Cadderly saw the fight off to the side, and noticed Vander buried beneath the flabby folds of the monstrous hill giant. He tried to think of a way to help, but suddenly the valley walls were up around him again as Fyrentennimar began another breath-stealing approach.
Shayleigh nimbly moved around on the dragon’s back, determined to play a role and firing her bow repeatedly. At first, her shots were random, though nearly every one scored a hit, but then she concentrated her fire on one hill giant. By the time Fyrentennimar’s flight took her beyond range of the beast, its wide chest sported half a dozen arrows.
“Get lower, ye damned, fun-stealing wyrm!” came a cry from below. Ivan and Pikel were in position. The young priest fell flat to his belly and peered over the front edge of the dragon’s wing.
Hanging below him were the Bouldershoulder brothers, one in each of Fyrentennimar’s clutching talons. The dragon did fly lower, and Pikel howled in glee as he put his tree-trunk club in line and used the dragon’s momentum to splatter the head of a giant that was too slow in ducking.
Ivan took an axe swipe on the other side as they passed, but he mistimed the blow badly and caught nothing but air.
“Sandstone!” the frustrated dwarf bellowed.
Cadderly’s orderly sensibilities couldn’t accept the craziness around him. Helplessly shaking his head, he managed to sit back up and dropped a hand into a berry-filled pouch. He uttered the last words of the enchantment in resigned tones, then took out a handful of the berries and tossed them randomly into the air. The seeds exploded into tiny bursts of flame as they hit, startling and stinging giants, wounding and even killing a few goblins.
Fyrentennimar swerved up again slightly, as the valley started to narrow, but the friends knew he would not soar away, knew that he’d not finished the run.
A swarm of creatures huddled around the back end of the valley, hemmed in by the sheer walls and Cadderly’s biting enchantment. Their frenzy multiplied many times over as the dragon reared near them. Giants stuffed goblins through the archway. One actually passed through without being hit, to run screaming down the rocky slope on the other side. Then many giants, in sheer terror of the great dragon, jumped in themselves.
The dragon’s serpentine neck shot forward, then came the flames. Fyrentennimar’s head waved from side to side, changing the fire’s angle, immolating the whole mass of creatures.
On and on it went, interminably long for the stunned Cadderly.
Agonized cries came from creatures who were soon no more than crackling bones. All the monstrous swarm seemed to flow together in a singular bubbling mass.
“Oo,” Pikel muttered, the dwarf having a fine view of the catastrophe from his low perch. Ivan, shaking his head in disbelief, couldn’t find the words to reply.
Danica saw the panic welling in the goblin, and knew it wanted to throw the spear and run off. She locked her gaze upon it fully, forced it to stare into her eyes, almost hypnotizing in their intensity.
She had to hold the goblin’s shot a bit longer, until the anxious club wielder to her right made the first move.
Danica straightened and seemed to relax, though she kept her intimidating gaze steady. She dipped and turned suddenly, caught the club in both hands as it predictably came across, and slid down, hooking the surprised goblin’s knees with her feet and pulling the creature around her.
The goblin jerked, its eyes popping wide, and Danica, though she couldn’t see the spear sticking from the goblin’s back, knew that her timing, and her understanding of her enemies, had been perfect.
She came up in a spin, tearing the club from the dying creature’s grasp and hurling it straight back into the chest of the next charging goblin. The creature fumbled with the unexpected missile for a moment, getting it tangled with its sword, then finally tossing it aside. It managed to focus its attention on Danica just as her foot snapped into its throat.
Again Danica was spinning, leaping over the dead club wielder and tearing the spear from its back. Three running strides later, she let fly the crude weapon. The spear didn’t hit the mark exactly, but it did get tangled up in its original owner’s legs enough to drop the goblin hard to its face.
It lay on its belly for a moment, trying to shake away its dizziness.
Then Danica was upon it, and it was dead. The monk looked back to the one remaining goblin, the first of the four she’d hit. It was floundering around, half-hopping, half-crawling, as it continued to grasp at its shattered kneecap. It struggled past two of its companions, two goblins that had died grasping at daggers. Thinking to arm itself, the struggling creature ambled for the daggers, but stopped and looked up, dismayed, for Danica had gotten there first.
Vander slapped futilely against the giant’s bulk, thrashing around with all his strength, even biting the monster on the neck. But all the savagery the powerful firbolg could muster seemed puny beneath the sheer size of the hill giant.
Vander found his breathing hard to come by and wondered how long he could hold out beneath the two-ton behemoth. His estimate lessened considerably when the hill giant began to bounce, pushing off the ground with its huge hands and free-falling back on top of poor Vander.
Vander’s initial thoughts were to curl up in a ball. He realized, though, that his body couldn’t take the pounding for long, whatever he might do—the first bounce had blasted out his breath, and he could only draw small amounts of air between each subsequent slam. Every time the hill giant came crushing back down, Vander expected his rib cage to collapse.
Without even thinking of the movement, Vander used one moment of freedom to tuck his legs up near his belly. Fortune was with the firbolg, for when the hill giant came back down, its own weight drove Vander’s knees hard into its abdomen. Back up went the hill giant, fully extending its arms that it might come back with one final slam.
But up came Vander’s feet, straight out in pursuit of the monster’s belly, locking the giant up high before its fall could build momentum. The desperate firbolg strained with all his might. Leg muscles flexed and ripped, and stood out like iron cords. The giant, its girth hanging several feet off the ground, freed up one hand and punched Vander across the face, nearly knocking him senseless.
Vander accepted the blow and kept his focus on his legs. He groaned against the strain, compelling his massive legs to straighten.
The giant rose up a few more inches, but Vander knew he couldn’t hold the weight. He kicked out a final time, trying to buy himself precious heartbeats, then curled his legs and rolled, securing the butt of his sword against the ground and angling the blade straight up.
The giant’s eyes widened in horror as it flailed its arms and thrashed around for the instant of its descent, but it couldn’t get to the side, couldn’t get out of line. The sword entered it at the juncture between its belly and its chest, driving upward through the monster’s diaphragm. The hill giant planted its quivering arms firmly and broke its fall so it wouldn’t further impale itself.
Vander was free, but he didn’t roll out from under the giant right away. He grasped his blade in both arms and heaved it straight up, driving it deeper into the giant’s flesh.
The quivering arms buckled, and the giant slid down the blade, issuing a long, low groan as the tip of the sword came against its backbone and stopped its descent for a moment. Then the sword broke clear, and the behemoth lay very still, feeling no pain, feeling nothing at all.
Vander, pressed again under the enormous weight, jerked the sword a few times to make sure the monster was dead then began the task of crawling out. Danica, finished with her own work, was soon crouched beside him.
Eventually the dragon’s fire ceased, leaving the entire horde of creatures at the narrow end of the valley lying together in a bulbous, smoldering mass.
Those monsters behind the dragon could have rushed in to strike at the low-flying beast’s back, but they didn’t, for they were too terrified to even approach the deadly wyrm.
Ivan and Pikel waved weapons at them and tau
nted them, trying to draw them in.
“Aw, run off then, ye cowardly bunch!” a frustrated Ivan yelled.
A moment later, when the dragon’s talons let go of the dwarves, Ivan yelled a singular note of surprise. He and Pikel dropped fifteen feet to the ground, bounced right back to their feet, and hopped around, dazed.
Fifty feet behind them, the fleeing giants and goblins turned and stared curiously, not knowing which way to run.
“Humble priest, get you down!” Fyrentennimar roared, shaking Cadderly from his daze.
The young priest turned back to Old Fyren, wondering if his enchantment had ceased, wondering if he was about to die.
“Get you down!” Fyrentennimar cried again, and the force of his stone-splitting voice nearly knocked Cadderly from his perch.
He and Shayleigh were moving in an instant, crawling down the spiked back and tail and dropping the last few feet to the ground to stand beside Ivan and Pikel.
“Playing with dragons….” Ivan remarked sarcastically under his breath.
Shayleigh lifted her bow but had to close her eyes and look away as Fyrentennimar, wings beating fiercely, pivoted in the air, whipping the smoke and dust around. The dragon dipped into a short stoop, reared again, and fell over the remaining group of monsters, tail thrashing, spiked foreclaws slashing, great hind legs kicking, and wings beating a hurricane of wind. A swoop of the dragon’s tail sent four goblins soaring, splattering them against the valley wall with force enough to shatter most of the bones in their bodies, then the tail itself connected on the wall, opening a huge crack in the stone and leaving crimson marks where goblins had been. A giant, horrified beyond reason, lifted its club and charged.
Fyrentennimar’s jaws clamped over it, hoisting it easily into the air. Squealing like some barnyard animal at the slaughterhouse, the giant freed one arm from the side of the wyrm’s maw and slapped its pitiful club against the armored head.
Fyrentennimar bit the giant in half, its legs dropping free to the stone.
Even sturdy Ivan was shaken by the spectacle of the dragon’s wholehearted slaughter, by the mass of bubbling corpses and the flying and broken bodies of those enemies caught in close to the enraged wyrm.
“Glad he’s on our side,” Ivan said, his breathless voice barely a whisper.
Cadderly grimaced at the words, remembering again the tone Fyrentennimar had used when ordering him down. He studied the dragon’s lusty, hungry movements as Old Fyren reveled in the blood and carnage.
“Is he?” the young priest muttered under his breath.
TWELVE
CHAOS
Agiant’s broken form came flying up over the wall of the valley, landing hard and bouncing down the rocky slope past Vander and Danica.
They heard the chaos within the valley, heard the dragon’s primal roars, and the horrified screams of the doomed monsters. Neither Danica nor Vander held much pity for the goblins and giants, but they looked to each other with honest fear, simply overwhelmed by the awakening storm within those confining walls.
Danica motioned for Vander to move around to the valley entrance while she took a more direct course up the slope. Before she even got to the top, she saw monsters, and pieces of monsters, flipping into the air, tumbling around and dropping back into the frenzy. Her nerves on end, Danica couldn’t hold back a chuckle, thinking that the scene reminded her of Pikel’s work in the Edificant Library’s kitchen, the druidic-minded dwarf stubbornly, and clumsily, tossing a salad of woodland flora despite Ivan’s roaring protests.
The dragon’s tail must have hit the stone wall then, and Danica, though she was separated from the blow by forty feet of solid stone, suddenly found herself sitting down.
Cadderly slipped into the dream state, into the song of Deneir, and reached his mental perceptions out to Fyrentennimar.
A wall of red blocked his entry.
“What do you know?” Shayleigh asked, recognizing the concern, even dread, in the young priest’s expression.
Cadderly didn’t answer. Again he fell into the song, reaching out to the dragon. But Fyrentennimar’s savage rage blocked any communication.
Cadderly knew in his heart that Old Fyren would no longer consider him an ally, that in his bloodlust, the dragon had reverted to its true, wicked nature. He moved the notes of the song toward the sphere of chaos, thinking to delve there again and attempt to tame the wyrm once more.
He opened his eyes for just a moment, regarded the complete slaughter of the few remaining monsters, and sensed that no such spell could get through the outraged dragon’s instinctual defenses.
“Get back to the far end of the valley,” he said as calmly as he could to Shayleigh. “Ready your bow.”
The elf maiden eyed him gravely, considering the implications of his grim tone. “The enchantment is no more?” she asked.
“Ready your bow,” Cadderly repeated.
There wasn’t much left of the monstrous column, and Fyrentennimar would be finished in mere moments. Cadderly called up his protective magic, drew a line of dragonbane across the valley floor, and brought a magical fire shield around him and the two confused dwarves at his side.
“What are ye doing?” Ivan demanded, always suspicious of magic and especially on edge with an enraged dragon barely a hundred yards away.
“It’s a spell of the elements,” Cadderly tried to explain. “On me, it will stop the dragonfire.”
“Uh-oh,” Pikel mumbled, figuring out the implications of Cadderly’s precautions.
“On you it will diminish the fire, but not completely,” the young priest finished. “Get to the wall and find a rock to hide behind.”
The dwarves didn’t have to be asked twice. Normally, they would have remained boldly at their ally’s side, ready for battle. But it was a dragon, after all.
So Cadderly stood alone in the center of the valley, surrounded by carnage, by torn reminders of the dragon’s wrath. He stooped low and grabbed a handful of dirt from one of Fyrentennimar’s footprints then stood straight and resolute, reminding himself that he’d done as the tenets of Deneir demanded. He’d destroyed the Ghearufu.
Still, he thought of Danica, his love, and the new life they had begun in Carradoon, and he didn’t want to die.
Fyrentennimar swallowed whole the last cowering goblin and turned around. Reptilian eyes narrowed, shooting glaring beams even under the light of day. Almost immediately, those beams focused directly on Cadderly.
“Well done, mighty wyrm!” Cadderly cried out, hoping that his guess might be wrong, that the dragon might still be caught within a goodly moral code.
“Humble priest …” Fyrentennimar replied, and Cadderly thought the booming voice would surely destroy his hearing. Since he’d leveled the enchantment at the dragon, Cadderly had only heard that voice twice, both times when the dragon had suspected that enemies were about. Crouched low like a hunting dog, walking on all fours with his leathery wings tucked in tight to his back, the dragon quickly halved the hundred-yard distance to Cadderly.
“You have done us a great—” Cadderly began.
“Humble priest!” Fyrentennimar interrupted.
The song of Deneir played in Cadderly’s thoughts. He knew he would need a diversion, something physical and powerful to gain him time as he sorted through the notes of a spell he’d not yet fully come to understand.
“You have done us a great service, both in your cave and in taking us across the mountains,” Cadderly went on, hoping that he might steal some time with flattery. He remained conscious of the song as he spoke, the notes of the needed spell coming clearer with each playing. “But now, it is time for you—”
“Humble priest!”
Cadderly found no answer to the thunderous roar, the absolute indication that Fyrentennimar did not yet consider the killing to be at its end. With low growls shivering the stone beneath Cadderly’s feet, the dragon stalked in.
Those eyes! Cadderly lost his concentration, caught in their hypnotizing inte
nsity. He felt helpless, hopeless, surely doomed against that godlike creature, a terror beyond imagination. He fought for breath, struggled against the welling panic that told him to run for his life.
Fyrentennimar was close. How had Fyrentennimar gotten so damned close?
The dragon’s head slowly moved back, serpentine neck coiling. A foreclaw tucked up tight against the massive beast’s chest, while its hind legs tamped down securely on the stone.
“Get outta there!” Ivan roared from the side, recognizing that the beast was about to spring. Cadderly heard the words and agreed wholeheartedly, but couldn’t get his legs to move.
An arrow zipped above Cadderly’s head, splintering harmlessly as it struck the dragon’s impenetrable natural armor.
Intent on Cadderly the deceiver, Fyrentennimar didn’t seem to even notice.
Of all the things Cadderly of Carradoon would see in his life, nothing would come close to the sheer terror of Fyrentennimar’s ensuing spring. The dragon, so huge, shot forward with the speed of a viper, came at Cadderly with jaws opened wide enough to swallow him whole, showing rows of gleaming teeth, each as long as the young priest’s forearm.
In that heartbeat, Cadderly’s vision failed him, as though his mind simply couldn’t accept the image.
Just a dozen feet in front of him, Fyrentennimar’s expression changed. His head snapped to the side and contorted weirdly, as if he was pushing against some resilient bubble.
“Dragonbane,” Cadderly muttered, the success of his ward bringing him some small measure of hope.
Old Fyren twisted and struggled, bending the blocking line, refusing to relent. The great hind legs dug deep scratches into the stone, and the hungry jaws snapped repeatedly, looking for something tangible to tear.
Cadderly began his chant. Another arrow whipped past him, grazing Fyrentennimar’s eye.
The dragon’s wings spread wide, lifting Old Fyren upright. The dragon roared and hissed, and sucked in air.
Cadderly closed his eyes and continued to chant, locking his thoughts on the notes of Deneir’s song as flames engulfed him, scorched and melted the stone at his feet. His friends cried out, thinking him consumed, but he didn’t hear them. His protective globe sizzled green around him, thinning dangerously as though it would not endure, but Cadderly didn’t see.