THE DRAGONS AT WAR
Edited by Margaret Weis and Tracy Hickman
(c)1996 TSR, Inc.
All Rights Reserved.
OCR'ed by Alligator
[email protected]
TABLE OF CONTENTS
1. Dream of the Namer
Michael Williams
2. People of the Dragon
Mark Anthony
3. Quarry
Adam Lesh
4. Glory Descending
Chris Pierson
5. A Lull in the Battle
Linda P. Baker
6. Proper Tribute
Janet Pack
7. Blind
Kevin T. Stein
8. Nature of the Beast
Teri McLaren
9. Even Dragon Blood
J. Robert King
10. Boom
Jeff Grubb
11. Storytellers
Nick O'Donohoe
12. The First Dragonarmy Engineer's Secret Weapon
Don Perrin and Margaret Weis
13. Through the Door at the Top of the Sky
Roger E. Moore
14. Aurora's Eggs
Douglas Niles
Introduction
Margaret Weis
It is storyteller's night at the Inn of the Last Home. Tika began the institution in order to boost sales during those cold winter nights when people would much rather stay home near the fire than venture out into the ice and snow.
They became enormously popular and now, periodically, she and Caramon send invitations to the most renowned storytellers in Ansalon, offering to pay room and board if they come share their tales.
This evening, the Inn has a fine collection of bards.
Caramon stands up on a keg of ale to be seen over the crowd, and makes the introductions.
"First, I'd like to present the old-timers like me," Caramon says. "These friends date clear back to the time of the War of the Lance. Just raise your hand when I call your name. Tasslehoff, put your hand down. We have tonight: Michael Williams, Jeff Grubb, Nick O'Donohoe, Roger Moore, Doug Niles, Margaret Weis, Tracy Hickman ... Where's Tracy?"
Caramon peers out into the crowd. There are shouts of laughter when Hickman is discovered wearing mouse-colored robes and accusing everyone of stealing his hat.
After the noise subsides, Caramon resumes. "A few of our bards this evening are making return appearances. Please raise your hands. No, Tas, that doesn't include you. I-Wait a minute! What's that you're holding in your hand? That's tonight's cash box! Tas! Give me that!"
General confusion. Caramon clambers down off the keg.
Tas's shrill voice rises in protest. "I was just keeping it safe, and a good thing, too! There's a lot of shady-looking characters in this crowd tonight."
"No, that's just Roger!" calls out Michael Williams.
When order (and the cash box) are restored, Caramon introduces the bards who have told stories here before: Janet Pack, Linda Baker, Mark Anthony, and Don Perrin.
"Finally," says Caramon, out of breath and red in the face, "I am pleased to introduce several bards who are newcomers to Ansalon. Everyone please welcome Adam Lesh, Chris Pierson, and J. Robert King."
The newcomers are warmly welcomed and advised to keep their hands on their purses.
Caramon bows to thunderous applause and returns to his place behind the bar. Tika makes a final call for ale.
Come, friend. There's room on this bench next to me. Sit down. Order a mug and be prepared to laugh and cry, shudder and shiver.
Tonight, our storytellers are going to talk about The Dragons at War.
Dream of the Namer
Michael Williams
I
The song of the high grass,
the twinned lamps
of the arcing moon,
the whisper of stars
and the darker moon
we must always remember-
these are the guides
on the first of the journeys
to a time past remembrance,
past the words for time
into the Namer's country
where we venture in dreams.
The time of the walking,
the Namers call it:
the time of the breath,
the forgotten time
when the lamps of the moons
wink out in an instant
and we steer by the dark
unforgettable light,
by the lost heartbeat.
It is the dream
of the Namers' time,
the convergence of visions,
when the moon and the wind
the strung bead
and the parables of sand
unite in a story
we do not remember
until we have traveled its country.
II
On the eve of the wars,
the signs and omens
bright as mirages,
I walked in a dreaming,
through an emptied country
bloodied with iron and sunlight,
and there in the dream
I asked three times
for the voice of the god,
and he came to me quietly,
a shimmer of smoke
at the edge of imagined country,
where the whispered truth rises,
and the words that you dream
are here and suddenly elsewhere.
It is the old voice
felt on the back of the neck,
the thing under reason and thought,
when out of the smoke of your dreaming,
out of the harbor of blood,
out of the ninth moon's drowning,
the dead rise are rising
have risen and speak
in the language of sparrow and drum.
And oh may the gods
believe in my telling,
in the dream I recount,
and may the long dead listen
in the wind-drowned lands
in the dust's generation
as I tell you the seventh
of seven visions,
the song of the dragon's wing.
III
First there was eye,
then night, then immutable north,
then the smell of the springbok
over the launched horizon,
and then I was walking,
over a dying plain
littered with rock
and immaculate bone.
Ahead in a cavern
of dazzled sunlight,
on the sunstruck and burnished
edge of the world,
the dragons, dark jewels,
a flicker of ebony wings,
a frenzy of beetles
feasting on carrion,
and I cannot tell you
in memory's dream,
whether the sight
or the seeing drew me
whether I went
of my own accord
or drawn like a jessed bird
hard to the falconer's will.
But what did it matter
when the dark thing ascended
in an old smell of blood,
of creosote and coal?
I looked to the sun
and I saw them in legion
wingtip to wingtip
in the western skies
and it was for this
I was brought to the summit,
it was for this
that I dreamed the philosopher's dream.
Sunlight under my riding
and an alien heartbeat,
the cold pulse of blood
like the waters' convergence-
>
on the back of the monster
the sunlight was dreaming to shadows
as the wings passed over
the dying world.
And out of the lifting heartbeat,
out of the drum and shadow,
a voice rose around me,
inveigling, caressing,
a voice indistinct
from my own in my dreams,
a voice indistinct
from the chambered shadows,
from a century's nursing
of venom and fire,
and all of my dreaming
had brought me to this,
had prepared me to ride
on the wings of the darkness,
and the voice of the serpent
I heard in the air
as she spoke to me
saying ... saying ...
IV
Do not believe
this is only beginning,
Oh do not believe
of my dark and interminable legions,
that as long as the heart
is a thicket of knives,
we will not prevail
regardless of knights
and their rumored lances.
I am telling you this
from the heart of the storm,
from the tumult of wings
at the edge of your vision.
Over the miles
of a dozen kingdoms
I hasten toward Huma
toward his forged
and impossible lance,
toward victory, though
the hot abysm of dreams
swells with a voice
that is telling me always
it will end in this age,
in expected convergence
of dragon and darkness,
of the plain appointed
and the point of the lance.
Oh do not expect
there is ever an ending,
for even the sunlight
that closes around me
masks a nation of shadows,
the sigh of the desert
drowns out the wails
of the buried and beaten,
and do not believe
this is changing,
that the endings are happy,
that the cycle of seasons
awaits an eventual spring,
that the sunrise riding
the wake of the darkness
is more than a mutual dream.
Oh do not believe
as I ride into battle,
that the battle is more
than an accident, formed
in the clumsy collision
of sunlight and shadow,
that a morning will pass
in an unending sunlight
without the dark brush of a wing.
V
And as I arose on the Lady's back,
the wake of her wingbeats
blossomed in darkness,
darkness surrounded me,
darkness expanding
and harvesting light,
and around us a tumult of wings
settled like ashes
in a winter of loss.
So circled the Lady
over plain over sunlight
toward the knight and the lance,
and I clung to the darkness,
to the spiraling chasm
that swallowed my clinging hands
to the scale to the flesh
to a cavernous nothing
that opened beneath and around me,
to a darkness so deep
that the shadows around it
paled to a grayness
a darkness devouring
all color all light
a darkness entangled
expanding contracting
a pulse that I heard
in the walls of my riding veins.
As she flew toward Huma
I fell toward the heart
that was slowly becoming my own,
and there at the source
of stillbirth and scar
of the hunger of knives,
there at the source
of a failed mathematics
in the chambers of knowledge,
where the mind says
this it is this no this
as the damaged world
slips from the net of numbers,
Oh the heart of the Lady
was fractured ice
was iron was fever
the sharp and insistent
hook in the flesh,
was famine pellagra
the tedium of days-
all of it stirring
the waters of darkness,
all of it saying
you are here you are here
you are home.
They tell you a story
of lances and daylight,
the old song of Huma
spreads over the desert of night
like a balm like a blinding
like an old narcosis of dreams.
We remember the lance-wielder
waiting in history,
we remember the story
the thousand contractions
of light and the absence of light,
and it was the dream
of Huma the Lancer
from which we have never awakened.
Oh continue to choose
the bright lance-wielder,
the feigned historical morning
in exchange for the heart
you have veiled in the dreams
that your Namers make idly
and the centuries sing
through a long desolation of night,
as the old heart inhabits
the innermost moon
you must never must always remember.
People of the Dragon
Mark Anthony
When the valefolk uncovered the old grave, they sent for me at once.
The warm winds of spring had rushed into the valley only seven days before, breaking winter's hard grip on the mountainous lands of Southern Ergoth. As always, I was thankful for the change of seasons. Though cool and even pleasant in summertime, the cave in which I had dwelled these last years was during the dark months a tomb from which no fire-be it mundane or magical-could fully drive the bitter chill. However, winter had finally fled, and I had cast back the leather curtain that hung across the narrow mouth of the cave, letting light and air stream inside to dispel the dank darkness within.
The cave was small, no more than five paces across and thrice that number deep. Despite this, it served me well enough. The floor was dry and sandy, and there was more than adequate room for my scant possessions: a cot of bent willow supporting a pallet woven of rushes, a rack for drying herbs, and a shelf to hold wax-sealed clay pots filled with oil, salted fish, and wrinkled olives. A small fire burned in a brazier in the center of the cave, while coils of smoke sought an escape through unseen cracks in the ceiling above.
Sitting on a threadbare rug beside the brazier, I examined a tiny mole skeleton that I had affixed to a piece of bark with pine sap. By nature I am a man of learning, and I have always been particularly fascinated with the way in which living creatures are put together. I always found that each animal I examined possessed features perfectly designed for its manner of survival.
The mole was no different. Its almost fantastically convoluted arm bone allowed attachment for the powerful muscles used in digging, and its sharp, pointed teeth were well suited to piercing the shells of beetles, which were its primary food. I dipped a feather pen into a pot of ink made from nightshade berries. Then, on a piece of stretched sheepskin, I carefully drew the mole's skeleton, noting interesting features as I went.
A shadow fell across the doorway.
I looked up in surprise. A thin silhouette stood in the mouth of the cave. The dark figure froze at my sudden movement, then turned to run.
&nb
sp; "Wait!" I called out.
The silhouette halted but did not step any nearer. Setting down my pen, I stood and approached the door. As I stepped across the stony threshold from dimness to daylight, I saw my mysterious visitor fully: a boy, no more than twelve winters. He was clad in loose clothes of rough cloth, and he shifted nervously back and forth on his bare feet.
It was not uncommon for the valefolk to come to me. From time to time, one of them trod the winding footpath that led from the ramshackle village below, up through the grove of silver-green aspen trees, to my cave. Usually they came seeking salve for a cut that had turned septic, or herbs to ease a toothache, or a tea to help a barren woman conceive. To the valefolk, I was simply a hermit, a wise man who had shunned the outside world, and had come to the mountains to conduct his studies in solitude. Mad, perhaps, but not dangerous. Of course, if they ever learned my true nature, the valefolk would certainly turn on me and burn me alive in my cave.
It had been five years since I fled the destruction of the Tower of High Sorcery at Daltigoth. Sometimes I still dreamed about the flames.
The mob had come sooner than any of us had thought. The Kingpriest had decreed all mages to be anathema, workers of evil, and magic itself to be heresy. But Istar was nearly a continent away. Daltigoth was on the western fringe of the Empire. We had thought we had time- time to finish our work in progress, to carefully pack away our books and journals, to travel to secret havens where we might resume our magical studies in peace.
We were wrong.
The edict of the Kingpriest had traveled across the face of the land like wildfire, ignited by fear, fueled by hate, sending up thick clouds of ignorance like dark smoke in its wake. When the throng surged through the streets of Daltigoth toward the Tower, brandishing torches and gleaming weapons, we did not fight back. To do so would have only damned our kind further in their eyes. Instead, we let them stream through the open gates to set ablaze centuries of knowledge and cast down our shining Tower in rum.
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