Riverwind the Plainsman

by Paul B. Thompson

  “Empty time,” she said. “Empty decades.”

  He looked her up and down. “There are probably cures for your condition.”

  Her eyes widened. “Cures? Would you have such a cure?”

  Krago tapped the side of his face with a finger and frowned at her in concentration. “An impurity of the blood keeps you in this state, I believe. I do have potions that can cleanse the blood.” He turned and regarded the shelves that formed the walls of his sleeping quarters. Mumbling to himself, he went to a section near Di An’s stool and poked about in the vials and bottles.

  “There was something here—” he said. Bottles rocked and rattled as he rummaged through them. “Ah, this.” He lifted a yellowed glass bottle from the rear of the shelf and brushed dust and grime from it. “Four drops of this, taken when the Silver Moon is ascendant, should clear the metallic impurity,” he said. “It would be a fascinating experiment.” He put the bottle back on a lower shelf and looked at Di An. “Though I fail to see why you want to grow old and die.”

  Di An stared at the bottle. She tried to imagine what it would be like to be an adult. So many times in her two centuries of life she had cursed her smallness, her child’s body. Since meeting the plainsmen, her desire to be an adult had increased. Would Riverwind care differently for her if she were truly a woman?

  A crash rose from the corner where the gully dwarves were working the furnace. The ore-scoopers had dumped a load of cinnabar over one of the pestle pounders, and the offended party was chasing the scoopers around, trying to brain them with the massive marble pestle. Despite the looks of outrage, it was an eerily silent fracas. For the gully dwarves did not utter a sound.

  “How do you keep them so quiet?” Di An asked. “I thought they talked all the time.”

  “Thouriss had their tongues cut out, so they couldn’t talk of what they see,” Krago explained casually. “I must: attend to them.”

  He left her sitting on the stool and went off to calm the gully dwarves. Di An pitied the unfortunate gully dwarves, but her attention had been captured by the yellow bottle on the shelf. She couldn’t take her eyes off it. Should she take it now? She knew nothing about the moons of Krynn and their places in the sky. Would Krago actually help her?

  She glanced over her shoulder. Krago was embroiled in an argument with the Aghar. They mimed their woes to him as he urged them to get back to work. Di An slipped off the stool and snatched the bottle. She pulled the cork with her teeth and measured four drops into the palm of her hand. She licked the oily liquid off her palm and replaced the cork.

  She set the bottle back in its place on the shelf. Di An’s tongue was numb where the potion had touched it. The numbness spread down her throat and across her jaws. Her eyes watered. A ringing started in her ears. Medicine wasn’t supposed to hurt you—merciful gods, she’d poisoned herself!

  “No, no!” Krago burst out. “Put the ore in the mortar!”

  The elf girl staggered to her feet. Water—she had to have water. She wandered down the length of the bookshelf, searching through tearing eyes for a life-saving drink. The books and shelf swam before her eyes. Heat seemed to roar through her. She gasped for air.

  A stick of wood stuck out of the shelf, right at Di An’s face level. She grasped the stick blindly to keep herself from falling. It swung down. With a clank, a section of bookcase swung inward. Oddly patterned light flooded over her. Without thinking, Di An had opened a secret door into a hidden portion of the chamber. Hoping that there was water in there, she entered. Dimly, Di An heard Krago shout behind her as she walked through the portal.

  It was very bright, this place, but the heat was less intense. Di An stumbled over a rise in the floor and went down on her hands and knees. She must have remained like this for a while, for the next thing she knew, Krago was there, pulling her to her feet.

  “What are you doing in here?” he was shouting at her. He peered closely at her white, strained face. “Did you take the potion?” Di An nodded dazedly. “Stupid girl! The time was not quite right. Who knows what the effect on you might be?”

  The glare lessened, and Di An realized it was an effect of the potion rather than the inner room itself. She was leaning against the inside of the wooden bookcase. Stomach cramps sliced through her slight body. She gasped and bent over. Then, Krago’s hand was on her shoulder.

  “Drink this,” he said.

  She straightened and found he was holding a slim glass vial out to her. She didn’t care what it was, as long as it made her feel better.

  It did. It halted her pain. The details of the room leaped into clarity, and the ringing in her head stopped. Di An looked past Krago and saw that the room was filled with all sorts of strange apparatus. Magic circles were drawn on the wall; sigils and glyphs of obscure purpose covered the stone floor. A double row of alembics, pelicans, and distilling retorts lined the walls. And in the center of it all was a great vat, cast in solid glass and braced with metal straps. Now that the torment of her body had eased, she took in the contents of the strange room. She had no idea what purpose all these things could serve.

  “What? What is it?” she said hoarsely.

  “You might as well know,” he said, folding his arms. With an exasperated sigh, Krago took the elf girl’s hand. “Come and see the crowning achievement of my work.”

  The vat, eight feet in diameter, was filled to the rim with quicksilver. Floating half-submerged in the silver bath was a still-unformed thing. At least the details were unformed; the general shape was clear enough. Two arms, two legs, a head—the thing was red and glistening, like fresh, raw meat. A mouth split the unfeatured face. Needlelike teeth protruded from the thing’s bloodless gums.

  “What is it?” Di An asked, afraid to get any closer.

  “My creation,” Krago said. “I call her Lyrexis.”

  “Her?”

  “Yes, she is female, make no mistake. She will be a worthy mate for Thouriss.”

  Thouriss’s mate! Di An took a step closer to the vat. The outline of scales was visible in the translucent skin. The creature’s face was flatter and more normally proportioned than a lizard man’s, yet still it was not human. The cheekbones were high and wide, the skull massive but well-shaped.

  Ribs showed like dark shadows under the skin. Deeper still, the double fist that was the creature’s heart throbbed quickly, sending a current of blood through its tender, visible veins. Muscles lay like coiled ropes around the creature’s limbs. As Di An’s shadow fell across Lyrexis’s face, the thing in the vat seemed to twitch and turn its sightless gaze toward her. Di An yelped and cowered back.

  “It’s alive! It can see me!” she gasped.

  “Of course it’s alive. There would be very little reason to have it here if it weren’t. And it can’t really see you; it’s merely reacting to light and shadow, warmth or cold.”

  Di An backed away. “It’s—it’s horrible,” she murmured.

  “Horrible? Horrible?” Krago slipped the cowl off his head and regarded the elf girl with disdain. “Here is a feat no alchemist on the whole of Krynn ever dared attempt, and I have succeeded. I have created life. It is a triumph, you silly little girl. A complete and utter triumph!”

  “But why? Why create such a thing?”

  Krago gazed at the unfinished creature with pride and fascination. “It was a challenge,” he said. “To create a race of beings so powerful no one could stand against them.”

  Di An began to look for the way out. “What about your own people? Won’t your lizard folk wage war on humans, too?”

  Krago was regarding the thing in the vat with admiration when a voice boomed, “Krago has no loyalty except to his art. Isn’t that right, Krago?”

  Thouriss filled the secret doorway in the bookshelves. Behind him, Di An could see the hulking outlines of goblin guards.

  “Eh? Oh, it’s you. What do you want, Thouriss?” the young cleric said distractedly.

  “What is that creature doing here?” asked Thour
iss, pointing at Di An.

  “Oh, I called her here to discuss her aging problem. She stupidly took some of my purifying potion and wandered in here.”

  “So you told her about us? About Lyrexisss?” he finished the last syllable with a hiss. Thouriss strode into the room and seized Di An by the arm.

  “Let me go! I don’t know anything!” she cried. Struggling against his grip was like fighting the hold of a vise.

  “I hardly think any harm can come of it,” Krago said dismissively.

  Thouriss seemed to consider that for a moment, and then he laughed. “True. Perhaps she should know. Tell her the story, Krago. Tell her everything.”

  Krago couldn’t resist the opportunity to boast. He summoned one of the mute gully dwarves. “Bring a stool,” he said. The chair was brought, and Krago motioned Di An to it. “Sit,” he told her. He made himself comfortable in a chair and began his tale.

  “The draconians, what you call lizard men, are produced by the action of a magic spell on the eggs of dragons aligned with Good,” Krago said. “The first to be used were eggs of brass dragons, from which the Baaz draconians were made. Next came the Kapak, or copper draconians, and the Bozak, whom you have seen here in Xak Tsaroth. They stem from bronze dragon eggs. Each race has its own peculiar strengths and weaknesses. Tails and wings, for example, are not uniform among the draconians. This makes it hard to fit them with armor, or to make cavalry soldiers out of them.”

  Di An knew nothing of the wars to rid Krynn of dragons, and she didn’t know that dragons had become creatures of myth to most surface-dwellers. Less still did she know about draconians, but she tried to pay attention.

  “But why do you do this at all?” Di An asked, confused by this new knowledge.

  Thouriss said, “It is the will of Takhisis, the Queen of Darkness. She intends to build an army of draconians with which to conquer all of Krynn.”

  “And you do this evil thing willingly?” she said to Krago.

  “Don’t be impertinent,” Thouriss warned. Di An shrank away from him.

  “As I was saying,” Krago continued blandly, “the variation in the draconians made one problem. Another was the fact that there were only so many dragon eggs available, and in order to build and maintain a standing army, the Dark Queen needs a more ready source of warriors.”

  “A task assigned to the ruler of Xak Tsaroth,” Thouriss said. “The Great One, called Khisanth.”

  “A black dragon,” explained Krago.

  “Black dragon? Here?” Di An stood up, only to have Thouriss’s scaly hand force her back down on the stool.

  “Don’t worry, elf. The Great One is away, communing with our queen.”

  Krago’s recitation was interrupted by a delegation of gully dwarves who came in with a sample of crushed ore. The young human left his place and went to the door of the secret room. He examined the ore with numbing care and pronounced it fit for smelting. When he returned to the secret room, his face was smudged with soot and the hem of his robe was black with ash.

  “Where was I?” he said, dropping lightly into his chair.

  “Our Queen’s need for warriors,” prompted Thouriss enthusiastically. He seemed to enjoy hearing the story, though no doubt he had heard it many times.

  “Oh, yes. Well, Khisanth sent out agents to every corner of Ansalon, seeking a method to remedy our Queen’s problem. Some of them came to Sanction, where I was under arrest for graverobbing and heretical magic. All a mistake, you understand, but very inconvenient. I had hired two Sanctionites to dig up a newly buried corpse so that I could test an alchemical preparation I’d concocted. The potion restored the corpse to animation, but not to life.” He sighed, remembering. “Perhaps a bit more powdered copper or—”

  “Krago,” growled Thouriss impatiently.

  “Mm? Yes, well, the hired men panicked, got drunk, and spilled the whole story to the city fathers. I was taken and condemned to death. I languished in prison until Khisanth’s agents broke me out and whisked me back to Xak Tsaroth. Khisanth made me a proposition: unlimited resources to do any experiments I wanted, as long as I found a way to create a race of super-strong, super-intelligent draconians, who could breed like other races.”

  “And you accepted.” Di An’s voice was a whisper.

  Krago blinked his blue eyes. “Obviously. It was a fateful offer that made my life’s work possible. I was going to create life!”

  He hopped up and strode to the quicksilver vat. “You see, I reasoned that there was a fundamental reason why the dragons aligned with Good were so closely linked with metals.” Excitement tautened Krago’s voice. He gestured to the vat. “There is a harmonic correspondence between the etheric vibrations of the higher planes of magic and the order of pure metals.” Di An was baffled. Casting a look at Thouriss, she saw he could not follow the explanation either.

  “That being the case,” Krago continued, “it should be possible to generate dragons out of any purified metal! Do you see? Besides gold, silver, copper, bronze, and brass, you could have lead dragons, quicksilver, electrum, or any mixture!” A genuine fervor had ignited in the serious young cleric. “I chose quicksilver because it would be easy to handle. It’s liquid all the time, thus eliminating the need to use dangerous molten metals. Khisanth ordered the gully dwarves and the Bozak to provide me with everything I needed. Soon, I had the quicksilver, the powdered arcana, and the celestial alignment I required. All I needed was a suitable egg.”

  Krago turned his back on Di An and placed his hands on the rim of the vat. “Khisanth was wary of risking a dragon egg on my first attempt, so I chose the egg of a land serpent. They grow rapidly and have many offspring. When the black moon, Nuitari, was in the ascendant, I immersed the serpent’s egg in the bath of quicksilver. The powders were applied and the incantation begun. In just six weeks, Thouriss was born, fully grown, though his mind was as empty as any infant’s. A completely new race, never before seen on Krynn.” Here, Krago smiled. “An ophidian, as I have named this race. Thouriss’s education and training as a warrior started immediately, and by the age of four months, he was more than a match for any Bozak in the city.”

  Thouriss hissed sharply. It was easy to see on his face the pleasure that Krago’s praise brought.

  “Khisanth was so pleased with Thouriss that she made him commander of all her warriors and departed to tell the Queen the news,” Krago said. “I was to proceed with the second part of the grand design, the creation of a mate for Thouriss who would be the mother of this new race. Lyrexis, as I have named her, is in her fourth week of growth. By the time Khisanth returns, I hope to be able to present her with a fully developed female ophidian.”

  When Krago was done, Di An sat with her jaw hanging open. This human spoke so casually of the evil he was bringing down upon his own people, upon the world. He would destroy the surface world as Li El had nearly destroyed Hest.

  “Nothing can stop us now,” Thouriss said proudly. “Each passing day increases my wisdom and strength. When my mate is ready, I shall lead the invasion of southern Ansalon.” He twined his cold, hard fingers in Di An’s short hair and tugged her head upright. “The elves of Qualinost are reputed to be good fighters. I look forward to shedding their blood.”

  “We’ve finished our conversation for now, girl,” Krago said amiably. “Shall I have her sent back, Thouriss?”

  “Yes,” Thouriss said. He had released Di An and was staring at the thing that lay in quicksilver. “The Great One will want to question her and her friends,” he said. “We will pass through Que-Shu country on our way to Solace. Estimates of the barbarians’ strength would be useful.”

  Two goblin guards took hold of Di An’s arms, hoisting her off her feet. They carried her all the way back to the cell she shared with Riverwind and Catchflea. The tall plainsman was on his feet when the cell door opened. Di An rushed to him as soon as her feet touched the floor. She flung her arms around him as the cell door clanged shut.

  “Are you all right?
” Riverwind asked quietly.

  “I saw the most terrible thing!” she said, clinging to him fiercely. “I saw it—I saw—”

  Riverwind made Di An sit down, and he sat by her. Holding her ice-cold hands, he asked, “What did you see, little one?”

  “The end of the world!”

  Chapter 20

  The Oldest Trick

  Di An calmed enough to relate what she’d seen and heard. When she was done, the three of them sat in the semi-darkness, facing each other. No one spoke for a long time.

  Riverwind clasped his hands tightly. “I’ve been idle too long. My quest has consumed my thoughts. But if Thouriss and this dragon and the Dark Queen herself mean to lay waste to my homeland and enslave my people, then there is no more sacred task than to stop them.”

  “How can we?” Catchflea said. “We have no weapons and we are only three against a hundred.”

  “How can we even escape this room?” Di An asked.

  “We must get out before the dragon returns. Once it’s here, we’ll never get out alive,” said Riverwind. He idly traced some lines in the dust with a finger. “When we do get out, I want the two of you to leave Xak Tsaroth as fast as you can. Head for Que-Shu and spread the word! If Thouriss thinks he can defeat us so easily, he’s in for a sharp lesson.”

  “You’ll not throw your life away, yes?” Catchflea said.

  Riverwind laid a large hand on the old man’s shoulder. “I’ve no intention of dying,” he said firmly. “Goldmoon awaits me. That’s reason enough to want to live.”

  Di An gave a frowning sigh. At first, Riverwind thought he’d hurt her feelings. She was hunched over, kneading her bird-thin ankles. “What’s the matter?” he asked.

  “I hurt,” she said. “In my bones.”

  “Did they beat you?”

  “Thouriss? No, no.” She grimaced and knotted her fists in a spasm of pain. “I drank that potion, though.”

  “It was a foolish thing to do,” Riverwind said.