Relieved and repulsed in equal measure, Pavel turned his attention to the rest of the company, and winced at what he found. Five of his comrades were manifestly dead, and four more, wounded. Intent on aiding one of the injured, he took a step forward, but weakness abruptly overwhelmed him. He swayed and would have fallen if Drigor hadn’t caught hold of his arm.
“You took a full dose of shadow dragon breath, didn’t you?” said the burly priest of Ilmater.
“Yes,” Pavel gasped.
“Once we get back to the palace,” Drigor said, “I can restore you. Just hang on till then.” He turned to his other surviving comrades. “Whatever cures or other magic you want to cast, do it fast. We need to get out of here.”
Eyes gleaming, Brimstone lifted his gory mask away from his prey and rumbled, “You’re right. The battle raised too much commotion. Other shadow wyrms are surely coming.”
In another minute, they were on the march, scurrying through the columns of stone. For Pavel, the frantic scramble was a brutal test of endurance. He panted, his head swam, and the eternal night of the Shadow Deep seemed even darker than before.
At the head of the column, Celedon said, “Can’t we go any faster?”
“No,” Brimstone growled. “It takes me time to choose the correct path.” They rounded another outcropping. “But behold!”
Squinting, Pavel could just make out a relatively low hump of rock with a ring of standing stones at the top. At the center of the circle was the rarest of all phenomena in that universe of gloom, a point of pale phosphorescence.
“This is the place,” said Brimstone. “Come on.”
Pavel felt as if it required the very last of his stamina to clamber up the rise. Climbing beside him, Will eyed him with concern.
“Are you going to make it?” the halfling asked.
Pavel nodded. He supposed that to truly reassure Will, he should have responded with an insult, but he couldn’t spare the breath.
The light they’d spotted from below floated at the center of the ring of menhirs. It was Dragonsbane’s spirit, gleaming, semitransparent, and motionless, seemingly in a deep slumber like his physical body back in the mortal realm. Pavel knew that by rights, the soul of a great paladin ought to shine more brightly. But an egg-shaped weave of crisscrossed shadows surrounded the king’s essence, trapping and dimming the radiance.
Igan scowled and reached for the black web as if he thought to break it apart by strength alone.
“Don’t touch that,” Brimstone snapped, “unless you want to rot your arm off. I’ll open it.”
The dragon hissed words of power. Magic whined through the air, and made fresh blood trickle from the nicks on Pavel’s face. The dark prison faded for a moment, then clotted back to its former condition.
“I thought you knew how to do this,” said Will.
“I do,” Brimstone snarled.
He recited the incantation a second time, but achieved no more than before.
“I can break it,” said Mor Kulenov.
Staff held high, he declaimed a counterspell. A screech of wind lashed everyone’s clothes. The mound shuddered and groaned. Yet the black mesh held.
Will studied the sky.
“More dragons,” he said, “coming fast.”
He extracted a skiprock from his belt pouch. Celedon rounded on Brimstone.
“It’s now or never,” the spymaster said.
“My spell should work,” the vampire said. “But if Sammaster himself enchanted the fetish …”
“Light,” Pavel croaked. “Light drives out dark. Somebody conjure a flash at the same time Brimstone works his spell.”
“I’ll try it,” Drigor said, and produced a flare so bright it made Pavel squinch his eyes shut. Still, the shadow prison remained.
“The wyrms are just about close enough to start throwing their own charms,” Will reported. “I’ll wager those will work.”
“We’ll attempt it again,” said Pavel, raising his sun symbol, “only this time, I’ll summon the light.”
Drigor shook his head. “My friend, you’re sorely wounded, and I’ve advanced farther in the mysteries than you. If it didn’t work when I—”
“Your light,” Pavel snapped, “isn’t Lathander’s light.” He glared at Brimstone. “Your incantation is longer than mine. You begin.”
The dragon snarled words of power. Pavel tried to judge when to chime in with the opening of his prayer. It was more difficult than it should have been. He felt so weak and muddled.
Yet he and Brimstone finished at precisely the same instant, and a ray of red-gold light blazed from his amulet to strike the web of shadows. Striking in concert with the force of the vampire’s spell, it seared away the strands of darkness. The radiance of Dragonsbane’s spirit shined forth in all its glory, and the translucent figure vanished.
“Can we go home, too?” called Will. “Preferably soon?”
Brimstone began a new spell. Half a dozen dragons dived and spewed shadow from their gaping jaws.
But it never reached their targets. The dark world spun, dropped away, and Pavel and his companions stood in the torchlit courtyard once more. Christine and her retainers exclaimed at their sudden reappearance.
Pavel turned toward the couch and its occupant. Whereupon anguish and frustration stabbed him to the heart, for the king looked exactly the same as before.
But then Dragonsbane’s eyes flew open, and he bolted upright.
“Lances—!” he rasped, then peered about in confusion.
Celedon murmured an incantation and flicked one hand through a cabalistic pass. A large, luminous, three-dimensional map of Damara and the surrounding territories shimmered into existence to float three feet above the ground. Small, stationary images of goblins, giants, mounted knights, spearmen, and archers stood about the landscape like tokens on a game board.
“Our intelligence concerning the enemy’s whereabouts is incomplete,” the thin, sly-faced spymaster said. “But as you can see, the scouts report that the Vaasan horde has dispersed to plunder. Still, the majority remain in the duchies of Brandiar and Carmathan, all within a few days’ march of one another. They’d have little difficulty recombining into a single force, and I believe they’ll soon do precisely that, to assault Heliogabalus.”
Still slightly ill from his exposure to dragon breath, but vastly improved thanks to Drigor’s ministrations, Pavel shuffled and craned with the foremost captains and royal officers in Damara for a clearer look at the map. It had surprised him when he, Will, and Brimstone received a summons to the council of war, especially since the vampiric drake’s participation required another open-air palaver in the benighted courtyard. But evidently the king felt they’d played such a significant role in his rescue that it was their due.
Like Pavel, Dragonsbane was still trying to shake off the lingering effects of an ordeal. The magic of the priests of Ilmater had kept the monarch’s body alive in his soul’s absence, but couldn’t entirely compensate for the lack of water, food, and exercise. As a result, Dragonsbane stood leaning on a gold-headed cane. Pavel prayed that the king’s strength would return quickly. The gods knew, the man was going to need it.
As he studied the map, Dragonsbane’s face was tight and grim.
“So much devastation,” he said, “and the representation doesn’t even show the damage to the fields and crops.”
“I’ve conferred with the elder druids,” said Queen Christine. “They say it’s not to late to insure a reasonable harvest, one large enough to stave off famine in the months ahead. They’ll petition the earth and weather to yield all the bounty they can. But the farmers must return to their labors soon.”
“Which requires chasing the goblins out of the barley,” said Will, standing on tiptoe to see over the top of the map.
Dragonsbane smiled for just an instant. “That it does, Goodman Turnstone, that it does.”
“It’s obvious we have no choice but to fight,” said Brellan Starav. “But we nee
d to lay our plans in the knowledge that the Vaasans have us greatly outnumbered.”
“We’ll send forth riders tonight,” said Dragonsbane, “to every noble hiding on his estate with a company of guards. With luck, some of them will reach the royal army in time to make themselves useful.”
“With respect, Your Majesty,” Drigor said, “we told people right along that you weren’t dead. Nobody believed our reassurances.”
“Because folk assumed that if I truly was alive, I’d get up off my arse and drive out the invaders,” the blond-bearded monarch said. “Now, the heralds can proclaim that the king is riding to war. Maybe that will make a difference.”
“You realize,” Celedon said, “the goblins and giants will learn of it as well.”
“Good. We don’t have time to defeat a hundred raiding parties one by one. We need our foes to merge into a single army, which we can then smash at one go. Demoralized, any survivors will run back to Vaasa, or at least the protection of the Gates.”
Drigor grinned a grin that made his harsh, scarred features even more forbidding. “A nice trick if we can manage it.”
“Trickery,” said Dragonsbane, “is what I have in mind. Even a proper army will often disintegrate in fear and confusion if attacked unexpectedly on the flank, or better still, the rear, and goblins, though fierce under the right circumstances, aren’t disciplined troops. So here’s what I propose. We’ll split our force in two. One half, with me at its head, will proceed across country with no attempt at stealth. With some maneuvering, it can probably arrange to engage the enemy around here—” he pointed with the ferule of his cane—“to the west of these hills.”
Brellan, nodding, said, “I understand. The second half of the army sneaks north and hides behind the rise. Once the battle begins, and Your Majesty’s command fixes the Vaasans in place, the rest of Damara’s protectors take the creatures from behind. We crush them with a convergent attack.”
“Maybe,” said Will.
The commander of the Paladins of the Golden Cup scowled down at the halfling. “Do you see a problem with His Majesty’s strategy?”
Will shrugged. “I’m no knight, just a hunter, but I’ve had a few brushes with goblin kin out in the wild. They may not be ‘disciplined troops,’ but they’re not idiots, either. They know how to look after themselves in hostile country. They’re liable to send scouts into those hills, spot the second force, and spoil your big surprise.”
Brellan stood silent for a moment, pondering, then said, “Curse it, you’re right.”
“Then how about this?” said Dragonsbane. “My company will engage the enemy farther north, then flee the field with the Vaasans in hot pursuit until we reach the final battleground. That will deny them the opportunity to investigate what waits behind the hills. Does that meet with your approval, Goodman Turnstone?”
“I’m not sure it meets with mine,” Celedon said. “You’ve more than once observed that retreating in good order while under attack is one of the most difficult tasks any force can undertake. If the goblins’ harassment renders you incapable of standing and fighting a second time when you reach the right patch of ground, your strategy fails.”
“It’s a chancy plan in a number of ways,” Dragonsbane admitted, “but also the best I can devise. If anyone has a better one, by all means, let’s hear it.”
The company stood silent for a moment.
Celedon grinned and said, “I guess that’s it, then. We’ll just have to hope for the favor of Lady Luck.”
Brimstone arched his serpentine neck, bending his crimson-eyed mask closer to the king.
“I can’t improve on your scheme,” the smoke drake whispered, “but I can suggest an embellishment.”
Dragonsbane surely loathed vampires as profoundly as the other paladins and priests in the assembly, but unlike them, he didn’t allow even a hint of that revulsion to show in his expression.
“Please,” he said, “tell us.”
Weary as she was, Kara no longer trusted herself to handle the ancient documents with the delicacy required. Fortunately, the mindless, shapeless, invisible helper she’d conjured was immune to fatigue. She willed it to turn the page, and the brown, brittle leaf slowly shifted without crumbling.
Eyes aching, squinting at the crabbed, faded characters that kept trying to blur, she read to the end of a nonsensical tale in stumbling iambic heptameter. At the conclusion, the butterfly knight flew into a misty field of marigolds and emerged transformed into a kestrel.
By all the notes ever sung, what was it supposed to signify? Had the knight, by changing from insect to bird, become a higher form of life? Or, by becoming a predator, had he lost his innocence? And in any case, what agency produced the metamorphosis?
It was hopeless. Kara didn’t understand and she never would. She felt another urge to smash the mocking, worthless books to dust, and this time, Dorn wasn’t there to stop her.
But the thought of him was.
He believed she could solve the puzzle, and even with the Rage gnawing at her mind, she couldn’t betray his faith in her. She drew a ragged breath, calming herself, and returned to her labors.
Hours passed, somehow seeming both to drag on interminably and to hurtle by. Her phantom servant ceased to be, and she invoked another. A neophyte brought her a tray of bread and beans. She tried to eat, but a single taste made her stomach churn, and she set the rest out of the way on the floor.
And through it all, she accomplished nothing, until at last, she pushed back from the table and closed her eyes. She needed a different approach, but what could that possibly be? Reading was reading, wasn’t it?
Well, perhaps not. She was studying the allegories as a human scholar might, pondering every image, symbol, and apparently meaningless incident as she read. But she wasn’t a human scholar. She was a song dragon, and both story and magic were a part of her very essence, forces she supposedly comprehended instinctively.
She resolved to try experiencing the ancient writings as she’d experience any poem or tale. She’d stop agonizing over every nuance and see how the material made her feel.
Much of it didn’t make her feel anything. The stories were simply too disjointed and obscure. But as she once again worked her way through the feckless wanderings of the butterfly knight, something occurred to her.
The marigolds represented fire. Their yellow was the brightness of flame, and the fog swirling around them was actually smoke.
Fire could purify. By turning an aimlessly flitting butterfly into a sharp-eyed hawk, flying purposively forth in search of prey, had it cured the character of folly? Perhaps even of madness? Was that what the poet was implying?
If he was, then other elements of the tale, and even the surrounding material, must relate to the idea of fire, physical or metaphysical, actual or notional, in a way that made sense according to the principles of magic. She read on, and though much of the texts remained entirely cryptic, nonetheless, fragmentary patterns began to emerge. Until, her heart pounding with excitement, she started to see how one might construct a spell. She dipped a quill in the inkwell and scribbled furiously on the fresh parchments the monks had provided for her use.
At last she completed a deceptively brief and simple-looking incantation. She regarded the lines with a fierce satisfaction that immediately withered into doubt.
Because she didn’t actually know that she’d truly fathomed any part of the arcane writings. Perhaps her interpretation was completely false, the product of frenzy, exhaustion, and wishful thinking. Even if she had gotten part or all of it right, the majority of the information in the grimoires, all the fine and subtle points, remained impenetrable. How, then, could she possibly imagine that she’d successfully moved from a set of half-comprehended mystical relationships to the exquisitely balanced and nuanced artifact that was a functional spell?
She scowled at her misgivings. The magic would work because it had to. Because she had no time to study and tinker endlessly to refine it.
>
In any case, she didn’t need to sit and wonder if she’d succeeded. It was an easy thing to test.
She rose and sang the words she’d written. As she reached the final notes, she couldn’t help but tense. The spell was meant to draw a sort of cauterizing blaze into her mind, no less dangerous for being psychic and spiritual instead of corporeal. If she’d botched her work, the flame might sear what remained of her sanity and even her very soul away. Even if she’d gotten it right, she feared the magic’s touch would be excruciating.
It wasn’t, though. All she felt was a fleeting lightness, as if the spell had lifted a weight from her being.
Will and Pavel rounded a corner, and the priest stared in surprise at the old clapboard building across the street. He’d expected to find it ablaze with light and raucous with music and laughter. But except for the gleam of a candle behind a window or two, it was dark, and entirely quiet. The painted sign above the door was gone, and by the looks of it, someone had remodeled the stable to serve some other function.
“Oh, slop and dung,” said Will. “I know you’re hopeless in the wild, but I didn’t think even you could get lost in the same town where you grew up.”
“This was it,” Pavel insisted, and he was sure of it. In days gone by, the building had been the Boot and Whistle, the tavern where he’d learned to drink, play cards, and chase women, as much a part of his youth as the cloisters and archives of the Temple of the Dawn. But it appeared someone had turned the place into a cheap boarding house. Pavel had scarcely thought of the establishment during the years he’d been away, but nonetheless felt a pang of sadness to find it gone.
“Oh, well,” said Will, “it’s a pleasant enough night, and it shouldn’t be that difficult to find a mug of beer. Let’s walk on.”
The council of war had dragged on for some time after everyone ran out of worthwhile things to say. At the end of it all, Will and Pavel had discovered a common urge to escape the company of lords and royalty for a little while. Accordingly, they’d slipped away from Dragonsbane’s citadel to visit the commoner precincts of Heliogabalus.
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