DW01 Dragonspawn (6 page)

“We cannot expect anything less than victory because of certain matters of which you are not aware,” the young king interrupted. A smile formed on the king’s thin lips as Culdus’s face began to grow white with apprehension. “Relax, Culdus,” he said, leaning forward and patting the old warrior on the forearm. “You have done well. But Valdaimon should now enlighten you concerning certain additional forces that will be at your disposal.”

“No!”
the baron thundered, slamming his fist on the table so that the sound of both his shout and the blow echoed in the vastness of the great hall. “Your Majesty, with all respect, you know I am your loyal servant and will obey your commands, whatever they may be. But in conscience, I would not be doing my duty if I did not protest and beg you to reconsider this rash and dangerous course.”

The old man began pacing the length of the hall, turning and jabbing at the air to emphasize his points. “I have trained for you the mightiest army—not in numbers but in tactics, skill, and sheer cruelty—that this world has ever seen. You think I do not know of this wizard’s surprises, but I do. Yes. And I say there is no need to add the forces of dead, stinking things to those of the fine army I have provided you. What warrior would willingly march next to zombies, wights, and other obscene things of the night? I’d sooner die in battle, fighting honorably, than wrest victory from my foes by using the dead hands this villain would animate.”

“Then,” Valdaimon said, smiling his hideous smile that revealed his few remaining yellowed teeth, “you will no doubt be uncomfortable in command of such forces.”

“Aye, that I would,” Culdus stormed, falling into the trap. “I beg Your Majesty to—”

“I have already given this matter much thought, Culdus,” the young king said, rising to emphasize his point. “You will command our human forces. Valdaimon himself will support you with his... special forces. As for your fears about the elves and Parona—Valdaimon, you will address these points.”

The old wizard hoisted himself slowly from his seat.

“Your Majesty is well aware of the terms of the Covenant that ended the elf-human wars some three hundred years ago and that have been honored without notable breach since that time. The elves, reduced in numbers to a mere handful, nevertheless held it in their power to wreak magical destruction upon the human powers on such a scale that a settlement seemed advisable to all the human rulers. Under the terms of that Covenant, all human rulers of the time pledged that any attack upon the Elven Preserve, defined in that treaty, would be considered an attack upon all human powers. In
short, if we attack the elves, all mankind is pledged to come to their aid.”

“Yes, yes,” the king said impatiently. “Come to the point, for Culdus’s sake.”

“This was all predicated upon the powers of magic then held by the elves,” the wizard explained. “Now, through means we need not discuss, the League of the Black Wing has come into possession of certain items and certain facts, then which taken together will nullify the magical power of the elves. Indeed, as soon the eggs arrive—”

“Eggs?” Culdus interrupted. “What eggs?”

“Surely you know what is common knowledge in the marketplace.” The king smirked. “I have purchased from the King of Parona the famed Golden Eggs of Parona, reputedly the greatest treasure on the face of the earth. Even as we speak, a guard of five hundred hand-picked troops is escorting that treasure from the northlands here.”

“What? What drain on the royal treasury was caused by this purchase?” Culdus demanded, his incredulity causing him to forget his place.

“Yes,” the king said. “Tell me, Valdaimon, what payment have we made to obtain this treasure?”

“The price is not the point, Culdus,” Valdaimon replied. “And Your Majesty told me to spare no expense to guarantee the success of Your Majesty’s plans. Now, once the eggs are in hand—”

“How much?” the young king demanded.

Culdus smiled. Now it was the wizard’s turn to squirm. The stinking old man moved out from behind the table and, aided by his giant staff, hobbled across the room toward the high window. He threw the window open and gazed out into the darkening sky. On the horizon, he caught a glimpse of the display he had ordered, should just this question arise.

“Your Majesty, what price would you consider fair for the display of power you can see by gazing from this window into the night sky?”

“What?” the king exclaimed. “What deviltry have you conjured, old friend?” The youth sprang to the window and surveyed the lands and the river below. “I see no display of power, wizard,” he grumbled.

“Look to the horizon in the sky.”

The king’s head snapped back as he gazed into the far sky. Then his mouth dropped open in shock before his eyes glazed over a kind of ecstasy. “Oh! Oh, by the gods! Look at this, Culdus! Look!”

The soldier came to stand by his king and his tired eyes peered toward the far horizon. What he saw froze him with fear. Winging toward the palace-fortress, in numbers sufficient to blot out a good eighth of the sky, were the hideous flying lizards known as wyverns. The ugly beasts were twenty feet long—though half of that was tail—and they could kill a man with a nasty bite from their jaws, with swipes from their deadly claws, or with the poisonous sting of their serpentine tails. Mounted on each wyvern was either a wizard of the League of the Black Wing or an armored man-at-arms, complete with lance and great helm. Onward toward the palace the armada of airborne warriors flew, until they passed within a few feet of the king’s window.

“Wyvern riders, Your Majesty,” Valdaimon said. “Power from the skies to aid your conquering armies on the ground. At their mere appearance many foes will break and flee, for their appearance almost reminds one of the dragons of old legends—does it not?”

“Indeed, Valdaimon, indeed!” the king enthused. “How fitting, given our choice of heraldic crest—the black dragon...”

“I am glad Your Majesty is pleased.” Valdaimon smiled again, this time turning his full gaze on Culdus. “The riders are wizard members of the League and a few troops we have trained on our own. Their leaders will meet with you tomorrow to coordinate cooperative efforts on the field of battle. Agreed?”

Culdus was feeling trapped. How could he disagree? How could any commander turn down a force like this that would guarantee victory in the opening battles of the campaign? As for the long run, Culdus didn’t see how these things could overcome elven magic or the hordes of Parona, but... but what about the eggs?

“Agreed, friend Valdaimon.” Culdus returned the wizard’s smile. “But tell me, what have these wyvern riders to do with the Golden Eggs of Parona?”

“It is a magical link—a technical matter for wizards. Do not concern yourself too deeply. Only those trained for decades in the magic arts could appreciate the nature of the connection.”

“I see,” Culdus replied. And he did see. Valdaimon was up to something, and neither Culdus nor the king was to be allowed to know what it was. And, Culdus thought, the question of price had been neatly sidestepped altogether.

Far below the great hall from which Ruprecht watched the display of power he imagined to be his, a solitary elf hung crucified against the cold, slime-covered walls of a tiny dungeon cell. The elf’s hair shone in the darkness with a kind of silvery light of its own—a unique feature even among elves. Not that Ruprecht had noticed; this was the only elf the Black Prince had ever seen, and under Valdaimon’s tutelage Ruprecht believed that all mature elves appeared this way. But this was no ordinary elf. Only elves that attained to legendary age were gifted with the glowing silver hair, and only one such elf remained. He was commonly called Elrond. This Elrond Ruprecht had made prisoner at Valdaimon’s insistence and against the Covenant, but then this Covenant was not a matter that Ruprecht took seriously.

Elrond hung on the dungeon wall, his wrists and feet manacled to iron spikes driven deep into the stones. His near-naked body, withered with age, was a mass of bloody streaks and festering welts, the souvenirs of his periodic torture for the amusement of the Black Prince. Despite his wounds, Elrond at this moment felt no pain, for his mind, trained over five millennia in the arts of elven magic and elven mental discipline, was far from the dungeon.

He began his mental journey while the Black Prince still dined. First, his senses reached out to the creeping green slime that grew upon the wet stones of his cell, for slime, however disgusting to humans, is green and living, and wherever there are green and living plants, the mind and soul of an elf can dwell. Slowly, the consciousness that was Elrond made its way through the trail of the slime, inching over the cold stones, slipping between tiny niches and cracks the eye could never see, working its way upward and outward until, somewhere in the soil beyond the dungeon wall, it made contact with a tiny tendril of root sunk deep by an evergreen tree. From there, his mind flowed, faster now, with greater ease, upward, upward, upward with the running sap, until it broke above the surface of the earth and, in a thousand, thousand green needles felt the warmth of the last rays of the day’s pale spring sun.

Onward and outward the consciousness that was now Elrond and slime and root and tree and then forest raced and expanded like a great, empty balloon expanding and discovering the nature of the air inside itself. His mind touched creepers that led up the wall to the great hall, and he heard all that was said between Culdus, Valdaimon, and Ruprecht. At the same time his mind counted the numbers of blue jay nests in the forest conifers and discerned that the spring, though still cold, was far advanced. His mind felt the coldness of death of the branches of trees that would not be renewed and sensed the joy of spring birth in the tendrils of tiny plants that would soon be saplings reaching for the sun.

Onward and outward raced the mind of Elrond, now at an astonishing clip, until the ancient elf, with his five millennia of memories and knowledge and love was part of all the living green things in the southern part of the world, reaching almost to the boundaries of the Elven Preserve, seeking for... what? Whom?

Elrond searched his vast memory. He did not seek food, for his vast array of roots brought him food from the depths of the earth. Water, too, was provided in abundance. Warmth would be welcome, but Elrond knew that in time, just a little time, the warmth of the sky light would come again, as it always did. But there was something, someone....

Shulana! It required all the discipline of his millennia of training to snatch the name of a single, discrete being from the vast consciousness of half a world of living things. But when Elrond’s mind cried out the name of Shulana, the cry was so great that every tree, every budding flower, every blade of grass over a range of six hundred miles echoed that cry in the vibrations of their flowing sap. The cry, silent to human ears, leapt from the plants into the very air and was carried on the breeze until a little gust touched the fresh flowers in a vase on a table near a certain bedstead.

“Shulana!” The call of the most ancient of all elves roared in the mind of his stripling kinswoman. Shulana, who the instant before had felt the glow of triumph as she knew that Bagsby’s own greed and pride had won him to her cause, trembled in her innermost being. True, in elven communion she had before encountered the minds of other elves, melded with little patches of green nature. But never before had so powerful another consciousness, so vast in its scope and extent, ripped into her own mind without warning and so focused on her own identity that she felt naked and completely alone. The young elf’s hands trembled. Her eyes grew wide with terror and she gazed at the vase of flowers just in time to see it tumble to the floor and shatter.

“What was that?” Bagsby said, annoyed, glancing about. He saw the sheer terror in the elf’s eyes and leapt to his feet, grabbing his dagger. “What is it?” he called.

Shulana neither replied nor moved. She stood stone still while her mind became a receptacle into which was poured all Elrond’s knowledge of Ruprecht’s plans and the single command, “Hurry!” For as both elves knew, once the Eggs of Parona were in Valdaimon’s hands, the vile wizard would be unstoppable.

“Curse you, elf!” Bagsby complained, slinking around his own room in a crouch with the dagger held ready to strike at any shadow that moved. “I should have known you’d bring me danger!”

In a single instant, the mind of Elrond flowed back into the body of the frail elf in the dungeon of Ruprecht’s castle. Elrond groaned in pain. He was no longer part of the Earth. He was merely a very tired, very old, very tortured elf. Indeed, he was the oldest elf in the world and the one in the greatest physical pain.

“Be still, Bagsby,” Shulana replied. “You do not yet know what real danger is.” Shulana shuddered, and goose flesh rose along her arms and legs. The thought of the eggs in the hands of Valdaimon chilled her. So did the thought of the power of mind that Elrond must possess to cry out to her over a distance of hundreds of miles.... “But you will learn, Bagsby. You will learn.”

Ruprecht clapped his hands and rubbed his palms together in gleeful anticipation. So far, the evening had gone better than he had expected. The anticipation of victory was thrilling. The display of wyvern power that Valdaimon had showed him was elating. But now would come the best part of all. “Come, smelly old tutor of mine,” he said eagerly. “Show me, show me in your ball of crystal the victories that will be mine.”

Valdaimon smiled, his usual scraggly toothed, obsequious smile. His Majesty was in a fine form tonight, pleased and easily controlled. Even Culdus dared not cross the wizard now; the display of wyvern power had silenced him. The old mage’s long staff thudded on the stone floor of the great hall as he made his way back to his seat at the main table. Slowly, he eased himself into the chair. He breathed deeply, then began to wave his arms in broad circles over the crystal globe.

He would show the king victories, Valdaimon decided. He would even show the king something good about Culdus. This conference would end with hopes for victory high and the king with no doubts that his expectations would be fulfilled.