troops in formation, but without them, the outnumbered Aurolani forces were doomed.

  Adrogans surveyed the battlefield. From the bridge, the land began a gradual descent through the plains to the city. Snow covered the ground, but it could not hide the depression made by the road as it cut its way through the landscape. Where the land swelled, the road might be as much as ten feet deep, and all but on the level with the surrounding terrain, but here it was a five-foot-deep gulf choked with snow snaking a white line through the Aurolani formation.

  A slight breeze whipped pennants on lances and tugged at furs. Icy snow swirled up from the ground and rasped over helmets. Horses stamped and blew out great jets of steam, while across the battlefield frostclaws ducked their heads to groom white feathers on their breasts. The hoargoun slowly swayed from side to side with the breeze, like the mighty oaks from which they had formed their clubs.

  Both sides stood ready, and Adrogans was content to wait. Since the Aurolani would be attacking uphill, he was happy to let them come. Maintaining the momentum of a charge was difficult that way, and once they stalled, his cavalry would charge. The Aurolani had chosen both the battlefield and their position on it poorly. He had no idea what they were waiting for, but unless they had the good sense to withdraw, few of them would be leaving the battlefield alive.

  Then Adrogans saw it, above the city. It descended through the clouds as a fireball trailing a thick plume of white smoke. It slammed into the highest remaining tower and exploded there in a shower of flaming debris. A jet of fire shot straight up into the air, touching the low, grey clouds, and just for the barest hint of a second, he could feel heat radiating out.

&nb
sp; The Aurolani host raised their voices as one, and their lines lurched forward.

  That wasn’t just a signal to begin . . . That was the arrival of Nefrai-kesh. Adrogans narrowed his eyes. The Aurolani general had stationed himself in a city tower twelve miles distant, but with a clear view of the battlefield. He had decided to watch his troops, not lead them—for reasons that were beyond Adrogans. But the Jeranese general did not mind. I will give him something to watch.

  Astride his horse, Adrogans turned to his signalman. “Blow an alert for the Savarese Knights and Matrave’s Horse.”

  The man raised his brass horn to his lips and blew. First he played a callsong for the Savarese horsemen, then another for the mercenaries. After that he blew the alert signal and followed it, again, with their individual callsongs. Flags went up in each formation to acknowledge the order.

  The sunken road caused more of a problem for the Aurolani than Adrogans had anticipated. The whole right wing was lagging and its westernmost elements had a weak connection to the center. While that wing was made up of heavy infantry, their formation was losing its front and spacing as it moved through the sunken road, leaving it vulnerable.

  “Signalman, blow left wing advance.”

  The man complied, and the left wing of Adrogans’ formation began to move forward. It consisted primarily of the Jeranese Mountain Guards, which was a heavy infantry regiment. As their reserves, Adrogans had the Svoin Irregulars, but he was very reluctant to use them in combat. They needed seasoning, but this sort of battle was not the sort of place to get it.

  The Aurolani host picked up the pace as it came uphill. They marched to the increasing beat of huge drums, and chanted loudly in tongues and cadences that sounded blasphemous. Adrogans could feel Pain sinking her claws into his breast as she clung to him from behind, but he ignored her. There would be enough pain for her to feast on soon enough, and he had no need of the special vision she would grant.