The Dragons of Ice and Snow (47 page)

“
Okay, hang on a
second.”

Simon made a gesture and
the view in the mirror zoomed out slowly.

“
Whoa,” he
muttered. “What the hell is that?”

The rocky wall that Aeris
was next to was revealed to be the side of a huge cliff that rose
many hundreds of feet above him. It stretched out on either side and,
as the mirror pulled back even more, he could see the wall slowly
curving, possibly into some sort of snow-covered mesa that rose above
the icy ground.

“
I didn't know that
there were mountains that far north,” he said, still keeping
his voice down.

“
There aren't,”
Aeris answered softly. “You are looking at an artificially-made
construct.”

“
Artificially-made
by what?”

“
The primal white
dragon, I would assume,” the air elemental said a bit smugly.
“I believe that this is the nest it created to hold its supply
of eggs.”

Simon leaned forward with
wide eyes.

“
You found it? You
actually found it?”

“
I did indeed.
However, credit would have to go to the red dragons who led me here.
All of them are up there somewhere. I haven't gone up to spy on them
yet. I was waiting for you to call first. Maybe you can see what is
happening using the mirror spell.”

“
I'll give it a try.
Better my way than you risking yourself.”

“
That was basically
what I was thinking,” Aeris said a bit meekly.

“
Do not be
embarrassed by not taking chances with your life,” Kronk spoke
up strongly, but kept his voice low. “Our master does not want
you to be discovered. And neither do I.”

“
Thanks for that,”
came the reply.

Simon tilted the mirror
away from himself and the view began to move forward, as if he was a
bird flying toward the high mesa. As the scene changed and the top of
the flat mound came into view, the scene began to fade and mist
started to creep in from the edge of the mirror's surface.

“
Hey, hang on a
second,” Simon exclaimed. He tilted the mirror back and the
view reversed itself. The mist disappeared as the mirror backed away
from the mesa.

“
What's happening?”
Aeris asked, sounding nervous.

“
Nothing. Don't
worry. But at a guess I'd say that the top of that nest, or whatever
it is, is shielded against outside magic. At least, as soon as the
view got close to letting us see what's up there, it began to lose
the connection. It kind of reminds me of what happened when I tried
to contact Shandon and was blocked.”

“
Yes, I was afraid
of that,” Aeris said with a resigned sigh. “I guess I'll
have to do this the hard way.”

“
You don't
have
to do anything, Aeris,” Simon said firmly. “This is
entirely voluntary. Heck, you may have already found the eggs and
that's more than I could have hoped for. There's no need to do more
if you don't want to.”

“
Don't
you want to know what red dragons are doing this far north?”
the air elemental asked.

“
Yes,
of course I do,” Simon replied reluctantly. “But...”

“
But.
But. But. I know all of the buts, my dear wizard. I've repeated them
to myself for the past several hours as I've waited for your call.
And I have already made my decision. I'm going to take a look. I will
ask for a favor though.”

“
Anything.”

“
Keep
this connection open. I know you won't be able to see beyond the edge
of this thing, but you can hear me. Once I take a peek, I would very
much appreciate you summoning me home. I think I've had enough of
scouting for quite some time.”

“
You've
got a deal, my friend,” Simon assured him. “Just say the
word, and I'll have you back before you know it.”

“
Good.
That's good. Okay, I'm going up. Please don't make any noise. I don't
know if there are guards up there or anything else that might hear
you.”

“
Got
it.”

The mirror followed the
invisible elemental up along the side of the cliff, his progress
painfully slow and cautious. Simon's nerves were beginning to fray as
the tension level rose, and rose again.

As the top of the mesa
inched into view, the mirror began to mist over at the edges again.
Before he lost the connection, Simon adjusted the scene so that the
mirror stayed focused on the cliff a few feet from the top.

“
I've lost you,
Aeris,” he whispered carefully. “But we're still
connected.”

“
Okay,” Aeris
breathed back.

Both the wizard and Kronk
exchanged worried looks and then stared at the unmoving picture
anxiously, waiting for whatever was about to happen.

Simon heard an odd
scuffling sound, quickly silenced and then an odd, rhythmic pounding.
Footsteps? He couldn't tell.

And then he heard Aeris
gasp.

“
By the Four Winds
and all that's holy, what are they
doing
?”
he murmured. “Simon, quickly. See what I see. Look through my
eyes!”

“
What?”
Simon muttered. “What are you talking about?”

“
No
time. Look! And then get me out of here.”

The
wizard was slammed back in his chair, his eyes suddenly burning as if
someone had stuffed them with hot coals. He bit down on his tongue to
stifle a scream and then he was...elsewhere.

In
front of him was a panorama that was so incomprehensible that he
couldn't quite grasp what he was seeing.

A
group of red dragons about a hundred yards away were standing
together, wings fluttering nervously. Near them were several white
dragons, also shuffling and flapping their wings, occasionally
hissing at the reds.

In
front of them, huddled dejectedly and shivering in the cold, were
dozens of people. They were staring at the ground, hunched over
dispiritedly. Men, women, children. All were bruised and filthy and
not paying attention to each other or anything around them. They
exuded misery.

But
what caught Simon's attention was the being that stood near the
center of this bizarre gathering. It was a winged creature, similar
to the dragonoids that the wizard had seen in Daniel's pictures.

But
this monster was a pure dazzling white in color and towered over
everything around it. Forty feet tall? Fifty? It was impossible to
tell. Its wings stuck out from its back, but they were scrawny,
misshapen things; twisted and useless.

It
was a horror. Heavy, brutal features and glaring yellow eyes reminded
Simon of every bully he had ever known. Its scaled skin was
corpse-pale and it wore a heavy, iron breastplate.

In
a moment that was to come back in nightmares later, Simon watched as
the brute reached down with a massive hand and picked up a person
seemingly at random. It was a little girl, perhaps eleven years old,
who hung limply from the clawed, scarred hand.

The
monster gestured and a red dragon stepped forward with seeming
reluctance. The creature laid its free hand on the head of the dragon
and its eyes burned even brighter. A series of grunts, some sort of
spell, issued from its lips and both the dragon and the child were
engulfed in a greenish light that was too bright to look at directly.

And
then in revulsion, as the light faded Simon saw a dragonoid standing
in front of the leader. It threw back its head and roared, its
muscular arms raised in triumph.

The
huge brute pointed to its right and the wizard saw a pulsing round
portal rimmed in lightning at the far edge of the mesa.

A
Gate, he thought numbly.

“
Damn
it, Simon. Get me out of here!” Aeris hissed in his ear.

The
huge leader's head suddenly whipped around and it pointed directly at
the wizard. It shrieked in rage and took a massive step toward him
and...

Simon
was sitting in his chair again, breathing in great gasps.

“
Aeris,
I need you!” he managed to choke out.

A
moment later, the air elemental was standing in the middle of the
table, trembling in terror.

The
wizard grabbed the sides of his head, a sudden stabbing pain making
it difficult to think or move. He sat as still as he could and tried
to catch his breath. His muscles were twitching with little spasms
and his headache made his recent hangover seem mild by comparison.

When
he could finally speak, Simon carefully opened his eyes and stared at
Aeris.

“
What
the hell did you just do to me?” he asked breathlessly.

“
I
invoked a rarely used connection between summoner and summoned,”
the elemental said weakly.

He
was barely visible, obviously drained by his experience. He looked
the way that Simon felt, faded and exhausted.

“
I
didn't know you could do that.”

“
It's
an ability that only we of the air realm have, and we use it rarely,
for obvious reasons.”

“
Yeah
well, let's avoid doing that in the future, shall we? It feels like
someone hit me with a frigging brick and then tossed me off a cliff.”

“
I
feel the same way, believe me. But you had to see what was going on
up there for yourself. It was an abomination against the laws of gods
and men.”

Simon
stood up shakily and went to the sink. He pumped out a stream of cold
water and splashed it on his face. The he massaged his temples and
waited for the pounding to fade a bit.

“
Yes,
I saw. My God, I never imagined anything so horrible.”

“
What was it,
master? What did you see?” Kronk asked urgently.

“
You tell him,
Aeris. I want to take a walk for a few minutes, clear my head and
think about this.”

The wizard walked slowly
to the front door, opened it and then looked back.

“
Welcome home, by
the way. I'm glad you're still in one piece.”

Aeris ventured a small
smile.

“
Thank you. Me too.”

Simon nodded at the
elementals and walked outside.

The afternoon was windy
and a bit chilly, but the sun was warm and only a few wisps of clouds
drifted across the sky.

The wizard walked around
the tower and let himself out the back gate. He wandered down to the
lake, found a dry spot on the grass and sat down with a thud.

As he looked across the
restless surface of the water, he reluctantly let himself think about
what he had just seen through Aeris' eyes.

The entire scene had
lasted no more than a minute or two, although at the time it seemed
to go on forever. He tried to recall every detail of that nightmare.

There had been red and
green dragons, true. But behind the group of reds, had he seen the
head of a brown dragon. He sifted through the memory. Yes, he decided
that he had.

Near them had been a bunch
of white drakes, writhing and tumbling together, but the wizard
hadn't paid them much attention. Mindless killing machines is all
that they were.

So, three kinds of
dragons, white drakes and a group of captured humans. Changlings,
almost certainly. Simon doubted that there were very many mundane
humans left, not since the dragons began hunting them down in
earnest.

And that horror of a being
who was obviously running the show.

My God, what a
monstrosity, he thought with a shudder.

The dragons had been the
standard size of lesser dragons, about fifty feet long. When the
leader had melded the dragon and the human to produce a dragonoid,
the new creature had stood around twelve feet tall, twice as tall as
the largest of the captive men who had been huddled nearby. Daniel
had been right about that.

But the leader, the huge
dragonoid, had been four or five times that size. It had been wearing
armor. God only knew who had forged that heavy breastplate. And
instead of a dirty gray, like the dragonoid Daniel had shown him, or
the brownish-red of the altered red dragon, it had been a blazing,
pure white.

Where did it come from?
Had the dark gods created it for their purposes?

Simon shook his head.
Impossible, he thought. There were a finite number of dragons. Their
queen had produced the five primals and had laid a certain number of
eggs for each one of them to replenish their ranks. And that was all
there was. Everyone was agreed on that point, even the elementals and
the elves.

So what was that...thing?

Something else intruded on
his thoughts. There had been a stable portal, a permanent Gate, set
up on the mesa. He assumed that it transported the altered dragons to
the battle at the dwarven capital. But he hadn't seen a wizard up
there. Had the dragons used him or her and then killed them? Or
perhaps the magic-user had been elsewhere?