“Or their remains might be in the caves,” Verlis said bitterly, snorting fire.
Timothy went to him and reached up to put a hand on the Wurm’s leathery shoulder. “We’ll help you look.”
“No,” Verlis said, shaking off the boy’s touch. “They are my tribe. The task is mine.”
With a shuddering breath, Timothy nodded. He bit his lip to keep from speaking again. Verlis’s tone was clear. Timothy blamed himself for delaying their return, and Verlis blamed him as well. He wanted to say how sorry he was, but now was not the time.
The Wurm turned from them and started up the mountainside toward the mouth of the nearest cave. Ivar came up beside Timothy again.
“It is not your fault,” the Asura said, his voice low. “You cannot be blamed for the crimes of others.”
He was right, but it did not make Timothy feel any better.
The two of them watched Verlis walk toward the cave. So focused were they on their friend that they did not see what emerged from the cave. Instead they only saw the way Verlis reacted. The Wurm froze for a moment, then his wings spread out wide, and he rose, wings beating the air, bellowing fire.
Only then did they see the figure of another Wurm emerging from the mouth of the cave. The creature was taller than Verlis and clad in armor the same blood red as the leaves of the trees. In one hand it held a long chain, at the end of which was a metal ball with spikes jutting from it. The other hand was alight with a burning yellow sphere of magic.
Timothy and Ivar were in motion at the same time. The two of them were running to aid Verlis.
The rest of it happened so fast they barely had time to react. Wurm flew down from the sky, some of them armored. Others spilled from the caves up the mountainside, armed with vicious bladed weapons, with swords and maces and axes. Timothy and Ivar paused only a moment, and then they heard the beating of heavy wings above them and glanced upward to see a legion of Wurm descending from the yellow sky, claws reaching for them, fire hissing from their open jaws.
They never had a chance.
Heat seared Timothy Cade’s left cheek and the back of his left hand. He woke up hissing through his teeth from the pain, but when he put his palms on the ground to push himself up, they were scalded as well. Timothy put his hands on his lap and sat, not letting his bare skin touch the floor now, and surveyed his surroundings.
It was a cave, but he immediately sensed that this was not one of the caves he had seen upon arriving in Draconae. The air was so dry that his lips where chapped, and when he breathed in, his lungs were stung by the heat. Jets of steam blew up through cracks in the stone floor at various points in the cave, and the floor nearly glowed with the heat coming from somewhere below.
Where his flesh had touched the ground while he had been lying unconscious, his skin was burned. He winced as he reached up and touched the left side of his face. Painful, but not much real damage. He hoped.
Even now, the heat radiated up from beneath him, and he could not sit on the stone any longer. He stood, shaky on his feet at first, but then regained his equilibrium. The soles of his boots protected his feet, but the temperature inside the cave was lethally hot. He felt as though he were being cooked, and the cave were one big oven.
With his unburned hand Timothy pushed his hair away from his eyes and stepped carefully, exploring the cave. It was not large, but he appeared to be its only occupant. A frown creased his forehead. This made no sense at all. He had not really expected to ever wake up at all after the Wurm had attacked him, Ivar, and Verlis in such numbers and with such savagery. They had fought and he had been pummeled. Slipping into unconsciousness, Timothy had believed that they were all about to die.
Yet here he was. Stiff, bruised, scratched, and with new burns from the floor of the cave. Otherwise, he was unharmed. There was no sign of Ivar or Verlis, but Timothy had to hope that if the Wurm had taken him prisoner, that his friends were also prisoners. He tried not to remember the grisly image of the charred corpses of the Wurm on that mountainside.
“Hello?” Timothy called into the recesses of the cave. Only the hiss of steam and the echo of his own voice replied.
He retraced his steps, careful not to put his hands on the walls. They were likely as hot as the floor. His chest burned inside, and his throat felt scorched, as though he himself were a Wurm and at any moment might exhale an inferno of liquid flame instead of breath.
Alone, he thought. You’re alone. But this was not the first time that Timothy Cade had found himself alone in a world that was alien to him, and he did not have it within his character to surrender to fear. Somewhere nearby, perhaps in caves much like this one, his friends still lived. He felt sure of it.
It was simple enough to find the entrance to the cave. But through that opening his gaze beheld a hellish panorama, a vision of darkness and fire and terror. Timothy shuddered and tried to swallow back the dread that rose up within him.
“Oh,” he whispered softly, not even aware he had spoken.
The cave he was in was one of hundreds that riddled the inner walls of the throat of a terrible volcano, as if the entire thing were a beehive. The Wurm kingdom was alive with motion. The descendants of dragons circled and soared and glided all through the vast open space, traveling between the cave mouths or up and over the rim and out into the dark night of Draconae. Some of them were spitting fire, though for no apparent reason. Timothy guessed it might be some form of communication—some system of signals. Far below, hot, molten lava boiled, casting a reddish-orange glow upward, illuminating the extraordinary city of the Wurm. Though there were stars and a single, silver moon in the night sky, visible above the rim of the volcano, the glow of the lava overpowered the celestial light.
The caves were of varying sizes, and many were surrounded by ornate formations of dried lava that seemed to have been sculpted into aesthetically pleasing shapes. There were cracks in the volcano walls of the lower parts of the city, and fire belched up from those cracks in spurts that shot hundreds of feet into the air.
“Beautiful, isn’t it?”
“Aaah!” he barked as he flinched and looked straight upward, searching for the source of the voice.
His boot slipped on the ledge, superheated stone giving way, and he could feel his balance shifting. Timothy flailed his arms, trying to keep from going over the edge, but it was no use. He felt the heat from below blast upward, baking his skin, and he caught a single glimpse down at the boiling lava, knowing that it would melt even his bones.
A powerful claw clamped his shoulder, caught him in midair, and Timothy was dangling there, a fiery death waiting below. He looked up into the face of his rescuer, a hideous Wurm with a single deep scar running from its forehead down across one grotesquely empty eye socket and out to one nostril. Tiny jets of flame erupted from its nostrils, one of them wider than the other, where the scar cut through its snout. The Wurm wore no armor, but a jagged insignia had been branded into the leathery hide of its chest.
“I would suggest that you watch your step, boy, but I imagine even your kind are not so stupid that you have not realized this already.”
As the Wurm set him down again inside the cave, Timothy marveled at the creature. It appeared cruel, but its voice was warm, even kind, with a dry humor to it that made him confused. They had been attacked and captured.
“You’re … you’re being nice to me. You saved my life.”
The Wurm snorted, and Timothy had to back up a step to avoid being singed. “Do not waste the breath to thank me, young mage. I am your guard. Raptus would not be pleased with me if I were to allow you to die while in my care.”
Timothy frowned. He did not like the sound of that. But at least the Wurm was willing to speak to him.
“You’re to keep me prisoner, then. What’s your name?”
“You may call me Hannuk, young mage.”
Young mage, Timothy thought. Obviously, the Wurm did not know yet that he had no magic. And he decided he would keep that fact
to himself for now.
“And there is no door on my cell because—”
Hannuk interrupted him with a laugh. “Because you have no wings. You are welcome to attempt an escape, but I wish you would not. As I said, Raptus would not be pleased if you fell to your death, and no other outcome of an escape attempt is likely. Your hands are too soft, your muscles too weak. And a spell has been cast upon you so that you cannot use magic here.”
Timothy was only barely able to prevent himself from smiling at that. “And what of my friends? What happened to them?”
Only now, as Timothy mentioned Verlis and Ivar, did he see the glint of cruelty in Hannuk’s eyes. The Wurm’s entire demeanor seemed to change. He glanced out at the kingdom that sprawled over the inner circumference of the volcano’s throat.
“The Asura has been put to work. His kind are good workers if they can be broken. If they cannot, they make excellent meals for our spawn. Oh, I remember the rich flavor of Asura meat. We thought they were all dead, slain by the scheming mages. It is a pleasant surprise to find one alive. They are a delicacy. No child of this new generation of Wurm has ever tasted the flesh of an Asura. If it comes to that, and he fails to prove himself a capable slave, they will be fighting for a scrap of him.”
He remembers, Timothy thought. He knew that Wurm could live hundreds of years, but Verlis had been only a child when his people had been banished to Draconae and Timothy had never met another Wurm. This one was old and battle scarred, but still strong, still powerful. And yet he remembered the time when the Asura and the Wurm had been engaged in constant tribal warfare, before the mages began to persecute both races.
“As for the traitor … he is being questioned.”
Timothy felt every muscle in his body stiffen. His jaws clamped down and he breathed through his nose to keep from screaming and panicking. If Ivar did not cooperate with them, the Wurm would eat him! And Verlis … Timothy could only imagine the torture that might be used to question him.
“And me? What about me?”
Hannuk snorted fire again. “For now … you are here.”
“But Raptus wants me alive?”
“You have many questions, young mage,” Hannuk muttered. With a hiss of liquid fire that drooled to the ground and burned there in a small pool, he turned and launched himself away from the cave. His wings beat the air several times, and he circled around to come to a stop once more above the entrance to the cave.
Timothy hesitated only a moment. He needed to know what was going on here. There might be some bit of information that would help him stay alive, that would help him save his friends. He moved carefully to the cave opening, trying not to look down at the churning lake of burning lava below.
Hannuk raised one thick brow and glared down at him.
“Is Raptus the king?”
“We have no king,” Hannuk spat dismissively. “Raptus is our leader. Our general.”
Timothy paused. He had to learn more. Hannuk seemed to like to talk, but obviously had decided the less said to his captive the better. He tried to think of a way to get the Wurm to speak.
After a moment, a tiny smile twitched at the edges of his mouth.
“Why?”
Hannuk sneered. “What do you mean, ‘why’?”
“Why is he the leader? Why is Raptus the general? Why him and not someone else?”
Hannuk grunted in frustration. His wings unfurled, and then he pinned them back again. His shoulders rose and fell with a sigh, and he glared down at Timothy. “Had I known you were going to be so talkative, I would have let you drop and burn.”
“But Raptus wouldn’t have liked that.”
The upper part of Hannuk’s snout curled into a sneer. “No. No, he would not. In answer to your question, Raptus is leader because he has vision. He is general because we will all follow. We know what he has suffered because of your kind, your monstrous, traitorous kind, and we know that with him in command, you will all be made to suffer for our pain.”
Timothy shook his head. Despite the torturous heat and the knowledge that these creatures would never set him free, he felt some compassion for them.
“I’m sorry,” he said.
Hannuk flinched.
“I am. Truly. I grew up away from mages, from my world. I know very little about the past. Most people on my world—the younger people especially—know only what’s been taught to them. They see you as monsters.”
The Wurm grunted. “We are monsters? We made no war on mages until they began to attack our settlements, all driven by the demon Alhazred, Prince of Lies. He showed us what to expect of mages—betrayal and treachery.”
Timothy frowned. “You speak of betrayal and treachery. What do you mean? Alhazred and the Parliament were stupid and brutal. But treacherous?”
Fumes drifted from Hannuk’s nostrils as he considered Timothy’s words.
“Look, if I’m going to be your prisoner,” Timothy prodded him, “if my friends and I are doing to die for the crimes of others … I think it’s only fair of me to ask what those crimes were. The mages were your enemies. I understand that. But betrayal … I don’t understand.”
Hannuk stared at him for a long time before at last he spoke, his voice no longer friendly. Now he seemed only cold and distant. The heat shimmered in the air, but there was ice in the Wurm’s eyes.
Hannuk began, his words dripping with venom. He told the story of his own experiences in the months leading up to the banishment of the Wurm to Draconae and revealed things Timothy could have never even dreamed of.
Timothy knew that the Parliament had banished the Wurm out of hatred, but had never known the extent of their betrayal—the secret truth behind the mages’ war against the Wurm and the destruction of the Asura. As Hannuk concluded, Timothy could only stare at him, horrified.
“One of the original peacemakers, one of the ambassadors who met with the Parliament of Mages that day, was Tarqilae, father to Raptus. Thanks to the wounds he received in that struggle, Tarqilae did not live long after the banishment. He was the one who called this place Draconae, the land of dragons, harkening back to the primitive beasts all Wurm are descended from. The general never saw his father’s eyes; the ambassador was dead before he was born. Tarqilae was the first Wurm to die on the soil of Draconae, and his son was the first to be born here. Raptus was raised with hatred for the mages in his heart.”
Hannuk’s snout contorted into what might have been a smile, his scar stretching obscenely. “He will use all of the resources of Draconae to find a way back to your world, young mage. And we will destroy you all.”
Timothy shook his head. “But not all Wurm believe in Raptus’s vision. Verlis and his tribe, his clan, they wanted peace. They only wanted to make the most of their lives here. Why did you have to destroy them? Couldn’t Raptus have just gone ahead with his plans without them?”
“You are a mage. It is no surprise that you do not understand. They are traitors. If they will not support the general, then they are betrayers to all of Draconae, to our entire race. As traitors, they must die.”
Timothy felt an aching sadness fill his heart, overpowering even the searing heat and his fear.
“They must die, and yet here I am, a mage, and you’re going to keep me alive.”
Hannuk tucked his wings in tightly to his body and bent down so he could curl his head into the cave and peer into Timothy’s face. Merriment seemed to dance in his eyes. The flickering flames from his nostrils rose a bit higher.
“You misunderstand, young mage,” Hannuk growled. “I am to keep you alive, yes. I am to keep you from killing yourself while trying to escape. But that is only so that Raptus will not be robbed of the pleasure of tearing your heart out with his own talons in a public execution, so that all the Wurm of Draconae can watch, and cheer.
“It will be excellent for morale.”
Chapter Twelve
It was a long and terrible night. Timothy did not sleep. Several times he began to nod off, but t
he moment one of his bare hands or his face would touch the floor of the cave, he would hiss in pain and sit up again. At best he had perhaps an hour’s rest, propped up carefully with his legs beneath him, his back against the wall, and his hands on his lap.
Morning came far too soon.
Sometime during the night Hannuk had brought him a tall stone jar filled with water to keep him from dehydrating completely. There was only a small gulp of it remaining when the red glow outside the cave began to lighten to a golden orange.
Whatever star served as the sun for this world had risen.
He raised the stone jar to drink the last of the water, and when he lowered it, Hannuk stood just inside the cave entrance, silhouetted by the golden orange glow from outside. Two other Wurm came in behind him, both of them in the same dark red armor he had seen on the warriors that had attacked them the day before.
Half a dozen witty barbs came into Timothy’s head, but his mouth would form none of them. He gnawed his lower lip and could only watch as Hannuk stood aside to allow the Wurm warriors to approach. He let his limbs hang loosely and lowered his head as if in surrender to his fate. But Timothy had spent years being trained to fight by an Asura warrior. He would not surrender without a battle. As a tiny child he had sparred in combat with a full-grown Asura, and learned that greater size could be turned against an opponent. The moment one of the Wurm reached for him, he acted.
Timothy grabbed the wrist of the nearest Wurm and hauled the monster down toward him, at the same time bringing up his knee with every ounce of strength his tired muscles could summon. He slammed his knee into the creature’s jaw, then drove his knuckles into a pressure point at the Wurm’s temple. Its snout hung slack, and a snarl came from the fiery bellows of its gullet. Then it collapsed on the floor beside him.
The second warrior lunged at him, but there was no room for it to fly. Timothy batted its hands away, spun sideways, and shot a hard kick at its head that made a loud cracking noise as it connected. Flaming spittle shot from its nostrils, and Timothy darted past the Wurm, grabbed hold of its wings, and began to shove it toward the open mouth of the cave. Even with his training, he knew that his chances of surviving the next few seconds were ridiculously slim, but they were going to execute him anyway. He at least had to attempt an escape. The Wurm tried to get its footing back, but Timothy had it off balance. He would shove it out into the air over the volcano. It would have to fly to save its own life. If he could just get to the rim … or a place from which he could climb to the rim—
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