The Grieving Tree: The Dragon Below Book II

by Don Bassingthwaite

  Feita looked ready to spit venom. “Captain d’Lyrandar, what’s happening here? Are we going back to Sharn? We’re due in Trolanport tomorrow!”

  Cira stepped forward. Her eyes were narrow and suspicious. “Captain, is something wrong? If my magic—”

  “Ah, yes,” Vennet said. “Your magic.”

  He took a fast step back. His right hand darted to his cutlass and he drew and swung it in one powerful motion. Cira was wearing a white gown. The cutlass slashed the pale fabric with red.

  “It could be a problem,” said Vennet.

  Cira fell with a startled expression on her face. Karth and Marolis both stared in shock. Tomollan fumbled for a knife but Vennet’s cutlass flashed and the young man reeled back, screaming and clutching his arm. Vennet followed and silenced him with another blow.

  For all her pompousness, Feita reacted with the quick reflexes of her race, darting away from the captain’s weapon and trying to get around him, maybe back to the safety of her cabin. Karth started to step forward, to try and restrain Vennet, but the halfelf raised his cutlass in silent threat. His eyes narrowed and he thrust his free hand toward Feita. Where his shirt hung loose across his back, Karth saw his dragonmark shimmer.

  Wind summoned by the Mark of Storm howled from Vennet’s outstretched hand to pummel Feita. The gnome staggered, stumbled—then was caught up by the powerful gust and tumbled, shrieking, over the ship’s rail. Her shrieks ended in a splash.

  The nearest herons turned to watch with glittering eyes.

  “Lords of the Host! Man overboard!” Karth rushed past Vennet and leaped to the rail. Feita was struggling in the water. Even moving slowly, Lightning on Water was already passing her. He spun around to stare at Vennet and his bloody cutlass.

  A hand fell on his shoulder. He looked up to meet a green-eyed gaze.

  “Be at ease,” said Dah’mir.

  Up close, Karth could see that the smile on the man’s face was strained, as if he held back tremendous pain. Even before the words were out of his mouth, though, it seemed to Karth that he could feel Dah’mir’s presence pushing at him, overwhelming his will. He tried to struggle, tried to remember that he had just seen his captain kill two people and send a third to her death, but there was a charisma about Dah’mir. The strange man was right. There was nothing to worry about.

  He watched Marolis fight and lose the same battle. Vennet repeated his order to bring the ship around and this time Marolis nodded. “Aye, captain,” he said, spinning the wheel.

  Dah’mir patted Karth’s shoulder. “Why don’t you dispose of those?” he said with a nod at Cira’s and Tomollan’s bodies. His voice was tired, but still powerful. “Then give the deck a good scrub.”

  “Aye, lord,” Karth said above the rising howl of wind. Overhead, the ship’s elemental ring began to churn furiously.

  “Coming about,” called Marolis. “Coming about and turning back to Sharn!”

  “No,” said Vennet. He bent and wiped his cutlass clean on Tomollan’s tunic. “Not Sharn.”

  His world ended in fire. His last sensations were of the human wizard Singe clinging to him, then of a pinprick of heat as the wizard cast a final spell. He’d seen that spell before. He tried to leap away, but Singe’s weight dragged at him, holding him in place for the scant moments it took for the pinprick to explode into an inferno. Flame seared the delicate buds of his skin, burning away every sensation but pain. It ate his chest tendrils and fleshy head growths. The powerful tentacles that sprang from his shoulders flailed in the fiery air—flailed, blistered, charred and finally went numb as they crumbled into ash. He screamed and fire filled his lungs, scorching him from the inside out.

  The rage that consumed him was even hotter. As he burned, he tried to strike out at his killer, to take Singe with him into death but the fire finished him too quickly. He fell in silent agony, still raging at the wizard as he died and the world faded around him—

  —until a flickering appeared in the stillness. His pain-maddened mind seized on it, tore at it, and the flickering vanished, snuffed out by his attention.

  New strength shivered through his arms, though. New awareness woke in him. New … life.

  Hruucan rolled over. His skin cracked and flaked away as he moved but he could feel again. Shifting currents of air touched his burned skin and showed him the world once more. It was night—Hruucan could sense it on the air. He could hear, too. He could hear voices.

  Only a few paces away, two humans argued. Both of them held spears. One held a stick that smelled of oily smoke. An extinguished torch. The human with the torch shook it at the other. “Toch tabeka tocha’ari! An ano totocha’ario!”

  They spoke the language of Dah’mir’s humans, the Bonetree clan. Hruucan rose silently to his feet and drifted forward. He could sense other forms around him: the corpses of fallen orcs and humans, the broken chitinous hulks of dead chuul, the sprawled forms of slaughtered dolgrims. They stank with a day’s decay, the passage of the corrupting sun. He still stood on the battlefield in the shadow of the Bonetree mound, he realized, though the fight was long since over. The Bonetree clan had slunk back to the abandoned field to pick over the bodies of the dead, now cold.

  But the humans were warm, the heat of their lives pulsing inside them.

  One of the humans sniffed at the air and made an expression of disgust. “Do hiffi eche?” He turned around. His face dropped in sudden fear. “Khyberit gentis!”

  Hruucan lunged in a sifting burst of ash. He would have lashed out with his shoulder tentacles, but even through the haze of pain he knew they were no longer there. Instead, he struck the human who had cried out with the heel of his hand, pummeling him just under the ribs. The man went down with a weak gasp. Hruucan whirled on the other human, grabbing him before he could bring his spear to bear and wrapping him in blackened arms. He could feel the heat in the man, feel it rushing and beating …

  The heat seemed to reawaken the buds of his skin. A shiver swept over him as they burst through the blackened crust and burrowed into the human’s flesh. The human cried out in agony.

  Usually the buds sucked out the moisture of any living creature the dolgaunt cared to embrace. Now they seemed to dig even deeper. Hruucan let out a grating moan as the buds burrowed into the human’s very essence and sucked out his life.

  The man’s flesh began to smoke, then to smolder. Then it burst into flame. He died in Hruucan’s arms and the dolgaunt felt stronger for it. Hruucan let the dead man fall and turned to the other human. He was still on the ground, trying shove himself away. His eyes were wide.

  Hruucan’s skin still flaked and crumbled as he took a step forward, but beneath the ash was raw flesh. Flames licked his chest, but caused him no pain. In fact, they were very much like the chest tendrils that had been burned away before.

  He flexed. They writhed.

  He smiled and leaped for the human, wrenching him up from the ground. Skin buds and fiery tendrils tore the life out of him as well and set his corpse ablaze. When Hruucan shoved him away, some of the fire clung to him in long, writhing whips that sprang from his shoulders, drifting in the air. His tentacles given new form.

  The night was sharp around him. His senses had been completely restored. More than restored: he could sense the ramshackle camp of the Bonetree clan well beyond the battlefield. Warm forms moved among the half-perceived shapes of the huts. More human lives to feed the furnace of his body.

  But there was something else he could feel, too. Something far, far in the distance, pulling at him like a hook in torn flesh. Another being. Familiar. Hated.

  Singe.

  He turned to face the wizard’s distant presence. His tentacles flared white hot and lashed the air. Singe’s face danced before him and he moved after it, stepping up to the brow of an embankment and sliding down the other side, utterly lost in his anger—until hissing steam exploded around his feet. Pain burst within him and he leaped back.

  Water rippled before him. The wide ri
ver lay between him and Singe. He could feel the wizard, but he could not follow.

  “No!” he roared. “No!”

  There were startled shouts from the direction of the Bonetree camp, the sound of hunters coming to investigate what might be moving—and burning—on the empty battlefield.

  Blind with fury at the denial of his vengeance, Hruucan whirled around and raced to meet them.

  The night filled with screams and smoke.

  Batul raised his head sharply, looking away into the night.

  Dandra froze, but her mind snapped out, summoning up psionic power. The droning chorus of whitefire hummed on the air, ready to be flung at any danger. Around the small campfire that was all they had dared to build, the others reacted as well. Ashi’s sword and Singe’s rapier made bright flashes in the shadows while the heavy blade of Geth’s strange, ancient Dhakaani sword, forged from the twilight-purple metal byeshk, flickered almost like a shadow itself. Orshok snatched for the crooked length of his hunda stick, Krepis his axe. Natrac spun around, the mounted knife that fit over the stump of his right wrist a perpetual weapon. All of them held their positions, waiting with nervous energy for whatever might be out in the darkness.

  “Batul?” Dandra asked.

  “I heard something,” said the old orc druid. His gaze—one eye good, the other filmed white and sometimes capable of seeing more than his good eye—remained fixed in the distance, a moment longer then he shook his head. “No,” he said. “It was nothing.”

  His words were thin and weary. The others eased themselves back down, releasing their weapons but keeping them close. Ashi prowled the perimeter of their feeble camp before settling down as well. Dandra let the chorus of her power fade away. It wasn’t easy—Tetkashtai clung to it like a child clutching a toy amulet.

  No! she whined. The yellow-green light of her presence flashed and swirled in Dandra’s mind’s eye. We need to be ready!

  Dandra looked down at the psicrystal that hung—once again—against her chest, and sent a soothing thought to her. We’re together again, she reminded her. We can summon the whitefire back when we need to. Let it go.

  Tetkashtai released her hold on the power reluctantly, then gasped and clawed for it again as Geth spoke up. “He’s out there,” he said. “Somewhere, Dah’mir’s out there, and he’s wounded and he’s angry.”

  Dandra shot him an angry glare, but the shifter wasn’t even looking at her. He was staring into the fire. Its light made his animal eyes shine in the darkness. Krepis grunted and said something in Orc. Natrac translated. “The only thing harder than killing a wild boar is not killing one.”

  Geth looked confused. Beside him, Singe groaned and lay back on the ground, covering his eyes with one arm. “It means,” the Aundairian wizard said, “that if you’re going to try killing something as dangerous as a dragon, you better make sure you do it right or you’re in even worse trouble.”

  The shifter growled, sounding more like his usual self, and bared sharp teeth. “Well, when Dah’mir finds us, you try to kill him.”

  Dandra wanted to smile at the men’s sniping, but she couldn’t find it in herself. The day had been a long flight, hours spent racing along the river in an attempt to put as much distance between them and the territory of the Bonetree clan as possible. Her arms ached. All of them except Batul and Natrac had taken turns at paddling. There had been no time to rest—they’d told each other their stories when they weren’t breathless from paddling—and little enough time to even think

  And now that there was time to think, she had doubts.

  She turned her attention back to her chosen task: cleaning Geth’s great gauntlet. The armored sleeve had been forged from black, magewrought steel by a master artificer. It was weapon and armor both, with three low, hooked blades protruding from the back of the hand and flat spikes across the knuckles and along the ridge of the forearm. It was crude in comparison to her own weapon—a fast, delicate spear tipped with a glittering head of crysteel—but even she could appreciate the brutal effectiveness of its design and construction. With part of her mind focused on the careful effort of cleaning each spike and plate, and another part engaged in soothing Tetkashtai’s trembling, terrified presence, conscious thought slowed to a dull, nagging …

  In her memories, Dandra saw Dah’mir’s handsome face again and heard her own question to him. Why?

  Why had he done all of this?

  It was a question he hadn’t answered—maybe because he didn’t need to.

  She squeezed her eyes shut tight and clenched Geth’s gauntlet between her fingers.

  There was movement beside her. She opened her eyes to see Batul looking at her, his good eye flashing in the firelight. He leaned a little closer and asked, “Something bothers you?”

  Her feelings gnawed at her. She hesitated, then looked up at the orc’s wrinkled face. “We should go back to the Bonetree mound.”

  The words brought everyone’s attention to her. Singe sat up as sharply as if he had been kicked. “Twelve moons, are you crazy?”

  Dandra flushed and turned back to Geth’s gauntlet, but Batul reached over and laid one gnarled gray-green hand on hers. “Dandra, if this is in your head, you should tell us more. Why should we go back?”

  The kalashtar clenched her teeth. “Because this isn’t over,” she said. “Dah’mir isn’t dead and we know that he’s not going to just leave us alone. He’s going to come back for revenge.” She took a vicious swipe at Geth’s gauntlet with the rag—a strip torn from the shifter’s shirt—that she had been using to clean it. “He’s going to come back for me.”

  “But you broke the dragonshard at the heart of the device he used on you, Medala, and Virikhad,” said Geth. “Whatever plans he had are ruined.”

  “You didn’t hear him, Geth. When he discovered how I’d escaped his device—how a psicrystal had resisted him—it was like he’d discovered the missing piece of a puzzle. I was an experiment to him, a problem to be solved.” Dandra let go of the rag and returned Batul’s grasp. “He wanted to drive us mad. Medala was his success. Virikhad was his failure. I was something unexpected. But now that Medala and Virikhad are gone and his device is broken, Tetkashtai and I are all that Dah’mir has left. And we still don’t know why he did this to us! We need to go back to the mound. We need to find out if there’s anything there that could tell us why.”

  Her voice shook. She forced her mouth closed. For a moment, all of them were silent. Inside her head, Tetkashtai’s agitation had given way to a cowering fear. The presence was less than a spark. Go back? she said. Back there? Back to the mound? Again?

  Then Singe spoke up. “Dah’mir told Ashi and I that Medala was the first of a new line of servants to the powers of the Dragon Below.”

  “A new line of what?” asked Natrac. “Mad kalashtar? That doesn’t make any sense.”

  Dandra shook her head. “Dah’mir is insane, but he’s still dangerous. Light of il-Yannah, what if he’d succeeded in turning Virikhad and Tetkashtai as well as Medalashana? How far would he have gone? How many other kalashtar could he have broken with his device?”

  “His lair is in the middle of the Shadow Marches, Dandra,” said Singe. “There aren’t many kalashtar around here—look how much trouble he had to go through to lure you to him the first time.”

  “We were test subjects. That much I know. Dah’mir told me that his work needed refining. His intent was to do more.” She wiped her free hand across her face. “I broke the binding stone, but Dah’mir might be able to start again with another dragonshard. We need to go—”

  “Dandra.” Batul squeezed her hand. She turned to look into his eye. “Dandra, we can’t go back. It’s already too late.”

  Dandra’s expression tightened. “Prophecy, Batul?” she asked.

  The druid shook his head. “No,” he said, “just common sense. Look at us, Dandra.” He nodded to their group, huddled around the fire, and she looked.

  Geth’s shining eyes had dark circles ben
eath them. Singe propped himself up as if he might topple over. Natrac was worn down. Ashi sagged. Krepis and Orshok looked half-asleep. Even Batul’s shoulders were slack and rounded. Dandra blinked as understanding caught up to her. Baul nodded.

  “We’re exhausted,” the old orc said. “We need to rest and regroup. It was luck and very little else that enabled us to bring down Dah’mir after he revealed himself as a dragon. The orcs who came with us on the raid are either dead or fled and already making their way home. I saw survivors among Dah’mir’s creatures flee back into the mound when he vanished after Geth wounded him. Some of the Bonetree hunters still live, too. And Dah’mir—maybe he’s inside the mound, too. Maybe he retreated there as well to lick his wounds. Geth’s right—we don’t know where he is.” He squeezed her hand again. “We can’t go back. Not now.”

  Dandra stared at him. He was right. For all the doubt that seethed in her, their exhaustion—her exhaustion—was inescapable. She clenched her fingers around Geth’s gauntlet. “I can’t just wait for Dah’mir to make me his prisoner again!” she said. “I have to do something, even if we can’t go back to the Bonetree mound. There must be some way to figure out what Dah’mir has been planning!”

  “Maybe,” said Ashi, “there is.”

  Dandra looked at her. “What?” she asked. “How?”

  The hunter stared into the fire for a moment before she answered. “There is a story told among the Bonetree,” she said. “In the days of our ancestors, not long after Dah’mir came out of the east and gathered the clan together, he dispatched a group of hunters back into the east. When he came to us—” she bit her lip and corrected herself—“to the Bonetree, he’d left certain treasures behind in what the story calls che Haranait Koa, the Hall of the Revered. With the clan established, the hunters were sent to gather those treasures and bring them back to the ancestor mound.”

  She glanced up at Dandra. “The story tells that one of the greatest treasures they brought back was a great, blue-black dragonshard. Dah’mir made the hunter who placed it in his hands the first huntmaster of the Bonetree. The shard was enormous, ‘the size of a crouching child’ according to the story.” She held up her hands to show the size.