The Ruin

by Richard Lee Byers

  He waited tensely until it became clear that the gigantic reptiles’ attention was centered on the approximate point from which he’d called, not his current hiding place. They hadn’t perceived him moving from one spot to the other. That was reassuring, albeit, not profoundly so, not when they were casting their net widely enough that, on two occasions, a vast winged shadow swept right over him.

  It only took a few moments for one of the reptiles to notice the mark he’d left behind. It cried to the others, and tilting and furling their wings, they all came wheeling and thudding down to earth to inspect the sigil more closely, peer about, and hiss and snarl.

  Taegan couldn’t speak their language and had no idea what they were saying to one another, but he thought they had an air of perplexity that might have been comical in other circumstances. To say the least, it seemed unlikely they actually believed that Sammaster had returned to the valley to play childish games with them, but they couldn’t figure out the point of what really was happening.

  The answer was simple mystification. Anything to befuddle them and keep them on that end of the vale while Kara and Brimstone labored to penetrate the citadel.

  Three of the Tarterians bounded back into the air and resumed their wheeling scrutiny of the slopes. Their fellows stalked around on foot, forked tongues flickering, sniffing the air and ground like enormous hounds. Taegan held his breath whenever one prowled too close, but feared the reptile might still hear the pounding of his heart. He could certainly feel it, beating in the arteries in his neck.

  They didn’t find him, though. His father had taught him how to conceal himself, his comrades were able spellcasters, and perhaps the fact that the Tarterians were probably looking for Brimstone again, not a considerably smaller creature, aided him as well.

  So it was all right. Until the great dark creatures with their mottling of lighter scales and lambent green eyes shrieked to one another, and the trio on the ground beat their ragged wings. Then all six flew out over the ancient battlefield with its carpet of tangled bones.

  Which was to say, they were moving their hunt elsewhere, and Taegan couldn’t allow that. He picked up a stone and threw it as far as he could, to crack down on the slope and start other rocks tumbling and rattling.

  The Tarterians wheeled, orienting on the noise. Taegan flew in the opposite direction, toward a shadowy depression that ought to serve for a second hiding place.

  Will found Pavel still asleep, and taking care not to bump the gimpy leg, or do any other actual harm, kicked him in the side until his eyes fluttered open.

  “You poxy dung beetle,” the human croaked.

  Will grinned and proffered a steaming tin cup. “Lentils and beef stock. Not too vile, for army food. Drink it while you have the chance.”

  Pavel tossed off his blankets and stood up. Will was relieved to see that his leg didn’t appear to be giving him any more trouble. He sipped the soup, then asked, “How long did I sleep?”

  “Most of the day, sluggard. Once we won the race to get here, Zethrindor and his crew apparently slowed down. So they could march up in good order, maybe, with all sorts of obnoxious enchantments in place. But they’re coming now.” He pointed.

  Some distance beyond the foot of the tableland, the snow appeared to stir like the rippling, heaving surface of the sea. Then the eye picked out individual shapes from the all-encompassing white: Striding giants, barbarians, and dwarves; and crawling wyrms. Other drakes wheeled and darted against a leaden sky.

  Pavel studied the oncoming horde, then gulped the rest of his meal, stooped, and collected his weapons. “Let’s find Dorn.”

  “He’s with Stival and his troop. Madislak shuffled the squads around and put them—us—over this way.”

  They wended their way through a host making its final preparations for battle. Warriors honed blades and arrowheads, reinforced ramparts built of branches and packed snow, or kneeled to accept the blessings of one or another of the lesser druids. The greater ones were busy at the center of the company, swaying and murmuring in front of fires that leaped and changed color in response to their incantations, or declaiming words of power that made the cold air gust and the ground tremble and grumble. Wolverines, badgers, stags, and even a shaggy, hulking bear prowled among Mielikki’s servants as though awaiting instructions.

  A bowman bustled into the midst of the ritual preparations and jabbered a question, interrupting Madislak in the midst of a prayer. The stooped, scrawny old man with his bald, brown-spotted crown spun around glaring.

  “You officers know the strategy!” he snarled. “Is it too much to ask you to manage the tactics by yourselves? It is supposed to be your area of competence, isn’t it? Then go away and let me work!”

  Stival’s troop stood on the western side of the ridge, not too far from the point where the ground fell away so precipitously that it would be difficult for any of the Sossrim’s foes to flank them on that side. Well, any but the white dragons and ice drakes, who could probably fly wherever they cared to go. Dorn was there, filthy and sullen, iron fingers repeatedly clenching on his longbow. Wings flickering, snapping the occasional bug from the air, Jivex darted hither and yon. The bands of color streaming down his flanks seemed almost dazzling on an afternoon when everything else was white and gray.

  For the moment, at least. Will reflected that he’d likely start seeing plenty of red in just a little while.

  “Hello,” Stival said. “You look like you feel better, Master Shemov.”

  “I do,” Pavel replied.

  “Then may we have your blessing?”

  “Of course.”

  The Damaran brandished his amulet, invoking a golden glow. Will felt a bracing surge of resolution and vitality. Other folk smiled, or sighed and closed their eyes, as Lathander’s grace buoyed their spirits. Dorn, however, scowled and turned away from the light, spurning the god’s gift as, since Kara’s death, he’d rejected all efforts at comfort.

  “Now, then,” Pavel said, “what’s our specific role in Madislak’s strategy? Knowing will help me determine how best to employ the rest of my spells.”

  “Well,” Stival said, “naturally, it’s everybody’s job to hold the ridge. But beyond that, you have experience fighting dragons, so do I, and so do the rest of these fellows. So, if somebody has to get in close and meet one of the beasts blade to claw, it’s likely to be us.”

  Jivex hissed. “Dragons aren’t ‘beasts.’ Not even the dull-witted runts out there.”

  Some of the warriors grinned at the little drake’s display of indignation, or maybe, at his calling wyrms a hundred times larger than himself ‘runts.’ Trying to suppress his own smile, Stival began to offer an apology. But before he could finish, the enemy attacked.

  Enormous hailstones hammered down on portions of the Sossrim line, breaking heads and limbs despite the protection of helms and armor. Flares of pure cold froze men into rime-encrusted statues. Bursts of shadow, rushing in like breaking waves or leaping up from the ground like geysers, rotted flesh, or sent folk reeling in shrieking terror.

  Behind the cover of that sudden barrage of magic, Zethrindor’s army charged. The warriors on the ground roared their battle cries and sprinted forward. The drakes in the air lashed their wings and hurtled at the top of the hill.

  Unfortunately for them, however, their initial ploy didn’t work as well as Zethrindor had no doubt hoped. Sorcery had torn chinks in the Sossrim line, but hadn’t thrown it into disarray. The wards and blessings cast beforehand, and the protection afforded by the improvised fortifications, had saved most of the defenders, and they drew their bowstrings back to their ears. The whole ridge seemed to creak with the sound of flexing wood.

  “Shoot!” Stival shouted. Other captains yelled it, too.

  The volley clattered and thrummed. Pavel’s crossbow, the only such weapon in the immediate vicinity, gave a distinctive snap amid the ambient drone.

  At the same time, the Sossrim druids and wizards struck at the dragons on
the wing. Explosions of flame engulfed them, twisting, crackling thunderbolts speared them, and howling whirlwinds, visible thanks to the snow spinning inside, leaped at them. Clouds of stinging flies materialized to swarm on them.

  The magical harassment flung the flying dragons backward, while the hurtling arrows balked the attackers on the ground. Many toppled, pierced. Some tried to shoot back, but the bows of the Great Glacier were inferior to those of Sossal, where the proper sort of trees for bow-making grew, coaxed by druids to provide wood perfectly suited to the purpose, and most of the shafts fell short.

  Though the frost giants could cope with the range and the disadvantage of lower ground. Their strength compensated for the inferior quality of their gear. An arrow the size of a human longspear drove into the torso of a warrior near Will and slammed him back into the soldiers standing behind him.

  When the first exchange concluded, Will couldn’t tell who, if anyone, had gotten the better of it. The Sossrim had kept the flying dragons from descending on them, and their defensive line remained intact. But they’d also, in just a few heartbeats, sustained casualties that no army, facing superior numbers, could easily afford.

  At the foot of the hill, Zethrindor snarled orders. Will couldn’t catch the words, but the meaning became clear enough when some of the attacking force split off and headed into the forest. They meant to use the trees to shield them from further volleys of arrows while they advanced on the Sossrims’s eastern flank.

  Will hoped some defensive measure was in place to counter such a move, but he didn’t know what it was. That was one of the many things he hated about war: the feeling that most of the time, he didn’t fully understand what was happening and certainly had no hope of controlling it.

  Arrows flew back and forth. Magic filled the air with strange smells and pulses of warmth and chill as the spellcasters chanted it into being. The white dragons tried again to fly at the ridge, and as before, the Sossrim druids and wizards created bursts of flame, and conjured warriors of living fire and wind, to bar the way. The wyrms fell back.

  Their quivers nearly empty already, archers cried for more arrows, or yanked shafts from the ground, the ramparts of snow and sticks, and the bodies of fallen comrades. A man near Will caught a shaft in the chest, smiled as if delighted to discover the wound hadn’t inconvenienced him in the slightest, then collapsed.

  Stival chaffed Pavel on how long it took to cock an arbalest. The human side of his mouth sneering, Dorn shot methodically at whatever target presented itself. No doubt he would have preferred to attack Zethrindor, but the undead white hadn’t yet ventured into range. Thus far, the dracolich was directing his army more or less from the rear, evidently holding his own terrible prowess in reserve for later.

  Meanwhile, Will simply stood and watched. The sling the Sossrim had given him was a decent weapon, but it couldn’t throw a missile as far as a bow, and at that point, the enemy was simply too distant.

  Or so he imagined. But then, closer to the center of the battle line, earth and snow heaved, a section of the ramparts collapsed, and a gigantic, wingless dirty-white wyrm burst up out of the ground. Pale blue eyes blazing, it snagged an archer with its stubby foreclaws, conveyed him to its jaws, plunged its fangs into him, and sucked at him in a way that reminded Will of Brimstone. The white drake only guzzled for an instant, though, before spitting out its first victim and reaching for another.

  The blood-drinker was a tundra landwyrm. Will had never encountered one before, but recognized it from Stival’s stories. It shouldn’t have been able to tunnel all the way up through the hill so quickly, but presumably, magic had augmented its natural capabilities.

  As well as those of its kin, for, farther down the ridge, two more landwyrms exploded up out of the earth. The trio slaughtered at least twenty men in just a couple moments. Other soldiers, overcome by fear, scrambled away from the drakes. Madislak’s entire formation was in danger of disintegrating.

  Zethrindor knew it, too, and flung his troops into another charge at the hilltop. Men, dwarves, and giants ran. Dragons beat their way through the air.

  Nearly knocked down and trampled by fleeing Sossrim, Will felt an uncharacteristic panic welling up inside. For a moment, he too nearly bolted. Then he glimpsed Dorn shoving his way toward the nearest landwyrm, and the sight steadied him. Maybe it was because he and Pavel felt responsible for their friend, or perhaps it was simply that he was used to following where Dorn led. In any case, he scurried in his wake, meanwhile switching out the sling for his new short sword.

  Dorn sprang at the reptile’s flank, ripped its scaly hide with his iron claws, then slashed it with his hand-and-a-half sword. The landwyrm screeched and whirled, and he leaped backward, evading a snap of its jaws.

  It was at that point that Will squirmed his way out of the press of humans fleeing in the opposite direction and got his first good look at the fight as a whole. To his relief, he and Dorn were by no means battling alone. Pavel had conjured a glowing, flying mace to hammer at the landwyrm, and it bloodied the wyrm’s shoulder with a shrill whine of concentrated noise. Wheeling around the reptile, Jivex evoked a hood of glittering golden dust, which unfortunately fell away without sticking to the larger creature’s head. Stival, Natali, and other members of their troop assailed the foe with swords and spears.

  Though it was difficult to imagine what good it could possibly do. Even if they managed to kill the landwyrm, other drakes, giants, dwarves, and barbarians were already rushing to overrun the ridge.

  Will shoved such reflections out of his head. The task at hand was to slaughter that particular dragon. He’d worry about other perils later.

  He waited until the landwyrm’s head was pointed away from him, then, wary of its stamping feet and lashing tail, darted underneath it. He plunged his short sword into its guts.

  He stabbed four times before the landwyrm’s flesh shuddered in response to what might have been a particularly telling stroke. The drake would try to retaliate. Will scurried to get out from under it, and his boot slipped in the snow, costing him his balance and forward momentum.

  The shadow of a huge foot fell over him. He struggled to regain his equilibrium and realized it wasn’t going to happen quickly enough. Then Pavel lunged forward, grabbed him, and yanked him out of harm’s way. The wyrm’s foot slammed down, jolting the frozen earth.

  They were both off balance, and the landwyrm twisted its head perpendicular to its usual attitude and spread its gray-white jaws to strike at them. Stival scurried to interpose himself between the reptile and its intended prey and cut with his broadsword. The straight, heavy blade sheared so deep into the underside of the drake’s jaw that bone crunched, and blood gushed in bright, rhythmic arterial spurts. The landwyrm screamed and whipped its head away.

  Dorn gripped his bastard sword with both hands and hacked at the base of the reptile’s neck. Jivex lit midway down its back, beside the heavy, jagged, segmented dorsal ridge, and ripped at its flesh with fang and claw. Natali and her comrades slashed and stabbed.

  The landwyrm froze. Shuddered. Flopped over onto its side to roll and thrash. A couple warriors were too slow scurrying out of the way, and the reptile crushed them.

  As its death throes subsided, Will, panting, turned to find the next threat.

  Rather to his surprise, all three tundra landwyrms were dead. Better still, it seemed the panic the creatures had inspired had been less universal than his initial impression of it, because folk who hadn’t engaged the burrowing drakes had resumed the task of holding back the rest of the enemy. The giants, dwarves, and barbarians had gained some ground, but their advance had bogged down short of the top of the rise. Nor had the flying dragons penetrated the mystical barriers the Sossrim spellcasters kept placing in their way.

  Will spotted movement in the forest. Limbs slashed up and down, shaking snow and icicles loose. Was it possible the trees themselves were walking and striking at creatures on the ground?

  Dwarves and barbarians
reeled out into the open with bears, wolves, and hawks in pursuit. A frost giant likewise tried to flee, but something even bigger than itself grabbed its head in gnarled brown hands and gave it a neck-breaking twist. The killer was a treant, a creature like a tree with a face, and a divided trunk that served for legs. Bare bark from its root-like feet to its highest branches, denuded of leaves by the advent of winter, it turned and strode back into the forest, presumably in search of other intruders.

  It didn’t seem as if the invaders could flank Madislak’s army by looping around to the east. In fact, for a moment, Will found the entire situation encouraging, and grinning, was about to say so. Then he noticed how many more Sossrim the landwyrms had left smashed, torn, and lifeless in crimson pools on the ground.

  Does it truly all just come down to numbers? he wondered. No matter how well we fight, Zethrindor and his flunkies just grind us away in the end?

  No. He refused to believe it. Though if it did happen, then sometime before the finish, he’d make a point of reminding Pavel he’d predicted it would turn out to be a bad idea to backtrack.

  Dragons flew high, then circled, plainly intending to attack from multiple directions at once. Stival herded his surviving warriors back to what remained of the ramparts. Will grabbed the edge of a dead archer’s tabard, wiped the blood from his short sword, replaced it in its scabbard, and pulled the sling from his belt.

  Taegan remained absolutely still. Breathed as softly as possible. Did his utmost to remain calm, lest the pounding of an agitated heart, or the smell of fear, somehow leaking through Raryn’s enchantment, betray him. Meanwhile, the huge Tarterian, with its luminous green eyes, tattered wings, and black teeth and talons, stalked closer, while its fellows prowled higher up the mountain, or wheeled against the stars.

  Taegan supposed that, incongruous as it seemed to posit such a thing about such a precarious situation, his daft scheme was going relatively well. The dark wyrms hadn’t located him yet, which meant that, if Tymora smiled, Kara and Brimstone might actually have sufficient time to penetrate the ruined castle.