Death of the Dragon

34

“The last of the snortsnouts are down, my liege,” the battlemaster growled through the protesting squeal of his visor being pushed up and open. “We’ve lost some good men, but fewer than I’d feared.”

King Azoun nodded grimly, his eyes still fixed on the line of trees where the forest began, not far to the west. His mouth was set in a tight line, and a lone muscle twitched beside his mouth. It was a sign that few men there had ever had the misfortune to see before.

Battlemaster Ilnbright, however, was one of them, and knew well that it meant fear warred with anger in Azoun’s thoughts. He did not need to follow the dark fire of the king’s gaze to know the source of the royal fury. Every man gathered on the hill, and the many now cleaning their blades and finding places to rest weary backsides on the slopes below, knew the same dark truth. As Purple Dragons and growling orc warriors had met and the ringing din of blades had risen, Azoun had given the signal that should have brought the Steel Princess and her noblemen charging out of the trees to strike the orcs from the rear, long swords flashing. The blare of the signal horns had been as loud as any Haliver Ilnbright had heard, in tens of summers of riding under the Purple Dragon banner… but no one had come out of the forest.

Not a single blade. Outnumbered and exposed to the foe on three flanks, Azoun’s warriors had fought hard and well, and hacked every last tusker into the dirt. Without Alusair’s forces, the choice had been simple: win victory, or welcome death.

The king had long since sent scouts to find Princess Alusair and order her to rally her men back to the royal standard. Three veteran rangers-each alone so one at least should escape ill-Randaeron, Pauldimun, and Yarvel, good men all, had gone out. Either they had found ill or not found the princess. How long must it take to travel a mile or two? Less long than they’d already taken, surely.

“Back to the river, or make camp here?” the battlemaster asked gently, mindful of the royal mood.

“Here,” Azoun said, the word clear and cold. A long breath of silence passed before he added, “I’d not welcome fighting my way back across the bridge next morn, just to reach this height again.”

Ilnbright turned and gestured. Men who’d been watching for it reached with swift, practiced speed for the first poles that would soon become the royal tent.

The guards standing close around the king were weather-beaten, eagle-eyed veterans. Gaerymm and Teithluddree had the better sight, still able to outshoot many of the arrowmasters, but the hulking bannerguard, Kolmin Stagblade (no one ever seemed to use just one of his names, perhaps because of his mountainous, inexorable bulk) stood a good two heads taller than either, so it was he who said suddenly, “Randaeron Farlokkeir returns. Alone, but laden.”

In silence the other men stepped aside to allow Azoun to stride forward and peer along the bannerguard’s pointing arm.

After a moment, Azoun turned away. His voice was almost gentle as he said to the nearest messenger, “Wine. Flamekiss. Just the flask.”

That flask was empty by the time the scout trotted around the men driving home the last lines of the royal tent. He went to his knees before Azoun, stretching his arms forth in silence to place a scorched helm and a half-melted, twisted shield on the trampled turf. A sharp burnt smell came to the hilltop with him-the smell of cooked flesh.

The helm might have belonged to any Purple Dragon but for the battered cheek guard. All of the men standing on the hill knew a certain scar and bend in it. The shield, too, might have belonged to a hundred hundred soldiers of Cormyr-but its unblemished upper corner bore a device that was Alusair’s alone, a steel-gray falcon leaping up from the palm of a war gauntlet.

“Majesty,” Randaeron murmured, “these were all I could find that I could be sure were the princess’s, in a place of many bones and bodies.” He spread his hands helplessly, and added, “The dragon…”

“Everyone slain?” Azoun asked, in apparent calm. “Torn apart or… cooked?”

“There were signs of many men in boots fleeing into the forest, each by his own path rather than together or along a trail. I searched the remains a long time, while Paulder and Yar followed the signs into the forest, but I cannot say that I found her highness… or know that I did not. So many were… bones.”

The ranger’s voice broke, then, and it seemed for a moment that the hands of the king trembled. When he reached down to put a hand on the scout’s shoulder and to take up the ashen helm, however, they seemed steady enough.

“My thanks, Randaeron,”Azoun said quietly. “Tarry here in camp, at least until your fellow scouts return. I am sure no man could find more among the dead than you did.”

Without another word to anyone the king walked away. Down the hillside he went, his steps slow and aimless, looking at the helm in his hands as if it held his daughter’s face.

Not a man moved to follow, though all of his bodyguards shifted to where they could clearly see where Azoun went, and the hillside below him. They saw the Old Blade of the Obarskyrs walk ever more slowly, until he entered a little hollow where he sat down as wearily as any overweight pike-dragoneer.

“Is she dead, d’you think?” a lancelord standing by the tent muttered to his superior. Keldyn Raddlesar was too young to know when to keep quiet.

“Lad,” Ethin Glammerhand growled back, “how could she not be? I doubt w-“

A shadow fell across the lowering sun, and both men fell silent, staring up into the sky in mounting terror as the Devil Dragon plunged down upon them.

Nalavarauthatoryl the Red was huge, as large across as the main turrets of High Horn, with jaws broad enough to swallow half a dozen horses-and their riders-at a single bite. They were gaping wide now, revealing the dark, vibrating throat from whence the flames would come. Eager fire burned in the dragon’s eyes, and its cruelly curved talons were spread wide to strike. In places the wyrm’s body was a deep, angry purple, almost black, and men were screaming as its racing shadow fell across them-screams echoed in the raw, mounting roar of fear and defiance that burst from the throats of the warriors on the hilltop, as they scrambled to stand apart from one another and raise their tiny weapons.

The dragon’s talons were aimed for the royal tent, but it must have noticed that no one rushed into that pavilion to warn anyone, or hastened forth-and that no bodyguards stood watchfully by its entrance. It veered aside at the last moment to pounce on one man whose raised and ready blade seemed to glow as if alive with magic.

Randaeron Farlokkeir screamed as he died, torn open from belly to chin by a talon an instant before his hands were bitten off, his enchanted sword vanishing with them into a mouth as large as his cottage.

“As large-as-” he managed to gasp, before a sudden tide from within him choked his words-and the world-away.

As the mutilated scout reeled and collapsed in a rain of his own blood, the dragon landed heavily beyond him, its tail sweeping aside a trio of sprinting dragoneers, and a sudden silence fell.

In that strange calm, the dragon looked around with an almost feminine, menacing smile.

“Well,” it said, its breath acrid and stinking, “where is the human king?” The voice, too, was female. The loudest reply to it came from the mouths of the Cormyrean officers slowly advancing on it. That response was an eerie chorus of teeth chattering in fear.

“Die, dragon!” one of them shouted suddenly, charging forward with his blade thrown back over his shoulder, ready to chop down.

“Die!” another echoed, starting to run in turn.

Both had seen what the dragon must not have. A lone, bareheaded figure sprinted up behind the dragon, drawn blade flashing as it raced along Nalavara’s flank. The Devil Dragon was about to find the man she was seeking.

As Nalavara almost casually smashed her attackers with a wave of one talon, the King of Cormyr bounded into the air and thrust his blade behind the corner of her jaw. His steel slid home easily, gliding with oily ease into the spot where no scales waited. Black blood spurted forth, smoking.

“Here, dragon!” Azoun snarled, his eyes blazing. “Murderer! Despoiler of my realm! Here I am!”

He jerked his blade free, and as the dragon turned her head with snakelike speed and a fearsome snarl, Azoun struck again, thrusting his steel deep into her tongue then plucking it out to leap away, rolling desperately in under the dragon’s chin.

Fire roared forth, setting grass afire and crisping an unfortunate dragoneer who was caught in its full fury and sent tumbling away through the air like a burning leaf. The king was gone.

Gone, that is, until the royal blade stabbed upward between the small, soft scales behind the dragon’s chin. The sword rose like a bloody fountain through Nalavara’s mouth and tongue.

“For Alusair!” the king cried. “For my daughter, wyrm!”

His words were lost in the squall of pain that burst forth from the dragon’s throat. She thrust her head up, baring her throat to the furious monarch, but he couldn’t drag his sword free in time, wallowing in blood-drenched dimness, to strike before Nalavara twisted away.

A talon longer than the king stood tall stabbed out for him. It missed his shoulder by a foot, no more, as the dragon gathered herself to spring into the air-doubtless for a short flight that would end in another swoop at the hilltop, and more fire, and the death of Azoun.

But Nalavara trembled, faltering, and above Azoun’s head there were ragged shouts of, “For Azoun! For Alusair! For Cormyr!”

Above his head?

Azoun rolled, keeping hold of his sword only with difficulty, and came out into the sunlight to see warriors running up the hill with fear white on their faces, but swords and spears and axes in their hands.

A rope was stretched tight up and over the dragon, one end trembling under the frantic sledge-blows of a sweating knot of warriors, and the other-The other was driven deep into the muscles of one of the dragon’s wings, held there with a savage smile by Swordlord Ethin Glammerhand. Lancelord Raddlesar was bounding up slippery scales to meet him, slashing at whatever parts of the wing he could reach as he hastened. A gruff swordcaptain wasn’t far behind, his axe rising and falling as if dragon meat was wanted on his cookfire forthwith.

Nalavara roared deafeningly and bucked, hurling the lancelord off his feet. The dragon rolled over, one slash of her jaws severing the rope, then scrambled upright as swiftly as any cat. The swordlord bounced helplessly against her scales, clinging to his sword’s hilt. Nalavara raked her talons across the Lancelord Raddlesar, cutting him to ribbons as he lay twitching on the ground, and bit down on the warrior in front of her.

Swordcaptain Theldyn Thorn was suddenly gone above the waist-blade, breastplate, and all.

His hips trembled, swaying, then crashed to the ground under the impact of the tumbling swordlord, spilled from the dragon’s wing high above. Spears bounced harmlessly off dark red scales, and King Azoun charged in once more to hack at all he could reach-the blood-drenched talon that had slain his lancelord and so narrowly missed him.

The dragon turned her head, spitting out torn gobbets of flesh, and drew back to either spew fire on the raging king or thrust her head down and bite him.

A priest of Tempus stammered out a spell that made the air around Nalavara’s head erupt in a sudden, dancing storm of blades, but the snarling dragon flapped her wings in the very heart of the whirling steel, as if their flashing points weren’t there at all, then bounded into the air. A flick of her tail smashed Swordlord Glammerhand into the heart of the steel storm. Two men leaped onto the king as he bounced helplessly, keeping him just beneath the whirling blades. They could do nothing to stop the dragon as she bent down, eyes closed against the flashing steel fangs, and bit blindly at Azoun.

The King of Cormyr rose to meet her, throwing off the lords trying to shield him as if they were lap dogs, and thrust his sword mightily through welling dragonfire and into Nalavara’s lip. Black blood gushed forth once more. The dragon roared and shook her head, one fang hurling the king away in a tangle of torn armor and royal blood. The two lords rushed desperately forward again.

Rings on their fingers flashed as the dragon bit down once more. This time cruel teeth closed on something unseen and skittered vainly across air, well above the struggling men.

The Devil Dragon roared her rage in the heart of the steel storm, then flapped her wings, rending the air with a sound like a clap of thunder, and ascended, ignoring the few arrows that reached for her, and all the shouting below. She trailed a few smoking wisps of blood as she flew in a wide, climbing arc west over the forest, not looking back at the hilltop, and disappeared north.

In the wake of the dragon, the hillside was slick with blood and littered with moaning men or the torn fragments of what had been men. In their midst, two of those whom the nobles of Cormyr liked to contemptuously call “little lords”-men recently ennobled by the crown for service, and lacking long years of proud family power-lay panting, face to face, atop their groaning king.

“Best end the shielding,” Lord Edryn Braerwinter gasped, “lest one of those ghazneths comes.”

“Is it… gone?” his fellow lord gasped, not daring to look. Braerwinter nodded, lacking the breath to speak again, and rolled slowly off the King of Cormyr.

Azoun Obarskyr lay with his eyes closed and his mouth twisted in pain, his limbs moving restlessly. Tendrils of smoke from the black blood of the dragon rose from him, and his armor was crumpled into ruin above one hip, and entirely bitten away above the other, all along his flank, which was dark and wet with blood. Wherever his breast was dry of blood, it was dark with the ash left by dragonfire.

Men were hastening up on all sides, now.

“He needs healing,” Lord Steelmar Tolon gasped, finding his feet, “but we must get him into the tent before half a hundred archers start spreading word that they’ve seen him lying dead. Take his other arm… under the shoulders…”

“What’re you doing?” Battlemaster Ilnbright roared, as the two lords staggered upright, Azoun hanging limply between them.

“To the tent!” Lord Braerwinter snarled. “Get him some healing-now!”

“You can’t just-“

“Well, we are,” Lord Tolon roared, in a voice even louder than the battlemaster’s bellow. “Get out of the way or die!”

He held up the hand in a menacing fist and his ring winked. Ilnbright, not knowing for certain what that ring did, fell back, face black with rage, then turned and shouted for priests.

“Bring me healers!” he roared. “Every holy man on this field, whatever his rank or protests. Haste!”

The ring on Tolon’s finger winked again, and the battlemaster fell silent, blinking in surprise. The ring’s magic had carried his shout miles distant, in a great and terrible roar. All over the field Purple Dragons were on the move, snatching up robed men by the elbows and collars.

“Bring the king’s sword,” Lord Braerwinter said to the astonished officer. “A warrior feels better if he can hold his blade.”

Still blinking, Battlemaster Ilnbright bent over and meekly scooped up Azoun’s mighty warsword.

A little later, two weary lords staggered through the grim ring of archers, ignoring the hard eyes that watched them go down the hill. The dragon had not come again, but if it did, the army of Cormyr would be ready. A splayed forest of shafts rose from the ground in front of each bowman, and the archers were standing almost elbow to elbow, all around the height where the royal tent rose.

“There,” Braerwinter murmured, pointing at the little hollow where the king had sat.

Alusair’s blackened helm still lay there. Tolon bent and picked it up as the two men sat down together, back to back so as to be able to see anyone approach, and in unison thrust their fingers under their gorgets to pluck forth pendants.

Hidden on the backs of those pendants were clasps akin to the weathercloak clasps that war wizards bore. Etched beside each was a tiny symbol, the badge of Filfaeril, the Dragon Queen, whom Braerwinter and Tolon had served now for many years. Laspeera had laid longspeaking enchantments on them that even Vangerdahast-or so it was said-knew nothing about.

“Lady Queen,” Braerwinter murmured, picturing the cold beauty of the lady they both served-and loved, “there is no gentle way to say this. His majesty has fought the dragon, and lies sorely wounded. The wyrm is fled, the orcs lie slain, and we hold the field against hosts of goblins still. They advance again, as we speak. More, the dragon came down on the Princess Alusair, and she is feared lost, with all who served under her. We gave the king all the healing magic we carried, ghazneths or no, for many healers have died already this day, but, your Highness, our potions seemed to do nothing to help him. I know not how much longer he has to live. He lies in his tent, atop the first hill north of Calantar’s Bridge, just east of the Way. More priests are coming, but if you could send hence the mightiest clergy…

They both heard the gasp that came from Filfaeril’s distant lips before she replied, her voice very steady,

You’ve done well, I doubt not, and my thanks for this news, dark though it be. Guard my lord, both of you, and yourselves. Cormyr will have more need of you, soon.

“We hear and obey,” the two lords chanted in unison, not falling to hear the sob that escaped the queen’s lips before the magical connection faded.

Lord Edryn Braerwinter looked at his friend and said, “Well, I guess we’d best-“

That was as far as he got, through a vain shout from nearby, before a dark form swooped down out of the sky, cruel talons spread, and tore off both their heads.

Cold laughter trailed the ghazneth as it soared into the sky again, pendants clutched in fingers that trailed blood, as the torn husks that had been Lords Braerwinter and Tolon toppled to the ground in bloody ruin. Arrows stabbed into the sky after the laughing scourge, but as usual they were too few, too feeble in flight, and too late.