And whoever it was had caught her completely by surprise, something else Dranth had believed impossible.
So if invulnerable Evil could be so stripped of life, so torn, snuffed without so much as a skirmish, it was clear to Dranth that he had lived his entire life underestimating just how powerful his enemies, and those of the guild, could be.
He was still shaking now, a month later. He had slipped into the desert when the moon was new, and in the devouring darkness of the wilderness buried Esten’s remains beneath the sandy red clay, blinded by the blackness of the night and his tears. Dranth did not wish to remember where her grave had been, because there were so many who would seek to steal its contents, to mock her in death as they never had dreamed of doing in life, putting her skull on display in some ignominious place like a tavern, a brothel, or a privy.
As she herself had done to innumerable opponents.
He had burned the leather crate, the table, and everything it had touched.
Dranth glanced up from staring at the new table board. In the dim light of the guildhall three score or more of thieves stood, clinging to the shadows, waiting for instructions.
When his voice was able to be forced into his mouth, it was soft, harsh, deadly.
“It was to the court of the Bolg king that the guildmistress went, seeking revenge for an old wrong,” he said, his eyes glinting black in the fireshadows that roared on the hearth behind him. “It was from the court of the Bolg king that the package containing—that the package was delivered.
“Esten built this guild with the labor of her hands, with her very blood. Any that would dare to spill that blood must answer to the guild.”
A quiet chorus of voices rose, murmuring assent, then fell into silence once more.
“The Bolg king has earned our undying enmity, and he shall have it visited upon him. But anyone with the strength to fell Esten will not be vulnerable to traditional attack, not even the kind of murder we practice in the shadows.” He lapsed into silence as well.
“What, then, Dranth?” one of the journeymen asked.
Dranth stared into the fire. He watched the flames flicker against the soot that stained the bricks of the back of the hearth, letting his mind wander with them. Finally he turned back to the guild.
“We will stand ready to aid his enemies,” he said simply. “Before her death, the guildmistress sent back meticulous plans, maps of his inner realm, details of his stockpiles, armaments, treasury, manpower. This information will be invaluable to anyone who seeks to bring him down, and has the army to do it.”
He tossed the crystal glass into the fireplace.
“There are any number of such men out there,” the guild scion said. “But I think I will make inquiries first in Sorbold. It lies on his southwestern border, and has a new regent. I hear he was once a guild hierarch himself.” Dranth’s eyes glittered. “And as the mistress always said, a guildsman knows the value of the goods; it is merely a matter of making him feel an overwhelming need to have them, whether he needs them or not.
“So we will make them available at a price he cannot resist.”
The gargantuan doors of the ice castle were frozen over almost beyond recognition.
The dragon stared at the entranceway, her body beginning to slow from the loss of heat. Snow now caked her mammoth claws, packed between the phalanges of what had once been her fingers, hardening with each painful step. Her eyelids stung from the crust that had formed on them, her skin peeling under the weight of the ice on her scales.
The life that she had felt returning to her after so long in the grave was ebbing now.
Open, she whispered, please open.
Her dragon sense, fading along with her life force, felt a stirring in the doors, as if the very steel of them had recognized something in her, but was too weak, or too unwilling, to respond.
Deep within her, in the part where her will remained, steely and haughty, the refusal rankled.
The dragon’s ire at the rebuff sparked, then roared like a hedgefire through her.
“Open,” she said, louder now, her voice stronger. It issued forth from her mind and her sinuses, rather than her throat—wyrms are absent vocal cords, and thereby must manipulate the element of air to be able to speak as men do—in a tone that could be heard above the howling of the autumn wind.
Before her the gigantic slabs of ice seemed to soften slightly. The crack between them shuddered; the doors trembled, but remained closed.
The beast trembled, too, but with rage. Fury, full-blown and allencompassing, heated her blood, and her anger radiated out from her, causing loose snow on the distant crags to crumble and fall into the crevasses below.
“Open!” she howled, the winds shrieking with the sound of her words. “I command it!”
The ice that had glazed the doors for three years undisturbed cracked and began to slide down in great rolling sheets, avalanches of snowy shards falling onto the frozen stones of the courtyard. The dragon, her searing blue eyes burning hot in frenzy, inhaled, then loosed her wrath in her breath.
The blast of acidic fire from the brimstone in her belly almost blinded her with the intensity of its light.
The wave of boiling breath blasted the frozen doors, melting the ice completely, along with the snow that caked the walls around them. Rivers of liquid steam rushed like waterfalls down them, even as the ice underneath sublimated into the air in the beat of a three-chambered heart, revealing sheets of towering steel.
Slowly the palace doors swung open.
The beast watched, panting, triumphant, as the vast, cold inner chamber of the palace was revealed. I may not have reclaimed my memories yet, she thought, watching the melted ice refreeze in rivers of gleaming glaze, but I recall that this is mine. And all that is mine will bow before me.
Ignoring the pain in her limbs, she crawled forward, dragging her stinging body through the vast doorway and onto the cold stone floor beyond.
The great doors swung shut silently.
The cavernous halls echoed with the sound of metal on stone as the beast pulled herself across the floor of the towering center hall, scraping her claws on the granite as she moved.
Before her in the central hall was a massive fireplace, black with long-cold soot. The vault of the ceiling towered above, not far from where her head would reach should she rise to her fullest height. Behind her, tall windows thickly glazed with ice allowed muted light to enter.
Her dragon sense, as innate a sensory tool as her sight, hearing, or touch, rose from within her, dormant from the cold, as if it were thawing gradually. She was distantly, then more acutely, aware of the contents of the castle—its three towers, the winding stairs, the deep basements filled with stores, frozen now that the fires of the enormous hearths had been extinguished for years. She turned slowly, absorbing the information, as if through her skin, from the air around her.
There were very few memories here; she had lived alone, from what she could glean, within these frigid walls, these empty rooms. She could tell that there were chambers above and below that she would never be able to see again because of her massive size; the doorways to all but the largest common rooms of the ground floor would deny her access. Still, at least there was shelter here from the endless cold of the pale mountains.
A powerful hum drew her attention; she turned her massive head away from the empty hearth in the direction of the tall window. Before it stood an altar, simple, of heavy, carved wood; atop of it lay a tarnished spyglass.
The dragon closed her sore eyes.
Even blind, she could still see the instrument, power radiating from it in the darkness behind her eyelids. All of her focus was drawn inexorably toward it; the vibrations rippled over her skin, thrumming with the rhythm of her blood.
Remember, she thought desperately. What is it?
She opened her eyes again and made her way across the cold stone floor to the altar, then stared intently down at the spyglass.
In her mind images
swirled willy-nilly, scenes of ferocious battle, desperate suffering, struggles, triumphs, events of world-shaking import and the tiniest significance, all vying for her attention. The dragon’s mind burned with the intensity of it; bewildered, she slithered back away from the altar, closing her mind as if in defense.
Pain, hollow and clutching, twisted inside her, even more than the constant ache of her broken body. It gripped strongly enough to make her weak; her head sagged rapidly toward the ground, leaving her dizzy, until she righted it.
Then, amid all the confusion, she heard a voice ring clear in her scrambled memory, like a bell tolling through a storm at sea; it was that of a woman speaking clearly, as if pronouncing a sentence.
I rename you the Past. Your actions are out of balance. Henceforth your tongue will only serve to speak of the realm into which your eyes alone were given entry. That which is the domain of your sisters, the Present and the Future, you will be unable to utter. No one shall seek you out for any other reason, so may you choose to convey your knowledge better this time, lest you be forgotten altogether.
The great beast shuddered.
She thought for a moment about slapping the spyglass from the altar, shattering it, crushing it beneath her weight, or hurling it from the castle battlements into the crevasse below, but the thought brought her pain, physical pain, as if her mind were being stabbed with the icepick thought. In the limited scope of what she knew, she was certain that the instrument was older than she, ancient, from a realm that was no more, a place the winds could no longer find, that Time had all but forgotten. She also felt sure that it was tied to her in some way, some deeply significant, almost holy way.
I rename you the Past.
The spyglass glimmered in the fading light.
It sees the Past, the dragon thought, and with the thought came new certainty, as if it had unlocked doors in her mind to small, hidden places previously inaccessible. It sees the Past.
It can see me.
With the realization came a surge of power, of revitalization. The beast, still lost in her own life, was no longer invisible to the eyes of Time, no longer alone in the vast white of the endless mountains. Somewhere in the Past her memories were hiding, waiting for her to find them.
And the glass could see them.
The pain in her belly grew stronger, followed again by the weakness. Hunger, the dragon thought. This is what hunger feels like.
She moved to the icy window but could see nothing beyond the frozen panes. Innate survival mechanisms began to burn within her, her dragon sense making note of everything that might possibly be considered sustenance within the range of her senses, about five miles.
Minutiae became mammoth; the tiniest crumb of grain was suddenly as clear to her as the sun. She knew instantly that there was food to ease human hunger in the subterranean vaults of the castle, but that to get to it would require the breaking down of walls and strength she did not, in her weakened state, possess. Her mind turned outward, scanning the hillsides and the crevasses.
An eagle was passing a mile and a third away, flying southeast at thirty-two—no, thirty-one—knots. Farther out a flock of ptarmigans was scattering to the wind. The dragon discarded the thought. She did not know if she was capable of flight yet; one of her wings ached with an infuriating stiffness and hung off-kilter, likely a result of whatever wound had scarred it so deeply. She would have to seek food on the ground for the time being. She concentrated harder.
A glacial stream ran through her lands, she realized, the water silver-gray and cold, having been ancient blue ice a moment before it turned to runoff and slipped, laughing, down the frozen hillsides. She might find food there, she thought, but discarded the notion a moment later. Winter was coming; the great red and silver fish had come and spawned, laid their eggs and died, having completed what life expected of them. There would be nothing to ease her hunger in the gray water now.
Then, tickling the very edges of her consciousness, she felt something else.
Near the river’s edge, tucked away beneath a wide, sheltering ridge, was a small hunting camp.
Men. Humans, from the smell that the dragon sense inspired in her nostrils.
At first the thought repulsed her. She was, or at least had been, a being like them once herself, a woman, though not human—her blood was much older than that, she suspected. Dimly she recalled words spoken to her by another dragon, a beast she believed might have been related to her; her mother, perhaps. Hate, bitter and foul-tasting, came to her mouth at the memory.
If they are encroaching on your lands, why do you not just eat them? she heard herself saying in the voice of a child.
Eat them? Do not be ridiculous, the wyrm had said. They are men. One does not eat men, no matter how much they may deserve it.
Why not?
Because that would be barbaric. Men are alleged to be sentient, though I admit I have not seen evidence of that. One does not eat sentient beings. No, my child, I limit myself to stags, sheep, and tirabouri. They digest well, and carry none of the guilt that men would in the stomach.
I know no guilt, thought the dragon bitterly. Only hunger.
She allowed her dragon sense to explore further, to wander closer to the hunting camp, where the snow had walled the huts inside the ridge, forming a frosty barrier between the humans and the river. They had dug a pathway—four feet, three and three-quarters inches wide, seven feet, four and five-eighths inches high, her dragon sense noted—between the camp and the river. In her mind’s eye she could see the footsteps that had tramped to the water’s edge, and the skids where the buckets had been hauled back.
With the rising hunger and the expansion of her dragon sense, the wyrm’s eyes narrowed in thought.
I have no such qualms about men, she ruminated. They are a large source of meat, warm of blood and thin of skin. I imagine they roast nicely, and will keep well.
And I am famished.
The decision was an easy one.
Open, she commanded the doors of the castle in a voice that rang with bloody intent. They slammed open in response; the icy wind blew in, swirling angrily through the cavernous hall.
Spurred by hunger, and the desire to vent her pain in destruction, the beast slithered out through the doors into the dusk, over the battlements, and down into the crevasse, where she disappeared into the earth beneath the snow.
7
The Rampage of the Wyrm was an epic poem penned in the Cymrian era, inscribed on an illuminated scroll and found, after centuries uncounted, hidden deep in the vaults of the library of Canrif by Achmed, who presented it, with wry amusement, to Rhapsody just before she undertook a long journey with Ashe to find the dragon Elynsynos. The Bolg king had sat smugly, scarcely able to contain his glee, watching her expressive face as she read the tale, which told of the murderous exploits of the dragon she was about to seek.
Elynsynos, the wyrm for whom the continent was named, was older than Time, the manuscript said. It related in breathless detail the story of the primordial dragon, said to be between one and five hundred feet long, with a mouthful of teeth the size and sharpness of finely honed bastard swords. As dragons possess some of each of the five elemental lores, she was able to assume the form of any force of nature, such as a tornado, a flood, or a blazing forest fire, the manuscript said. She was wicked and cruel, and when her lover and the father of her three daughters, the sailor Merithyn the Explorer, did not return to her as he promised, she went into a wild fury and rampaged through the western continent, burning it with her caustic breath and decimating the lands up to the central province of Bethany, where her fire sparked the eternal flame which burned to that day, in Vrackna, the basilica consecrated to the element of fire.
Rhapsody was quick to point out to the gloating Bolg king that the account was mostly nonsense, which was evident to her without even meeting the dragon. As a Namer she was familiar with folklore as well as lore, the first told by untrained storytellers and woven over time into tales
that tended to be filled with falsehoods and exaggerations, as opposed to the latter, which was as pure as possible, related by those trained to keep the history accurate.
Even so, the descriptions in the tale carried enough possible truth to make her nervous.
Sometime later, when she finally did meet the wyrm in her lair, Elynsynos quickly debunked the manuscript and its false account of history.
You’ve been reading that tripe, The Rampage of the Wyrm, haven’t you?
Yes.
It’s nonsense. I should have eaten the scribe who penned it alive. When Merithyn died I thought about torching the continent, but surely you must be able to tell that I didn’t. Believe me, if I were to rampage, the continent would be nothing but one very large, very black bed of coal, and it would be smoldering to this day.
The continent and its people, for all their fear of the dragon legends, for all the tremulous whining in the manuscripts that recounted their history, had never in fact seen the immolation the tales told of, had never lost more than a stray sheep to the beasts, and certainly had never experienced a true rampage.
And therefore were totally unprepared.
The men of the Anwaer village in the midlands of the Hintervold were a quiet lot.
Unlike the seasonal nomads who spent the summer culling fish from the area’s fertile streams and trapping fur-bearing animals, then relocating to the southern part of the realm when autumn came, the families of Anwaer braved the bone-chilling cold and the towering snowfall to stay together in their ancestral lands. They were all related in some manner, and found the beauty of the isolated tundra, the verdant forests of spiraling spruce, and the silence that reigned unchallenged by any but the mountain winds to be reason enough to endure the harsh winter in the place their families had called home for generations.
So when the autumn came, and the nearby villages thinned out, Anwaer ended its season of transport of skins and fishing and prepared to hunt.
Usually the hunting time lasted only a few weeks, less than one turn of the moon. With the heat of the summer fading and the merciless swarms of blood-sucking insects dispersed by the approaching cold, the game animals of the Hintervold would come out from their summer hiding places, down from the summits of the white crags and into more sheltered areas, seeking vegetation or prey, and a more hospitable clime for the coming winter.