The Story of Sorrel

by Joseph R. Lallo

  “I can tell you that the people of Tressor, and of the northern places, do not think this is so. No one utters your name there. Not in praise and not in fear.”

  “That proves only ignorance. Something this world has in abundance.” He shook the chain from his tail and snagged it instead with his claw. “The offerings of your people have left me wanting,” he muttered. “It is time for a proper meal.”

  He paced inside. Sorrel dashed at a near-sprint to avoid being dragged. He tipped back the much-abused statue that had become something of the official stake for her chain.

  Boviss didn’t bother offering his flame to the hanging lights above. He simply left her in the darkness, tethered to a statue she couldn’t hope to lift. She watched him go, and when she was certain he would not return, she produced the arrowhead from its hiding place and put it back to work, just as she had for each precious moment free of his gaze.

  The arrowhead was fashioned by dwarves to wound a dragon, so it was every bit strong enough to peck at the chain. But the chain was designed for a dragon as well, and it put up quite a fight. She persevered. Slow progress had rewarded her with an ever-widening gap. The first half of the link had been shaved away to nearly nothing. She’d lost track of just how long it had taken to get this far, and it was still only half the job of breaking the chain link and setting her free, but as the last few slivers of metal scraped away, she could feel her pulse quickening.

  A final scratch broke through the link. Etchings and runes that had been softly glowing since the chain had latched on to her flared suddenly brighter. In the light they cast, she saw the damaged chain link peel open. It dropped away and faded to darkness. For a brief, glorious moment she had only a short length of chain hanging from her neck, and she was free of the heavy statue that anchored her. Then the loose links of chain popped open and drew themselves together. They joined with an arcane flash. Just like that, the chain was strong as ever. All she’d managed to do was make it a link shorter.

  Sorrel trembled with fury. She spat profanities in every language she knew. A vicious throw sent the broken chain link clattering down the hallway leading back to the outside world. She screamed until her lungs ached. Silence only came when a deep breath revealed something that stirred even more potent emotions.

  She turned to the hallway and drew in another breath. The faintest breeze from the outside carried the scent of lost freedom, and now, two more familiar scents. In the near darkness, it was difficult to see what, if anything, was coming. But she didn’t need to see it. She could smell it. She could hear it. And even if those senses were denied her, she could feel it.

  Her young ones were coming.

  They scampered along with the near-silent padding of their feet that she’d spent their entire lives trying to silence further. Raw, potent emotions rushed through her as they drew nearer. She felt pride that they had come this far, fear that they might be caught if Boviss returned. There was relief, hope, and disappointment. But more than anything else, there was joy.

  When they were finally near enough that a fresh whiff of her own scent reached their noses, the twins abandoned stealth and rushed toward her.

  “Mama! Mama!” Reyna cried, bounding toward her on all fours.

  “We found you!” Wren crowed, keeping pace with his sister.

  The two young ones tackled their mother in a pair of hugs that threatened to squeeze the breath from her lungs.

  “I knew we’d find you. I knew you’d still be alive,” Wren said.

  Sorrel held them tight and murmured sweetly and soothingly into their ears until they started to calm down. When the rush of seeing their mother again had passed, she gently pulled herself from the embrace and looked upon them. In the near darkness, only the sparkle of their tearful eyes betrayed them.

  “My clever little ones,” she said softly. “You aren’t hurt, are you?”

  “No, Mama!” they said.

  “You are well-fed? You are strong? You are thinking clear and fast?”

  “Yes, Mama!”

  Sorrel nodded.

  “Good.” She gave both her twins a light bop on the back of the head. “Then why did you come to this place?!”

  “We had to rescue you, Mama,” Wren said.

  “It isn’t your job to keep me safe. It is my job to keep you safe. You should not have come here. I taught you better than that.”

  “But we waited until the dragon was gone.”

  “And we have a friend at the mouth of the cave watching for him,” Reyna said.

  “Our friend doesn’t like caves,” Wren explained.

  “How do you have a friend?” she said dubiously.

  “He’s a fairy,” Reyna said. “And we were nice to him and gave him food, and he’s nice to us in return.”

  “You are not nice to him, because you brought him to a dragon’s cave.”

  “But the dragon is gone, Mama! It was still flying away when we got to the cave,” Wren said.

  “Over the ocean. It was going far. It won’t be back anytime soon,” Reyna added.

  “It has a nose, doesn’t it? It will smell that you have been here. And there is nowhere it cannot get to. You should not have come here.”

  “But we did come here, Mama,” Wren said.

  “And if we stay or go, it will chase us just the same,” Reyna said.

  “So we might as well save you,” Wren said.

  Sorrel smirked. “Clever little ones. Fine. You have until we get a whiff of the dragon. Then, whether I am free or not, you go. You find a place to hide and you—”

  “We won’t need it, Mama!” Wren said. “You have a chain on you. Is that all?” He started to haul the chain through his paws, searching for its end.

  “Is there a key?” Reyna asked.

  “Can we break it?” Wren added.

  “It is magic. No key, and if you break it, it fixes itself.”

  Wren reached the end of the chain and gazed up at the statue just barely discernible in its dim glow. “This is big…”

  He tugged at the chain. Reyna joined him. Sorrel, though she knew all too well they wouldn’t have a chance of budging it, hauled at the chain as well.

  “What do we do? Reyna, it’s your turn!” Wren said. “I found her like I said I would. Now you have to figure out how to get her free.”

  “I thought I was going to be figuring out how to defeat a dragon, not free Mama from chains.”

  “Enough!” Sorrel snapped. “Arguing doesn’t help anything. I’ll tell you what we need to do…”

  “We need to break the statue!” Reyna said.

  “We can’t break the statue. Look how big it is!” Wren said.

  “No, your sister is right. Other places, we could not, but there is much magic here. Many magic things. I cannot get them, because of the chain. But you can. Go! That way. Find things for breaking stone. This is a dwarf place. There will be things for breaking stone. And there will be tunnels too small for a dragon. Find one. A deep one. We’ll need somewhere to hide because we’ll never get far enough away to escape him before he returns.”

  “Yes, Mama!”

  Chapter 11

  The twins rushed through the darkness. Everything about this place was spine-tingling. Though they could barely see, the scope of the lair was still evident in the echo of their motions and the airy breaths of wind. It was as though the lair was its own little world, cut off from the outside. Every inch of the place was saturated with the scent of the dragon. Tracking Boviss was the first time they’d ever sampled such a scent, but a deep, instinctive fear shook them with every breath of his aroma. For such sensitive noses trained for survival, the smell was a treatise on things that they should avoid. He was ancient. He was enormous. He was well-fed. And this was his home.

  It might have been more of a battle than they could bear, silencing the wise voices of antiquity who screamed at them to run from this place, but for two very important things. First, if they ran now, there was no telling what would
happen to their mother. Second, the hallways surrounding them were filled with wonders enough to distract even the most terrified mind with their splendor.

  “Look at this one,” Wren breathed, dragging a silver-headed hammer out of a mound of equipment. It was all he could do to heft it from the ground.

  “You need to be able to swing it, Wren,” Reyna snapped. She raised her nose and sniffed the air.

  “I could swing it once or twice. A hammer this big, I bet it could turn that statue to pebbles in two blows.”

  Reyna scrabbled up on a pile and sniffed again. “There’s something this way, I’m sure of it.”

  “Here!” Wren said.

  He pulled a fierce-looking weapon from the mound. If it were a bit cruder, one might have called it a pick ax. But like so many other things here, it was covered with spiderweb-thin etchings. Dust layered it, but a quick swipe of his thumb revealed a gleaming polished finish. And while one end of it had the blunt shape of something meant to cleave stone, the other side was a spike that could pierce through the heaviest of shields.

  The weapon-cum-tool was still a bit heavy for Wren, but with a bit of teetering and balancing, he found he could wield it quite ably. A single blow to the wall fractured it.

  “That’ll do it, I’m sure of it!” Reyna said. “Go back to Mama and get to work.”

  “You aren’t coming?”

  “I’ve got to find a way out of here.”

  He nodded and bounded away as quickly as the heavy tool would allow. Reyna continued to stalk through the towering hallway. It was a bit of a trick she’d learned from Wren on the way to this place, but she had a feeling if she headed away from the smell of fresh, clean wind, she should find a place that led deeper into the mountain.

  She moved with agonizing slowness, sampling the air a dozen times with each step. Just a hint of dankness. Just a dash of mustiness. And then something else… char.

  Reyna crept toward the smell. This was the lair of a dragon. She would have imagined that char would be everywhere. Such hadn’t been the case. True, there was no shortage of acrid, roasted scents. But a good long burn in a single place had a distinct aroma that was lacking everywhere else but in this corner of the hallway.

  She found the source, a stretch of wall seared black, so baked by flame that the carvings had bubbled and crackled. The damaged patch of wall peeked out from behind a huge pile of twisted, gnarled armor. Each piece was small enough to move, but the pile as a whole was enormous.

  “The dragon did this,” Reyna murmured. “He tried to burn this wall, and then he tried to bury it. And I smell something else. Something behind it. There is a way out. There must be.”

  She rubbed her paws together and scrambled to the top of the pile to start throwing bits of armor aside.

  #

  Sorrel sat with her eyes shut. A malthrope lived and died by its senses. There were few races walking the world who had been more thoroughly gifted in terms of sight, sound, and smell. Unfortunately, there were always limits. Somewhere, Boviss was out there. Perhaps he was half an ocean away, hauling up a squirming leviathan, something fit to feed so massive a predator. But he might be just a few miles away, soaring back to find Sorrel and her children and char them to cinders. Every moment of warning was precious, so she did what she’d done a thousand times before. She shut out every sense but the one she used. She poured as much of her mind and soul as she could into wringing just that much more out of what her ears told her. It was as near to magic as she ever came.

  She heard her little ones. The staggered padding of her boy toting something heavy. The rattling and rummaging of her girl. She could hear the flick of fairy wings. Wind curled about the peaks of the mountains outside. Far, far away she could hear the rustle of leaves. And farther still, not just at the edge of hearing, but at the edge of what she imagined she could hear, the leathery whistle of titanic wings tearing through the air. It simply wasn’t possible that she truly heard Boviss, but all the same, she knew she was right.

  “He’s coming…” she murmured.

  Wren skidded to a stop beside the mound of gold, pick in paw.

  “We don’t have much time,” she said.

  “Leave it to me, Mama,” Wren said.

  She gathered up the slack on her chain and tugged at it. Wren raised the pick and brought it down. The blunt head turned a fist-size piece of the towering statue into powder. Again and again he attacked the base of the statue. The dwarves truly knew how to make a tool. The statue crumbled as easily as a block of ice, but Boviss had taken care to set the chain deep beneath.

  For a few minutes, Sorrel and Wren took turns tugging the slack out of the chain and swinging the pick. The base of the statue was nibbled away, turned bit by bit into powder and gravel. Soon the once grand statue was standing on a precariously thin base, but it had yet to free the chain.

  Both mother and son were terribly winded from the effort, and though it probably wouldn’t take more than another session or two from each of them to whittle the base of the statue away to nothing, it was clear that getting close enough to deliver the final few blows was a good way to end up crushed should it choose that moment to collapse.

  Wren huffed and puffed, then gazed up.

  “What are you thinking…” Sorrel asked uneasily.

  “Be ready to run, Mama. I think this will work.”

  Before she could stop him, Wren shouldered the pick and scampered up along the body of the battered statue. The great figure had one hand held aloft, and the other supported a massive stone shield. The artists must have worked for ages to ensure that the weight of one balanced the other, and their work showed in the fact that the base had been chipped to barely a third of its original size and the statue had yet to tip. But Wren was going to change that. He dropped down from the head onto the outstretched arm, then slid down to the shoulder.

  “Wren, you be careful!” Sorrel shouted.

  “Just be ready to run!” Wren called back.

  He put the pick to work. Chips of stone rained down. Sorrel stretched the chain to its limit and watched through half-squinted eyes. She didn’t have to watch for long. After a dozen blows, the triumphantly raised arm split away. It landed with an ear-splitting smash. Without it to act as a counterbalance, the statue started to tip. Wren tipped along with it.

  Sorrel’s eyes widened. In the dimness of the cave it was difficult to see precisely where the motion of the tipping statue was taking it. The chain slipped free suddenly. Sorrel fell backward and scrambled away.

  “Wren!” she cried.

  She swept her eyes desperately over the teetering form, but she couldn’t see if Wren had jumped free. When it finally landed, the statue came down directly atop the dragon’s bed of gold. Perhaps it was something in the statue itself, or perhaps it was something hidden within the mound, but as the mass of stone struck, light lanced up from the hoard and curled through the air. It illuminated a wave of glittering nuggets. They splashed into the air and caught the light from the awakening chandeliers overhead. For a few moments the whole of the cave suffered an extravagant golden hailstorm.

  Sorrel scrambled to her feet and rushed the mound, flinching as walnut-sized lumps of gold thunked down on either side.

  “Wren, you answer me right now, or you never get another story again!” she hissed.

  She sniffed her way across the mound. It took her a few heart-stopping moments to find the proper place to dig, but when she did, she drove her arm down into the gold and found the wrist of her boy. She tugged and dug until his head surfaced. He took a deep breath and shook some jewels from his hair.

  “Did I do it?” he asked.

  Sorrel hugged his head to her chest. “What you did was a foolish thing that almost killed both of us,” she raved, rocking him back and forth. “But you didn’t kill us, and I’m free. So good boy.”

  “Mama! Wren!” Reyna called, sprinting out of the hallway. “What happened? Is everyone all right?”

  Wren climbed
out of the mound of gold and dusted a fortune off his shoulders.

  “We are not hurt,” Sorrel said. “Did you find a hiding place?”

  “I found a door, but it’s shut tight.”

  Wren tugged the pick out of the hoard. “Not for long,” he said.

  Sorrel looked to the hallway behind. She shuddered. “Boviss is close. I can feel it.” She looked down at the mound of gold she was standing on. “Quickly. Fill your pockets.”

  “Mama, if the dragon is coming, shouldn’t we run?” Wren said.

  “Gold won’t do us any good if we’re dead,” Reyna said.

  “Yes. These are very wise things to say. Fill your pockets anyway. This dragon will know that the gold is missing, and it will make him mad.” Her eyes flashed with petty vengeance. “Some creatures deserve to be mad.”

  The twins nodded and filled their pockets to bulging. Sorrel stuffed as much as she could into the meager outfit she wore. Then she scooped up the slack of the chain and coiled it to make it easier to tote along with her. She nodded to them.

  “Lead the way,” she urged.

  #

  The trio rushed toward the blackened stretch of wall. Along the way, they’d been harvesting some choice bits of equipment. They’d acquired quite a tidy haul of valuables. Sorrel topped off her outfit with a dwarf-made cloak and bag. The twins found some light armor. Sorrel and Reyna each picked up a well-made sword, and Wren kept his pick.

  They reached the pile of twisted armor Reyna had been working at. While Wren and Sorrel had been chipping away at the statue, Reyna had cleared away most of the pile and unearthed a sturdy door.

  The surrounding wall and floor had been blasted so intensely with dragon fire that it was little more than crackled black glass. The door, its hinges, and the doorjamb around it had survived with little more than a coating of soot.

  “I don’t know if it is magic, or if the dwarves are just really good at building doors,” Reyna said. “But smell. There’s definitely a passage back there, one that hasn’t been opened in ages. And if he attacked the door, the dwarves must have gone through it. And if the door is still here, it means he couldn’t get them after.”