Betrayal

Chapter Seven Scales

The marshy ground grabbed at Dhamon’s boot heels as he slogged through a thickening cypress grove. Varek and Maldred were a few yards ahead of him, talking. In the younger man’s voice was a decided urgency. Occasionally Maldred turned and said something to Dhamon, though Dhamon didn’t answer—he was paying less attention to his companions’ words than to the persistent soft chitter of the cloud of insects that surrounded them. Dhamon was thinking about the mysterious healer to whom the enchanted map pointed.

“The pirate treasure first,” he said to himself, “if it exists.” Use as much of it—all of it if necessary—to buy the sorceress’s cure. “If she exists,” he added, though he hadn’t meant to speak aloud.

“What did you say, Dhamon?” This from Maldred, who had stopped at the edge of a sodden clearing.

“I said I’ll take first watch,” Dhamon returned. “Sun’s setting. I don’t fancy walking through this bog in the dark. Especially since we’ve got no torches.”

Faint stars began appearing by the time Varekand Maldred were asleep. Dhamon sat with his back to a spindly shaggybark. He could hear Maldred snoring, a chorus of crickets, and from a tall mossdraped poplar a parrot softly scolded them for intruding in its territory. For the briefest of moments Dhamon considered stealing the enchanted map from his large friend and getting down to the business of finding the treasure and then the sorceress—maybe they would both prove hollow fantasies. “Let Maldred and Varek find Riki,” he softly mused. “They don’t need my help with that task. I don’t need to waste time… by all the vanished gods, please not now!”

His right leg had begun to throb, gently at first. Within the passing of a few moments, the pain grew intense and his body feverish. He shakily stood and stumbled away from the marshy clearing, following the path of a small stream to the east for nearly a mile until his chest grew so tight and his legs so numb he could no longer walk. He stumbled down a low rise and into the night-cooled water, then struggled to pull himself up on the muddy bank. He pressed his hands against his thigh, feeling, through the worn fabric of his trousers, the scale as hard as steel.

“Damn this thing!” he softly cursed, “and damn me!” Icy cold waves pulsed outward from the scale now, as if Dhamon had been plunged into a frigid sea. His teeth chattered, and he curled into a ball, though he gained no warmth from the position.

The sensation persisted until he felt he could endure no more and until he nearly passed out, then began to dissipate, slowly, and after interminable moments he felt warm again. He gulped the late summer air into his lungs and labored to stand, the slippery mud pulling him down. His questing fingers found a vine, and he tugged himself to his feet.

For an instant he considered returning to Maldred and Varek, though he loathed the notion of looking helpless in front of them. Suddenly he felt warmer still. Jolts of heat stabbed into his leg where the scale was embedded, regular and pulsing like the erratic beat of a heart not his own. The heat intensified, and he clenched his fists, fingernails digging deep into his palms, in an effort to deny the agony. He felt blood on his hands but no pain. The wounds he inflicted on himself were insignificant compared to what the scale was doing to him.

“No,” he breathed. “Stop this.” He continued to stagger east along the stream, chanting the words, as if they might chase away the pain. After several more steps he crumpled, slipping on a oily patch of sawgrass and falling on his back, sliding down the sloping bank headfirst until his heel caught on a root. His hair hung in the water.

The heat again mounted, and the jolts quickened until he was gasping for air. His limbs trembled. He was unable to control them, and his arms flopped about as he prayed for unconsciousness, death, anything to relieve the pain. He rolled until his face was in the water, and he retched, emptying his stomach of the little food he’d consumed today. Then he summoned what strength he had, raised his head, and slammed it down against a rock, cutting himself and adding a dull ache to his miseries. He raised his head again, felt the root tug free, and felt himself sliding all the rest of the way down the bank, spinning until he was laying on his back immersed in the stream. It was shallow in this spot, the water only lapping over his shoulders and rising halfway up on his face. Some part of him registered that it was pleasantly cool, but it did nothing to cut the allconsuming heat. By now Dhamon was trembling all over. He cursed himself for losing control to the pain, and he cursed the Dark Knight and the dragon who put him in this vulnerable and tortured state.

His mind propelled him back to a forested glade in Solamnia. He was kneeling over a Dark Knight he had mortally wounded, holding the man’s hand and trying to offer what comfort he could in the last moments of the man’s life. The man beckoned him closer, loosed the armor from his chest and showed Dhamon a large blood-red scale embedded in the flesh beneath. With fumbling fingers, the knight managed to pry the scale free, and before Dhamon realized what was happening, the knight had placed it against Dhamon’s thigh.

The scale molded itself around his leg, feeling like a brand thrust against his unprotected skin. It was the most painful sensation Dhamon had experienced in his young life. Worse than the pain was the dishonor: Malys, the red dragon overlord whose scale it was, used the scale to possess and control him. Months went by before a mysterious shadow dragon, along with a silver dragon called Silvara, worked ancient magic to break the overlord’s control. The scale turned black in the process and shortly thereafter it had begun to ache periodically.

At first, the pain was infrequent, fleeting, and tolerable. Certainly it was preferable to being controlled by a dragon. Gradually the spasms grew worse and lasted longer. He had sought a cure numerous times from mystics and sages, from old men who peddled bottles filled with all manner of stinking concoctions. He had sought Tanis’s sword, because it was said to find lost and elusive things for its wielder. Dhamon had told it to find him a cure. Instead it cursed him with unfathomable visions.

“Should kill myself,” Dhamon hissed between clenched teeth. “Kill myself and be done with all of this. Not hope like some fool that Mal’s healer exists.” He’d toyed with the idea of suicide several times, but he either could not find the courage or he found a reason to hope things would change, found some notion to cling to—like Mal’s mysterious healer in the Plains of Dust.

“If she exists.”

He’d even begun to believe that perhaps the spasms were finally over. It had been nearly four weeks since the last episode. A part of him knew better, though, and tonight was the worst yet. In the past the pain had persisted until he passed out. This time it seemed he was not to be granted that mercy. In the back of his mind images flashed of the great red called Malys, the shadow dragon, and the silver. He saw other images, too, bronze and blue scales and wings, and he wondered if his mind was imagining it all or if dragons of those hues were passing by overhead right now. The scale gave him the ability to sense if dragons were nearby.

He lay in torment in the stream for nearly an hour, tears running from his eyes, chest heaving, sucking in the fetid air of the place, images of bronze and blue and black dragons clouding his thoughts. When the waves of fire and ice finally became irregular and diminished in intensity, he crawled out of the stream and up the bank, finding flat, higher ground. He threw himself on his back and stared up at the myriad of stars that he could see through a gap in the foliage. He did his best to blot out the pounding in his head. When the warm air finished drying him, he climbed to his feet, fingers fumbling with the fastenings of his trousers.

Dhamon tugged down his pants and hunched over to study his leg. The large black scale on his right thigh faintly reflected the starlight and illuminated several scales the size of steel pieces that had sprouted around its edges. He counted the small ones—eleven-two more than he had a few weeks ago.

“What is happening to me?” he breathed. Mal knew about the one, large scale that had once belonged to the red overlord. Palin Majere, Feril, and a host of others knew about the scale, too. No one knew about the growing number of smaller ones. He’d managed to keep this unfortunate development all to himself.

He pondered returning to the camp and stealing Maldred’s knife. He was as stealthy as any thief. The half-elf had taught him well. He could leave Maldred and Varek, slip away, end his life with a slash of the knife, end this misery.

“I should,” he told himself. He tossed his aching head back to again study the stars. He didn’t recognize the constellations. It had been weeks between this and the last episode, he reminded himself, weeks of freedom in which he and Maldred had indulged in pleasures in various ogre towns. He had honestly enjoyed the time with his friend.

“I should,” he repeated.

But then the scale wins. He’d never been one to completely give up on himself. Krynn? Yes. He gave up on the world long months ago when he decided the overlords could not be bested. His friends? He gave up on most of the ones who hadn’t died in his company. Palin Majere could do nothing about the scale. Feril left him. Fiona and Rig—the latter seemed always at odds with him—had given up on him and he on them. He had given up on most of them—but not Maldred.

“I should, but not yet. Not just yet.” There was the healer the map pointed to. She was his last hope. There was the pirate horde, which came first. “Then the healer.”

Oh, and there was the half-elf to rescue. Dhamon wasn’t in the mood to rescue anyone except himself. If they did not come to this village Polagnar within a day or two, he’d do his best to talk Maldred into giving up on Riki and just pursuing the pirate treasure. Let Varek worry about his wife. Dhamon had the scale to worry over. He knew he was living solely for himself, but damn the consequences, and damn anyone who got in his way.

“Damn me,” he said.

Exhausted from his ordeal, he returned to the spindly shaggybark. Nobody was awake. Nobody had noticed that he had been gone. He grabbed a flask of ale. A faint rosy light was intruding in the sky overhead, suggesting that dawn was only an hour or so away. He propped his back against the trunk and took a long pull from the flask. The ale helped to numb the throbbing in his head, which usually continued for up to a few hours after an episode. Enough ale numbed just about anything, he had learned. He drank nearly all of it, then replaced the cork and waited for his companions to wake up.