Dalamar The Dark (classics)

by Nancy Varian Berberick

  In the silence following his words, he heard the Speaker's breath hitch, just a little.

  Lord Garan hissed a curse. "How dare you say that, mageling?"

  Dalamar ignored the insulting tone of Garan's voice and the offensive diminutive. He looked to the king and spoke only to him. "I dare say it, my king, because what I say is true. It might not be convenient that this truth is noticed by a servitor, or that a servitor has considered it and reckoned a way around it, but not the less, what I say is true."

  "You have a quick tongue, Dalamar Argent." Lorac leaned forward, looking at Dalamar narrowly over the steeple of his fingers. "A quick tongue, and you would do well to use it now to tell me what plan you have made."

  Fire snapped in the hearth, and ashes fell slithering into the fire bed. Dalamar's mouth went suddenly dry, and the words of an old saying came mocking to mind: Who leaps, leaps best when he knows where he will land. Of course, who doesn't leap at all, knowing or unknowing, gets to stand at the edge of the precipice until he must turn back with nothing earned but the failure to act.

  Unacceptable.

  "I would strike at the Highlord from behind, my king, and-"

  Lord Garan's laughter snapped out, stinging. "You'd do that, eh? Haven't you heard that all the northern lands from Khur to Nordmaar are occupied by Phair Caron's army?"

  "I've heard," Dalamar murmured, his eyes low, a small smile playing around his lips. He looked up again, assuming an expression of innocent frankness that fooled the Head of House Protector not at all. "No doubt you've heard, my lord, that there is a mage or two in the kingdom with skills that might facilitate my idea? Illusions skillfully cast will make our forces advancing from the south seem invisible to the eyes of the Highlord's army, while at the same time other illusions will make it seem they are being attacked from the north." He smiled, a chill twitch of his lips. "At which time, they'll turn to fight what isn't there, while the Wildrunners surround and attack them… from behind."

  Ylle Savath, until then silent, lifted a hand, with the simple gesture capturing the attention of all. "My lord king," she said, "it might be well to remind this servitor that illusions are not the province of White magic. They are the province of Red magic. Here," she said, turning a glance upon Dalamar that was cold as winter and as dangerous, "here we practice constructive magic."

  "And yet," Dalamar replied in his mildest tone, "it seems to me that we had better learn to construct some illusions, my lady."

  Ylle Savath's eyes glinted sharp as knives. "If you are suggesting we practice any magic other than Solinari's, you come perilously close to blasphemy, Dalamar Argent."

  Blasphemy.

  The word hung in the stillness of the room. It seemed the flames in the hearth whispered it, once and again. At last Lorac stood, his face expressionless and masked by shadows.

  "Young mage," he said, inclining his head in the only bow a king need make, that of courtesy to one of his people. "Young cleric, you have my leave to return to your homes. May E'li bless you on your way."

  He lifted a hand and dropped it again. The flames in the hearth fell. The torches dimmed. Thus did the elf-king, the highest of all mages in his land, signal that there would be no more conversation here tonight, on this subject or any other.

  Cardinals sang their chipping songs in the hedges of the Garden of Astarin. Late-goers, they were the last songbirds to sleep, the heralds of nightingales. The light of half-moons shone down, red and silver on the path away from the Tower of the Stars. Dalamar's blood sang brave songs, as it did when he was preparing to work magic. He had stood before the king, before Heads of Households, and he had laid out a bold plan, one he knew could work.

  "It was a waste," Tellin said, "a waste of time and a waste of-"

  Dalamar raised an eyebrow. "And a waste of the good will your family name gets you? Do you really think so, my lord?"

  Tellin snorted. "Did you see the way Lady Ylle reacted to your idea? 'Blasphemy,' she called it. I tell you, Dalamar, you won no friends there. You won no favor with Lord Garan either, lecturing him on battleground tactics. What, by the names of all the gods of Good, makes you think either of them will second your plan to the king, even if Lorac is interested in it?"

  Dalamar stopped, standing a long moment listening to the night. Wind sighed in the trees. Somewhere in the darkness a child laughed, and a woman's voice lifted in even-song, a lullaby for her baby. Lights glimmered in all the hollows and on all the hills. Towers built of marble rose up white in the starlight, some grand and high with wings of rooms reaching out from the base, others smaller and built in humbler imitation of their wealthy neighbors. A nightingale sang, and another joined in, their sweet liquid notes sounding in his heart like the very song of the nighttime forest.

  "My Lord Tellin," he said, "they are talking of leaving here, the king and the Sinthal-Elish. You've heard the rumor. If things keep on as they are…" He looked away north to the borderlands. "If things keep on, I don't think it will be long before they make up their minds."

  Tellin shuddered, his eyes dark in the night. Elves leave the Sylvan Land? Wasn't that, too, a kind of blasphemy? "How could they even consider it?"

  Dalamar looked over his shoulder to the Tower of the Stars rising above the whispering crowns of the aspens. Light shone from windows normally dark at this hour. Yes, the king sat waking. He was thinking, turning over the plan presented him by a minor mage of a lowly House, a scheme that bore the taint of blasphemy. Of this, Dalamar was certain, for a dragonarmy savaged his northern reaches, and Lorac Caladon had no choice but to consider all options. Whether he'd choose this one or not, none could say. But he was considering.

  "Desperate people, my lord, do things they might not otherwise consider."

  Tellin smiled, but without humor. "So you've solved all the problems, have you, Dalamar?"

  "No, my lord, not all."

  In silence, he followed Tellin through the Garden of Astarin, past Astarin's temple where chanting prayers were sung, round the fragrant beds of jasmine and late wisteria, of starweed and moonflower and nodding columbine. Men and women of House Gardener worked there by the light of tall torches, watering flower beds, for such work was best done at night while the earth has respite from the thirsty sun. The earthy scent of wet dirt drifted up. Fireflies danced in the recesses of each hedge, hungry for the larvae of slugs.

  It had been, indeed, love of his homeland that moved Dalamar to conceive this plan he'd put before the king-a real and abiding love such as every elf knows. He had not thought more than this moved him, not until this moment in the Garden of Astarin with the fireflies winking and the scent of jasmine in the air. As he walked, a wild hope rose again in his breast, one he'd thought banished. When his plan succeeded-and he knew it would-he would ask Lord Tellin to present his case to the mages of House Mystic, to ask that he be instructed as all other mages are, fully in the magic art. He dared hope now, for he'd stood among lords and spoken with a king who had heard him out, a king who might well heed what he heard.

  When this plan proved itself, he would tell Lord Tellin that he wanted to learn all the magic he could and then one day go to the Tower of High Sorcery at Wayreth, there to apply to the Conclave of Wizards in hope that they would grant him permission to take his Tests of Sorcery.

  Two days later, in the morning, while Dalamar sat in the scriptorium with the usual basket of quills to sharpen, a message came to the Temple, a short missive tersely worded, saying that the servitor Dalamar Argent must go to the home of the Head of House Mystic, and he must be there before the noon hour. Dalamar presented himself long before that time, where he learned-not from Ylle Savath herself but from one of her mages-that he would be among those who would travel north to the borderlands, there to bespell a dragonarmy.

  "Let him live or die by his plan," Lady Ylle said on the day that Lorac announced he'd follow the advice of a servitor.

  That she'd said as one pronouncing a dark doom. Yet, Dalamar heard her command as
the first note of a brave song, one to tell of his dream, long thought impossible, at last waking to reality.

  Chapter 5

  Phair Caron looked over her army spread out below like a great dark sea, restless and hungry. The long-legged woman in her red dragon armor, the lusty shape of her not hidden by mail and breastplate, stood like a queen overseeing her kingdom. Her hair, normally bundled up under her dragon helm, hung loose now to her shoulders, a golden spill of waving curls to catch the sunlight. It was her beauty that softened, if only a little, a face long ago shaped to hardness by want and rage. Eyes the color of the blue edges of swords, she looked around, satisfied. The tors of the Khalkist Mountains were her stony halls. Rising higher than the towers of any elf-lord, they housed her well. All round their base supply camps ranged, cook tents and food depots, even a small dry of smiths with their forges. The smoke rose up like the smoke over a battleground. Anvils rang as brawny human smiths worked at repairing breastplates and greaves, at forging new blades for swords damaged in the fighting. She could have wished for dwarf smiths, but those were hard to come by, locked up in Thorbardin while the Council of Thanes decided whether or not to get involved in the war.

  Phair Caron looked west to the land of Abanasinia, whose spine was the Kharolis Mountains. The estranged cousins of the Silvanesti lived there, the wood-dwelling Qualinesti. Humans lived there, and hill dwarves. Already Verminaard, the Highlord of the Blue Wing, had his eye on them, laying cruel plans and ready to swoop down upon those lands like an eagle after its prey. One day, if not sooner then later, all these lands and all the people who lived therein would belong to Her Dark Majesty. The forces of Takhisis would sweep south to Icewall and north to Solamnia to topple the towers of Vingaard and Solanthus. In her might, the Dark Queen would range even so far as the Ergoths. All of Krynn would be hers, a shrine to her glory built upon the bones of those who defied.

  Her blood humming in her, her heart high, Phair Caron looked south, to the dark line of the Silvanesti Forest. The Highlords of Takhisis would be as kings and queens in Krynn. She smiled, a wolfish baring of her teeth. This Highlord would rule from Silvanost, and she would have for her slaves the lords and ladies of Lorac Caladon's court.

  A roar came up distantly from below, the sound of her army, the restless hordes of humans and goblins, draconians and ogres. It had not been easy, organizing this army of disparate races. Humans refused to camp near ogres, who would not be anywhere near goblins. No one could get within striking distance of any of the three breeds of draconians without small wars erupting, and among mem, the Baaz hated the venomous Kapaks, who loathed them in turn and despised the Auraks.

  A long dark shadow passed over the hilltop as Blood Gem sailed on the warm currents, drifting on the sky. Terror kept all the factions of the Highlord's army in line, the dread of the dragons sunning themselves upon the tors. Often bored between forays into the forest, the mighty wyrms were happy to snatch a recalcitrant ogre or insubordinate human right out from the crowd of his companions and make a proper example of him. The dragons were Phair Caron's insurance of good order. With that general order insured, she practiced the kind of hard-handed control for which she had become known among the Dark Queen's Highlords. Whichever of her lieutenants failed to keep order among his men failed only once. There were, here and in the lands she'd early conquered, plenty of others willing and able to take the place of the man or woman who could not maintain discipline.

  Above, a wing of dragons circled in the sky, long lazy rounds that took them out over the aspen forest just turning gold with the approach of autumn. Blood Gem abandoned his lazy circling and went to join his kin. Phair Caron felt the joy in him as he looked down upon the destruction he and his kind had wrought, the smoldering, and the wide swaths of land that would not see a tree again for many long years.

  It is good! the dragon called, feeling her thought touch his mind.

  It is good, she agreed silently, the woman who had once scrambled in gutter-filth for a bent copper tossed her by an elf too disdainful to wait for her thanks. The flames of her ambition, of her long need for revenge, burned in her blood, firing her heart and her soul. It seemed to Phair Caron, as she stood upon the heights, that she could see as far as Silvanost, as far as that day when Lorac Caladon would be led before her in chains, condemned to death, the sentence carried out by stoning in the widest square of his city.

  A small figure moved among the army, his step determined, his way clearing easily before him. Goblins moved aside, their ranks rippling as he went. When he crossed the unofficial boundary between their camp and that of the ogres, it was the same. This one went untroubled as soldiers who had only the day before dealt mercilessly with elf villagers scrambled to get out of his way. Thus did the mage Tramd o' the Dark make his way to the high side of the army's encampment, the place where water came down in trickling streams from the tors. Two tents stood there, a small space apart from each other and well apart from all those housing the lieutenants and captains of the dragonarmy. One was of red silk and had a bright red pennon waving from the center pole. Peaked, even chambered, it stood like a splotch of bright blood amidst the dun and black and browns of the army. The second tent was a simpler affair, smaller, with leather sides and no pennon flapping from the pole. To the first Phair Caron looked, for she knew that was where the mage was going, head down and moving quickly.

  Blood Gem, she called.

  My lady?

  Tell him to meet me in my tent.

  As you wish, my lady.

  The red dragon peeled off from the others, stretching his long neck and bugling to the sky. The army moved, shifting like an uneasy sea before a storm wind. Ogres raised knotted fists to the sky, all bravado. Humans moved restlessly among themselves while goblins scurried. In the far eastern part of the encampment, draconians gave no sign of having heard. They felt about dragons as dragons felt about them. Tramd stopped and looked up, then he turned his steps away from the red tent and toward the leather one.

  Phair Caron smiled grimly. He was a good mage, this Tramd, and a good man in the field when it came to leading battles from dragonback. Among the elves he was known and not known, his presence felt in bloody carnage, though no two elves ever seemed to be able to agree on a description of him. Ogre, human, dwarf, even once an elf-all these were reported as being seen leading the attacks on the villages, a mage whose terrible voice boomed out over the burning and the killing. They thought he was a shapeshifter, some terrible creature out of the bloody Abyss. He was not that, though he was terrible.

  Phair Caron went bounding down the hill, the horned dragon helm tucked under her arm, her long sword slapping against her mailed thigh. A good man, terrible in battle, but Tramd had an annoying habit of disappearing from time to time. About this, they would now speak.

  When Phair Caron entered her tent, Tramd turned from me map pinned to the north wall. He had been studying it, his head thrust a little forward, his shoulders a little hunched. All of Silvanesti lay upon that map, the burned reaches and the forest beyond.

  "My lady," said the mage, whom the elves of the northern border feared, whom the members of the dragonarmy itself did fear. "I am here as you asked."

  Outside, the sound of the army was the sound of an ocean, ebbing and flowing, five thousand voices mingling with ten thousand more, undercurrents of ringing mail, blades belling on blades as warriors practiced their skills. The song of her army! Phair Caron set her dragon helm on the small table, straps whispering against the rough wood, steel ringing faintly in the musty air. She hooked a stool with one foot, dragged it behind the table, then sat. In silence she looked at the mage, leveled a long blue stare at the handsome face he showed her. Tall as a barbarian Plainsman, he wore a human shape today. His hair matched hers in thickness and in golden color, and the beard he wore grew long to the belt of his black robe.

  Phair Caron smiled, but only to herself, only inwardly. Shaped like a man, a woman, an ogre, a draconian, whatever guise he liked,
this mage was no shapeshifter. He was a dwarf. His gestures sometimes showed it, his expression and turns of phrase often bespoke it. He wore avatars the way a courtier wore his fabulous wardrobe, each scraped up from the earth itself, by magic shaped of clay and stone, each chosen exactly for the occasion. And so, Tramd did not, in fact, stand here beside her. This avatar was only a lifeless creation enlivened by the mind of a mage who lived in a far place Phair Caron had never seen. Nor had she ever encountered him in his true form. He would never permit it. Those who thought they saw him, saw what the mage wished to be seen, and if his whim decreed that anything of his true physical existence be presented, it was only his voice.

  "I looked for you, Tramd. This morning when the captains came to give me their reports of yesterday's battle, I thought you would be among them."

  A voice shouted outside. Nearby someone cursed, but the curse suddenly cut off. The scent of blood hung thick on the air. Phair Caron didn't look around, and into her stony stare Tramd shrugged, a small gesture. "I had other business."

  A frisson of anger raced through her. "Indeed. It seems you have had other business often."

  Tramd raised an eyebrow. "If you want to ask about my business, ask. You'll get the same reply I always give: Your business is yours, and I will make it mine because you ask. My business is mine, and no one needs to make it their own."

  A dark-cased insect crept across the floor-a beetle of some kind and nearly half the size of her palm. Absently, Phair Caron crushed it, smiling to hear the crackle of its shell bursting. She lifted her booted foot to look at the mess, satisfied. "Careful, Tramd. You're not quite right in your statements. You make my business yours because it suits you to go throughout Krynn with my army. Times might change, my friend, and you might find it doesn't suit me to have you here."