Guardians of the Lost

by Margaret Weis

  “Thus,” he often reasoned, “though I cannot see the gods I know they are there. And although they may not be able to see me, they know I am there.”

  He found this thought comforting.

  Catching sight of movement, Wolfram saw the monk Fire taking her morning constitutional. Grunting his displeasure, Wolfram decided to confront her, demand to know what had happened to his companion.

  At that moment, the sun lifted up from behind the mountain, its light warm and dazzling. Bathed in its fiery light, Ranessa rose up from behind a boulder.

  Breathing a heartfelt sigh of relief, Wolfram hastened toward her. She did not see him. She started walking toward the monk.

  Wolfram quickened his pace, hoping to intercept her before Fire noticed her.

  “Girl,” he began, the word sweet in his mouth.

  Ranessa gave a wild shout that drove the word back down his throat. Spreading her arms, she ran straight toward the cliff’s edge. He bellowed out her name. If she heard him, she paid no attention. Terrified, Wolfram broke into a run. He was too far away. He reached the ledge in time to see her fling herself over the precipice.

  Wolfram gave a wild cry of grief that echoed among the mountain peaks and covered his face with his hands.

  A voice spoke to him. “Open your eyes,” said Fire. “Open your eyes and see the truth.”

  Wolfram peered out from behind his fingers. The monk that had taken the shape of a dwarf was gone. Wolfram’s suspicions were confirmed. A dragon stood on the ledge, her wings spread, reveling in the sun of a new dawn.

  The dragon’s scales burned with the fire of the sunlight. The elegant head, with its elongated snout and rows of gleaming sharp teeth, lifted to the sky. The eyes looked to the heavens, searched out the very gods themselves. The dragon’s wings were orange and the sun shone through them, shimmering as through silken curtains. The long tail curved gracefully about the shining body. The taloned feet dug deep into the rock. The head turned on its long, sinuous neck. The dragon’s dark eyes looked intently at Wolfram.

  Shuddering, not even pleased to know that he had guessed the truth about the Heads of the Order, Wolfram looked away from the dragon. He looked down below to where he expected to see Ranessa’s body lying twisted and broken on the blood-stained rocks.

  She was not there.

  He blinked, stared about. He couldn’t find her.

  “Where is she?” he demanded hoarsely.

  “There,” said Fire and gazed out to the sky.

  Wolfram lifted his eyes to look out over the mountain peaks. A young dragon, orange as flame, circled in the azure air. The dragon’s scales gleamed new-made in the sunshine; the wings glistened, as if they were still wet from the hatching. Her flight was hesitant, tentative, for she was yet testing her strength, learning how to handle the new body. He did not know her and yet he knew her. When she soared past him, she looked down and saw him there. He looked into her eyes and he saw Ranessa.

  “You didn’t know?” Fire asked him.

  “No,” said Wolfram, bleakly. He was awed and proud, like a new parent, and yet lost and lonely, too. “No, how could I?”

  “She bore the mark,” said Fire. “As do we all.”

  Wolfram smiled then, and shook his head. “Is she your child, ma’am?” he asked humbly.

  “Yes,” said Fire. “She is mine and she has come home.”

  Young dragons do not hatch from eggs as do birds or other reptiles. The dragons of Loerem place their eggs inside the bodies of humans or elves, orks or dwarves. When the dragon child is born, the child takes on the appearance of the mother’s race. The human mother knows no different, nurses the baby that she believes is her own. The young dragon knows no different, believes that it is human or elven or dwarven.

  “Oftentimes, the children never know,” Fire said, watching her glistening-scaled daughter with affectionate pride. “Such dragon children live their lives among humans or elves, dwarves or orks, and they are content and happy with their lot. These children are lost to us. We know that and we accept it, for these children were never meant to be what we are.

  “Some children, the ones in whom the blood of our kind runs strong, know from their first conscious thought that they are not what they appear to be. They know they are different. They are often unhappy, that is true,” Fire admitted. “But it is their unhappiness, their dissatisfaction with themselves that leads them to the knowledge of themselves. Ranessa is one of these. She yearned to know the truth, she actively sought it out.”

  “You make a lousy dwarf, Fire, you know that, don’t you?” Wolfram groused. He made a rapid dash at his eyes with his hands.

  Fire looked at Wolfram and her own dark eyes were soft with sympathy. “As I told you, you were merely her guide. You shortened her journey. Eventually, she would have found us herself.”

  “So you say,” he muttered.

  He thought he would leave. He would make his report to the monks and then depart, maybe go see what this manor of his was like. He’d have fun ordering the servants about, if nothing else. He’d have fun until that grew tiresome and his feet grew itchy and the manor house shrank until it was too small to hold him.

  Wolfram thought he would leave, but he didn’t.

  He sat down on the sun-warmed rock and watched Ranessa learn to fly.

  The Tromek Portal had originally been constructed to provide access from the human city now called Old Vinnengael to the elven capital of Glymrae. With the fall of Old Vinnengael and the shattering of the Portals, the Tromek Portal shifted its position. The Portal’s disappearance from the city of Glymrae left the elves devastated, at first, for they had come to enjoy the benefits of trade with humans.

  Most elves believed that the gods had destroyed the Portals, but the Wyred were not so certain. They knew that magic, once it is in the world, may be altered, but is next to impossible to destroy. In secret, the Wyred sent out parties to search for the Portals. Hearing through their spies in the human lands that the Karnuans had discovered a Portal outside the city of Delek ’Vir, the Wyred redoubled their efforts.

  After a five-year search, the Wyred at last found the western end of the Tromek Portal in a heavily wooded area about fifty miles east of the border with Nimorea. Since no one knew where the other end was located, several of the Wyred volunteered to explore the tunnel to find out. Their journey was long, leading them to believe that the magic tunnel through time and space covered a great distance. When they emerged, they found themselves in the mountains.

  Knowing they would be required to map this territory, they brought with them various tools used for navigation and mapping. They discovered that they were inside elven lands, only about forty miles north of the border of the reborn Vinnengaelean Empire, due north of what would many years later become the capital city, New Vinnengael.

  The elves were immensely pleased to discover this: they had the only Portal that began and ended within the border of a single nation.

  While elven merchants travel to other lands, they are wary of outsiders entering their domains and they built massive fortresses protected by magic and steel at both ends of the Portal. The Portal entrance was guarded by the Wyred and their magicks. The walls surrounding the Portal were protected by the warriors and their swords. The entire system of defense consisted of rings: a ring of stone walls and towers on the outside, rings of magic on the inside.

  Using Nimorean humans to work Earth magic, the elves raised a double wall of granite around the outside of the Portal. These two walls were separated by a trench six feet wide and six feet deep. Inside this trench, they built a series of towers that provided an excellent view of the Portal and the surrounding countryside, an ideal location in which to post archers. Huge gateways, wide enough to accommodate large wagons, provided entry and egress into the Portal. The gates were well guarded, rarely closed. The elves obtained a great deal of revenue from those traveling the Portals and did not want to do anything to discourage business.

 
Everyone who entered the Portal was questioned. Human merchants were required to have papers signed by elven officials indicating that they were in good standing with their own Guilds and that they had permission to enter elven lands and permission to sell their wares. Elves traveling abroad must have papers signed by the head of their House proving that they had a valid reason for leaving their homeland and that they had received permission to do so. All wagons were inspected to make certain they were not carrying contraband. After the traveler paid the fee, he was permitted to enter the gate and sent on to the next ring, the ring guarded by the Wyred.

  Most human travelers never knew that they were under the watchful eye of elven wizards. The traveler walked through a beautiful garden, with trees and streams and arched bridges, golden fish and flowers and paths of crushed stone that all led to the Portal. After such beauty, the Portal itself was a let-down to those who entered it the first time. The Portal looked like a pool of stagnant gray water set among a grove of flowering trees.

  The Portal was real, but everything else around it—the trees, the garden, the flowers, the fish—were illusion. Cloaked in magic, the Wyred walked unseen among the travelers, eavesdropping on their conversations, searching them surreptitiously for hidden magicks. Those they mistrusted were spellbound and whisked away to caves hidden beneath the Portal, where they were questioned and then either freed to resume their journey or arrested and turned over to the military for further interrogation. The Wyred had devised other magicks for use against an invading army, but what these were, what lay beneath the illusion of the garden, no one knew.

  The Portal was guarded by an army of one thousand elven soldiers, loyal to the Shield and House Wyval, and twenty-five Wyred, also loyal to the Shield. The soldiers lived in barracks that had been built near the Portal. Their duty was boring and onerous, for the Portal stood in the middle of nowhere. The closest civilization was a small village that had sprung up about five miles distant to serve the needs of travelers and soldiers.

  The commander in charge of the Outer Ring defenses of the western Portal had been awakened before dawn by a messenger, who had flown to the Portal on hippogriff from Glymrae. Now, two hours later, as the sunlight gilded the tops of the trees with gold, Commander Lyall stood atop the vantage point located above the main gate and watched nine hundred of the one thousand elves supposed to be guarding the Portal marching away from it.

  He looked from the line of soldiers winding along the highway to the letter the messenger had brought to him that morning. Lyall had already read it many times, in the faint hope that perhaps the reading of it would increase his understanding of it. The twentieth time proved no more illuminating than the first.

  The elves often couch their messages to each other in flowery verse that is lovely, but sometimes open to misinterpretation. Military dispatches are not sent in verse, however, for they must be clearly understood, leaving no room for doubt. Gazing gloomily at the missive in his hand, Commander Lyall was left with no doubts at all. The Shield had ordered nine hundred troops to return immediately to Glymrae. He gave no reason. He did not have to. He was the Shield and he was in charge of the military defense of the nation. The messenger told Lyall what everyone in the capital city knew: the split between the Shield and the Divine was irreparable. The elven nation stood on the brink of civil war. The Shield needed every soldier loyal to him.

  As for leaving men enough to guard the Portal, it had not been attacked in two hundred years. There was no reason to think that it would be threatened now.

  “Hasn’t he been receiving my reports?” Lyall demanded of the messenger.

  The messenger was only a messenger. He couldn’t say.

  Lyall was a devoted follower of the Shield and rightly so, for the Shield had lifted Lyall from his obscure birth as the fourteenth son of a peasant farmer and elevated him to the rank of commander. Lyall had worked hard to attain his position. He had fought bravely in battle and had risked his life on numerous occasions. The number of battle scars he bore would have made a Trevenici warrior proud. He had been rewarded with this rank and this position.

  Lyall knew, of course, that he would be expected to repay the Shield for his promotion. He knew that he had been placed in this position because the Shield wanted a man he could trust serving as commander of the Outer Ring. Lyall was that man. If not for the Shield, Lyall would now be yoked to a plow, trudging through the fields. Every night, when Lyall said his prayers to the Father and Mother, he included the Shield’s name among them.

  Still, there was a brief moment in the early morning darkness when Lyall was tempted to question his master’s wisdom. The Shield had emptied the Portal of its manpower at the precise time when they might be needed most.

  Only five days earlier, Lyall had sent the Shield an urgent dispatch stating his belief that a human army was hiding in the woods around the Portal. Scouts, both elven and Nimorean, who patrolled the area on a regular basis had seen nothing untoward, but several had gone missing. Alarmed, Lyall had placed his troops on heightened alert and doubled the guard in the towers. He had not informed the Wyred, for, as a soldier, he must turn a blind eye to the dishonorable and suspect workings of wizards. Besides, he was quite confident that the Wyred knew all about the presence of the enemy, perhaps more than he did.

  He’d received no reply to his dispatch, and now this. Lyall couldn’t understand. He could only obey.

  The troops departed. Lyall had no time to bemoan their loss. Summoning what officers he had left, he made new plans for the defense of the Portal. He drew up new watch schedules. He did what he could to keep morale high, to make light of the matter, saying that they would certainly splurge on dinner that night, for they no longer had to share supplies with a thousand.

  The officers weren’t fooled, but they said what they were expected to say. All of them were thinking the same thought. What was out there in the wilderness? What had spooked the animals and caused the birds to vanish? What was picking off their scouts one by one?

  No one knew the answers, but they all knew this: whoever was out there had just seen the garrison emptied of its defenders.

  Lyall sent the men back to their duties, then sat at his desk and pondered his next move.

  Presumably the Wyred had received the same orders Lyall had. Presumably the ranks of the Wyred had been similarly reduced. Lyall had no way of knowing for certain. He had never once spoken to the commander of the Wyred. On those rare occasions when they were forced to interact—usually when there was difficulty over someone trying to enter the Portal—the Wyred simply appeared with the offender and handed him over. Lyall didn’t know the commander’s name. He knew so little about the magic-users that he wasn’t even certain the Wyred had a commander.

  The situation was dire. He did not have time to follow the usual circuitous route used by warriors who must rely on the Wyred and yet must at the same time appear not to. He had to know what was going on, what he could expect in case of attack.

  Other officers would have feared loss of honor. Lyall was a peasant. He had no honor to lose, or so he reasoned. Perhaps it was the peasant in him that tended to rank common sense higher than honor anyway.

  Lyall walked from the Outer Ring across the open paved courtyard that divided one sphere of influence from another and entered the garden. He lingered among the azaleas and the bougainvillea, looking at everything in general and at nothing in particular.

  Speaking to the azaleas or perhaps to the goldfish, Lyall said calmly, “I would talk with the master of the Wyred. The matter is of the utmost urgency.”

  He stood several more moments listening to the humming of the bees and watching the butterflies flit among the blossoms, then he strolled on, affecting nonchalance, though his nervousness grew. He could only guess that he’d been seen and heard. If he hadn’t or if for some reason the Wyred refused to speak to him, he had no idea what to do next. Abandon this plan and come up with another one. But time was running out.

  Th
e path on which he walked ended at a fish pond. Lyall paused a moment to gaze at the fish, then turned to make his way back.

  The Wyred stood in front of him, so close that Lyall might have touched her.

  Lyall had not heard footsteps, had not sensed anyone coming up behind him. He gave a great start and took an involuntary step backward, a step that very nearly carried him into the pond. Recovering, Lyall felt a flash of irritation. Quick to swallow his annoyance, he made a bow.

  “I thank you for coming. I am honored by this meeting.”

  “No, you are not,” said the Wyred coolly. “You are dishonored by it. But that is neither here nor there. What is this matter of urgency that has caused you to break all the unwritten laws to come to me to discuss?”

  He found himself staring, unable to take his eyes off the woman. The tattooed mask around the eyes marked her family, but in addition to that mask, she wore the tattoos that marked her as a Wyred. These were far more elaborate. Whorls and circles, lines and symbols extended down her cheeks and wrapped around her chin. Did these tattoos mark her standing among the Wyred? Did they have something to do with her magic? Were they nothing more than personal affectation? He had no way of knowing. He tried to wrench his mind back to the matter at hand, but he could not take his eyes from her face.

  “You said the matter was urgent,” she stated, growing annoyed at the delay.

  Difficult to tell her age, due to the tattoos. Her eyes were opaque, unreadable. They did not give, they took. She stood with her hands tucked into long sleeves whose cuffs, made of brightly colored silk, extended to the floor. Her silk robes were decorated with fanciful designs of birds, each bird trimmed in golden thread.