DW02 Dragon War (18 page)

She really is beautiful, Bagsby thought. And so unlike other women—so cunning in battle, so skillful at reading the plots of others, and yet so naive in her love and trust. He wanted to reach out to her, to draw her to him, to envelop her in his protecting, loving embrace and float away to oblivion with her in his arms.

Bagsby’s horse made a small jump over a large, fungus-eaten tree trunk that had fallen across the narrow forest path. The jolt to his backside brought the knight errant back to the present reality. It had taken three days’ ride to bring them to these mountain foothills, and now they had at least three more days—hard days—ahead as they ascended the great mountains whose icy fingers could be seen in the far northeast, reaching for the sky above the tops of the trees.

Shulana laughed as the surprise of the horse’s movement registered on Bagsby’s face. Her rare elven laughter carried in the thin summer air, and to Bagsby it sounded like the tones of wind chimes, a music at once strange, beautiful, and soothing.

“You must pay attention, Sir John,” Shulana chided, “to where you are riding. We can ill afford to lose you now to a spill from a horse.”

“That would be an inglorious end for the commanding general of the Holy Alliance,” Bagsby bantered back. “But I’ll wager you the secret of our destination that I can still outride a mere slip of an elven girl.” Still gloriously attired in his role as Sir John for purposes of this journey, Bagsby spurred his much larger mount. “To the top of this rise,” he called, as the large horse—laden with gear, armor, arms, and clothing—broke into a heavy, thunderous gallop.

Shulana laughed again, leaned forward, and whispered in the ear of her mount, which at once broke into a swift stride. The two raced forward down the narrow path, Bagsby slightly in the lead, his eyes glued to the top of the rise at the edge of the woods ahead, with its promise of a drop off into a sunnier, rockier landscape. Shulana, too, taken up with the excitement of the race, did not notice the two fluid-like patches of cold darkness that glided from the wooded shadows to ripple and flow down the dark path behind the pair.

The race was short, less than half a mile, but Shulana’s lighter mount and superior riding skills proved more than a match for Bagsby. The little man maneuvered skillfully, using the bulk of his larger horse to block the pathway, but eventually a break occurred in the trees and Shulana and her steed were through it in a flash. Bagsby’s view of the pleasant ridgetop was thereafter blocked, by the bobbing tail of Shulana’s mount though his ears were still rewarded with, the beautiful tinkling of her continued laughter.

Shulana reached the crest of the rise a good hundred yards ahead of Bagsby. She raised a hand to her forehead to shield her eyes against the sudden brilliance of the sun and gazed out with serene pleasure at the jagged, brilliant landscape that stretched below her. The path meandered downhill through a grassy field lush with wildflowers of a hundred hues which peeked out from around the rugged, gray granite boulders that were strewn everywhere like corpses after a battle. On the far side of the downhill slope, a similar rise led upward along the face of the first true mountain of this northern land. The snowline inched down the face of that rise; they would be traveling in snow and cold by tomorrow, Shulana thought.

The victory hers, Shulana turned to greet Bagsby’s arrival with her laughing face. Bagsby, his eyes glued on hers, had already reined in his mount—which was nearly winded—and was now merely trotting toward the same panoramic view enjoyed by
the elf. His eyes were locked on the beauty of Shulana, her hair, her form, her laughing face—which suddenly became sharp and alert, with deadly intent in the eyes.

“Bagsby!” she cried. “Run! Gallop for the sunlight!”

Bagsby instead drew his steed to a halt, puzzled. As he watched, the elf’s keen-edged sword flashed from its resting place on her horse’s flank, and the lithe figure slid down the side of her horse and raced forward, the deadly blade raised high above her head.

“Ride! Ride on!” she called as she raced on foot past the stupefied man. He watched, still unresponding, as she swung the blade downward, striking at the very earth at her feet. Instead of sinking in the ground, as Bagsby would have expected, the blow glanced off, the sword seeming to bounce back upward. Only then did Bagsby’s human eyes spot the round, black shadow on the ground in the place where Shulana had aimed her strike. Then the round shadow flitted forward, and another was rippling forward along the path fast behind it. The two forms could barely be seen in the thick shade provided by the forest canopy.

“No!” Bagsby cried, the sight stinging him into action. He had heard, of course, of such undead things as these shadow creatures—beings neither living nor dead, whose very touch could drain the soul from a human or the life force from an elf. He had heard, but never seen. But he also had heard that only a blessed weapon would avail against them.

Bagsby turned in his saddle and fumbled with the bundles strapped to his horse. That sword—it was here somewhere—was the one that the high priests of the Holy Alliance had blessed at his ceremonial investiture as leader of the Alliance forces. His fingers fumbled over knots and the outsides of knapsacks. Where...?

His hand found the hilt of the sword. Bagsby turned forward, spurred the horse, and jerked the reins around in one motion. A second later the great sword was free. Designed more for appearances than for function, the blessed blade felt like a weight of lead in his hand, and his arm strained to raise it as he guided the horse forward, his eyes searching the dark ground for a place that was slightly darker.

Shulana, her attack foiled by the natural resistance of the creatures, was fleeing back up the path toward the safety of the sunlight—these creatures could not bear exposure to the light of day. Even as his steed gained momentum, pounding forward, Bagsby thought for an instant about fleeing to that sanctuary of light. No good, his instincts told him. If we don’t get them now, they’ll come for us at night, and I’ll never be able to see them then.

Bagsby detected the slightest ripple in the darkness on the path ahead. He threw himself to the right of his horse and let his arm drop. The striking point of the huge sword plunged downward and slid without resistance into the ground. Bagsby heard a high-pitched wail as the forward momentum of his horse’s movement tore the sword from its hold on the earth. He lifted the weapon to find a quivering, writhing plane of circular blackness impaled on the point shrinking rapidly, wailing with the cry of the damned, until it vanished into nothingness.

“By all the gods!” Bagsby exclaimed, reining the horse to a jolting stop. He whirled. Shulana was just bouncing out of sight, over the crest of the ridge. She was safe. Now where was the other one?

The plaintive cry of Bagsby’s own horse answered his question. The little man felt the animal’s legs go suddenly limp, and the beast began to plunge toward the ground, all four knees buckling at once. Bagsby leapt to his feet in the saddle, and pushed off backward, throwing himself into a back somersault high in the air and landing on his feet behind the horse. The ripple of darkness was flowing over its back when, with a scream of rage, Bagsby slashed down at it with the blessed blade.

The horrid wail of the creature joined the whinnying screams of Bagsby’s dying horse as the blade sliced the shadow in two, brilliant rays of white light leaping from the sides of the sword as it sliced through the damned being. Bagsby staggered backward, breathing hard as much from anger as from exertion, and watched the shadow shrink, like its companion, down into a vanishing nothingness. Then, with a scream of rage and disgust, Bagsby drew back the great sword and again plunged it downward, giving his dying horse peace.

The forest was alive now with the sounds of countless birds, roused from their uncaring peace by the din of battle from the pathway far below their perches. Amid their whoops and whistles and warbling calls, Bagsby could hear the loud shrieking caw of a crow. Then he saw it: the tattered, large black bird swept past his face, its talons digging into the flesh of his cheeks as it raced past. Bagsby howled.

“Down!” he heard Shulana cry, behind him. Bagsby immediately dropped to one knee, his left hand clutching his bleeding, wounded cheek.

Shulana, too, had heard the cry of the crow, and guessed at its meaning. The attack on Bagsby as the bird fled the scene confirmed her guess. As the black thing flapped its bedraggled wings as hard as it could, slowly mounting the sky, Shulana raced to the side of her horse, grabbed her bow, and strung an arrow. The bird was already high in the sky, hard to see against the canopy of green above, when she let the arrow fly.

Bagsby heard the shaft cleave the air not two feet above his head; had he not dropped on Shulana’s command the iron point would have bit into the back of his neck. Instead the arrow sang past him, mounting into the air with a speed so great that Bagsby’s eye could not see the deadly missile until it stopped, having neatly pierced the body of its fat, ugly target.

The crow screamed a death cry far louder than any bird Bagsby had ever heard before. Its wings struggled onward for a few futile beats before collapsing. Then, the black, bleeding mass of flesh plummeted to the ground, trailing dirty black feathers in the air.

Bagsby felt Shulana’s hand upon his shoulder. His right hand released its tight grip on the hilt of the huge sword, and he moved it up to pat the back of hers.

“Valdaimon,” Shulana said flatly.

“What?” Bagsby said, still breathing in deep gasps as the anger and excitement drained from his body. The fingers of his left hand gently stroked his burning, bloodied cheek, seeking to determine the nature of the wound.

“Valdaimon,” Shulana repeated. “It had to be. He is known to be a black wizard who commands the lesser undead—those lesser than himself. That bird was what human wizards would call his familiar.”

“What?” Bagsby repeated, not comprehending.

“It is like the communion elves have with all green living things,” Shulana explained. “Human wizards can have that, too, but only with one animal, and only by means of a very powerful spell. Once the spell is cast, the wizard can see through the animal’s eyes, hear through its ears, feel, taste, and smell through its senses.”

“Can he taste its death?” Bagsby asked bitterly, moving Shulana’s hand aside and rising to his feet. His fine boots were stained now with the puddling blood of his horse.

“Yes,” Shulana said. “He used that animal to follow us. He saw this fight. He knows where we are.”

Bagsby tramped up to the fallen body of the crow, and spat on the corpse. “I hope he can feel that, too,” the little man said.

“No,” Shulana said, not grasping the ironic intent in Bagsby’s remark. “Once the familiar is dead, the wizard cannot use it, not even an undead thing like Valdaimon. But he will know where we are.”

“That was inevitable,” Bagsby said, shrugging, removing his fine silk ascot to make a bandage for his face. “Once Sir John made his reappearance in Parona, it was only a matter of time until Valdaimon’s agents found him. Better that they found us now rather than later. There will be few men or creatures in these parts that he can call upon to do his bidding. And Valdaimon himself must be far away, in Heilesheim or Argolia.”

Shulana nodded. “We’ve lost a horse,” she pointed out.

“We’ll walk,” Bagsby said grimly. “And I think there is a way to cut two days off our journey. Since I cannot go to the mountain, I must make what is in the mountain come to me.”

“Yes,” Shulana said, her face suddenly brightening. “I did win our race. You owe me the prize!”

Bagsby tied the ascot around the top of his head and grimaced with pain as he tried to grin. “Right, right,” he agreed. “And you shall have it, though I fear you won’t like it,” he said.

“Well, then, tell me. What is—or was—our destination?” Shulana asked.

“We’re going to meet two friends of mine, who I hope will help us in the war,” Bagsby said simply, striding up to Shulana and taking her in his aching arms. He pressed her tiny head against his chest and caressed her hair. “There is one thing you should probably know before we meet them,” he added in a soft voice, gently kissing the top of her hair.

“Umm,” Shulana said, nuzzling into the warmth of Bagsby’s embrace. “What’s that?” Her mind refused the obvious.

“They are... not humans,” Bagsby said.

“Elves?” Shulana asked, pulling her head back in surprise. A sudden doubt clutched her heart.
He wouldn’t
...

Bagsby shook his head. “No.”

“Dwarves, then? I’ve never seen dwarves, though I’ve heard much about them....”

Again, Bagsby shook his head.

“Not men, not elves, not dwarves, what could they be if not....” Shulana said, a look of shocked understanding dawning on her face. “Not them! You can’t mean...”

Bagsby held one finger up to his lips and made the
Shhhh
sound. “Dragons,” he whispered.

Bagsby warmed himself in the huge bonfire he had fashioned in the open field on the downside of the ridge. Despite the light of the fire, his eyes could pick out the twinkling of the thousand points of starlight that adorned the glorious northern night sky. He clapped his hands and rubbed them briskly near the roaring flames; it got cold this far north, even on a summer night.

The fire was huge. It had taken Bagsby the greater part of the day to cut the wood for it, and he had built it as large as possible, working well after the setting of the sun. Then he had waited anxiously as the first smolderings of flaming tinder had passed the magic of fire onto the larger pieces of wood, and then on to the great logs he had managed to pile up, until the whole was a circular blazing inferno some twenty feet in diameter. The flames licked at the starlight, rising high into the sky, and the combination of black and white smoke rose higher still.

Shulana did not share Bagsby’s joy in the accomplishment.

Bagsby did not find it strange that she had grown somewhat sullen at the news that they had come north to find the two dragons that had hatched from the Golden Eggs. He did think it odd that his reassurances that he could handle the creatures did little to ease her mind.