Legends of the Dragonrealm, Vol. III (36 page)

“Just your head.”

D’Marr tapped the side of the weapon against his palm. He stared thoughtfully at the captive, then politely asked, “And how long do you think before we might be graced with the presence of your cat? I’m looking forward to completing the set.”

This time, the Gryphon did not respond. D’Marr was working hard to keep his mind in turmoil and he was achieving that goal all too well. As desperate as his situation was, the only hope that the Gryphon had was in retaining his calm.

“Well, I suspect she’ll be here soon enough. I will be certain to greet her with open, loving arms.” His countenance once more a bland mask, the young officer gave the tangled lionbird a mock salute and departed.

Watching him walk off, the Gryphon knew that he had to somehow free himself despite the odds. If he did not, then Troia
would
follow, as D’Marr had predicted. The thought of her in the hands of someone like the sadistic Aramite made him shiver.

I’m looking forward to completing the set,
D’Marr had mocked. If the Gryphon did not find
some
way to escape his fate, without the aid of Darkhorse, apparently, it was all too possible that the deadly raider would do just
that.

XIV

“RISE, CABE BEDLAM.”

The voice sounded familiar, yet it also did not. Cabe, his body responding as if it had long ago given way to rigor mortis, managed to rise to a sitting position. He found himself staring at the blurred images of one countenance, a countenance that every facet of every reflective crystal repeated. It was the face of a man much like the one the warlock had seen in the visions, but despite the blurriness, he could see that this one was a younger, varied copy. A son, perhaps. Until the detail became much more focused, he could guess no more.

“You are resilient, warlock.”

He turned to the source of the voice and only then discovered that it was not the images that were blurred, but rather his own vision. Not really a shock, considering what had happened.

Dragon Kings will be the death of me yet . . . even when they are not purposely trying to achieve that result.

“Your—Your Majesty?” He blinked several times, but to no discernible effect.

“Wait a moment. Your vision should clear. You were not, fortunately for you, struck in the eyes. I did what I could for you otherwise.”

What did that mean? Cabe started to reach up with his left hand and was wracked by dagger strikes of pain. He quickly lowered the arm and clutched it with his other hand, which thankfully did not hurt. “What—what happened?”

“You deflected most of the fragments, but a few stronger ones broke through your shields. Only a few pierced you; it was the force of the explosion, which I fought to contain, that left you unconscious.”

“The fragments. The sphere. One of the pieces struck me in the arm?”

He knew it was the Crystal Dragon who spoke to him, but still the voice sounded so different from
anything
he had heard before. What new change had the explosion wrought upon the Dragon King’s personality? “It did not strike your arm. It
pierced it
, warlock. The wound goes completely through your upper arm. I did what I could, but it will not heal for me. It may never heal, you understand, not completely.”

Never heal.
Much the way King Melicard’s face and arm had never healed after the burst of magic that had maimed him. Cabe was aware that his own wound did not even approach the severity of Melicard’s, but he could not help but be more upset by it.

“There are also small scars on your neck. You were very fortunate, warlock. Your skills are impressive.”

Skills? More like pure luck!
Cabe pulled his robe askew so that he could study the wound. A jagged, green scar surrounded by red, swollen skin marked the fragment’s passage. With great trepidation, he touched it. The soft touch was still enough to make him grunt in intense pain. Bracing himself, the wounded mage touched the back of the same arm. Again, the pain struck him.

Never heal?

He was still staring at the wound when the Crystal Dragon spoke again. “We are both fortunate, Cabe Bedlam. When the sphere was shattered, the doorway to Nimth was closed, not opened. That was how the device was designed, but there was no true way of testing it except by an occurrence much like this explosion.”

Cabe looked up. His vision had cleared enough so that he could now clearly see the Crystal Dragon. The drake lord looked unmarred, but that did not mean he had not been wounded. More important now was his state of mind. He seemed sane enough . . .

“What happened?”

“I underestimated the wolf raider leader. I underestimated so much. He has wrested control of the mist from me. Before long, he will understand something of how to utilize it. Things go from bad to worse.” The glittering leviathan closed his eyes.

The warlock’s gaze darted back and forth between the massive dragon and the face that stared at him from all directions, but his attention remained on the subject at hand. “What will you do now?”

“Nothing.”

“Nothing?”

“I
must
do nothing!” The Dragon King’s long, narrowed eyes opened again . . . and was this the first time that Cabe had noticed how crystalline they appeared? They were almost like the insane orbs of Plool. “I dare not! I will not lose myself!”

Cabe’s gaze again drifted to the multiplied countenance covering the walls. This time, however, he studied them closer.
Not lose myself,
the leviathan had just said. Did that mean what Cabe thought it did?

“Who are you?”

The Crystal Dragon settled back. He seemed almost to welcome the strange question. The huge head turned and indicated the faces. “Once . . . I was
him.
”

Him. The faces in the visions. The eyes of Plool. The obsession with the foulness of Nimth. It all began to make sense to the warlock.

“You’re a
Vraad.
” He found he was really not that astonished by the revelation. So much had pointed to it. Yet, if the knowledge that the Crystal Dragon had once worn a human form was not shocking, then the fact that he still lived was. How long had it been since the coming of the Dragon Kings?

“How did it happen?
When?
”

The dragon’s laugh was harsh and humorless. “By the banner, I no longer even know, warlock! Centuries, yes. Millennia, yes. How many it has been I have forgotten! I have watched generations come and go, live and die! I have seen the rise of the Dragon Kings and I have watched their pitiful decline! The others passed on, but I lived! Ha!
Lived?
I am fortunate that I have not gone insane!”

The last word echoed throughout the chamber. Cabe stood, careful to avoid stress to his arm. He had to hear. “Tell me.”

“Tell you?” The Crystal Dragon contemplated that. His expression was weary. “Tell you of Logan of the Tezerenee? The dutiful son, one of many sons, to Lord Barakas Tezerenee, he was. Not like Gerrod or Rendel or Lochivan, he was. Logan obeyed blindly as was proper. When the Vraad fled Nimth, he was there to aid his father. When Barakas claimed this land under the dragon banner, Logan was there to enforce that claim.”

Cabe Bedlam listened transfixed as the history of the first Dragon Kings began to unfold before him. The wound was all but forgotten as the time-worn leviathan spoke of the fatal error that had led to his present existence.

“It was the bodies, the bodies his father and Master Zeree and his brothers Gerrod and Rendel had created, created from the stuff of
dragons
! They were people-shaped, but they were dragons in heart. The spirits, the ka, of the Tezerenee crossed the path of worlds to this one and claimed those bodies. Claimed their own eventual destruction.”

The sorcery-shaped bodies had worked well for the Tezerenee. Most of the other Vraad had crossed over physically, but that door had not been open at the time of the Tezerenees’ crossing. So the folk of the dragon banner truly became dragon men, which served to increase their power and presence among the other refugees.

It was not until a few years later that people, not merely the Tezerenee, began to notice some changes. Their skill in sorcery faded, but even that was not so insurmountable a situation to the Tezerenee, who had always espoused the physical even while they made use of the magical. For a time, it served to make the Vraad more reliant upon the clan. Not enough to accept the rule of Lord Barakas, however. When he sought to take his rightful place, there was resistance. Strong resistance. It was that in the end that forced Lord Barakas to seek a new kingdom overseas.

“They claimed that land.” The Dragon King did not seem to consider how the Tezerenee had made the long crossing from one continent to the other without ships and sorcery important enough to discuss. Recalling what little he had gleaned from Darkhorse over the years, the warlock wondered if this was where the eternal had fallen prey to the Vraad. It might explain the shadow steed’s bitterness and, yes, fear where things relating to Nimth and the Vraad were concerned.

Lord Barakas had evidently expected to fight the Seekers, but the avians’ civilization had collapsed in some war and only a few bands were strong enough to give them trouble. Flushed with success, they conquered the mountain stronghold of the bird folk and took its ancient secrets for their own.

Kivan Grath.
Cabe recognized the place from the Dragon King’s description. Kivan Grath, the mountain whose caverns would become the citadel of the Dragon Emperor.
Odd how he recalls so much but not how much time has passed. Then again, he may want to recall his humanity, but not how long it has been since he lost it.

As he spoke, the Crystal Dragon seemed to shrink a little. More and more he became a man seeing a horror ahead than a great leviathan who ruled and was feared. With great unease, the warlock noted how the multitude of faces copied the drake lord’s emotions. It was like being surrounded by a thousand tormented ghosts.

“It may be that the land was fearful of them and although it could not destroy the Tezerenee, it made them into its own. Or perhaps the bodies themselves, formed from that which was dragon, at last sought to revert to what they had been meant to be. In the end, all that matters was the changing. First one, then another. No one understood then. No one saw it was happening to all, not merely a few.”

He shuddered, blinked, then looked directly at his human guest with something approaching desperate envy. “I remember the pain that day. I remember screaming as my arms and legs stretched and bent at angles no human appendages had been meant to bend. Do you know what it feels like to sense burgeoning wings squirming beneath the flesh of your back and then having them burst fully formed through your
skin
? To feel and see your skull reshape itself and then realize that your eyes, too, are shifting, changing? To scream and scream again as the transformation tears through armor and sends you crashing to all
fours
. . .

“. . . and then to know oblivion.”

Cabe, thinking of his own fear of even the minutest shifting of form, swallowed.

The reptilian monarch looked down at the floor. “I recall vague images, the thoughts of a beast struggling to think. How long, I do not know. I only recall that one day I began to think as a man, but I was not
myself.
I was a
creature.
I was . . . a dragon. This land was supposed to be my kingdom. Years it would be before I remembered that it had been chosen for me by my father, that all of us had, despite becoming beasts, claimed our particular kingdoms.” His laugh had more than a tinge of bitterness. “I have never known whether he gave me this peninsula because he knew what wonders were here or simply because I was one of the least important of his many sons.”

It was child’s play to seize these caverns. The Quel civilization had been in worse condition than that of the Seekers, disorganized and much too busy trying to devise a method to save their kind to note the danger until it was too late. The self-proclaimed Dragon King explored his new domain and in doing so found a place that the Quel had obviously shunned. There were no signs of recent activity. Nothing but a dark passage before him, a dark passage leading to the mouth of an even darker cavern. His arrogance and curiosity got the better of him. The passage was wide enough to allow him through and so with no reason to retreat, the dragon entered.

“There was no flash of memory, no flood of recollections. I entered the chamber and stalked to the center, fascinated by the glitter. I was not yet what you see before you, although my form had already adapted to my kingdom. Turning about, I studied this place from floor to ceiling and from wall to wall. When I was finished, it came to me that this would make a most proper citadel for such a magnificent leviathan as myself. This chamber, I decided, would be my sanctum.

“And
then
it was the truth overwhelmed me. Then I recalled who it was I had
been.
”

Cabe waited, but the Crystal Dragon lowered his head to his breast, as if that distant moment was still too terrible to speak of even now. The warlock suspected he knew what had happened. The images surrounding a startled dragon, images of what he had been. Memories rising from the buried portion of his mind. It would be like awakening from a long, deep slumber, but a slumber whose peace had been shattered at last by a nightmare of untold horror. Only this was a horror that would turn out to be all too real.

“I can only say, warlock,” the Dragon King began again, lifting his head just enough to eye his guest. “I can only say that it was as terrifying as the transformation, which was my last recollection. Now I saw what had become of me. I roared in anger and madness and it would not be exaggerating to say that on that day I put the fear of the Crystal Dragon into all that lived in Legar.” He scratched at the floor with his talons. “Not that I cared. My own fear was all that mattered. I tried to destroy this place, but you can see how well I did. Although it resembles other cavern chambers in this underground world, I think it lives, in a manner of speaking, lives and plots and does what it can to give it purpose. If the Dragonrealm is not a living thing, then it may be that this chamber is what guides the course of our land. Perhapssss it even viessss with the Dragonrealm for powerrrr.”