The Sword and the Dragon (The Wardstone Trilogy Book One)

by M. R. Mathias

  Willa muttered the words of the promise spoken over a thousand years ago, just before the dwarves had gone to ground. At the moment, the need wasn’t so great, she decided. Pael could be bluffing or exaggerating his strengths. Just wearing the thing around her neck seemed to give her some strength. The confidence that Pael’s display had shaken from her earlier seemed to be returning. Nevertheless, when she and Andra left the temple of Doon, to try and get some rest, the horn remained looped around her neck.

  Shaella was sitting on her throne, in the empty Grand Petition Hall in Lakeside Castle. Hours had passed since the courtiers and petitioners of the day had been dismissed. Cole, her right hand, and the functional ruler of the castle and the city outside its walls, had reluctantly left her there at sunset.

  He was worried for her. He knew she was strong, and far from a foolish girl anymore, so he left her to her statuesque silence, and retreated.

  Shaella simply didn’t want to move. She was recuperating still, from her most recent use of the Spectral Orb. For two consecutive days and nights, she had been with Gerard in spirit and mind. She was exhausted.

  Through the orb, she could feel him, but he was weak, and had been transformed somehow. He was alone, and seemingly lost in the darkness he was bound to. She spoke, and he seemed to hear her. Sometimes, he even mumbled a coherent response, but mostly, he rambled off strange phrases, or cried out in confused terror.

  He was alive though, and that’s what mattered most to Shaella. She would not, could not, give up hope for him now. As soon as she rested, and regained enough strength to open the orb-way again, she would do so. At the moment though, her mind was numb. She didn’t even start when Pael appeared, suddenly and crisply, before her. In fact, she didn’t even seem to notice him there.

  Pael looked at her, with a father’s eye of concern for a moment, but his attention shifted when he saw the object sitting across her lap. His Spectral Orb had been shrunk to the size of a cantaloupe, and mounted on an intricately carved wooden staff. He eased up to her curiously, and reached out to take it, but when his hand came close, the shaft flared a bright crimson arc, and bit into him sharply. Shaella jumped from her daze, and raised the staff to strike Pael.

  Pael yelped in surprise and pain from the staff’s magical defense, and his head grew pink with his growing rage.

  When Shaella realized who it was before her, she relaxed the staff, and made a quick apology before her father could unleash something horrible at her. As a sorceress, she was fairly powerful. She had memorized a wealth of spells, and was learning more each day. She could cast them effortlessly, and with supreme confidence, but compared to her father, she was a kitten to his saber cat. She dared not cross him. She knew that the bond they shared as father and daughter was, at best, as thin as a strand of spider’s web. His anger alone, would burn it through, before it could be checked. Especially if she provoked him.

  “Father,” she said meekly, as he was trying to calm himself.

  “I see you have warded MY orb well.” The stress on the word “my” wasn’t lost on Shaella, but Pael’s voice betrayed little animosity, and most of his anger had dissipated by then.

  He stared at her, but the look softened. He had no further use for the orb, he decided. Xwarda’s vaults held much more powerful things, if one knew how to use them. Luckily for Pael, Shokin had that knowledge right there for him to take.

  “Why are you here?” Shaella asked kindly, and then stood. “Can I have something brought for you? Food? Wine? Anything?”

  He took her hand, and helped her down the three steps that formed the dais for the Lion’s throne. Her mind raced through the possibilities. His strange, suddenly fatherly manner, suggested that he wanted something. But what could Pael want that he couldn’t just take?

  “No my dear, I need no refreshment.” He put a hand on each of her shoulders, and looked her in the eyes. “You have made me proud, Shaella.” He seemed as earnest as one could be, but Shaella wasn’t fooled by the act; at least not completely. “I wish to have you by my side when I take Xwarda on the morrow. I wish to share the victory with you, and I hope to make you as proud of me as I am of you.”

  She would have thought that he just wanted her along to gain the advantage of intimidation and might that her dragon would bring, but she didn’t even have the collar on at the moment. It interfered with her use of the orb, allowing the dragon’s thoughts into hers and Gerard’s moments, so she had stopped wearing it. As it was, Pael could have just summoned the collar to himself, put it on, and taken control of the dragon. There was no question in her mind that Pael knew exactly where the collar was, but he hadn’t tried to take it.

  She dared not believe in this sudden burst of fatherly tenderness. Her mother’s voice rang through her head, spewing a myriad curses at his lack of such an emotion, warning her not to be taken in by his act.

  Shaella returned the loving gaze into Pael’s cold dark eyes, and searched them. Try as she might, she didn’t see, or sense any sign of deception or mockery. He seemed as sincere as one could be. She found that this moved her, and without a moment’s more thought on the matter, she agreed to join him in his conquest of Xwarda.

  Starkle, the blue-skinned pixie man, woke Queen Willa just after the sun broke the horizon. In a hurried zigzagging flutter, flown at a respectable distance from the waking Queen’s bed, he spoke to her in his deep, excited voice.

  “It is as he said, Highness, the necromancer didn’t lie. You have to see it for yourself. Hurry now.”

  He had to zip out of the way of a thrown pillow.

  “I am only the messenger!” he said indignantly after he had recovered.

  “General Spyra, and the High Wizard, Targon, sent me. They await you at the Coast Road Gate. Hurry now, Majesty.”

  “Would you excuse yourself so that I may dress, sir?” Queen Willa snapped sharply. A little tiny pixie man was still a man, and she was still a lady, no matter how serious the emergency.

  “Of, of course Highness, forgive me.” Starkle bowed in midair, then erratically zipped across the room, and out the slightly cracked door.

  “Milly!” Willa yelled coolly. “I know your ear is glued to the door! Someone had to open it for that little blue gnat!”

  A middle aged woman, blushing furiously, eased into the room. Willa was hurriedly swapping her night clothes for a heavy pullover gown.

  “Why wasn’t it you who awakened me?” the Queen asked. “Find my hooded cloak while you answer. No, the darker one.”

  Milly hid her face in one of Willa’s large closets.

  “Who can say the ways of the fairy folk Highness. Surely not I.” she called from inside.

  Willa found a black leather belt and buckled it around the velvety lavender gown she had chosen, and then took the cloak Milly offered.

  “It’s not the ways of pixies that concern me, Milly,” Willa said, while bunching her hair into a ponytail. “Pixies can’t turn door knobs by themselves.”

  Willa’s grin showed that she was just teasing her maid servant. Suddenly, her face turned serious, and she looked sternly into Milly’s eyes.

  “I want you to gather a pillow sack full of your dearest things, and then report to Lady Andra. Do it just as soon as I leave, and tell her I said to take you to the tunnel herself.”

  A half hour later, Queen Willa came up from the endless switchbacks of stairs, up to the wide roadway-like top of the outer wall. It took a few moments for her to catch her breath and gather her bearings, long enough for her to locate the General and Master Targon.

  In her cloak, with the hood up, no one bothered to acknowledge her, much less direct her. This was fine with her. She didn’t want to distract the men. Looking around at them, she decided that she could have come up to the top completely naked, and not a one of them would have been able to peal their eyes away from what was holding their attention.

  When she gained the side of her advisers, she was finally close enough to see for herself. Out and down
from her vantage, standing boldly, within bow range, row upon row of soldiers stood in perfect formations. Thousands of men, among them huge ladder towers, and great battering rams, stood at the ready. Catapults, and wagon loads of head-size boulders for ammunition, were spread evenly just out of bow shot, in a row parallel to the wall.

  “Look,” General Spyra pointed down, and then helped the Queen lean out past the arrow crenellations, to see what it was he was trying to show her.

  Below them, and a bit to the right, directly in front of that particular set of gates, stood half a dozen soldiers at attention. They had so many arrows sticking out of them, that they resembled porcupines, yet none of them had fallen. In front of them, was a pyramid stack of three barrel kegs.

  “What of the other gates?” Willa asked.

  She felt as if she were sinking in sand, and had the weight of the world pressing down on her shoulders.

  “The same,” Spyra answered, with little or no emotion in his voice. “Around ten thousand men, who are unhindered by our arrows, and ready to set all of the outer gates on fire with those casks of oil.”

  “Curse the gods of the heavens and earth,” Willa said to herself, fingering the horn that she had snatched from her bedside table as she left her room.

  Just then, a small, mule drawn wagon, pulling a load of supplies up one of the long, slow sloping ramps that ran on the inside of the wall, broke free from its tethers. Men shouted, and screamed to make way, as the cart wobbled, and scraped against the wall on its unhindered way down the ramp. Men dove and leapt out of its way, as it gained careening speed, then smashed into the next mule cart, which was halfway up the slope. A man, and a mule were crushed to death, and a few men were injured from the tumbles they took, while trying to avoid a direct hit.

  Queen Willa decided not to mock the gods anymore, and also decided that never in all of her life had she felt more helpless than she did just then.

  “What is it that you and Hyden Hawk have come up with?” she asked Targon, with her last bit of hope hanging in the balance.

  “There is a plan,” Targon answered, with a doubtful look on his face. “But it cannot even be started until he returns.”

  “Returns?” She didn’t understand.

  With an expectant wince at what her reaction would be, Targon explained.

  “He has gone into the Tower.”

  “Wha – What Tower?” Willa asked.

  The sand she felt like she was sinking in was about to suck her under, because she knew the answer to her question before he spoke it.

  At least ten would-be heroes had gone into Pratchert’s Tower in her lifetime. Not a single one of them had ever been heard from again. According to the records, over a hundred wizards, sorcerers, mages, and fools had tried to beat Dahg Mahn’s trials over the ages. None of them had succeeded.

  She didn’t even think, before she took the Horn of Doon from inside her robe, and put it to her mouth. The loud blasting sound it made startled General Spyra, who almost tumbled over the edge of the wall. It was all Targon could do to wrestle him back to safety. The scene before her only served to confirm that, without a doubt, it was indeed a time of great need.

  Chapter 53

  Vaegon sat patiently beside the big, bland block of Wardstone, waiting for something to happen. On top of the stone, Ironspike lay in the exact place, where it had melted itself a snug cradle, into the semi-smooth surface a few thousand years ago. A depression, shaped roughly like a war hammer, and a few smaller ones shaped like large arrowheads, were empty alongside the sword.

  Nothing had happened when Vaegon placed it there, nothing at all. He had half expected a flare of light, or a telling glow, or maybe even a hum, but there was nothing to indicate that the great sword was replenishing its power. He had slept for awhile and was now a growing restless. Dugak’s long, powerful snores filled the cavern. The sound reverberated off of the stone walls, and came closing in on the elf.

  If there was one thing that Vaegon, or any other elf for that matter, didn’t like, it was being enclosed underground. The smoky torch flame, wavering in its crude sconce by the entryway, was the only movement. Save for the grotesque shadows it threw across the roughly hewn walls.

  “There’s no breeze, to sway the grass and the trees, even if there were grass and trees to be swayed…” Vaegon sarcastically butchered the words, while singing a verse of an old elven tune in a soft, musical voice. “There are no songs, for the birds and the bees are all gone, and all they left here is the decay…”

  Worse than the dead air, and the suffocating feeling, was the fact that this wasn’t just a cavern: it was also a catacomb. There were no corpses in this particular room, but just outside, there was a tunnel lined with rooms, just like this one, and they weren’t so empty.

  Vaegon shivered at the thought, and forced it away. He didn’t want to think about it. He didn’t want to know. All he wanted was to get back into the open, to see the sun, the moon, or the stars overhead, and to breathe in the fresh air. He had been sitting there so long, that he wasn’t sure if it was night or day anymore.

  He decided that when Dugak woke, they would go. There was no way he, or the dwarf, could tell if the sword had been replenished. The important thing was that he now knew where the cooling stone was hidden so that he could bring Mikahl here if…No, he corrected his thought. Not if, but when, Mikahl recovered from his injuries.

  Vaegon stood, looked at the sword, and seeing that it appeared no different than it had the last time he had looked, let out a frustrated sigh. He began to pace the dusty gravel floor of the chamber, trying to fight off his claustrophobic feelings, and his unease, in general. The crunch of his footfalls gave him a strange comfort, in the otherwise silent catacombs. He was sure he would have felt much better if he still had his elven vision. Seeing in the darkness is one of the things he had taken for granted all of his life. He could still make his way in the dark without the torch, but with his vision he could have…Could have what?

  “No use in might’ve been, foolish elf!” he said to himself out loud. “It’s the lot I’ve been left with so I must accept it and move on.”

  “Who are you talking to?” a wavy, liquid voice said from the doorway.

  The sound of it, and its suddenness, startled Vaegon so badly that he almost fell to his knees. He looked for the source of it, and found a ghostly form standing there, a man in a long, flowing robe, sporting a crown upon his head. The figure had no substance, and very little color, but was still defined in smoky white, and vivid detail. The ghostly thing had been human once, with a sharp nose, high cheekbones, deeply set eyes, and long straight hair.

  “What? Who are you?” Vaegon asked, as he eased his way back towards the cooling stone.

  “I was once a King,” the ghost said sadly. “But now, I’m just a harmless ghost.”

  There was a hint of sarcasm in the tone of his voice.

  “There’s so many undead up and about, that I decided to go look for a conversation. It’s lonely down here, you know. I felt the sword there, and heard you singing.” The apparition pointed a bony finger at Ironspike on the cooling stone. “It’s not every day a power such as that comes around. It’s driving them away. As I suppose it should do. No undead soul wants to feel its edge biting into them. It’s such a final thought, don’t you think?”

  “What?” was all Vaegon could manage to get out of his mouth. The dwarf’s powerful snore filled the silence that followed.

  The ghost looked at Dugak curiously and then back to Vaegon.

  “Well sir, there are no ghosts or undead in here, and I doubt you can relate to my situation well enough to sustain a decent parley, so I’ll be on my way.”

  The ghost bowed regally.

  “Good day,” it said, just before it disappeared entirely.

  Instantly, Vaegon felt the air begin to warm around him. He had been too frightened to notice how cold the chamber had gotten. He spent long moments blinking his good eye, trying to figure out
whether he’d really seeing the thing, or if he’d gone crazy down here in the underground. It didn’t matter, he decided. Crazy or not, the thing had felt Ironspike’s power, so it was time for them to go.

  He put the sword back in its sheath and, as politely as he could manage, he woke Dugak.

  They started back the way they had come. Vaegon had never been happier to see the light of day than he was when they came out of the mouth of the necropolis, into the afternoon sun. The moment they were drenched in the bright, welcoming warmth of it though, he knew something was wrong. He turned, and saw the source of the rancid stench that had assailed his nostrils. A troop of soldiers was there, looking just as surprised as he and Dugak were. Every one of them was dead, and rotting on the bone, but coming at them with murderous intent nonetheless.

  Mikahl was back in his childhood bed, in his mother’s tiny apartment, in the servants’ wing of Lakeside Castle. His mother was in the old, creaky rocking chair in the corner, needling something or other out of a peach colored yarn. The fall of her golden hair shone with angelic radiance, and he was bathed in her feelings of love for him.

  “Creeek…Krooth…Creeek…Krooth…Creeek…Krooth…” the chair sounded, as she slowly rocked it to and fro. In a nearly inaudible voice, she hummed an old lullaby in time with the rocking of the chair.

  Quietly, so as not to disturb the tranquility of the scene that he found himself in, Mikahl crept out of bed, and tiptoed to the window.

  Outside, he saw the ocean rolling and swelling in the distance. A deep, dark sea wasn’t supposed to be outside that window, but he accepted it as if it was. He felt a comforting presence ease up beside him, and peek its furry head out, to see what it was that he was looking at. It was Grrr, the Great Wolf, and sensing him there, caused a coldness to churn inside Mikahl’s belly. As he scratched the wolf behind the ears, he realized that he was no longer a boy, and that the sound he was hearing wasn’t his mother’s rocking chair, but was the creaking, and groaning of a ship. He looked from the wolf, back out the window, and it was there, passing very close to them.