As Verden gazed at the shield the insignia on it seemed to come alive, to realign itself, to take new shapes and patterns. No Aghar would have recognized the elaborate design as a picture of a face. Even humans might have seen it only as an intricate pattern of contours. But to the dragon’s eyes it was a visage. To Verden Leafglow, who had lived twice, the tracery was more than a just a likeness. In the patterns on the ancient shield Verden saw the face of a god, of Reorx himself.
Once again the green dragon, who had once served a darker god, found herself in the presence of a god. But Verden Leafglow was no longer exactly green. Rich, warm hues now tinged the verdant scales of her mighty form. And the god before her now was not that vindictive deity of her first incarnation. In the shield Verden saw the face of Reorx, wielder of the hammer of heavens, Reorx the life-giver, the creator of balances.
Within the dragon’s mind a voice like distant, rolling thunder murmured. You have come to the fulcrum, Verden Leafglow. In this place issues must be resolved. High and low lurk here, awaiting balance. Those less than you will decide the outcome, Verden. But it will be for you to seal the choice when it is made.
“I’ll have my revenge?” the dragon breathed.
Revenge is a dark thing, the silent voice whispered. It really was not a voice at all, just thoughts that came unbidden within her head, and had words of their own. Vengeance creates vengeance but clear retribution can balance scales. You were promised a gift, Verden Leafglow. That gift is what it always was … the freedom to choose.
“I don’t know what I’m expected to do,” the dragon breathed.
This conflict is cluttered, the distant thunder murmured. One might begin by tidying things a bit.
The voice faded. The shield held by the trembling gully dwarf was again only a shield. Behind it, three humans and most of a tribe of Aghar gaped at the huge beast confronting them. But now Verden Leafglow knew her task.
One of the human males—the big one with the sword—was edging aside, crouching to attack. Verden pinned him with her eyes. “Don’t even think about it,” she suggested. But even as she turned toward him, something flashed in the dim cavern and a sleek dagger thumped into her scales, an inch from the softer tissue over her heart. The weapon hung for a moment, suspended from its needle-sharp point, then clattered harmlessly to the floor.
At that moment, the green dragon she had once been would have begun a slaughter, and its first victim would have been the second human male—the slighter one, with the dark garments. Even now, he was balancing another dagger, ready to throw it.
But she was not the dragon she had been long ago, and she controlled the anger that rose within her. “Stop that!” she hissed. “What do you think you’re doing?”
The man hesitated. “Well, ah … I guess I’m throwing knives at you,” he admitted, frankly. “I’m trying to kill you, you see.”
“Why?”
“Why?” He lowered his throwing arm, puzzled. “Well, because that’s what I do. I mean, you’re the enemy, aren’t you? You’re a dragon.”
“And you kill dragons?”
“Of course I do!”
Verden’s eyes narrowed, in what no human would have recognized as mirth. “And how many dragons have you killed so far?”
“Actually,” Dartimien the Cat admitted, “you’re the first dragon I’ve ever met. At least, socially.”
“That’s obvious,” Verden said. “You’re still alive. Do you have a name?”
“Dartimien,” he said.
“I’m Verden Leafglow,” the dragon said. “And you?” Her gaze shifted again to the other man, who was still looking for an opening to use his sword.
“Ah … Graywing,” the warrior said. “Pleased to meet you.” His eyes roved over her, and stopped at a chink in her scales, below the left wing. He crouched, raising his blade.
“Forget it,” the dragon warned. “Who is that little dolt with the big shield, and what does he think he’s doing?”
Behind the Aghar, the human girl said, “This is Bron. He’s a hero.”
“My, my,” Verden muttered. “A hero? You don’t say.”
Emboldened by the accolade, Bron raised his shield higher and waved his broadsword over his head. Its weight almost overbalanced him. “Dragon go ’way!” he said. “Scat!”
Ignoring him, Verden said, “There’s a war going on around here. Are any of you involved in it?”
“What war?” some of the gully dwarves muttered, mystified.
“Not by design,” Graywing said.
“We’re just passing through,” Dartimien added.
“Then you won’t mind if I simplify things a bit?”
“Help yourself,” Graywing shrugged. “But I warn you, we’ll fight if you—”
“You’ll get your chance,” the dragon assured him.
Dartimien frowned. “What do you mean by that?”
“You’ll see,” the dragon hissed happily. Then the cavern seemed to shimmer as a powerful spell resonated soundlessly, outward to echo in the recesses, then inward upon its source. For an instant Verden Leafglow towered over them, seeming to fill the vaulted cellar with her presence. Her spell was a simple one, that she had used many times. Yet now it seemed slow, as though someone, somewhere, was drawing substance from it. Verden concentrated. She shimmered, became a dim outline in the gloom, and condensed into a drifting vapor. The vapor flowed upward toward an air duct and vanished through it.
Graywing shuddered. “I hate magic,” he rumbled.
“Magic is alright,” Dartimien argued. “Might be handy sometimes. What I hate is dragons.”
Among the goggling gully dwarves, small voices were raised in wonder. “Dragon gone?” “Where dragon go?” “Get off my foot, clumsy!”
A little gully dwarf female stepped forward, gazing proudly at the puzzled Bron, who had lowered his shield and sword and was peering around in bafflement. “No big deal,” Pert assured them all. “Bron tell dragon to go ’way, so dragon go ’way. Bron a hero.”
“That’s ridiculous,” Dartimien snorted.
“It is not!” Thayla Mesinda said. “He is a hero. I told you that.”
Chapter 20
Bron’s Dragon
Drained of his strength by the demands of his spells, Clonogh lay alone in the tower of Tarmish, cursing the fates. Hatred coursed through him as he remembered that dim-witted little Aghar who had been so close at hand—almost seeming to offer him the magical relic he so desperately needed—then had run away with it. To Clonogh it had seemed almost that the gully dwarf was taunting him, though he knew that gully dwarves lacked the subtlety to taunt. Taunting was cruelty, and gully dwarves had no cruelty in them. Cruelty was a form of evil, and gully dwarves simply had no capacity for evil. They could no more do an intentional wrong than do an intentional right.
“Gully dwarves just happen,” so the common saying went among other races. Gully dwarves were just gully dwarves. There was little more to say. The creatures operated on simple inertia. Once started, on anything, they were difficult to stop. And once stopped, they were reluctant to start.
A bit of insight presented itself to Clonogh, though he was too weak and tired to give it thought. Gully dwarves were innocent. They were innocence personified. They could never be anything else.
Clonogh shoved thoughts of gully dwarves aside and concentrated on someone who was truly evil—the power-mad tyrant, Lord Vulpin. Clonogh’s loathing of the man raged within him. Vulpin held Clonogh’s life in his hand. And Vulpin did taunt him, constantly.
The man was half of a double evil. The other half was Vulpin’s sister, Chatara Kral. Clonogh knew their origins. Both Vulpin and Chatara Kral were spawn of the Dragon Highlord Verminaard, archenemy of the Dragonlance War.
They were like their sire, those two—both crazed by an insatiable thirst for conquest. It was their manipulations—both of them, that had brought Clonogh to the state he found himself in now.
As always, when cataloging his enemie
s, the mage cursed old Piraeus, that long-dead sorcerer who had yielded up the secrets of magic to him so long ago, yielded them all but one! Somehow Piraeus had withheld from Clonogh the power to resist the ravages of his own spells. Just in a matter of months now, Clonogh had become old, incredibly old, old beyond death but unable to die.
Piraeus, before he died, had tricked him. Magic always demands a price, and Piraeus had known that. It was a necessary part of any spell, a secret inflection, a directing code to cause the spell to draw its energies from elsewhere, other than from its user. But in Piraeus’s revelations the shielding magic had been withheld. Instead, in each spell the old trickster had substituted a different sort of inflection—the shield-code of a dragon spell.
The code worked … but only for dragons. It was useless to anyone else, except in the presence of dragon magic.
Clonogh wished he could see Chatara Kral beheaded. He wished he could see Vulpin disemboweled. He wished the sky would fall on all gully dwarves. He wished that the ancient mage Piraeus might burn forever in the torments beyond death.
Mostly, he wished that he could wish. If only he could have captured that bumbling Aghar who carried the Fang of Orm in its grimy hand, he could have forced a wish from it. The Wishmaker responded to innocence. And nothing, he realized now, was more innocent than a gully dwarf. The creatures were detestable, despicable and deplorable, of course, but more than anything else they were innocent! They fairly reeked of innocence. They simply weren’t smart enough to be otherwise.
One wish! A single wish, made by an innocent, could have saved him! It would have been enough. That wish would have restored his own youth and delivered his enemies to him for his amusement.
But wishing without the Wishmaker did no good.
Beyond the tower, all around him, he heard the sounds of battle. Chatara Kral and the Gelnian hordes were not settling in for a long siege. That would have required patience. No, they were attacking the Tarmish stronghold in force. The air was filled with the crashing of hurled stones, the clatter of weapons and the voices of men striving in mortal combat.
Unable to do anything about his plight, so weak and frail he was hardly able even to move his fingers, Clonogh closed his eyes in resignation. Then he opened them abruptly. Somewhere, around him, arcane forces were brewing. He could sense them, feel them in his bones, forces nearby, near enough that their power wafted over him.
Magic! But not his magic. Not the sorceries that he could command or had known when he had the strength to exercise spells. The magic here was not human magic. It was a powerful, alien magic as different from his own as iron bonds differ from silk threads. Dragon magic! Somewhere within his mind’s hearing, a dragon had cast a spell.
With the last of his will, Clonogh focused his thoughts, concentrating on the sorcery he sensed, drawing its tuned vibrations into himself, willing its shield powers to fill the holes in his own magic, to mend him and brace him and make him complete.
The power of the dragon spell flowed around him and he drew from it as a sponge draws water, absorbing those patterns that he required.
In a moment it was gone, but the moment was enough. Like a leech in stagnant waters, Clonogh had ridden the turbulent energies and sucked from them the sustenance he required. For an instant he marveled that it had come at such a time—in his hour of greatest need, magic had turned for him, and his grasp on it had been sure. It was almost as though some god had intervened, he thought. But the thought did not linger. He had other things to think about now. A glance at his pale, skeletal hands told him that he still appeared incredibly ancient. But now it was only appearance. Within the husking shell of him, he was as powerful as any youth.
Energized and rejuvenated, feeling strong and fit, Clonogh stood and gazed around through renewed eyes. A catapult’s stone crashed against the tower, spraying its interior with shards and dust, but Clonogh cared nothing about it. An energy like steel veils flowed about him, and nothing touched him. He strode to the west wall, pulled down a tattered tapestry there and with strong hands tore it into segments, which he bound around his nakedness with pieces of sash.
Beyond the shattered doorway, at the top of a descending circular stair, he found a dead mercenary clad in the colors of Lord Vulpin’s tower guards. The man seemed to have been trampled by a horse. Clonogh took the man’s boots and put them on his own feet, then paused curiously, gazing down at the corpse. With only the slightest hesitation, the mage pointed a finger and muttered a minor spell. Before his eyes, the guard’s body writhed and shriveled, collapsing inward upon itself until only skeletal remains lay there.
Clonogh took a deep breath, stood thoughtfully for a moment, then nodded. “Good,” he muttered. He had made a strong spell, and for the first time, the spell had done him no harm. He was protected now by dragon magic.
A memory presented itself in his mind, the memory of that old mage whose secrets Clonogh had taken from him so long ago. That old mage who, even in death, had avenged himself by tricking his killer.
“I win,” Clonogh said. “Now I truly have the power!”
Beyond the tower, a battle raged. All along the ramparts of Tarmish, men struggled frantically to maintain their defenses. Below, beyond the walls, hordes of Gelnians stormed forward under the cover of their bombarding catapults and trebuchets.
Another great stone impacted the tower, and whole sections of it collapsed, but Clonogh sang a spell and the portion where he stood—the floor beneath his feet, the portal and the stairwell-remained intact. Like a bizarre, misshapen finger pointing at the sky, the wreckage of Lord Vulpin’s tower stood above scenes of chaos. The structure was only a skeleton of itself now, but it remained sturdy. Vaguely, Clonogh marveled at the ancient engineering that had raised such a structure.
Of more immediate interest, though, was the Fang of Orm, somewhere below, probably still in the hands of some detestable gully dwarf scurrying through the rubble. For that relic, Lord Vulpin had robbed Clonogh of his spirit. For that same relic, Chatara Kral had ordered the mage tortured. For the Fang of Orm and the power to use it, a few minutes ago, Clonogh would have given his soul. Now it meant less to him, though he still wanted it. Now he had magic of his own, unburdened by the pain of instant aging.
What he wanted now was revenge. And in the Fang of Orm rested delicious vengeance.
A chorus of screams arose now from below, and Clonogh turned full around, watching with bemused interest as a great dragon swept from the sky to glide across the ramparts of Tarmish. In its wake, on the ground, attacks and defenses collapsed as men by the hundreds ran in all directions, trying to escape. Dragonfear spread and rippled among them. Where Crealic mercenaries manned repelling catapults atop a wall, the dragon swept low, its huge claws ripping downward to destroy the defenses. Spears and javelins bounced harmlessly from its armored scales, and men tumbled from the wall, along with the wreckage of their machines.
Clonogh frowned. Somehow, it seemed, Chatara Kral had induced a dragon to help her. But then the dragon, completing its sweep of the walls, turned its attention outward, trailing wreckage in its wake as it slashed through the Gelnian attack.
Puzzled, the mage watched from his high perch. The dragon veered here and there, smashing into concentrations of troops almost at random. And always, where it went—gliding low on great, flaring wings—it left a widening wake of fleeing men in its path. Spears and arrows arose from the human masses. Many bounced harmlessly off the dragon’s armored scales. Others missed, to fall back among the humans below.
Around and around the attacking fields the huge beast flew, dipping and diving here and there while armed men ran screaming from it. Then with beating wings it rose above the walls and again descended upon Tarmish.
And now the grapple lines dangling from the walls, lines placed by the attackers, were alive with panicked soldiers trying to escape from the fortress. As the dragon descended into the central courtyard, the great gate of Tarmish swung open and fleeing defenders by the h
undreds streamed outward, a shrieking stampede of men trying to get away from the fear among them. In the receding fields, armies blended—Gelnian and Tarmite fighters fleeing together in their panic.
For Clonogh it was beyond understanding. A dragon had come to Tarmish, and was raging among the combatants, but it seemed not to discriminate. It was attacking both sides with equal enthusiasm.
Clonogh could not identify the dragon. Several times, during the dragon wars, Clonogh had seen dragons. He had always identified them by their color. There had been the beasts in service of the dark lords—brilliantly-colored creatures of crimson or blue or green. And then there had been the others, those whose colors were the colors of fine metal—the silvers, the coppers, the golds. These, he remembered, had fought against the chromatic beasts.
But the dragon he saw now, wreaking havoc on Tarmish, striking attacker and defender with equal enthusiasm, was none of these. Its iridescent scales flashed in the high sunlight with definite hints of brilliant green but equally strong hues of rich umber and warm bronze.
It was a mystery, but it had nothing to do with him. He knew dragon magic had occurred, and that he had been strengthened by it, but he knew also that its purpose had been something else. He had just happened to be in the right place at the right time.
Now the far fields were alive with fleeing men, and Clonogh knew who they were. Mercenary soldiers, some wearing the colors of Tarmish and some of Gelnia, mingled in their retreat, and Clonogh smiled a cruel smile. Whatever the dragon’s purpose here, both Lord Vulpin and Chatara Kral had just lost their hired armies.
His eyes roving the scenes around and below the tower, Clonogh saw Lord Vulpin raging along his southern rampart, followed now by only a handful of true Tarmites. And in the field beyond the gate. Chatara Kral stood in the midst of her desolated encampment, screaming orders at fleeing men who did not look back to respond. Only a few of her troops remained with her now, native Gelnians bound to the cause of the Tarmish campaign.
The Gully Dwarves Page 17