by Jim C. Hines
With a twisted sneer, he added, “But you seem to lack a sword, brother. Here, take this instead.” He tossed a knife to Barius. Halfway between them, it twisted into a hissing snake.
Darnak’s war club knocked it aside before it could strike. The snake bounced off the tunnel wall and fell to the ground, where it became a dagger again.
Barius grabbed for the dagger. “Darnak, help me fight his foul magic.”
The dwarf looked at them both. The humans wore mirroring expressions, jaws tight and eyes narrow with determination. “No, I can’t be doing that, Barius.”
To the prince’s outraged expression, he said, “I’ve served your father for longer than you’ve been alive. I’ll not tell him how I was after killing one of his sons. And if you’ve any brains at all between the two of you, you’ll stop this nonsense. We may have found the ore, but we’ve yet to haul it from the mine, as the saying goes.”
Behind them, the sound of the waves changed. Something had disturbed their rhythm. Jig stared at the lake, noting the low shadow that broke up the reflections on the surface. It moved toward the shore, growing more distinct as it neared the sand. Ripples spread out from the disturbance. A head rose out of the water, and Jig felt a surge of fear streak from the tips of his ears down to his toes.
“Dragon,” he said. Tried to, rather. His mouth was too dry to speak.
Barius, still searching for an opening against his brother, hadn’t noticed yet. But Darnak did, and his head jerked up as he spotted the dragon sliding out of the water.
“Now there’s something I can be pummeling on,” he said. “Solve your problems quickly, boys. I’m off to tenderize myself some dragon steak.”
Barius finally saw the dragon. “We shall resolve this at a later time. For now, there is a common foe to slay.”
Twirling his club over his head, Darnak charged into the room toward the dripping dragon. Barius followed close behind, his knife looking like a joke before the dragon’s bulk.
Jig glanced at Riana. Their eyes met, and they nodded in silent agreement. Leaving the humans and dwarf to meet their respective painful deaths, they ran back down the tunnel as fast as their feet could move.
“A common foe to slay,” Riana gasped, mimicking the prince’s crystalline enunciation. “Though maybe Straum will laugh himself to death when he sees Barius’s weapon. I swear, it’s a wonder there are any humans left.”
Jig saved his energy for running, not talking. The tunnel was wide enough; he only bumped the walls twice in the darkness, neither time losing more than a bit of skin against the rock. Riana had a harder time, being less accustomed to darkness. She fell several times, cursing like a dwarf every time she scrambled back to her feet.
I should help her. But another part of Jig’s brain overruled that idea, the part that argued, If she’s behind me, that’s one more thing between me and the dragon. Not terribly noble, but he and Ryslind were in agreement on the usefulness of nobility. As Barius had so aptly demonstrated time after time, nobility was the first step toward suicide.
In this case, however, he might have been better off to wait for Riana after all, or even to let her go first. Yes, far better for him to have followed her out of the tunnel. That way she would be the one to face the large figure silhouetted against the mouth of the tunnel.
Jig clenched his teeth and ran faster, ignoring the cramps in his legs. He was short and skinny. Big creatures tended to be slow. If Jig was quick enough, maybe he could slip past the thing, whatever it was.
He wasn’t quick enough. Nor was this big thing at all slow. A long arm snapped out and caught the back of his loincloth so fast that Jig never saw the movement. He grunted as his rope belt bent him double and took his breath away. The arm lifted him effortlessly into the air. Jig grabbed at the creature, but it was awfully hard to get a good grip on something behind his back. He scraped the thing’s wrist and felt scales, but he couldn’t break free.
Slowly he found himself turned around to face the creature. When he saw what held him, he stopped struggling and concentrated on looking small and harmless. For now he knew what had killed the ogres.
The thing stood a head shorter than an ogre, but Jig would have happily faced all three ogres by himself rather than fight this beast. Dark bronze scales the size of large coins covered most of its body, with lighter scales along the belly and chest. Its legs were jointed like an animal’s, so it stood with its thighs hinged up close to the stomach. A long tail helped it balance. As Jig watched, the tail twitched back and forth, causing the barbs at the end to smash against the wall. The creature didn’t seem to feel any pain from the impact.
The head was a miniature version of the dragon’s that Jig had seen coming out of the water, and he would have been happier had he never gotten the chance to examine it so closely. Curved white teeth lined its long, flat jaws. The eyes were golden, with slitted pupils. Twin horns spiraled back from behind its small tufted ears.
Jig glanced at the nostrils, watching them widen and close as the thing breathed. Could it breathe fire? he wondered. Then he banished that thought, afraid one of the gods might hear him and decide to satisfy his curiosity.
Something tickled his back. Jig craned his head and saw Smudge hastening toward his belt pouch. Before, Smudge had fought like a cornered tunnel cat to avoid the pouch. Faced with this thing that had snagged Jig so easily, the fire-spider had obviously decided that maybe the pouch wasn’t as bad as he thought.
“Don’t struggle, little one,” the dragon-thing said. The voice sounded male, though Jig saw no evidence either way on its naked body. But dragons were probably built differently than goblins, and Jig wasn’t about to ask. “Once I have your friend, we’ll be on our way back to Straum.”
His breath smelled like rotting meat. Jig wondered what he ate, and again decided he was better off not knowing.
Riana’s footsteps came closer, then faltered as she fell yet again. Jig could hear her saying, “. . . going to kill you, Jig. Leave me behind, will you? I’ll take a strip of your skin for every one of these bruises. You owe me a finger anyway.”
He almost wished she’d have the chance to take her revenge. Without thinking, he cupped his hands to his mouth and screamed, “Riana, run!”
One golden eye swiveled at Jig, and he wisely shut his mouth. “Very well,” the thing said. “The hard way.”
He pulled Jig close against his body, and Jig felt the spring of powerful muscles as his captor leaped into the air. Clawed feet scraped against the wall and launched them another twenty feet down the tunnel, where he bounced onto the opposite wall. Three more bounds took them to where Riana stood, torn as to which way to run.
Even had she fled as soon as she heard Jig’s warning, it would have gained her only a few seconds. As easily as Smudge had caught the fly, the creature pounced and snagged Riana’s tunic in his claws. He tucked Riana under his other arm and continued at a slower pace toward Straum’s lair. As Jig fought to keep from throwing up and waited for the tunnels to stop spinning, he heard Riana mutter, “I hate this place.”
The creature dropped Jig and Riana in the sand. He was so confident, he hadn’t even bothered to take Jig’s sword or Riana’s knife. Not that it mattered. Riana had managed to squirm enough to slash at the creature’s arm. Against those scales, she might as well have attacked the stone walls.
“Ah, your friends have returned.” Straum’s bronze body rested half-submerged in the lake. His front legs sank into the sand, and his long neck stretched just high enough to let him look down at his newest captives. “I was telling your friends about my collection of chamber pots. So many adventurers bring their own. That way they don’t leave as much of a trail to follow. I have one hundred and thirteen. Fourteen, now that I’ve claimed Barius’s pot as well. Ingenious, the way the lid twists into place so perfectly. I’d guess that elven craftsmanship went into this beauty.”
Straum picked up the gold-trimmed chamber pot, which looked like a porcelain bead in his cl
aws. “I’ll have one of my children clean it out. The flowers can always use an extra bit of fertilizer.” He tilted the pot. “Not terribly decorative, though. No artistic style. See that blue pot on the third shelf? That belonged to a barbarian lord named Terinor.”
The indicated pot was covered in cloisonné images of huge muscular men and women, their hands raised high as if they were trying to raise the sky. The wide-rimmed top appeared to be cushioned in leather and trimmed with red jewels. It suddenly occurred to Jig that, were the owner to sit on the leather, the men and women would appear to hold him up.
The chamber pot was easily one of the tackiest things he had ever seen, and he felt a wash of pity for those poor bearers of barbarian buttocks.
“Very nice,” Barius said sharply. “And now that our companion has been returned, perhaps you can get on with the matter of our deaths.” He stood with Darnak on the other side of the dragon. Behind them, Ryslind had taken their weapons and watched the proceedings with a smile. Even Jig could see that, unlike the others, Ryslind was no prisoner.
“Oh, but I so rarely have company,” Straum protested. His voice was like an earthquake, though his serpentine tongue gave him a bit of a lisp when he spoke Human. “Most people never make it past the Necromancer. If they even find him. I had such a good time watching you figure that out.”
He tilted his head toward two small pools that Jig hadn’t seen before. No more than puddles a little way from shore, a short wall of clear glass bricks surrounded and protected each one. The surfaces were so still it was like looking at a pair of mirrors. Instead of reflecting Straum’s muscular bulk, Jig saw a whirling pillar of water at the center of an empty room when he studied the nearest pool. A small corpse lay to one side, next to an enormous throne. The Necromancer’s room. He wondered how the magic could show so much detail when the throne room itself was dark.
Flecks of color sparkled across the both pools, and finally Jig understood the purpose for those two decorative ceilings in the shiny room and the Necromancer’s throne room. Straum had been watching them, probably since that first confrontation where Jig betrayed his captain.
While Jig wrestled with a new wave of fear, Straum gestured to a wall full of lanterns. “See that one, with the handle shaped like a naked eight-armed woman? That belonged to Erik the Eunuch. Used to be a slave of some eastern emperor. Once he built a name for himself, he had everything he owned redesigned with a kind of ‘melon-breasted naked woman motif.’ Personally, I think it’s a blatant example of overcompensating.”
Lowering his head toward Barius, he asked, “Tell me, do women of such proportions truly exist among your people? If so, are they able to walk upright like the rest of your species?”
“And where in your fine collection do you keep the Rod of Creation, oh great worm?” Barius asked, ignoring the question.
Straum began to laugh. Whitecapped waves crossed the lake as the dragon’s chest heaved, and Jig flattened his ears to block the worst of the sound. It was a terrible laugh, one that combined fury and bitterness with genuine mirth. Straum’s head and neck slid through the sand until his mouth rested mere feet from the prince.
“Therein lies Ellnorein’s greatest joke. ’Twas a joke played as much on you as on me.” His voice dropped to a whisper, though a whisper from Straum’s mouth still blew Barius’s black hair backward. “I don’t have it.”
“No! You’re the guardian,” Barius protested. “You must have it. This is a trick! You seek to gull me.” His head whipped around as he scanned the shelves.
“No trick, brother,” Ryslind said. “Ellnorein had no choice, you see. The rod needed to be safe from even the most powerful adventurers, so his first step was to trap the most powerful creature he could find and imprison him here, at the heart of the mountain. In thousands of years, no party has survived an encounter with Straum.
“Ellnorein knew this would happen. He predicted the tales of wealth, the fame that would draw adventurers from around the world in search of the rod, all of them intent on battling their way here. Many die before they reach this point. Others flee after a few encounters. A fortunate few live long enough to again see the light of the sun.”
Straum growled at that. “They see sunlight.” His claws began to flex in the sand, and Jig could imagine those claws tearing thousands of years’ worth of adventurers into scraps of meat. “I have been trapped here, alone, for so long that I cannot remember what it feels like to be free.”
Clouds of hot smoke formed around his nostrils. “I can create an entire world of illusion, but I can’t break these walls. All the illusion in the world cannot change the fact that I am a prisoner. I could grind an ordinary mountain to dust and scatter it on the wind, but Ellnorein, damn him to the lowest pit in the Shadow-elves’ icy hell, used the rod to form these caverns and tunnels. Rod-created rock resists lesser magic, including my own. Only the rod can free me.”
Ryslind ducked past Straum’s mouth, probably afraid that the dragon might loose a jet of fire in his fury. “That is why Ellnorein couldn’t leave the rod here,” he explained. “Straum, being a created creature, could not use it himself. But like all dragons, Straum collects followers. Ogres, trolls, and other creatures you haven’t yet seen. One of them could have used the rod, either to free the dragon, or for their own use. It had to be hidden, but hidden so well that nobody would ever be able to use it.”
“Why not encase it in the mountain?” Darnak asked. “Why all this nonsense with the tunnels and the monsters? He had to know that would bring adventurers like beggars converging on a feast.”
“The rod’s magic is like a living thing,” Ryslind said. “Left alone, its magic would have seeped into the mountain itself, the effects could be . . . unfortunate. It had to be left somewhere those effects would go unnoticed.”
Straum sighed, and smoke shot across the room. “If I had the rod, I would give it to you with my blessing and send you on your way. I would give you all of my gold, every treasure I own, if you only used the rod to release me. Do you know how bloody bored I’ve been? I tried talking to the other creatures for a while. But the ogres talk about nothing but fighting and food, and as for the trolls, they’re a bit too clever. They kept trying to steal from me, and I grew tired of disintegrating them. The smell of burned troll is, by far, one of the most nauseating scents in the world.”
Jig thought of privy duty and disagreed. The corpses at the mouth of the tunnel had been almost pleasant by comparison. But he kept his argument to himself.
“I taught myself magic from the spellbooks I collected. The trick was to kill the wizards without damaging their books. A difficult trick, since your races use such flammable materials for books. Though there was one fellow, a bright young lad, who had his spells engraved on brass plates. Heavy book, but it survived just fine.”
Another tuft of smoke floated from Straum’s nostrils, and Jig tried not to wonder what had happened to the owner of that book.
“That killed a century or two. But all too soon, I was better at magic than the wizards who approached me, and the fun began to wane. And then I created my children.”
The dragonlike creature that had captured Jig and Riana stepped forward. Head raised, it seemed to preen before Straum’s proud gaze.
“Your children?” Darnak asked. “Don’t tell me you’ve got a lady dragon hidden away in that lake.”
“If only there were.” Straum’s eyes glazed. “I haven’t flown a mating dance in five thousand two hundred and twelve years. While I may have forgotten most of the surface world, I still remember the scrape of scales against scales, the lashing of tails, the twining of necks.”
He shivered, and his scales puffed out, turning him a darker bronze. Jig was thankful that the lake concealed the dragon’s lower body. This adventure had given him nightmares enough already without the extra fuel of an aroused dragon.
“No, I used magic to create them. They’re fairly intelligent, stronger than anything else down here, and excellen
t company. Their only flaws are arrogance and a powerful loyalty to one another that tends to override their common sense. You were tracking this one back to his lair, Barius. Had your brother not diverted your party, you would have been slaughtered the moment you threatened his offspring.”
Which meant that by diverting them here, Ryslind had saved their lives. Jig glanced at Barius.
Taken aback, the prince said nothing. The stoniness of his face as he studied Ryslind was an expression Jig had come to recognize. It was the expression Barius wore when he had made a mistake, but wasn’t yet willing to admit it.
“Yes, my children are a clear improvement over the low creatures Ellnorein abandoned me with,” Straum said. He gave Jig a dismissive nod. “Goblins. Ogres. Trolls. Worthless creatures. But I’m afraid that even my children have their flaws.”
Jig wasn’t sure, but he thought he saw this dragonchild’s eyes narrow with suspicion.
“See, in order to keep them interesting, I had to give them a bit of independence. Sadly, it goes to their heads from time to time. This one plans to bring me a poisoned deer and take my place as ruler.”
Before anyone could move, his head shot toward the dragonchild, who had time for one shrill scream before Straum’s jaws closed over its head with a loud crack. The headless body crumpled.
Jig began to shake. For all Straum’s bulk, he had moved faster than any creature Jig had ever seen. He watched as Straum’s tongue flicked out to clean dark blood from his teeth.
“He’ll not get any more ideas into his head,” Straum said. When nobody spoke, he added, “That was a joke.”
Jig forced himself to smile. Yes, that was a good joke. Please don’t eat me.
“I can read their minds, you see. I never mention that detail to them. I fear they might react badly.”