The Dragons

by Doug Niles

  It was a collection of tales that never failed to move Darlantan’s offspring, Callak and his proud brother Arjen, and his sisters Daria, Starr, and Splendor. Even tiny Agon, crippled and malformed since emerging from his silver egg, allowed his chest to puff out when the name of their heroic sire was invoked.

  All knew, too, of Smelt and Burll and Blayze. The silvers were not the only wyrmlings who had lost their sire before hatching. But it was Callak who felt the greatest burden of that history. Natural master of all the lesser wyrms, he engaged in constant rivalry with Auricus, while at the same time striving to learn the lore of magic as taught by the wise elder.

  Now, however, as Aurican lectured sternly, the wyrms of the brown metals were content to let the silver absorb the browbeating. Bronze Bolt and brass Dazzall carefully averted their eyes as Callak mutely looked for support.

  Copper-scaled Tharn, meanwhile, merely smirked and flexed his wings, no doubt still seething because of a recent trick the silver male had played. Indeed, Callak couldn’t suppress a smile as he remembered his deception. The copper had eagerly pounced upon an object that looked like the plump carcass of a newly slain deer, only to discover that the silver dragon had used a minor illusion to create that appearance over a muckhole of brackish water and quicksand. The prank had resulted in a week of careful watching, as Callak had spent each waking moment since in wary anticipation of Tharn’s revenge.

  “The teleport spell works like this!” declared Auricus, suddenly appearing in the midst of the gathered wyrmlings. The golden dragon was poised in the air a good high jump off the ground, and before he could start flying, he plunged to the floor, sending several of the coppers tumbling and scrambling to get out of his way.

  “And it’s a good thing you can teleport!” Callak jabbed with a delighted sneer. “That way you won’t have to learn how to use your wings!”

  “I can fly!” Auricus insisted, sitting up and flexing the shimmering flaps of brilliant gold. “It’s just that it’s not as much fun as magic.”

  Callak knew his kin-dragon spoke the truth—at least, the truth as it appeared from Auric’s perception—but just the same, the whole notion seemed crazy to the young silver. After all, he had learned that flying was simply the best thing there could possibly be, and no mastery of magic would ever make him feel any different.

  “I think that’s enough of our lessons for now,” declared the tutor, with a stern glare between Auricus and Callak. “I suggest you fly to the valley, perhaps paying visits to your mothers.”

  In the moment of the suggestion, the wyrmlings were off, flashes of metal gleaming down the corridor and into the cavern of the great lake. The race evolved as always, with Callak in the lead, head and neck arrow-straight, wings all but buzzing from the strain of his flight. The others trailed behind, darts of metal hurtling through the air. Wind whistled over their scales, and the darkness passed in a blur.

  The flash of gold went by him so quickly that the silver dragon wobbled in the air, almost losing control. In disbelief, he strained even harder, but could only watch as the golden tail pulled away. Within moments, Auricus had disappeared into the distance.

  By the time Callak had led the rest of the brood into the sunlight warming the Valley of Paladine, Auricus had assumed a position of casual ease on the lordly rock that dominated the valley floor. Licking traces of rabbit fur from his jowls, the golden dragon regarded his approaching nestmates with an affected air of great boredom.

  “Whatever in Krynn is the reason for your delay?” he asked, golden eyebrows rising in a mask of perplexity.

  “You’ve learned another spell, I see,” replied Callak sourly, having figured out by now that his nestmate had employed some kind of enchantment that greatly increased his speed. “What do you call this one?”

  “It’s the haste spell—quite a simple casting, really. Would you like me to teach you?” Auricus asked, innocently lowering his translucent inner eyelids.

  “No, I would not!” huffed the silver wyrmling, lashing his tail in frustration. “I’m still trying to learn what each spell is called, while it seems that you’re casting them one right after the other.”

  Auricus frowned. “Well, sometimes I have to. It’s the only way I have to keep you from beating me all the time. After all, you’re faster and stronger, and you can fly for days at a time, while I need to land for rest after each sunset.”

  It intrigued Callak to think that his golden nestmate actually felt he was getting the poor end of the competition. After all, the gold’s sire was their collective tutor, and Auricus’s intelligence often made the rest of his nestmates feel slighted and inferior. Still, if even Auricus could feel like this, Callak decided that life, perhaps, was not so unfair after all.

  As to the other males, Bolt and Tharn had already shown tendencies toward the solitary life that had occupied the later years of their fathers. Each had discovered his patriarch’s secret hoard and returned with tales of mystery and wonder, aggressively guarding against any hint that would lead to the location of their ancestral treasures. Dazzall, in the meantime, had made many friends among the humans who populated Krynn in ever-increasing numbers.

  With a flexing of his silver wings, Callak took to the air, at first skimming the soft grass that layered the Valley of Paladine. He flew in long, lazy circles, and over a leisurely afternoon, he spiraled far above the valley floor. Finally he approached the ridges themselves, the precipitous heights that encircled the vale.

  First he passed the reclining form of Oro, greeting Auricus’s mother with a respectful nod. The mighty gold was stretched along a high crest so that, with just a turn of her head, she could see a hundred miles to the west or the east. She blinked lazily as the silver wyrmling flew onward.

  Finally Callak saw another silver form, the sinuous shape coiled around the summit of a steep, conical peak. He came to rest beside Kenta, curling under her wing, nudging her flank with his snout. She was serenely placid, barely aware of him as he tried to recline with the regal grandeur of an adult dragon.

  But soon Callak grew restless again. Then, inevitably, his narrow wings swept outward to carry the silver serpent over his steadily expanding world.

  Chapter 18

  Intransigents

  circa 3000 PC

  Crematia spread her wings wide, gliding through the cool night air, drawing close to the black pyramidal mountain she had visited a hundred days before. She broke from the overcast and screeched a warning of her presence, enjoying the panicked maneuvers of the dwarves as they scattered from their fields and roads, scrambling chaotically in a hundred different directions. Like ants revealed beneath an overturned log, they darted about in a vast and instantaneous reaction to her presence, a reaction that pleasantly reassured Crematia of her own might:

  Yet by the time the red dragon’s echo had returned from the opposite elevation, every one of the dwarves on the ground had disappeared. Crematia blinked, wondering if her aging eyes were suffering from the effects of minimal light. But no—she could see the roads and trails, even spot the picks and shovels dropped by the scattering work crews as they had funneled into an apparently infinite number of holes, niches, hatches, and caves. Her first impression had been right: The dwarves had all vanished.

  She settled to the ground on the still-scorched paving stones of the plaza, the same place where she had earlier demonstrated her infernal might. Now she raised her head to the massive stone doors leading into the mountainside, allowing a deep growl to rumble from her belly. She sensed the reverberations of the sound vibrating the great gates, and she trusted that the import of her message was reaching the dwarves, who were no doubt cowering within. Still, it frustrated her that she was unable to attack, even to see, the wretched denizens huddling within their stone shelter.

  Patiently Crematia waited, and while she did, she studied this valley of dwarves. The tower on the mountainside was a secure fortification. She saw that steel shutters had been drawn across the windows and do
ors, a barrier that might possibly prove resistant even against the killing heat of her breath. And the great gates of the dwarven city were set deep into an alcove in the wall of the mountainside, anchored by huge stone hinges and reinforced by straps of heavy steel. She could see slits and gaps above the entryway, and imagined that the resourceful creatures would no doubt find ways to attack her through these openings if she made an attempt to smash the sturdy gates.

  Still, the dwarves were vulnerable otherwise. Their terraced hills were lush with crops approaching harvest, a harvest that Crematia could eliminate in a few hours. And she took it for certainty that the bearded creatures would not be content to dwell within their mountain for a long time without glimpse of the sun. After all, they obviously had labored with nearly inexhaustible energy on a variety of major projects throughout the valley of their realm.

  So she was not surprised when a tiny aperture opened in the base of the great gate and a figure came out. The tiny fellow was dressed in a blue robe that trailed along the ground far behind him. His chest was as broad as a barrel, his arms strapping, terminating in powerful, callused hands. Though he wore no weapon at his waist, he bore a satchel of leather over his shoulder.

  Naturally Crematia could have slain the dwarf with a slap of her forepaw or a minor sneeze of her breath. But she was impressed by the fellow’s courage and curious about his intentions. She held her violent impulses in abeyance, at least long enough to hear what the dwarf had to say.

  “Who are you?” she demanded, punctuating her question with a puff of black smoke.

  “I am Bayrn Takwing, a chieftain of this delving,” the dwarf replied, with a belligerent glare, as if he would have welcomed the dragon’s precipitous attack—a notion that lingered temptingly in Crematia’s mind.

  “Have you obeyed me?” she demanded, once again sparing the insolent dwarf with a supreme effort of will.

  “We have here one of your ‘eggs,’ Mighty Killer,” declared the dwarf, glaring upward with an audacious display of ill temper.

  “Then you have failed me, for I bade you bring four of them,” growled Crematia, rearing back in unconscious surprise at the dwarf’s manner. “Know that I am not one who is tolerant of failure.”

  Fire swelled in her belly, barely restrained from lethal release. Smoke puffed from her nostrils, but something in the dwarf’s manner held her in check.

  The fellow’s beard bristled, and he slung the satchel forward, opening its mouth to allow a perfect sphere of white to tumble out. The stone sat still on the stony road, but seemed nevertheless to move with some sense of inner vitality. It pulsed and radiated, brightening the surrounding ground with a wash of icy light.

  “And you have lied to us, for this is no more an egg than you are a horse. It is a gemstone, and you should be glad that it’s magic. Because of that, we’re content to be rid of it, and you are welcome to take it away from here. Otherwise, understand that you’d not be seeing its likeness again.”

  “Bold words for a dwarf whose city cowers behind him.” Crematia was amused more than angered. Indeed, she was almost grateful, as she felt her hopes flaring at the sight of the dragongem. “Know that my displeasure has wasted greater realms than yours.”

  “Bah! We’re safe enough.” The burly dwarf crossed his arms over his chest and made a great production of turning to the side and spitting casually into the dust.

  Crematia reared back, seized by a deep rage. It had been many hundreds of years since anyone had dared to speak to her like this. “Do not expect mercy from me, foolish dwarf. Mercy is weakness, and weakness is death!”

  “Oh, sure, you could kill me now, maybe even break down a few of our doors. But then you’d never see another one of these stones.”

  “So you admit the others are within your delvings? You dare to hold them from me?”

  “They’re down there somewhere. Our priests have felt the magic, and they don’t like it much, neither. But there’s no sayin’ when we’ll get down to the stones themselves.”

  “I shall return in another one hundred sunrises, and you will produce all of the stones. Otherwise your city will die.”

  “No. You’ll take this white stone and be gone for now. You should come back in one hundred years. By then, we might have one of these stones for you.”

  “One hundred winters?” demanded Crematia, aghast. Her belly swelled, fire surging anew, pressure rising from the involuntary fuel of her rage.

  “And if you damage our crops, or indeed even try to damage our city—not that you’d have any luck—then you can consider those stones gone forever.”

  Crematia clenched her jaws and snatched up the whitestone, forcibly resisting the temptation to sear this insolent dwarf into charcoal. He would have the other stones, she knew, and she could force herself to wait for a while before they became hers.

  So instead of destroying this place, she took to the air, already resolved to wait the hundred winters—what was that time, really?—before she returned.

  Chapter 19

  Deathfyre

  2698 PC

  A red dragon male was the first to hatch, and he proved to be the largest and most powerful of Crematia’s large brood. He grew with a quickness that astonished and delighted the venerable matriarch, displaying cruelty and malice, bullying his nestmates, and immediately asserting his superiority. Even as a wyrmling, he ate voraciously, once killing and devouring one of his weaker siblings when his mother had been slow to bring fresh food.

  By the time he had entered his second century, Deathfyre was flying as swiftly as an eagle and bringing down prey that varied in size from young dwarves to the burly, spiral-horned rams that dared to graze in the heights of the Khalkists. He took a keen delight in killing and invariably tortured even the meanest of his prey with a deft cruelty that fascinated and impressed his savage matriarch.

  By his two hundredth winter, Deathfyre had flown far beyond his mother’s lofty vales. Sometimes he returned with meat—even humans and elves fell to his cruel claws—and other times with rare treasures, or news. He mastered a tribe of minotaurs and brought new bands of ogres into the fold of Crematia’s gathering horde.

  And in his third century, he returned with the bakali.

  The craven lizard men swarmed in some stagnant fen in the lowlands. Deathfyre had demonstrated his power by slaying several of the tribe’s elite warriors, finally blinding the chieftain as a reminder of his superiority. Then he had ordered the bakali to march into the mountains, to gather beneath the red dragon lair on Darklady Mountain. Bearing their maimed and eyeless ruler—a great, spike-spined lizard with strapping shoulders and brawny arms—on a feather-draped litter, a file of savage warriors encamped around the steaming springs of the Khalkist valleys.

  Crematia herself remained close to the lair, for her other hatchlings were not so strong nor so capable as Deathfyre. She tutored and trained them, punished every weakness or tendency toward mercy, rewarding cruelty, always demonstrating the efficacy of merciless violence.

  Every hundred winters, she journeyed to the dwarven home, and twice since her first successful visit had she come away with a dragongem. Now, corresponding to the arrival of Deathfyre’s legion and the growing maturity of her other offspring, who numbered thirteen in all, the interval had passed again, and it was time to collect the last gem, the blackstone.

  Her proud son accompanied her, the two dragons winging eastward through smoking, ash-laden skies. Deathfyre was already two-thirds of Crematia’s own serpentine length, with the black mane of an adult bristled in a steadily thickening thatch around his cruel jowls. He was a strong, swift flyer, and the scarlet matriarch shivered with a thrill of pride. She admired his sleek frame, the sinewy muscle rippling beneath the crimson perfection of his scales.

  Arriving over the dwarven vale, Crematia wasn’t surprised to see that all the dwarves had once again taken shelter within their underground lair by the time she and Deathfyre settled toward the ground. She bade her son to remai
n watchfully back from the gates, then stalked forward with her crimson head held high. The great red dragon had already resolved upon at least one thing: After the dwarven king gave her this last stone, he would have no more hold over her, and thus she would slay him as just punishment for his past insolences.

  Unfortunately the wretched delvers had apparently anticipated her intent, for this time, no berobed dwarf emerged to present her with the gem. Instead, a small hatch in the base of the gate swung open, and a sphere of perfect blackness rolled forth. Momentum carried the stone to Crematia’s feet, and by the time she looked back at the gate, the hatch had slammed shut and she heard the sound of metal bolts being drawn.

  She opened her mouth and belched a searing cloud of fire against the gates, taking minimal satisfaction from the slick surface of melted stone, the scorched blackness that now ringed the city’s entryway. Changing shape with a twinkling of magic, Crematia stood in the flesh of a tall human woman, her body a shape of slender curves and flowing red hair clad in a gown of shimmering green. She reached down and picked up the blackstone, then turned back to Deathfyre.

  A volley of arrows arced from small gaps in the mountainside, but the few that reached her merely bounced from the green silk and fell to the ground. She laughed, the sound a gaily trilling chime, as she strolled casually up to the red serpent, reaching upward to caress her scion’s shoulder with a slender human hand.

  “They seek to spite me,” Crematia declared in amusement, turning to regard the concealed dwarves with a coy, even playful, smile. She gestured with her other hand, to the lush fields of grain and fruit, terraced fields covering the gently sloping mountainside in every direction.

  “I told them to expect no mercy from me. But perhaps they did not believe me. Now, my bold son, show them that we know the meaning of spite as well as they.”

  For a long day, the young red dragon frolicked through the croplands, scorching with his breath, rending with talons, crushing with the wallowing weight of his great body. Crematia sat with the relaxed dignity of an amused lady, reclining in the shade of a great oak tree, occasionally tasting of some melon or grape brought to her by Deathfyre.