The Ruin

by Richard Lee Byers

  For that reason, the enchantment didn’t shift the travelers all the way to the endpoint. Instead, the disruption stranded them inside the gate, in a timeless, somehow cancerous emptiness.

  Their only chance was to force the damaged enchantment to function as originally intended, and maybe, just maybe, she could manage it. Of all dragonkind, song dragons were the greatest wanderers, with a natural affinity for magic facilitating travel. Unfortunately, she was relatively young, and had yet to grow into mastery of sending spells and the like. Still, perhaps she could exert influence over such an effect while already trapped inside.

  She probed the weave of forces around her, trying to discern where it had broken and how to patch it. When she believed she knew, she started to sing. She had no lungs, mouth, or ears to hear, but the music sounded clear and precise in her imagination.

  In response, disruption blazed through the bodiless essence of her, ripping, seeking to scramble her into something other than she was. She struggled to continue thinking, to cling to knowledge of her own identity, to insist on being herself and not some shattered unreasoning thing, and eventually, the threat of crippling metamorphosis abated.

  In the aftermath, she thought she comprehended what had happened. Mired in the damaged enchantment, she was like a person buried beneath a tangle of fallen timbers. Her only hope of escape was to shift some of the massive lengths of wood, but in the process, she ran the risk of bringing the whole mass smashing down on top of her.

  She wondered how many errors she could make, how many punishing jolts she could sustain, before they obliterated her.

  But no, enough of that. She wouldn’t dwell on the consequences of failure, nor even admit it was a possibility. Seeking to determine why her first effort had gone wrong, she reexamined the mesh of the elves’ enchantment, then tried a new song.

  8 Uktar, the Year of Rogue Dragons

  Dorn tried to move quietly, but wasn’t unduly concerned when, even so, a fold of cloth flapped, or rubbed against another, or leather creaked. He was sure his companions were too exhausted to wake.

  The days of climbing and hiking through freezing temperatures and bitter winds—the glare, sunburn, crevasses, and thin ice—had taken its toll on them all. Then there was the hunger and sickness, the wyrms, giants, tirichiks, colossal bears, and so many other predators indigenous to the Great Glacier. But they were weary most of all from the gnawing fear—a dread spoken by none but surely felt by all.

  But they had survived. Drawing on all Raryn had taught them about coping with such hazards—and aided by Pavel’s ability to conjure food from thin air, cure frostbite and other ills, and cloak a man in sunny warmth in the midst of a blizzard’s chill—they’d made it off the eastern rim of the glacier into a land called Sossal, or so Dorn had heard.

  On first inspection, its hills, lowlands, and patches of forest white with the snows of a premature winter, Sossal appeared little more hospitable than the wasteland they were leaving behind, but he knew the appearance was deceptive. The country was by no means warm or safe, but it was warm and safe enough. Will and Pavel would find adequate food and shelter as they trekked south then west into Damara, where Gareth Dragonsbane and his vassals would help them on their way.

  Which meant they didn’t need Dorn anymore. He’d kept his word and seen them safely off the ice, and he could depart.

  As he took a last look at their grimy faces, thin with privation and fatigue, he feared that when they woke and found him gone, they’d think he’d truly never cherished their friendship, particularly since he’d never had the knack of showing it. He could only hope they understood him better than that.

  He still prized them as highly as, for some inexplicable reason, they’d always valued him. In a way, that was why he was leaving. Because the worthless freak who’d let Kara die didn’t deserve such friends. He deserved loneliness, and they deserved to be rid of him before he led them to their deaths as he had Raryn.

  So he’d slip away and hike back onto the glacier. When his comrades woke, they’d fret, but in the end, they wouldn’t follow, for they had to reach Thentia. Do their best to save the dragons from their craziness.

  He realized he was having difficulty tearing his gaze away from them. Was he stalling? Hoping someone would wake and spoil his plan? The possibility generated another spasm of self-contempt, and somehow that enabled him to turn and skulk away.

  He forbade himself to look back, and kept to his resolve until a first silvery gleam of Lathander’s light brightened the eastern sky. Then, reaching a hilltop, he yielded to the temptation for one final glimpse of the hollow where he’d left them. It would hurt to look, and maybe that was why the urge proved irresistible.

  He squinted, trying to make them out in the feeble gray light, then stiffened in dismay.

  At last Stival Chergoba had found his way to a proper, natural autumn, with a bountiful harvest and exuberant harvest festival. The latter was a merry round of delights. He gorged on roast pig, fried trout, apple tarts, fresh-baked bread, and honey. Then he drank himself silly on ale and crowberry wine, and danced with all the prettiest maidens and widows.

  The only problem was that one annoying lass behind him kept repeating his name. Intuition told him that it would be a mistake to acknowledge her, but eventually she became too irritating to ignore. He pivoted to tell her to hold her tongue, and sure enough, that simple action wrenched him all the way out of the dream and slumber itself. In the dim light—not dawn quite yet, but Lathander’s anemic herald—he was just a hungry, weary ranger on patrol, his body stretched on cold, hard snowy ground.

  It was Natali Dormetsk who’d roused him. Natali was a deadly quick and accurate archer with a natural ability to assume the form of an owl. Sometimes when she reverted to human, her trim body took its time shaking off every vestige of her avian shape. At the moment, her legs were too short, and her torso, too long. A few brown feathers grew on her cheeks and the backs of her hands, while her eyes were a round, glaring yellow.

  “Why did you wake me?” Stival growled, tossing away his blanket and sitting up. “It had better be important.” Actually, he was reasonably sure it would be. Natali was one of the ablest, most level-headed warriors in his command. It was hard to believe she’d never been a soldier until the invasion made a warrior out of most everyone capable of gripping a weapon.

  “I saw a dragon,” she said. Obviously, while scouting the countryside as he’d ordered.

  “Damn it!” Divided into several companies, the Sossrim army was preparing to march south, and it was vital that the enemy not locate any portion of it prematurely. The commanders were exploiting every advantage of cover and terrain, while the druids and wizards did their best to shroud their comrades in spells of concealment, but even so, everyone conceded that if a dragon came too close, it was likely to notice them. “How far away?”

  “Close,” she said, “and on the ground.” The feathers melted into weather-beaten skin, and the golden owl eyes dwindled into gray human ones, revealing a face that might have been fetching if she didn’t always look so somber and severe.

  “But—”

  Stival heaved himself to his feet. “We’re lucky in that regard, anyhow, but I doubt we can kill a wyrm by ourselves. We’re too few. We’ll have to pray it stays put long enough for us to sneak back to camp …” He realized she was frowning. “I cut you off. What else did you want to say?”

  “It’s not the usual kind of wyrm. It’s about as long as my arm from its snout to the tip of its tail.”

  “A very young one, then.” A dragon they probably could kill. He picked up his coat of white dragon-scale armor and started pulling and buckling it on.

  “I don’t know. There’s something funny about the shape of its wings, but even though it was asleep, I didn’t feel like flying close enough to figure out exactly what.”

  “You were wise. A wyrm’s senses are keen enough that you might have woken it, and then it might have been able to tell you weren�
��t an ordinary owl.”

  “There’s more you should know. It’s got two companions sleeping alongside it, one a full-grown man, one that’s either a child or a member of a small race.”

  “One of Iyraclea’s dwarves.”

  She shrugged. “Could be. As I said, I kept my distance.”

  “Right. Eat something while I rouse the others.”

  The patrol consisted of highly competent warriors, their martial skills sharpened by the perils and hardships of the past two months. They only needed a short time to ready themselves for action. Stival explained the situation, and they moved out.

  Everything was a little brighter once they exited the copse of oaks where they’d spent the night, but even then, it was hard to make out men just yards away. Their white garments blended with the snow, and they all stalked along with commendable stealth.

  None more so than Natali, even though she was the one who’d gone without rest to scout by night. Stival gave her an admiring glance. If they both survived, if a day came when she was no longer a warrior under his command—but no. It was a stupid fancy. She was too sensible and prudish to lie with him simply for the pleasure of it, and too bereft of gold or land for a fellow with his aspirations to court in a serious way.

  She led the patrol up a rise, and the two of them peeked over the top. In a depression on the other side lay the little dragon and its two companions, just as she’d described. The dwarf, if that was what he was, lay mostly concealed beneath the cloak he was using for a blanket. But from what Stival could make out, he seemed slighter of frame than the general run of arctic dwarves, while the hair on his head was black, not white.

  “What do you think?” Natali whispered.

  Stival didn’t know. The little drake was no ordinary white, he was certain of that much. Even in the feeble light, its scales gleamed like silver, or a mirror. If the dwarf hailed from the Great Glacier, he was a member of a clan the Sossrim had never before encountered. Of the three, the human with his lanky frame and straw-colored hair was the least remarkable, but even in his case, his boots and other details of his filthy attire made him appear different from the common ice-dwelling barbarian.

  It would be a foul deed to attack strangers if they meant no harm. If they weren’t members of the Ice Queen’s army. Yet what else could they be?

  Stival decided that the wyrm at least must die while it lay vulnerable. Permit it to wake, and it might well strike at them with sorcery, or at least use magic to evade them. Then it could wing its way back to the dracolich and report where it had encountered Sossrim warriors.

  So Stival and his comrades would pierce it full of arrows, but try to take the man and dwarf alive for questioning. If they turned out to be innocent travelers, he’d do his best to make amends.

  He used hand signals to convey his orders. Silent and spectral in their white cloaks, his warriors rose, nocked arrows, and aimed them at the drake.

  Taegan had neither glimpsed nor felt the attack that killed him, and as a result, it took him a while to realize he was dead. That he was a bodiless mote of awareness suspended alone in emptiness. A malignancy gnawed at him. In time it would extinguish him altogether, or at least drive him mad with the threat of it. Surely this was punishment for a life ill-spent, his own strange little oubliette tucked away in one of the hundreds of nightmare worlds comprising the Abyss.

  Once the terror of that realization abated a little, he tried to comprehend what he’d done to deliver his soul into darkness. Certainly he’d committed an abundance of what one faith or another considered sins. He’d lusted after women and relished every sort of luxury and pleasure. He’d killed in anger, and when it wasn’t strictly necessary. Perhaps he’d even been a trifle vain.

  Yet if that had been sufficient to damn him, every rake in Lyrabar likewise stood condemned, and somehow, he couldn’t believe that. His true offense lay elsewhere, and eventually he realized what it was.

  Disloyalty. Coldness of heart. When he’d come to feel ashamed of his tribe, when he turned his back on those who loved him and his own nature, too, that was the moment he’d transgressed beyond hope of forgiveness.

  But such a judgment wasn’t fair! He’d been free to live life on his own terms, hadn’t he? To choose an existence that fulfilled him?

  No one and nothing responded to his protestations, or rather, nothing but his deeper self, and its answer was a paradox: He’d had every right to be selfish, and yet no right at all.

  That bitter, irrational insight was as far as his wisdom could take him, and once he reached it, he had little to distract him from the endless aching misery of his condition. He wondered what would happen if he simply yielded to the power grinding away at his essential identity. How badly would extinction hurt? Was it remotely possible it would bring his punishment to an end, or would the unseen fiend overseeing it simply reconstitute his psyche and begin again?

  He decided he had little to lose by attempting the experiment, but after a lifetime spent on the path of the sword, he found it difficult to drop his guard and surrender himself to extinction. Finally, though—after hours, days, years, centuries?—he mustered the courage, and heard Kara singing.

  Or sensed it, rather, as he registered his own thoughts. Without ears, one couldn’t hear anything. Yet he was certain the music was real, and equally sure he hadn’t died and gone to perdition after all. It was plausible that a rascal like himself might land in the Abyss, but the dragon bard, never! No, they were alive but trapped in some peculiar predicament, and she was surely attempting to free them. Hoping she could perceive it as he could discern her song, he urged her on.

  The shifting void blinked, giving way, for an instant, to a murky chamber or cavern paved with dark hexagonal stones, each inscribed with a glowing symbol. In that same moment, he had a body again, limbs, eyes, and lungs that tried to gasp in a breath before substance and a detailed, coherent world dissolved once more.

  Kara sang more fiercely and insistently. The void and the chamber flickered back and forth, until abruptly, the transitions stopped, dumping Taegan finally and unambiguously into the realm of solid, stable matter. Across the floor, a number of the cobbles cracked and shattered, and all the runes stopped glowing, deepening the darkness. A trace of light still leaked in from somewhere, but even so, a human wouldn’t have been able to see anything at all.

  It felt wonderful to have flesh again, but unpleasant, too. The air was cold, and Taegan felt puny and brittle, as if just beginning his recovery from some disease. His magical imprisonment had taken a toll on him.

  He stumbled a step, spread his wings to help him balance, and observed Raryn, Kara, and Brimstone gathered around him. They all looked dazed and ill, too, even the vampire.

  “What happened to us?” Taegan croaked, addressing the question primarily to Kara. She seemed the person likeliest to know. “What is this place?”

  She jumped away from him. “Stay back!” she said. “I can’t—it’s too strong here!”

  “You mean the Rage?” he asked, and something dragon-shaped and dragon-huge lunged out of the gloom. It rattled and clinked, and its talons clicked on the floor.

  Sprinting down the trail as fast as his mismatched legs could carry him, Dorn caught occasional glimpses of the white-clad men skulking toward Will, Pavel, and Jivex. For the most part, though, trees, brush, and higher ground cut off the view, leaving him to wonder just how close the strangers had gotten.

  He’d assumed his friends would be all right slumbering unguarded for just a short while, then the imminence of sunrise would wake Pavel as it always did. But when he’d looked back from the top of the rise, and by the luckiest of chances spotted a dozen warriors emerging from a stand of trees, he’d realized just how stupid and negligent he’d been. It was clear from the way they moved and the direction they took that the men in white somehow knew about his comrades, and if they slaughtered them in their sleep, it would be his fault.

  He reached the rim of the higher ground abov
e the depression where he and his exhausted companions had flopped down to rest, and there he felt a jolt of horror. The warriors in white had arrived before him, and were aiming arrows down into the bowl. Their captain, a stocky fellow in a brigandine of ivory-colored dragon-hide, raised his hand to give the signal to shoot.

  Dorn nocked a shaft of his own and drew the fletchings back to his ear. “Stop!” he bellowed to the captain. “If anybody shoots, I’ll kill you!”

  Startled, people spun around to look at him, sometimes goggling or screwing up their faces at his freakish appearance. Meanwhile, he observed that, judging by their more-or-less civilized attire, these moon-blond, fair-skinned folk were Sossrim, not glacier tribesmen bound to Zethrindor’s service. That was good as far as it went. It meant they had no legitimate quarrel with the travelers, if only Dorn could convince them of it.

  Down on the low ground, roused by Dorn’s call, Pavel, Will, and Jivex jerked awake. The faerie dragon spread his wings. Will, realizing that if Jivex took to the air, it would precipitate a volley of arrows, shouted, “No!” The reptile froze.

  The captain gave Dorn a level stare. “You have one arrow,” the officer said. “We have many.”

  “True,” said Dorn. “But if you people attack, my one is going straight into your chest.”

  “Why would you want to hurt us anyway?” Pavel asked. “You’re Sossrim, aren’t you, which means your enemies are our enemies. We just escaped from the same folk who’ve invaded your homeland. Look.” Moving slowly, he fished his sun amulet out from under his grubby, twisted mantle and set it aglow with red-gold light. “I’m a priest of the Morninglord. Is it likely I’ve made common cause with people who offer to the Frostmaiden?”

  The captain frowned. “Ordinarily, I’d say no. But you lie down and sleep beside a dragon. In Sossal, wyrms have always been a scourge, and never more so than this year.”