The Legend of Vanx Malic: Book 02 - Dragon Isle (17 page)

“This I know,” Vanx said as he took the precious fluid from the little milk-skinned creature. “I need a guide. I need someone to take me to the Fire Queen’s lair. I will…” He stopped speaking because the wispwight nut began shimmering and shining in his arms. The glow radiated brightly enough to turn his eyes, and then it pulsed three times, causing the growing group of Zwarvy onlookers to gasp in fright and wonder. The glassine orb made a popping sound and its form suddenly dripped away like so much soapy water. Left in Vanx’s hand was a tiny sparkling nugget the size of a green pea. It shot up into the air in a frisky zigzag, dripping a cascade of fading sparkles as it went.

A collective “Ahhh” resounded from those watching. The group had grown in number to nearly a hundred now. Each and every one of their strange, glowing eyes followed the tiny wispwight as it danced and frolicked around Vanx’s head. After a few heartbeats the little kernel of light seemed to grow bored and shot off in a spiraling streak until it disappeared from view entirely.

For a very long time there was nothing but silence.

“How did you take a wispion nut without being devoured?” Olden Pak asked after a bit. Fretful curiosity showed plainly on his strange face, and Vanx realized that he now clearly understood the strange language they spoke.

“It fell from the tree and landed in my lap,” Vanx answered while combing his fingers back through his hair. He was feeling, for the first time, some tingling effect from the sparkles the strange fairy creature had dripped on his skin. “I didn’t take it, it was given.”

“You must be famished,” Olden Pak finally said. “You’ll need nourishment and there is something I have that might help you, if you truly intend to venture into the Fire Queen’s lair.”

Vanx had to admit that he was incredibly hungry. He figured that the fatigue he was feeling was from a lack of food and not from any sort of exertion. He hadn’t done much more than sit there for the last several days. He’d finished off the flask of stout he carried in his boot a few nights earlier. Now, he was suddenly wanting nothing other than to gulp down as much water as his stomach would hold.

It wasn’t water he was given, but several wooden mugs full of piss-yellow ale by the backslapping Zwarvy as he and Olden Pak made their way back to the elder’s home.

The Zwarvy seemed to be revering him as some sort of hero. The notion made Vanx uncomfortable. He was more than a little woozy from the drink and was glad when Olden Pak’s wife gave them a meal.

After eating boiled devil goat meat on a bed of some warm, spinach-like vegetable with a grainy flatbread, Pak’s wife showed Vanx the papoon she’d made for the doogle. It was like a backpack, only it had a pouch in front to carry the pup that had found Vanx. The rest of the rig was like a typical pack with an area for storing goods in the back. When he tried it on, the pup seemed to like it, especially when Vanx lay down, allowing the little mutt to nestle its head under his chin. Within minutes the two of them fell fast asleep on the stony floor of the hut’s open living area.

Vanx woke sometime later to Ootlin’s insistent boot.

“Un doogle gon piss all over you. Lettun loose a while,” the young Zwarvy said in his strongly accented voice. The more he spoke the clearer his words became. He smelled faintly putrid and foul to Vanx’s keen nose, but his grin was wide and contagious, even though it showed his sharp, needle teeth.

“Be leadin’ un to the dragon’s den when you’re ready,” Ootlin informed him.

Vanx let the squirming pup out of the papoon and pulled the rig over his shoulders. He followed the little black-and-white dog out and relieved himself, too. When he returned, he found Olden Pak there stuffing wrapped packages of food and a pair of waterskins into the pack’s back compartment. When he was finished, and Vanx had refitted the thing over his shoulders, the elder gave him a small, stoppered vial.

“The very foundation of her lair glows with the heat of the core. This potion will keep the heat from crisping you. Two drops for the doogle and the rest for you, but mind yourself: the protective power won’t last forever.”

Vanx tucked it away in his belt pouch near the dagger he still had strapped there. With a sigh of resignation he situated the pup in the papoon and gave Olden Pak a slight bow of appreciation. The elder bowed back and, with a somber expression, led Vanx and Ootlin to a tunnel opening at the far end of the city cavern. When Vanx bade the elder farewell, the milky-fleshed creature hugged him as if he would never see him again.

Gallarael, or some feral-eyed semblance of her, sporting slick, pitch-black skin, fangs, and long, razor-sharp nails, howled out. The sound was filled with what might have been pain, rage, or even terror. She was behind the barred door of the tower room in which she’d been locked. Trevin and Matty had both been sliced to ribbons by her claws. Darbon, with the help of Prince Russet and some soldiers, had fared a little better as they ushered the limp wizard out of harm’s way. Those who tried to subdue Gallarael were savaged. When Darbon went back in to save Matty, he was raked across the face. Luckily, he didn’t lose his eye, but he would have to live with a quartet of nasty scars running diagonally across his mug. Trevin was now in a room two floors below being held together by cat gut stitches and the magic of one of Quazar’s acolytes. Matty was in the room beside him. Her wounds, while severe, weren’t nearly as bad as Trevin’s. Both of them were in a state of despair. Each of them felt guilty for causing the horrible change to come over the princess. Quazar, after he’d somewhat recovered, tried to convince them both that it wasn’t their fault, but neither of them fully believed it.

Matty had gone over what she had done again and again, and the old wizard confirmed that she had made no error. Trevin, though, on top of his guilt and severe injuries, was heartbroken and confused as well. He was certain that he and Zeezle had gotten blood from a dragon not potent enough to cure her, or too late in the morning to have been bathed in all Aur’s light. It was a good thing that Quazar had cast a dampening spell over Trevin’s form, because if he had heard Gallarael’s animalistic howling and screaming, he would have succumbed to his sorrow and probably died from despair.

Zeezle had come ashore with Captain Willie and the rest of his crew. Everyone was surprised at how calm and peaceful most of the stronghold was inside. It was crowded, and outside in the baileys and garden courts there were hundreds of people all huddled in fear, but there was little of the chaos they’d imagined.

Troops of engineers lobbed kegs full of rock and hot oil over the walls of the city to ward off the ogres that were still trying to get inside. What groups of archers and pike-bearing men they saw on the wall top looked to be busy repelling the enemy. Though the concentration of royal soldiers inside Dyntalla’s old fortress wall were doing an efficient job of keeping the enemy out, it was inevitable that sooner or later the ogres would breach the defense.

Both Captain Willie and Prince Russet refused direct orders from King Oakarm to sail Zeezle back to Zyth, saying that Captain Rosthuf had nothing better to do. The king finally rescinded the order when Zeezle decided that he wanted to stay and fight alongside the humans to honor the loss of his friend.

Had Zeezle known the stronghold’s protective barriers would be breached that night he might have chosen otherwise, but the Zythian adventurer found that he had no regrets when his sword came free of its sheath and bit into the flesh of one of the gargantuan beasts. Some of the ogres managed to scale the wall. He, Prince Russet, and a troop of the prince’s personal guard charged out to meet the first wave of them in the open training yard. The battle was long and bloody, and it was only the first of many to come, for the bigger of the green-fleshed beasts started bashing the wall apart in the areas where the catapults couldn’t keep them back. With tree trunks, hurled boulders, and whatever else they could find, they broke through in a half-dozen other locations and stormed the stronghold. The ogres met the brunt of Duke Elmont’s soldiers head-on. The battle was brutal and costly, and by the end of that first day it looked as if the ogres might actually take the old fortress.

It seems like a million years have passed.

I’ve been lost allways searching for that song.

It’s kind of funny I thought it we could make it last.

Now I am wondering where the time has gone.

– A Zythian bard’s song

A
fter traversing a long, narrow corridor with damp walls and none of the illuminating deposits that had been so common in other areas, Vanx began to wonder why exactly he had a wiggling pup strapped to his chest. He liked it, there was no doubt, but he didn’t want to be responsible for getting the little mutt cooked by an angry dragon. He considered turning it loose, but thought better of it. The poor thing would get lost in the darkness and tumble into a crevice or something. He was about to ask Ootlin if he would take the doogle back out with him when they parted ways, but as they rounded a bend at an intersection of cave-ways a blast of heat hit him in the face, sending him into an instinctual defensive crouch. He forgot about the pup completely. It took a few heartbeats for him to realize that he wasn’t being blasted with dragon’s fire.

“The Unzurra is hotter from here,” Ootlin informed him as they took the larger of the shafts out of the interchange. The Zwarvy wasn’t exaggerating. Vanx could see the deep, bloody glow of the rock in places along the walls and ceiling as they continued. The floor, kept cool from the dripping seepage of the sea they were under, caused the air to be thick and steamy. It took only moments for the sweltering heat to soak Vanx’s clothes with sweat.

At another junction of tunnels, Ootlin stopped and pointed to the passage that he should take. It was obvious by the expression of unease on his strange face that he wasn’t going to lead any farther.

“Take the elixir now,” Ootlin said. His pale face caught the eerie red glow of the rocks and it made him look like some feral troll-beast covered with a film of blood. “Queen’s lair is but a short way. No junctions, no crossings.”

Vanx got out the vial Olden Pak had given him and dripped two fat drops into the pup’s mouth. The pup began smacking and licking as if there were some pasty substance stuck on the roof of his mouth. It looked as if he were trying to scour the taste off with his tongue. Vanx found out why a few seconds later when he downed the rest of the vial’s contents. It was horrible-tasting, like rotten meat and bile, but almost instantly Vanx felt his body grow cool from the inside out. After a few moments the heat of the tunnels had disappeared entirely. The pup must have felt it too, for it had stopped its squirming. It was peering up out of the papoon with curious, almost eager eyes.

Not one to dally in the moment, Vanx nodded his appreciation at Ootlin and started down the passage, trying to build up some sort of courage to face the island’s queen.

The passage was short and relatively straight, leading right into a fantastical cavern that eclipsed Boondara’s wonders tenfold.

Where the city cavern glowed a soft bluish-green, this cavern was all crimson, ruby, and menacing shadow. A river of cherry-hot magma churned and swirled slowly along the far end of the space. It bubbled and steamed across the base of one of the cavern walls and its glow served to bathe the area in bloody light. Stalagma, long and jagged, jutted up and dangled from overhead, throwing long, wicked shadows across every surface of the gigantic area. The cavern itself elbowed away out of sight to Vanx’s right, and he could sense the Fire Queen’s presence back there. He was thankful that she hadn’t been able to see him enter, for she would have surely ended him while he stood gawking.

What was more striking than the cavern, or the fact that he was in it, was the glittering hoard of treasure piled at the crook of the elbow. A dozen or more chests of gold and silver coins lay open or broken, the contents spilled into a pile with which a man could fill a wagon cart. There were ornately carved ornaments and jewels, sapphires, emeralds, diamonds, and bigger diamonds, along with a polished steel blade and a gold-chased breastplate fit for a king. There were all sorts of goblets, bowls, and jewelry, too. All of this reflected the glowing magma in a sinister, yet glorious, manner. Some wooden planks, and what might have been part of a ship mast, charred away at the ends, were buried under the pile. It looked to Vanx as if a great dragon had latched on to part of a treasure ship with her claw and brought the whole load back to her domain.