The Rage (36 page)

He wondered if he had any hope whatsoever of killing it before it ripped him apart in its slavering jaws. The enchantment had long since faded from his sword, and for the present, he had no way of casting another. The weapon was just a piece of steel, and at best of limited utility against phantoms, shapeshifters, and their ilk. But it was all he had.

Taegan yanked the weapon all the way free and cut at the werewolf’s head before it could recover its balance. The blade split skin and grated on bone, out that didn’t stop his foe. The creature snarled and lunged at him.

The fencing master jumped backward and extended. If the werewolf kept rushing in, it would impale itself once more, so it stopped short. Taegan feinted a thrust at its eyes then slashed at a foreleg.

He had to believe he was hurting the werewolf at least a little. The gory wounds Taegan inflicted remained after he pulled back his sword. The creature’s paw was half-severed. Yet it was still game. Holding its maimed foot off the ground but scarcely less quick than before, it started to circle right, and he turned to keep it in front of him. Instantly it spun back to the left and pounced in on his flank. He slashed but only gave it a shallow gash he knew wouldn’t stop it.

The werewolf grabbed Taegan’s leg in its teeth. The pressure was agonizing, but the avariel couldn’t tell if the fangs had penetrated the sturdy leather of his boot to pierce his flesh. The beast-thing wrenched the limb out from under the winged elf, and he fell hard on his back. The werewolf scuttled forward over the top of him, intent, perhaps, on biting out his throat.

Taegan thrust his sword into the lycanthrope’s chest, gripped the hilt with both hands, and shoved with all his rapidly dwindling strength. The action served not merely to arrest the werewolf’s advance but to lift its jaws out of striking range. Taegan’s arms trembled with the strain of holding the creature aloft.

The werewolf thrashed furiously, trying to shake itself loose, and scrabbled at him with its nails. It started to melt

into its beast-man shape. Evidently it realized clawed hands would be useful in its current situation. Most likely they’d enable it to slaughter Taegan in short order—but it never completed its transformation.

Taegan’s point slid out of the creature’s back. Its gradual passage entirely through the torso must have done so much damage than even a lycanthrope couldn’t endure it, because the werewolf shuddered, coughed blood, and went limp.

Gasping, Taegan dumped the corpse to the side, relieving himself of its weight, then he sat up to check his leg. The werewolf’s fangs had shredded his boot and the layers of cloth inside but hadn’t broken his skin, which meant he wouldn’t become a shapechanger himself.

For a moment, Taegan felt relieved, then grinned bitterly, as he realized what a ridiculous concern that really was. Even if the werewolf had infected him, it would take time for the disease to develop, and time was one thing he most assuredly lacked. His foe had called to his comrades before trying for the kill, and he could hear them approaching despite the ceaseless sizzling sound of the rain. They were drawing in all around him, and in his current condition, he had no hope of fighting so many at once. He clambered to his feet and dragged his sword out of the werewolf. It was conceivable that he might slay one or two more adversaries before the rest overwhelmed him. It was worth a try.

Off to his left, lights appeared among the trees. Taegan assumed they were lanterns, since the rain would quickly douse an open flame. A hobgoblin saw them, too, and shouted to its fellows, whereupon the points of light rapidly receded.

Behind Taegan, human voices jabbered, then likewise drew away. On his right, several soaked, bedraggled knights walked their destriers into view, then, evidently realizing they’d blundered into another encounter with the foes who’d routed them that morning, wheeled the war-horses around. They shouted and dug in their spurs, demanding speed of the

exhausted mounts for a perilous gallop in the dark, through low-hanging branches and over uneven ground. No doubt anticipating an easy chase, werewolves bayed and raced after them.

In the aftermath, Taegan stood alone beneath rattling, storm-tossed branches and flaring thunderbolts. As the seconds crawled by, and no enemies slunk or charged into view, he gradually realized they weren’t going to. They’d all dashed off in pursuit of more conspicuous prey.

He then waited for his benefactor to appear. He was certain he had one. It hadn’t been mere coincidence that three separate diversions had occurred simultaneously, just when he needed them most. Tymora didn’t send anyone that much luck.

Yet even so, the creature startled him, for it popped into view immediately in front of him, as if it had been invisible until that instant. His nerves were so frazzled that he nearly stabbed at it before he caught himself.

It was a dragon, or something resembling one, no longer than his arm from its toothy leer to the tip of its serpentine tail. He couldn’t make out its color in the gloom, but its scales had a sparkle to them that reminded him of Kara’s iridescent sheen. As it hovered before him, its wings were a glimmering blur. As best he could determine, they were shaped more like a butterfly’s than a bat’s.

“All hail Jivex,” the diminutive dragon piped, “king of the forest.” He laughed. “All right, not really. But I did save you, so you should at least thank me.”

“I do thank—”

“You’re an elf, aren’t you? Who are you? What are you doing here?”

“I was born an avariel, and my name is Taegan Nightwind. I came here with Queen Sambryl’s troops to destroy the hostile creatures in the wood.”

Jivex grinned even wider and said, “It doesn’t seem like it’s going very well. Why’d you bother? Humans and elves don’t live in the Gray Forest anymore.”

Though it seemed entirely good-natured, a product of simple curiosity, the relentless interrogation made Taegan feel even edgier, if that was possible.

“The dastards are plotting harm to the entire kingdom,” he said. “Now shouldn’t we move away from here, before the goblins and wolves return?”

Jivex blinked and replied, “If they did come back, I’d just fool them with more illusions. That’s how faerie dragons stay safe. But pitiful as you look, maybe I should take you someplace. Come on.” He flitted a few feet forward. “What kind of dastardly plot is it?”

Jumping from topic to topic as unpredictably as Jivex darted about through the air, the questions kept flying as the small wyrm led his new companion through the trees. Speaking softly lest some foe overhear, Taegan gradually unfolded the tale of Gorstag’s murder and the subsequent struggle against the cult much as he’d related it to Sambryl and the paladins, albeit in a more disjointed fashion.

Once he’d seemingly absorbed the substance of it, Jivex made an angry spitting sound.

“I don’t want to Rage!”

Taegan shifted his burned wing in a futile attempt to ease the pain and asked, “Does the frenzy affect your kind as well?”

“We’re dragons, aren’t we, and I’ve had my own grumpiness and bad dreams.”

Spent, feverish, and half-delirious as he was, Taegan had to stifle a hysterical laugh at the thought of faerie dragons trying to rampage like their gigantic kindred, but really, it wasn’t funny. No matter how tricky they were, the small creatures would surely die by the score, by the hundred, should they seek to wage war on humanity. If Jivex was any indication, they were a harmless and even benevolent race, undeserving of such a fate.

“Well,” said the avariel, “some wise folk are trying to figure out how to avert the Rage.” Without going into specifics about Sammaster’s folio, it was as much comfort as he had to offer.

“Meanwhile, we who serve Her Majesty must find a way to keep the cultists hereabouts from birthing one dracolich after another, until the land is overrun with them. I doubt your phantasms would keep you safe from them.”

“You might be surprised,” Jivex said. He lit on a tree trunk, clawed the bark, pulled something from the gouge with his teeth, gulped it down, and flew on. “But it doesn’t matter.”

“It doesn’t?”

“Some folk might say that since the hobgoblins and werewolves came, the Gray Forest is already tainted, but such creatures are a part of nature. We faerie dragons don’t mind sharing the woodlands with them unless they make themselves particularly obnoxious. But the undead are unnatural. Just by existing, they poison the earth and air. Corrupt a being as powerful and magical as a wyrm with undeath, and it will become an especially nasty blight.”

Taegan thought of Pavel and Brimstone and said, “I have a friend who agrees with you, and an acquaintance who wouldn’t.”

Jivex continued with his own chain of thought: “So it’s a good thing you’re an elf.”

“How so?”

“Since the battle this morning, I’ve watched a lot of human warriors fleeing for their lives, but I didn’t help them. My folk are leery of men. Some are all right, but some try to kill or cage us, whereas the old stories say the elves were our friends, until they went west.”

“Which is why you decided to save me.”

“Right, and because I did, perhaps we still have a chance to stop these cultists and wicked wyrms and such.”

“If I can make my way to Lyrabar.”

“Wouldn’t it take a lot of time for you to reach there and fetch another army back, assuming your queen and lords will even consent to it? Mightn’t the cult be even stronger by then? Maybe we can still quash it now, if the other elves will help us.”

Taegan shook his head. Perhaps his weariness, sickness, and the clattering downpour were interfering with his hearing.

“I thought you said the elves had departed,” the avariel said.

He’d certainly never heard of any settlement in the Gray Forest.

“They did, and they didn’t,” Jivex replied. “You’ll see. I just hope they’ll talk to one of their own. Usually they ignore me.”

It was such an opaque pronouncement that Taegan wondered if the faerie dragon was not merely eccentric but genuinely mad. But perhaps it didn’t matter. Demented or not, Jivex had rescued him, and he had no better plan than to follow the reptile. At least it seemed that their path had taken them far away from any pursuers.

Though that would be scant consolation if he dropped dead of exhaustion. Jivex kept him trudging until the storm finally stopped, and the first pale light of dawn filtered down through the canopy, revealing that the faerie dragon’s wings were a silvery color, while his scales rippled with all the colors of the rainbow. Shortly thereafter, the two companions reached a circle of towering deciduous trees with gray bark and a grayish cast to their foliage. Taegan wondered if they were the plants that had given the forest its name. One thing was certain. Despite a youth spent in the heart of the Earthwood, he’d never seen their like.

“Elves,” Jivex cried, “look! Here’s one of your relatives.” Taegan peered about, perplexed.

“Whom are you addressing?” he asked. “We’re the only ones here.”

“No. They’re all around us.”

“Hiding? Invisible?”

Hovering. his butterfly wings a smear of gleaming whitish blur, the faerie dragon shook his head and replied, “They’re the trees.”

The fencing master sighed. That settled it. Jivex was crazy, and Taegan himself should have known better than to believe he had any chance of receiving aid from his vanished and inconsequential race.

Evidently affronted by his skepticism, Jivex said, “They are. When it was time to leave, some couldn’t bear to go. They turned themselves into the gray trees instead.”

“How ingenious.”

“It just takes them a while to wake. Or notice visitors. Or stop thinking big, slow tree thoughts and remember how to talk to quick little creatures like us.”

“If you say so,” Taegan said. “While they collect themselves, I’d very much like to rest. Are we relatively safe here?”

“Yes. No wicked creature can find these glades.” “I am a wicked creature. Just ask Lord Oriseus.” Jivex cocked his head and asked, “What are you

saying?”

“I’m too weary to know myself. Please, if you’re able, stand the first watch.”

Taegan unbuckled his sword belt then lay down on the wet ground with the weapon ready to hand. Jivex spotted an insect in flight and flitted off in pursuit.

At first Taegan’s wing throbbed so badly that, exhausted as he was, he couldn’t fall asleep, a circumstance that nearly made him cry. Eventually, though, when he’d all but abandoned hope of it ever happening, he slipped into slumber.

At first his dreams were a jumbled recapitulation of the ordeals and calamities of the previous day. Then he found himself standing in the center of the ring of gray trees once more His thoughts were more lucid, clear enough to recognize he was dreaming.

Jivex flew up, perched on a low-hanging branch, and grinned.

“I told you,” said the dragon.

“Told me what, precisely?”

“This makes it easier for the old elves to talk to you. I’m glad they pulled me in, too.”

“I’m sorry, my gallant friend,” Taegan said, “but none of this is actually happening. Even you are a figment. The real Jivex is off chasing bugs for his breakfast.”

Hail, avariel, someone said. The voice seemed slow, soft, and deep, even though Taegan perceived that it wasn’t sound so much as pure thought somehow resonating from one mind to another. Once, we were moon elves, and thus we claim you as our kin. Jivex, we greet you as well, much as you’ve often wearied us with your chatter and inexhaustible store of questions.

Taegan belatedly realized that it was all indeed more than a simple dream, though whether the gray tress were able and willing to help him remained to be seen. He gave them an elegant bow, though doing so hurt his wing considerably.

“I’m pleased to meet you,” he said. “My name is Taegan Nightwind.”

We rarely use our names.

For a moment, a pale face wavered inside one of the tree trunks, like a flame shining through thick, pebbled glass.

It no longer seems necessary. Our essences have blended over the centuries, even as our spreading roots and limbs have tangled.

“I see.”