Shadow Of The Mountain (3 page)

As soon as the rider’s boots touched the sand he moved to the young girl, releasing the horse’s reins.

His mount was clearly agitated, stomping at the sand and pacing erratically, head darting all about, breaths labored and strained. Its coat was shiny and lathered with sweat, and with such pitiful sounds coming from the beast Aldren knew it was dying. Nothing would save it. The horse had been pushed too hard and death just hadn’t had a chance to catch up to it yet, but it would fall, and soon.

The guards gave the rider room as he dropped to a knee before the girl. Her bandaged hands wrapped around his neck and brought him in close, whispering into his ear. Backlit against the torches, Aldren could only see the outline of the two while the other soldiers stood rigid in the glow of the flames, their own cloaks swaying gently.

Finally, the girl took a step back. She pointed across the sand at Aldren, and the newcomer’s gaze followed.

Aldren suddenly felt like a rabbit beneath the hawk’s shadow. The rider rose, ordering something to the men and pointing at his horse. Quickly one of the guards moved to calm the terrified beast while another unbuckled the saddle and slid it off. The horse stumbled but caught itself, legs quivering like a newborn.

Manais and Bodin stepped out to approach the new arrival.

They met halfway between the wagon and Dershaw’s gate, speaking beneath the light of moon and stars, but Aldren couldn’t hear a word of it. A scroll was handed to Manais, which he read against the torch’s glow. Whatever the Senior Officer read, it spun him about and all three moved towards Aldren.

The failing mount attempted to follow, frantically bolting from the Amorian guards. Kicking up sand, it swung to the right and turned in a sharp circle before its strength finally gave out. Collapsing with a wild snort, it rolled over heavily, chest heaving with its final gasps.

Upon seeing the horse fall, the girl ran to its side and dropped down to her knees, stroking its neck. The guards circled her and the dying beast, but none made to move her.

Manais, Bodin, and the rider approached the gate.

“Gather your kit at once,” the First Officer ordered, pointing at him. “You’re going out after the column.”

The three walked past him without another word, the rider not even looking in his direction.

Aldren stood there, head buzzing with nervous excitement. The envoy? But they were almost three days out!

Once the horse had died, the girl was carried back to the wagon. The other Amorians began gathering their gear and saddling their own mounts. Stools and crates were loaded into the wagon and armor was donned and tightened. It wasn’t until they began drawing the torches from the sand and snuffing out the flames that Aldren noticed something odd.

The girl’s blanket was right where she had indicated earlier and by some strange bit of chance, the dying horse had landed directly on it. The beast had bolted free of any guidance and circled with panic before coming to a final rest atop the blanket. It was as if the girl knew where the horse would fall.

But how could she have known?

Aldren heard a light snap of the driver’s whip and the wagon lurched forward beneath the waning moon. The remainder of the guards were on horseback, flanking either side of the wagon, while two others galloped ahead toward a rising dune of sand.

As the wagon rolled north toward Corda, the back flap opened and he saw the little girl peek out, looking in his direction.

She waved, and, oddly enough, Aldren found himself waving back.

Suddenly remembering Manais’s order, he darted off to his barracks.

***

The two of them rode at a hard gallop through the night, Aldren atop Scarlet, the piebald mare, and the rider mounted on a lively gray gelding. No words were spoken, nor any names exchanged. The stranger had refused to let anyone but Aldren accompany him on his journey to connect with the envoy, much to Manais’s disapproval, though the aging officer put up little in the way of an argument. Whoever the man was Aldren rode with, he was to be obeyed; that much was made clear.

They had left Dershaw with speed, putting the tiny outpost behind them in minutes. It was always a little frightening how fast the walls and buildings could disappear from sight, and equally humbling in a way. They truly were an island amidst an ocean of sand. Swim out a few waves and you could end up anywhere, or nowhere, to be precise.

The night air was cool for a time and Aldren knew they were heading south by way of the stars. The sky was cloudless, the moon’s glow lighting their path. The only sound was the muted rhythm of horse hooves against the ground.

Aldren tried to relax and enjoy the ride but could do neither. His gear bounced and jolted all around and he inwardly scolded himself. He should’ve fixed everything down much more securely, especially after witnessing what had happened to the horse his new partner had arrived on. The man had ridden the first poor beast to death and now seemed intent on sending both of theirs straight to the grave in pursuit. Aldren wasn’t used to such a frantic pace and hoped none of his supplies would jostle loose. He was armed with sword and dagger, a bit of food, and a great deal of water. Water was life when you traveled this far from the outpost, and Aldren would gladly be burdened by too much of it than be cursed by too little.

Long hours they rode, until the eastern sky grew pink and warm. Keeping the morning light on their left flank, they pressed on. Aldren wasn’t expecting to stop for a breakfast and he wasn’t given one. Forward they went, deeper south, deeper than he’d ever been before.

The sun soon burned angrily, lying against them in relentless waves of heat. Pulling up their hoods and covering their faces, they raced through barren canyons of dust and climbed unstable mountains of loose sand. By mid-afternoon Aldren began seeing discarded litter left behind by the envoy, already half-buried by the desert. A thousand men passing through any landscape would be hard to miss, and for a few days before the wind and sand had its way, this wasteland was no exception. Broken crates and split barrels lay strewn across a wide path. They passed a discarded wagon wheel, then a mile later an abandoned wagon, front axle buried, its canvas cover ripped and beating in the wind.

So intent was Aldren on following the envoy’s debris that he’d nearly missed a worrying sight to the west. Between the dunes along the distant horizon was a moving mountain of dust and shadows. Reaching high as the Amorian ranges, the sandstorm was dark and bulging at places, alive, heaving with an unhurried advance. For the moment it was too far off to be of any danger, but Aldren knew they were at the mercy of the wind, and the desert wind could be an unmerciful slag when you needed it otherwise. Such storms were beyond blinding, and without shelter one would surely perish from the swirling and suffocating dust before being devoured by the desert entirely.

Aldren leaned into the saddle, catching up to the rider.

“Do you see that?” he called out over the pounding hooves, pointing west to the mammoth cloud of dust.

“All morning,” the man answered, mouth muffled by a scarf.

They dropped down into a low gorge with walls of sand that gradually rose on either side.

Aldren saw for the first time that the stranger’s right arm wasn’t actually covered by a sleeve of fabric, but a twisting collection of tattoos. The colors wrapped around his arm, blending together all the way to his knuckles.

Very few soldiers were allowed to have such markings, only the most elite. Even then it was usually to signify an award of extreme merit, but never before had Aldren heard of someone with so many.

The man’s green cloak rippled out as he pushed forward, climbing the rise. As Aldren dropped behind, something happened to the other as he neared the crest. The stranger tugged the reins to the side, slowing the gelding. Pulling the spear from his saddle, he then gently kicked onward, though much slower and more carefully.

Aldren caught up to him quickly and wondered what had set him off, but soon discovered the reason as he crowned the sandy ridgeline. He looked out in awe for a moment before carefully following the rider down the hill and into a wide depression.

On the eastern bank of the rise lay the great mass of Rezin. Big as a house at his widest and long as ten wagons, his once mighty copper-red scales had turned an ugly brown in death. The largest of his curved ribs protruded from rent blankets of scales and flesh, soot-covered and splintered like twisted branches after a storm. Wisps of smoke curled off his remains when the wind allowed it, black and putrid-smelling.

“What happened to him?” Aldren asked the rider. He couldn’t take his eyes off the dead beast. Dragons were even bigger than he’d imagined.

The green-clad Amorian didn’t answer, instead charging past Rezin at a great gallop once reaching the base of the depression. Aldren pursued, all the while trying to catch a glimpse of Rezin’s head and horns.

Already a pack of scrawny yellow-striped foxes were having their way with any flesh exposed outside of the dragon’s armored scales, jumping and biting, hanging from heavy flaps of meat before ripping off a mouthful and tumbling to the dust. Finally riding all the way around, he was disturbed to realize that there was no head, and that the claws were missing as well. Only the stumps of a forearm and hind-leg were left, with nothing at the end of a long narrow neck. Whether as a trophy or for the riches paid by eager mages for dragon bones, Aldren could not say, but parts of the dragon had been harvested.

Remembering the Amorian column, he suddenly felt very troubled. Amorian dragons weren’t supposed to die. They couldn’t die, could they?

The vast sandstorm cloud to their west grew closer, chewing up the horizon, burying the land beneath it in quiet darkness. It was clear now that the wind was carrying it their way. In an hour or so, maybe less, it would be upon them.

He erased thoughts of the dead beast from his mind and instead heeled his mount on, pushing Scarlet faster in pursuit of the rider who by now had vanished over the next rise.

If Aldren was surprised by the sight of Rezin’s body a few minutes ago, what his eyes lay upon in the next depression all but froze his heart.

They’d finally caught up to the Amorian column.

Aldren slowly walked his mount down towards the rider, who was also taking in the horrid scene. Before them, two hundred feet wide and stretched out over half a mile of desert, was a dark river of death.

Everything was smoldering, black and bubbling, heaped and twisted together in jagged monuments of gristle and charred forms. The sand had been burnt with such tremendous heat that it was turned to a molten swamp which still burped and boiled, hissing out a fetid gas as if from a fired cauldron. Misshapen swords and other weapons stuck up from the glassy edges of the bog, blackened and bent like wilted flowers.

This, Aldren was certain, was the work of dragonfire. There could be no question of it.

The horses didn’t want to get any closer, as to approach within even twenty paces of the muck meant enduring invisible waves of forge-like heat. And the smell, Aldren thought! Skies above, the smell! When the wind blew it your way the fumes were enough to snap your head back, sending daggers and broken glass racing up your nostrils.

There were half-buried forms in the sand all around the bubbling black swamp; soldiers who weren’t caught directly under the dragon’s flame but instead suffered burns so heinous that flesh was peeled from their skeletons as if it had been clumps of wet clay. Some of them, Aldren thought, probably didn’t even have a chance to scream as the superheated air rushed into their lungs and burnt them to death from the inside.

 He tugged his reins back, dismounting.

“It was one dragon,” the rider said, pointing his spear along the ghastly scene. “One pass. A very large dragon.”

“How do you know it was only one pass?”

“All the men are still in line,” he said simply.

The approaching dust cloud blotted out the sun above, burying everything in its shade.

“I thought dragons didn’t attack men like this,” Aldren said.

“They don’t,” the rider told him, eyes taking in the carnage. “This is going to change things.”

“What do you mean?”

Before he could give an answer, a rider appeared on the distant hill to the south.

The man wore a black cape and dark armor, and sat atop a giant gray destrier. Aldren had never seen the armor before. It was sharp and barbed, forged of smoky iron.

The wind turned loud and violent as if on cue, kicking up great bellows of dust all around their little desert valley.

More of the strange riders appeared along the ridgeline. Too many.
Twenty
, Aldren thought.
Or forty
. He chewed on his lip. If there were more than two, did it even matter how many?

He drew his sword, not knowing why. Was he really going to open someone up with it? More likely he himself would be split wide, with hot blood spilled to the sand and a window for the world to see his insides.

He started to tremble.

Nothing that breathes would want to be chopped down.

The tattooed Amorian clenched his spear tighter and began to move towards the black armored riders.

“Where are you going?” Aldren called out through the wind, hoping his voice sounded as hard as he wanted it to. The leather grip on his weapon turned slippery with sweat.

The Amorian pulled his reins back and pointed to the waiting riders on the ridge, as if to say, “I’m going to kill those men.”

The storm was screaming now, sending sheets of stinging sand to spin from all directions.

“I would advise against that!” Aldren yelled over the noise. “We need to return to the outpost! They must know what happened to the envoy! The capital needs to know! And the king? Everyone needs to know!
These people have a dragon!
”

“You go and tell them!” the man barked before turning to advance towards the ridgeline.

“The weight of what we’ve discovered here warrants a return for both of us,” Aldren bit back, glancing at the dark riders. “What if something happens to me? Or my mount? Should you die, how many days would be lost before anyone discovered what happened?”