Death of the Dragon c-3

by Ed Greenwood

  Gritting her teeth against the crushing pain in her abdomen, Tanalasta propped herself up and drew the iron sword secreted in the door of her hiding box. Every day, her self-defense instructors drilled one simple lesson into her: strike to cripple, then strike to kill. But how to cripple a ghazneth?

  To stop Boldovar, she knew she had to do more than crush a knee or slash a hamstring. She had to assault him in the very heart of his sick existence. The answer came to the princess easily. She pushed herself to her knees and brought the short blade across Boldovar’s loins in a vicious backhand slash.

  “Coward!” she cried.

  Boldovar’s crimson eyes grew as wide as coins, then he let out a surprised little whimper and allowed the weathercloak to slip from his grasp. Tanalasta brought the sword back in the opposite direction, opening another dark gash in the underside of his belly. Her own pain seemed to vanish-or rather, her fear seemed to vanish. She was still aware of her labor, of the crushing feeling around her waist and the baby moving steadily closer to the world, but now she was in control. She brought the blade around for an overhand hack at the center of his big belly.

  “Enough!”

  Boldovar’s arm flashed out to block. The blow caught him across the wrist and nearly lopped it off, but the ghazneth hardly seemed to notice. He circled his forearm around as though it were a blade, forcing Tanalasta’s sword back against her thumb and stripping it from her grasp. The weapon fell free and clanged off the rim of the box.

  Tanalasta turned toward the stairwell door, where the sound of pounding boots had grown so loud the princess swore the warpriests had to be in the room with her. They very nearly were. The battlelord and his first three men stood at the top of the stairwell, panting for breath and running in place, apparently convinced they were still ascending the spiraling staircase into Vangerdahast’s study.

  “Steelhand!” Tanalasta called. “Run forward!”

  “What are you calling him for?” Boldovar demanded. “You asked me to play.”

  The ghazneth’s hand slammed into Tanalasta’s head so hard that she heard half a dozen teeth clatter off the wall. Her vision narrowed and her hearing grew distant, then she felt herself being jerked out of the iron box and hurled against the stone wall. The impact moved the baby lower, and she felt its head beginning to crown.

  When her eyesight returned, Boldovar was standing in front of her, holding her against the wall with his mutilated forearm and glaring at her with an insane, maniacal grin. “Good. You’re back.”

  Something sharp and hot pierced Tanalasta’s abdomen just below the navel, then her belly exploded into agonizing pain. She looked down and saw the ghazneth’s arm pressed against her stomach. At first, she could not quite fathom what she was seeing-then she noticed the collar of red blood around his forearm, and felt a huge hand feeling around inside her.

  “Let me see… where is that baby?” He grabbed something up near her rib cage and pulled.

  Tanalasta’s world became a red fiery scream. She brought her knee up more by instinct than intention and felt it connect hard. Boldovar did not groan, but the impact was enough to send him two steps back. He was holding something brownish and bloody in his hand. It wasn’t a baby, and that was enough for Tanalasta.

  Boldovar smiled and raised the bloody mass to his mouth-then pitched over forward as Battlelord Steelhand and his men barreled into him from behind. Their swords rose and fell in a tempest, hacking the ghazneth into a mangled black mass. It hardly mattered. The wounds closed almost as fast as they could inflict them. The Mad King pushed the bloody mass he was holding into his mouth and broke into a maniacal laugh, then began to chew and swallow.

  Tanalasta felt the strength leave her legs and slumped to the floor. The pain was all gone now. There was a cold numbness up under her ribs, where Boldovar had ripped her life out, and a warmer, happier emptiness down in her womb, where she felt her baby sliding out into the world even as she faded. She reached down and felt its head, waxy and warm and tiny. It was all she would ever know of the child. The ghazneth had sealed her doom when he ate whatever it was he had eaten, for even the finest healers in the kingdom could not save her without all of her organs.

  But the child would survive, and through the child, Cormyr. Tanalasta bore down with what little strength remained to her and felt the child slip completely free. It snuffled and began to cry. She tried to raise it to her breast, but could not.

  “Boldovar…” she gasped. “King Boldovar the Mad. I grant you… the thing you desire most.”

  Boldovar threw off one of Steelhand’s warpriests, then raised his head to glare, crimson-eyed, at Tanalasta. “Quiet, trollop!”

  “King Boldovar the Mad, I grant you my pain.”

  The darkness drained from Boldovar’s face. He did not stop struggling, but his efforts grew ineffectual, and little pieces of his body began to fly off beneath the impact of the warpriests’ blades.

  Tanalasta raised her fingers-as much as she could do to signal a stop-then said, “Enough. Just hold him.”

  The blows stopped, and the warpriests stamped their hobnailed boots down on his arms and legs to hold him in place.

  When Tanalasta did not speak again, Battlelord Steelhand looked over and seemed to realize there remained one thing he could do for his princess. Leaving Boldovar to his subordinates, he kneeled at Tanalasta’s side, then took the infant from between her legs and laid it on her breast.

  “Thank you,” Tanalasta said. She looked back to Boldovar and, to her surprise, found that the next words were not difficult to say at all. “King Boldovar, as an heir to the Obarskyr crown and a direct descendant of your sister’s line, I forgive your betrayal and absolve you of all crime against Cormyr.”

  Boldovar’s eyes flashed their old crimson. He opened his mouth as though to speak, then simply crumbled into black dust.

  Steelhand looked back to Tanalasta. “You’ve done well, Princess.”

  Tanalasta tried to nod, but made it only as far as lowering her eyes before the last of her strength left.

  Steelhand smiled, for as a High Priest of the War God Tempus, he had seen a thousand warriors die and knew a good death when he saw it. He placed a mailed hand under the infant’s naked bottom and boosted it higher on the princess’s chest and guided her nipple into its mouth.

  “Well met, little one,” he said. “And long live the prince.”

  42

  Alusair had only two hundred men left, and half those were wounded. The rest of her company had already fallen to the teeming hordes in… wherever they were. She had no idea where that might be, except that it was dark and full of little green goblins. The company was down to one iron-tipped arrow per man, and they were holding those in reserve. After an all-night chase-except that nobody really had any idea what “all night” meant in this city of darkness-she had finally come to some high ground and decided to make a stand.

  They had built a low stone breastwork and lit the perimeter with magic lights, but the little buggers just kept charging up the stony slope, wave after wave of them armed with little iron spears and little iron swords. Alusair’s dragoneers were well-trained, proficient with their weapons, and in good condition, so they cut down most of the creatures at the breastwork. Still, even her men weren’t perfect, and every three minutes or so one of the tiny bastards slipped through to drive a spear through the belly of one of her soldiers. Soon enough, she would lack the manpower to defend the barricade, then the hordes would come pouring in and finish them off.

  Alusair had been in worse situations-much worse. “Ready the fall back!” she called.

  The Steel Princess raised her sword to signal the retreat-then cowered in shock as the cavern erupted into a deafening roar of thunder. Blinding sheets of lightning crackled up the slope, clear-cutting whole swaths of goblins and turning the ground into a slick black mess of gore. The enemy charge simply vanished, and in the flashing light that remained, Alusair saw a circle of ramshackle stone walls, broken a
t odd intervals by the crooked windows and tilted doorways of the vast goblin city.

  Rushing out of the tunnels were the next wave of goblins, brandishing their little iron swords and clambering up the slope over the entrails and blood of their predecessors. Alusair ignored the mad charge and continued to scrutinize the passages, looking for the source of the strange lightning storm. There were only a handful of magicians in Faerun capable of such a flurry of magic-and only one who had good reason to help her.

  Instead of Vangerdahast, she found a dozen men in rusty chain mail rushing out of a tunnel far to her right. They were all soaking wet and carrying iron maces, screaming supplications to Chauntea even as they raised barriers of thorns and bubbling mud between themselves and the goblins.

  Alusair sighed in disappointment but decided that if she could not have Vangerdahast, a dozen Chauntean priests would have to do. She waved her sword toward the small party and commanded, “Prepare to support with bow fire by number.”

  Half of her dragoneers exchanged their swords for long bows and nocked arrows. When the first goblin broke through the priests’ barriers and raised his sword to hamstring the group’s wiry leader, a single iron-tipped arrow sizzled down from the barricade. It took the little warrior square in the ribs, knocking him from his feet and sending him tumbling down the slope backward. The priest raised his mace in salute, then-of all things-it began to rain.

  At first, Alusair did not know quite what to make of the storm. The rain came in driving sheets, with forks of light-fling dancing every which way and peals of thunder rolling across the cavern roof. Rivulets of water poured down the slope along courses that had never held a trickle before, and Alusair began to wonder if she had somehow come under the influence of Mad King Boldovar.

  A dark figure burst from the tunnel behind the priests and she finally understood. So far, they had only identified six of the Scourges mentioned in Alaundo’s prophecy, but here was the seventh-floods and storms-chasing a group of Chauntea’s priests up the slope in front of her. She could not understand how either of them had come to be in that cavern any more than she understood how she had, but her course of action remained clear: help her allies and attack her enemies.

  “There’s a ghazneth!” Alusair yelled. “Every man, ready iron arrows. Fire on my command only!”

  A soft clamor echoed through the cavern as every man along the line prepared his bow. Amazingly, the goblins fell back at the sight of the ghazneth-perhaps feeling he could handle a mere two hundred humans alone.

  Alusair was determined to prove the error of their ways. If she accomplished nothing else in this dark place, she was going to teach these little green-skinned discipline mongers to respect the human way of doing things. She waited until the priests had closed to within a dozen steps of their breastwork, then lowered her sword.

  “On the ghazneth-fire!”

  The cavern reverberated with throbbing bow strings, and a wall of iron points sailed down the slope to plant itself in the ghazneth’s body. The impact of so many arrows actually lifted the monster off its feet and hurled it a dozen paces down the slope.

  A howling wind tore through the cavern instantly. The rain began to fall from the ceiling in buckets, and the lightning came so fast Alusair thought her head would burst from so much light. She raised her sword and began to clamber over the breastwork.

  Before she could order the charge, the eldest Chauntean priest, a short wiry man with a hawkish nose, blocked her way. He reached up and plucked the sword from her hand as though she were a child.

  “No!”

  Alusair scowled, then yelled, “This is my command-“

  “And you have no idea where you are, or who that is!” the priest shouted back. His subordinates began to clamber over the breastwork and set to work healing Alusair’s wounded soldiers. “We have been trying to catch you for days.”

  The ghazneth sat up and began to pluck the arrows from its body, though the holes did not close as Alusair had seen the wounds of the other monsters do.

  Alusair narrowed her eyes, offended by the man’s angry tone, yet intrigued by what he was saying. “And you are?”

  “Owden Foley,” he replied. Owden waved two of his priests down the slope toward the ghazneth. “And if you are through skulking about down here, we have some real work to do. The goblins are on the march.”

  Alusair frowned. Though she recognized Owden’s name as that of her sister’s favorite priest, she was still having trouble understanding… well, pretty much everything.

  “On the march?” she said. “To where?”

  “To reinforce Nalavara, of course,” Owden waved a hand at all the priests he had brought with him into the darkness, then continued, “But I seem to have discovered the secret to traveling between the two realms. If you have done with your sightseeing down here, it is time we return to Cormyr and turn your blades where they will do some good.”

  43

  “I’m beginning to wish the goblins had driven us back to Jester’s Green,” a war captain panted, as they toiled up a slope wet and slippery with goblin gore. “At least it’s flat.”

  Azoun chuckled. “If you think I’m sparing breath to sound a horn right now…”

  “I’d have to be crazed enough to be King of Cormyr, hey?” Lanjack Blackwagon grunted.

  The king laughed aloud and clapped the oversword on the back-or tried to. In the attempt he slipped on a tangle of goblin bodies and almost fell instead. Three arms shot out to steady him.

  Perhaps twenty men in once-magnificent armor, now scarred and hacked, spattered with mud and blood, and creaking and clanking where it was torn or twisted, still stood around the king and the puffing, red-faced highest-ranking wizard in the land. War captains all, officers of senior rank through noble birth or battle prowess, they were all that was left, it seemed, of the once-mighty army that had fared forth to leisurely rout one more goblin rising before eveningfeast.

  Well, the wrong side might have done the routing, but goblins now lay dead in their thousands on this rolling field-yet there still seemed to be many around, stooping among the slain to pluck up swords and knives and coins. They kept well away from the small, purposeful band of their human foes, but cast many baleful, hissing glances at the passing men.

  Ahead, atop the hill the battered-armored Cormyreans were climbing, the Devil Dragon was rallying more goblins, her huge batlike wings arching up into the air like restless, menacing sails as she skulked to and fro. This battle was far from done yet.

  “Aye, if we were on the Green, the ladies could almost watch us from the walls of Suzail,” Kaert Belstable joked, striking a valiant pose.

  “And adjust their bets,” the lancelord next to him added dryly, touching off a chorus of mirthful grunts and chuckles.

  Azoun glanced around and met the startled eyes of Ilberd Crownsilver for an instant. He gave the lad a wink and a smile as they crested the hill-and found themselves facing a lot of goblins.

  Goblins who looked fresh and eager for battle, drawn up in three neat ranks, their shields gleaming and maces hanging ready in their hands, flanked by wedges of spear carriers who were even now trotting forward to encircle the small and weary band of humans. Above and behind them hung the heavy-lidded, leering head of the Devil Dragon, regarding her last handful of foes in open triumph.

  Harsh, high voices barked commands, and there was a rattle of chain as hundreds of goblin arms moved in unison, laying maces back on their shoulders for that first blow before they charged. Ilberd Crownsilver licked his lips and glanced swiftly to his left and right. He seemed to be the only fearful man present. On the older faces around him he saw only fierce determination and grim resolve.

  Ilberd swallowed, shaking like a leaf in a freshening wind, then heard a disturbance behind him. He turned almost wearily, fearing silent goblins had risen up in their rear to transfix the last few men of Cormyr on their spears, like boar spitted for the fire.

  No goblins, nor even alarm. Someone wa
s pushing forward through the ranks, someone old and stout and armorless, his breath ragged. It was Vangerdahast, wearing that strange iron crown. War captains slid smoothly aside to give him room.

  Ilberd Crownsilver relaxed. A spell from the court wizard or a blast from his wands, and the battle would be done.

  Vangerdahast reached the forefront of the Cormyrean band and threw up his hands. The crown on his brow seemed to sparkle for a moment, dazzling the eyes. His voice, when it came, thundered across the battlefield as if he were an angry god or colossus. The words that boomed and rolled forth were harsh and unfamiliar to Ilberd’s ears. They sounded akin to the shrill cries of the goblins. When they ended, there was a little silence but for the last rolling echoes, as the humans and the goblins regarded each other.

  Then, in eerie silence, the goblins went to their knees, laying their weapons gently down on the much-trampled ground, and touched their faces to the dirt.

  The dragon’s head snaked back and forth in obvious astonishment as she saw her force disarm itself. She reared back and bounded into the air. All around Ilberd, armor rattled as warriors tensed, trying to raise shields they did not have.

  Vast she was, yet sleek and terrible in her power. The young Crownsilver gaped at her magnificence, standing transfixed as she soared into the sky then turned, wings rippling, and plunged down upon them. He’d never seen such catlike grace, or sheer size-the beast was as large as some castles of the realm. He’d never seen such

  – swift and casual death. The dragon raced into the Cormyreans, spewing fire when she was perhaps twenty paces from the royal magician and following it like a giant torch thrust through cobwebs. Men were hurled in all directions. Ilberd saw Elber Lionstone tumbling along the dragon’s scaled back, his face a mask of pain and his frantically stabbing dagger rebounding from its scales in futility. He fell sideways from view, to crash somewhere back down the hillside whence they’d come. Red fire streamed along the dragon’s path, blazing in the grass around their boots. Men groaned or cursed weakly as they staggered or struggled to rise. Many a gauntlet dipped to a belt flask to quaff enchanted healing and banish searing pain.