The wizards whirled around, right in the face of a sudden burst of intertwined multicolored beams of shimmering light.
Fisticus threw his arm up before his eyes while the wizard to his left was bathed in blue. That unfortunate man, blinded by the brilliance of Zhengyi’s spell, tried to scream, but his skin hardened to stone, and he froze in place with his mouth agape.
Purple light engulfed Fisticus and he was gone, just gone, removed from the Prime Material Plane and launched randomly through the multiverse, though at least his abrupt departure allowed him to avoid the blast of lightning that jolted and seared the man to his right. The bolt arced through where Fisticus had been standing and crackled against the wizard statue across the way. The solid rock he had become exploded under the pressure of the lightning, sending finger pebbles and elbow rocks flying.
And a second hue washed over the wizard who had borne the initial shock of the lightning strike. Already down and near death, he mustered all of his remaining energy for one final shriek of agony as a red glow washed over him and he erupted in flames. He couldn’t even manage to roll on the floor, however, so he just lay there burning.
Zhengyi gave a raspy sigh and shook his head.
“Appreciation, dear Urshula?” he whispered as he turned his attention back to the dragon and the larger fight, to find that his intrusion had not gone unnoticed.
“The Witch-King!” one man yelled.
At the dragon’s side, Sir Donegan grimaced at the thought that such a foe had come against them at so desperate a time. He could only pray that his soldier was wrong and could only hope that they could be done with the beast quickly.
“Fisticus, finish it!” he yelled as he struck his great sword again against the dragon’s flank.
He managed a roll as he completed the strike to gain a view of the wizards-or of what remained of them. Donegan took note of a shadowy figure against the stone, but he couldn’t pause long enough to consider it at any length.
“Fight on, my warriors! The wyrm is failing!” he cried, rallying his troops and throwing himself with abandon against the great beast.
Urshula heard that claim, and couldn’t rightly dismiss it. The wizards’ strikes had wounded him badly, and he could feel the tip of a lance rattling around beneath his scaly armor, tearing up his insides.
“Zhengyi? My ally?” Urshula grumbled in the course of his continuing growl, and he was glad indeed to see one of the wizards smoldering on the floor, and the remaining piece of a second standing as stone, blasted to nothingness from the waist up.
But where was Zhengyi?
A sting in Urshula’s side brought him from his contemplation and reminded him of his immediate concerns. He thrashed and stomped a man flat with his hind leg then battered down with his wing, knocking aside several others. His tail whipped out the other way, driving back yet another group of the stubborn warriors.
Zhengyi watched patiently from within a crack in the stone, the material components for several spells ready in hand. He silently applauded Urshula’s ferocity as the dragon scooped up a man in his jaws and crunched him flat. Then the dragon snapped his head and let fly the human missile, bowling several men over.
In that instant, Zhengyi thought the dragon might prevail.
But Urshula lurched to the side, and Zhengyi spied the great knight who had struck the devastating blow. Urshula tried to turn at the man, too, but a second warrior, the same female scout Zhengyi had first seen enter the dragon’s lair, had cunningly made her way to the dragon’s back and up his neck. When the distracted wyrm focused on the knight, she drove a slender sword under the back of the dragon’s skull.
Zhengyi shook his head and produced the dragon skull phylactery.
“Witch-King!” Urshula bellowed in a great voice that echoed through the chamber.
Then the wyrm reminded Zhengyi and all of the others exactly why dragons were so rightly feared. Urshula leaped up, snapping his head back, forward, then down. The motion flipped the female warrior right over the crown of the dragon’s head spikes so violently that she could never have held on. The fall from twenty feet to the stone might have killed her, but the dragon never let it get that far. Biting out, his maw covered her so that her head, feet, and one flailing arm fell free from her body.
And through all of that, the dragon continued his leap and mid air roll. Urshula’s size became his primary weapon as he crashed down atop the bulk of the remaining force, crushing them under his great weight.
Zhengyi grimaced as the black dragon’s eyes tightened in pain, for that crushing attack forced weapons and ridges of armor through the dragon’s scales, injuring him badly as he crushed and thrashed the life from many of his enemies.
But not from the resourceful and valiant knight with the huge sword, Zhengyi saw, as that man danced out from under the tumbling wyrm and spun, slashing hard at the dragon’s flailing foreleg then moving past the limb to stab hard at the beast’s torso.
He tried to, at least, before an invisible force grabbed at the knight, the hand of telekinesis. As he leaped at the wyrm, he rose up over the beast and kept climbing into the air.
Zhengyi, quite pleased with himself, kept the man climbing.
Sir Donegan whipped around with great ferocity, trying to break free of the magical grasp. Rage gripped him as surely as the dragon’s spell as he saw again and again that image of the great wyrm biting Maryin apart. He went up twenty feet, fifty feet, and more, helpless as the dragon continued to slaughter his warriors, many of whom stared up at their flying leader, mouths hanging open, hope flying from their widened eyes.
Donegan slashed his great sword, as if trying to cut through some physical hand, but there was nothing to hit.
The knight turned his attention to the ceiling, which he fast approached. He braced himself for the impact, but never quite got there.
The invisible force let him go.
Screaming and cursing as he dropped, Sir Donegan refused to accept his fate. His startled cry became a roar of defiance, and he twisted himself around, lining his sword up with the head of the dragon, who did not see him coming.
Donegan’s blade drove in against the beast’s skull, cracking through the bone. Donegan held on until he, too, smashed into the wyrm, head first. His helmet jolted down, cracking his collarbone at either side. His neck compacted so forcefully that his spine turned to powder. He crunched into place and held for a moment, twisted over backward.
Then he rolled away, off the wyrm, whose great head was held suspended in the air, Donegan’s sword quivering in place like a third horn.
“Witch-King?” Urshula bellowed again, in a voice bubbling with blood. He peered at the wall where the wizards had been felled, and red filled his vision. “Witch-King!”
And Zhengyi answered him, not physically, but telepathically. Urshula spied a dark tunnel before him, and at its end, in bright light, stood the lich, holding the small dragon skull phylactery. Urshula instinctively resisted the pull of it. But there, in Zhengyi’s outstretched hand, was the promise of life, where otherwise there was only death. In that moment of terror, the blackness of oblivion looming, the wyrm surrendered to Zhengyi.
Urshula’s spirit flew from his dying body and rushed down the tunnel into the dragon skull gem.
Zhengyi marveled at his prize, for the skull glowed bright, seething with the spirit energy of the trapped dragon soul, the newborn dracolich Urshula.
Zhengyi’s newfound ally.
The Witch-King lowered the gem and considered the scene. He had timed his intervention perfectly, for only a couple of the warriors remained alive, and they lay helpless, squirming, groaning, and bleeding on the floor.
Zhengyi didn’t offer them the courtesy of a quick death. He cast another spell and magically departed with his prize taken and his victory complete, leaving them to their slow, painful deaths.
“You thought you had won those months ago when you defeated the force that had slipped behind you into Vaasa,” Byphast sco
lded Zhengyi on a cold Damaran winter morning.
“I won the day, indeed,” the Witch-King replied, and he looked up from the great tome on his desk to regard the dragon in elf form.
“My kin are fleeing you,” Byphast went on. “Lord Dragonsbane is a foe we will not face again. The allies arrayed against you are more formidable than you believed.”
“But they are mortal,” Zhengyi corrected. “And soon enough they will grow feeble with age and will wither and die.”
“You believed your kingdom secured,” the dragon countered.
Zhengyi had to refrain from laughing at her, so shaken did she seem by his calm demeanor. For her observations were correct; it was indeed all crumbling around him, and he knew that well. Gareth Dragonsbane could quite possibly win the day in Damara, and in that event the paladin would, at the very least, drive Zhengyi into hiding in a dark hole in Vaasa.
“It amuses me to see a dragon so fretful and obsessed with the near future,” he replied to her.
“Your plan will fail!”
“My plan will sleep. Cannot a dragon, a creature who might raze a town and retire comfortably in her lair for a century or more, understand the concept of patience? You disappoint me, Byphast. Do you not understand that while our enemies are mortal, I am not? And neither are you,” he reminded her, nodding to the shelf beside his desk where several gemstone dragon skulls sat waiting for the spirits of their attuned wyrms.
“My power comes not from my physical form,” the Witch-King continued, “but from the blackness that resides in the hearts of all men.”
He slipped his hands under the covers of the great tome and lifted it just a bit, just enough for Byphast to note the black binding engraved with brands of dragons-rearing dragons, sitting dragons, sleeping dragons, fighting dragons. Zhengyi eased the book back down, reached into his belt pouch, and produced a glowing dragon skull gem.
“Urshula the black,” Byphast remarked.
Zhengyi placed the skull against the center of the opened tome and whispered a few arcane words as he pressed down upon it.
The skull sank into the pages, disappearing within the depths of the tome.
Byphast sucked in her breath and stared hard at the Witch-King.
“If I do not win now, I win later,” Zhengyi explained. “With my allies beside me. Some foolish human, elf, or other mortal creature will find this tome and will seek the power contained within. In so doing he will unleash Urshula in his greater form.”
Zhengyi paused and glanced behind him, drawing Byphast’s gaze to a huge bookcase full of similar books.
“His greed, his frailty, his secret desire-nay, desperation-to grasp this great treasure that only I can offer him, will perpetuate my grand schemes, whatever the outcome of the coming battles on the fields of Damara.”
“So confident.…” Byphast said with a shake of her head and a smile that came from pity.
“Do you seek to sever your bond with the phylactery?” Zhengyi asked. “Do you wish to abandon this gift of immortality that I have offered you?”
Byphast’s smile withered.
“I thought not,” said Zhengyi. He closed the great book and lifted it into place on the shelf behind him. “My power is as eternal as a reasoning being’s fear of death, Byphast. Thus, I am eternal.” He glanced back at the newly finished tome. “Urshula was defeated in his lair, slain by the knights of the Bloodstone Army. But that only made him stronger, as King Gareth, or his descendants, will one day learn.”
Byphast stood very still for some time, soaking it all in. “I will not continue the fight,” she decided. “I will return to the Great Glacier and my distant home.”
Zhengyi shrugged as if it did not matter-and at that time, it really did not.
“But you will not sever your bond with the phylactery,” he noted.
Byphast stiffened and squared her jaw. “I will live another thousand years,” she declared.
But Zhengyi only smiled and said, “So be it. I am patient.”
Bones and Stones
The Year of the Tankard (1370 DR)
An uneasiness accompanied Thibbledorf Pwent out of Mithral Hall that late afternoon. With the hordes of King Obould pressing so closely on the west and north, Bruenor had declared that none could venture out to those reaches. Pragmatism and simple wisdom surely seemed to side with Bruenor.
It wasn’t often that the battlerager, an officer of Bruenor’s court, went against the edicts of his beloved King Bruenor. But this was an extraordinary circumstance, Pwent had told himself-though in language less filled with multi-syllable words: “Needs gettin’ done.”
Still, there remained the weight of going against his beloved king, and the cognitive dissonance of that pressed on him. As if reflecting his pall, the gray sky hung low, thick, and ominous, promising rain.
Rain that would fall upon Gendray Hardhatter, and so every drop would ping painfully against Thibbledorf Pwent’s heart.
It wasn’t that Gendray had been killed in battle-oh no, not that! Such a fate was accepted, even expected by every member of the ferocious Gutbuster Brigade as willingly as it was by their leader, Thibbledorf Pwent. When Gendray had joined only a few short months before, Pwent had told his father, Honcklebart, a dear friend of many decades, that he most certainly could not guarantee the safety of Gendray.
“But me heart’s knowin’ that he’ll die for a good reason,” Honcklebart had said to Pwent, both of them deep in flagons of mead.
“For kin and kind, for king and clan,” Pwent had appropriately toasted, and Honcklebart had tapped his cup with enthusiasm, for indeed, what dwarf could ever ask for more?
And so on a windy day atop the cliffs north of Keeper’s Dale, the western porch of Mithral Hall, against the charge of an orc horde, the expectations for Gendray had come to pass, and for never a better reason had a Battlehammer dwarf fallen.
As he neared that fateful site, Pwent could almost hear the tumult of battle again. Never had he been so proud of his Gutbusters. He had led them into the heart of the orc charge. Outnumbered many times over by King Obould’s most ferocious warriors, the Gutbusters hadn’t flinched, hadn’t hesitated. Many dwarves had fallen that day but had fallen on the bodies of many, many more orcs.
Pwent, too, had expected to die in that seemingly suicidal encounter, but somehow, and with the support of heroic friends and a clever gnome, he and some of the Gutbusters had found their way to the cliffs and down to Mithral Hall’s western doors. It had been a victory bitterly won through honorable and acceptable sacrifice.
Despite that truth, Thibbledorf Pwent had carried with him the echoes of the second part of Honcklebart Hard-hatter’s toast, when he had hoisted his flagon proudly again and declared, “And I’m knowin’ that dead or hurt, Thibbledorf Pwent’d not be leavin’ me boy behind.”
Tapping that flagon in toast had been no hard promise for Pwent. “If a dragon’s eatin’ him, then I’ll cut a hole in its belly and pull out his bones!” he had heartily promised, and had meant every word.
But Gendray, dead Gendray, hadn’t come home that day.
“Ye left me boy,” Honcklebart had said back in the halls after the fight. There was no malice in his voice, no accusation. It was just a statement of fact, by a dwarf whose heart had broken.
Pwent almost wished his old friend had just punched him in the nose, because though Honcklebart was known to have a smashing right cross, it wouldn’t have hurt the battlerager nearly as much as that simple statement of fact.
“Ye left me boy.”
I look upon the hillside, quiet now except for the birds. That’s all there is. The birds, cawing and cackling and poking their beaks into unseeing eyeballs. Crows do not circle before they alight on a field strewn with the dead. They fly as the bee to a flower, straight for their goal, with so great a feast before them. They are the cleaners, along with the crawling insects and the rain and the unending wind.
And the passage of time. There is always that. The turn of th
e day, of the season, of the year.
G’nurk winced when he came in sight of the torn mountain ridge. How glorious had been the charge! The minions of Obould, proud orc warriors, had swept up the rocky slope against the fortified dwarven position.
G’nurk had been there, in the front lines, one of only a very few who had survived that charge. But despite their losses in the forward ranks, G’nurk and his companions had cleared the path, had taken the orc army to the dwarven camp.
Absolute victory hovered before them, within easy reach, so it had seemed.
Then, somehow, through some dwarven trick or devilish magic, the mountain ridge exploded, and like a field of grain in a strong wind, the orc masses coming in support had been mowed flat. Most of them were still there, lying dead where they had stood proud.
Tinguinguay, G’nurk’s beloved daughter, was still there.
He worked his way around the boulders, the air still thick with dust from the amazing blast that had reformed the entire area. The many ridges and rocks and chunks of blasted stone seemed to G’nurk like a giant carcass, as if that stretch of land, like some sentient behemoth, had itself been killed.
G’nurk paused and leaned on a boulder. He brought his dirty hand up to wipe the moisture from his eyes, took a deep breath, and reminded himself that he served Tinguinguay with honor and pride, or he honored her not at all.
He pushed away from the stone, denied its offer to serve as a crutch, and pressed along. Soon he came past the nearest of his dead companions, or pieces of them, at least. Those in the west, nearest the ridge, had been mutilated by a shock wave full of flying stones.
The stench filled his nostrils. A throng of black beetles, the first living things he’d seen in the area, swarmed around the guts of a torso cut in half.
He thought of bugs eating his dead little girl, his daughter who in the distant past had so often used her batting eyes and pouting lips to coerce from him an extra bit of food. On one occasion, G’nurk had missed a required drill because of Tinguinguay, when she’d thoroughly manipulated out of him a visit to a nearby swimming hole. Obould hadn’t noticed his absence, thank Gruumsh!
The Collected Stories, The Legend of Drizzt (forgotten realms) Page 24
