The Day Of The Tempest

by Jean Rabe

  Blister’s vision had continued to improve as Feril tugged her away from the cave. Palin had paused only long enough to pick up the kender’s dropped gloves and hand them to her. He had repeatedly glanced back over his shoulder, expecting to see the mariner.

  It was several minutes, however, before Rig finally emerged from the lair. Palin turned and watched as the dark figure of the mariner rushed across the sand toward them. As he came closer, it was clear that what remnants were left of his pockets were bulging.

  “Feril!” The mariner picked her up, swung her in a circle, and kissed her. Then he released her and thrust his fingers into his pockets, drawing out pearls and emeralds and gold chains and holding them in front of her face. “Not what I hoped for, but it will do!”

  The startled Kagonesti felt a flush of embarrassment rise to her cheeks. She took a step back. “These will pay for supplies for the Anvil for several years,” he said, a wide grin decorating his face.

  “Wow!” A re-gloved Blister exclaimed. The kender’s sight had begun to return and her eyes locked onto the bright gems. “So we got some treasure after all.”

  “Do you want your daggers back?” Palin asked.

  The mariner shook his head, putting the jewelry back in his pockets. He had noted Blister’s interest and made a mental note to check his stash from time to time. “Keep’em. I’ve got plenty. I got back what the spawn had taken from me.”

  The Kagonesti shook her head. “You’re a walking arsenal, Rig Mer-Krel. Your headband’s a garrote, and you have more daggers than fingers. What else?”

  The mariner smiled. “The rest is a secret. And speaking of secrets, I managed to persuade the wyverns to tell me where the dragon’s stronghold is. There are people there that are doomed to be turned into spawn. I hope Groller will hold the Anvil for us, ‘cause we’re going to take a little side trip – see if we can do a little rescuing.”

  “Four of us against a stronghold of spawn?” Feril wondered aloud. “We can at least take a look at it,” the mariner said.

  “Not before we get some rest,” Palin stated.

  Two hours later they found a rocky ridge and huddled together in a comfortable niche. Dawn would soon be upon them, and none of them seemed able to take another step. Feril fussed over the cuts and burns on Rig’s chest and arms. He enjoyed her ministrations, but he was too tired to stay awake. He leaned his head back against the rocks and snored while she finished applying a salve she had concocted.

  Then she turned her attention to Palin. “You mentioned the name Khellendros back in the cave.” She made Palin sit still while she rubbed the salve into his cuts. “He’s the dragon overlord controlling this area “

  Blister, who had been studying the stars, became instantly interested and shuffled over. The kender settled back against a rock and cocked her head toward Palin.

  “Most call him Skie,” the sorcerer said. “My divinations revealed he laired far to the south of here. Otherwise I wouldn’t have agreed to traipse anywhere near this area.”

  “Maybe he does lair to the south,” Blister interjected. “Maybe he has several lairs. I would think an overlord could live pretty much wherever he wanted. So he’s called Khellendros and Skie?”

  “Skie was the name Kitiara uth Matar called Khellendros, and it’s a name that’s far easier to pronounce. They were partners in service to the Dark Queen. They made quite a pair, so all the stories claim. Both were ruthless and incredibly cunning – and fiercely loyal to each other. Kitiara is said to have died decades ago, and Skie disappeared shortly after. No one knows where he went.

  But when he came back, he was massive, and he became one of the first dragon overlords.” Feril shivered. “I thought the dragon that killed Dhamon and Shaon was big.”

  “Skie dwarfs that dragon,” Palin said. “My sorcerer associates and I have been studying the overlords, and Skie is in some respects the most intriguing of the lot. He appears to meddle the least of all in the affairs of the people in his realm – not directly anyway.”

  Feril shook her head and yawned. “I’d say that might make him the cleverest of the overlords. Why should he bother to directly involve himself?” She yawned again. “He has an army of spawn to do the work for him. He can lay back and count his treasure – or do whatever dragons like to do.”

  “And he has the Knights of Takhisis in Palanthas working for him,” Blister added. “The knights run the city and the land around it. How does the dragon spend his time? Counting treasure would get boring after a while.”

  Palin rubbed his neck. “He must be up to something if he has his underlings running everything. After we find this stronghold Rig’s interested in, I’ll contact my associates, see if we can figure out just what the Blue is up to. Perhaps we could —”

  Blister had fallen asleep. The sorcerer glanced at the Kagonesti. She had curled up into a ball, her head resting on her arm.

  “Perhaps we could discuss it later,” he said quietly. He closed his eyes and let sleep claim him, too.

  SPAWNING GROUND

  Khellendros glided several hundred feet above the desert floor. It was cool this night, too cool for his liking. He could make it warmer just by concentrating and casting an enchantment that would comfortably raise the temperature of the air around his massive body. But he knew the sun would bring the cherished heat with it in a few hours, and that would do. He had the patience to wait until then, and he pledged to devote at least part of the coming day to basking on the white sand and plotting.

  He angled his sleek body toward his northernmost lair, soaring past a small ridge in which two men, an elf, and a kender slept. He didn’t notice them, so intent was he on reaching the underground cave. Nor did they notice him, for he seemed to fade into the dark sky. Khellendros’s belly was the lightest part of him, thick plates of iridescent azure ran from just under his jaw to the base of his tail. The rest of his body was covered with sapphire blue scales that were almost black in some places on his massive back. His dark wings were leathery and covered in small scales, and his claws were long and as white as the single, pale moon that hung low in the sky. Only Malys was larger than he; the Blue stretched nearly four hundred feet from nose to tail tip. Despite his immense size, Khellendros was incredibly graceful on the ground – fast and dexterous. But in the sky, his element, he was even more agile and could turn and bank in smooth, quick motions.

  As he neared his home, he tilted his head and unleashed a bolt of lightning that shot up and buried itself into a cloud far overhead. The dragon closed his eyes for an instant, called to the cloud and merged his senses with its milky-gray tendrils. A moment later the cloud answered by caressing his body with soft rain. He released another bolt and another.

  The flashing light revealed his magnificent visage. A spiny midnight-blue crest framed his huge head. His eyes, elegantly slanted orbs, were the color of lightning and had a hint of malevolence about them. Horns curved up and away from his jowls, twin spiky growths the shade of cream at the base and turning to steel blue at the tips. Khellendros was a most impressive dragon.

  The rain came harder now, so he could better feel it against his thick hide. He rolled onto his back and let it run across his stomach plates. He rolled again and dove toward the sand, aiming for a large rocky ridge that sheltered an enormous cave. As he flew through the cave opening and down the tunnel, his claws never touched the ground. He tucked them in close to his body and the dark maw of the cavern swallowed him up.

  “No!” the dragon bellowed, pulling up to a stop and hovering in the air. Khellendros narrowed his eyes to golden slits, and peered through the darkness to observe that part of his beloved underground lair had collapsed. There was barely enough room in the one chamber left standing for his massive form and the two wyverns who trembled nervously.

  “Master home,” the wyvern stated. “Master free us?”

  The dragon’s wings, flapped only a little in the now-cramped confines. But it was enough to stir up the sand on the floor,
which stung the wyverns’ eyes.

  “Free please?” the smaller implored as it blinked furiously and jiggled its head to shake off the sand. Khellendros growled, a rumble that reverberated in his belly and sounded like an earthquake.

  Lightning flickered around his jagged teeth, and his eyes grew wide. “Explain yourselves! Explain this!”

  The wyverns looked at each other, and then the larger one gulped, trembled violently, and swiveled its neck so it could look straight into the enormous eyes of the Storm Over Krynn. “Spawn caught men,” the creature began. “And elf. Made prisoners.”

  The smaller wyvern nodded furiously. “Spawns popped.”

  “After...” the larger wyvern searched its dim brain for a word, “magic. Elf made magic.” It looked down at its trapped claws and once more struggled to free itself.

  “Elf,” the other wyvern agreed. “Elf made floor magic. Made walls fall.”

  “Bad elf,” the larger one said. Then the creature described the prisoners in as much detail as its limited vocabulary allowed – the dark skinned mariner with a seemingly unending collection of daggers, the tan elf with paintings on her skin, the childlike kender who pelted the spawn with pearls, and the older man with brown-gray hair. The dragon paid particular attention to the description of the eldest in the group.

  “Free now?” the smaller wyvern asked. “Free please?”

  Khellendros growled louder. His huge nostrils quivered, taking in the foreign scents in his lair, and his eyes locked onto the bits of drying blood on the stone floor and along the walls. “Where are these prisoners now?”

  “Escaped,” the wyverns chorused.

  The dragon swung his head around to bring it close to the wyverns. His growl died to a soft rumble, and he sat back on his haunches, his tail trailing behind him and flicking angrily. “And...”

  The smaller wyvern swallowed. “Prisoners popped spawn. Guards. Only two popped.”

  “And ones below when cave fell,” the other added, then glanced hopefully at the dragon. “Free please now?”

  “When Fissure arrives.” Khellendros stretched out in the cave as much as possible and closed his eyes. The wyverns*banter faded to plaintive whispers, then stopped. They were afraid to wake the dragon and incur his wrath.

  But the dragon was not sleeping. Rather, he was thinking about his lost spawn, his lost hours of work, and of Palin Majere, whom he fully intended to find and slay. The sorcerer was the whelp of Caramon and Tika Majere, Kitiara’s nemeses. Therefore the sorcerer was the dragon’s enemy. And now, because of the sorcerer and his friends, Khellendros would have to rebuild his spawn army and reshape this lair. The dragon growled softly and let his thoughts drift to the storm outside, his mind playing with it. He ignored the nervous breathing of his ugly brown servants. The wind howled and thunder boomed – sounds he considered preferable to music. Lightning flashed down to kiss the sand. The storm continued to grow more intense, and then he thought of Kitiara.

  *

  Shortly before dawn a diminutive figure glided into Khellendros’s cave. Not much more than a foot tall, his smooth skin was the color of the rocky walls, His eyes were black, pupilless circles that seemed too large for his pinched face and his ears were flush with the sides of his bald head. He wore no clothes and had long-fingered hands.

  The little man shuffled forward, past the wyverns, who looked at him expectantly but kept their mouths shut. He silently approached the Storm Over Krynn, stopping a few feet away from the tip of the dragon’s great blue snout. The large yellow eyes opened.

  “Fissure,” the dragon rumbled. “Palin Majere was here “

  The little man looked beyond the dragon and noted the collapsed walls. “Did he discover your plans?”

  Khellendros shook his head, the motion sending sand flying in all directions. Fissure’s skin shimmered for an instant, and the sand passed through him. “No, faerie, he does not know. I never discussed my plans when the wyverns were present”

  “Ah, to return to The Gray....” the diminutive man sighed wistfully. He was a dark huldrefolk, one of the lost race of faeries who, prior to the gods departing from Krynn, could access the many dimensions that overlapped the world. The Gray was his home, a realm of swirling clouds and floating spirits, a place with no land – only mists. He had not been able to return there since the world’s magic was suppressed. As was the case with the Blue, he had an innate magical aura about him. But tt wasn’t powerful enough to transport him beyond Krynn, even with the aid of one of the many portals scattered across the land.

  Fissure had met Khellendros at one of those portals. The dragon was trying to use it to return to Kitiara’s spirit in The Gray. Perfecting spawn was part of his plan to snatch her spirit and place it in a spawn shell. “To go home,” Fissure mused aloud.

  “To find Kitiara’s spirit,” Khellendros said. The dragon had sworn an oath to protect Kitiara uth Matar, the only human he knew who seemed to have the soul of a dragon and a mind as calculating and clever as his own. Decades ago, on a day when she was away from him, she died. Khellendros had felt her spirit drift beyond Krynn, and so far he had searched in vain for it. Vowing to find her spirit, to be reunited with his partner, he had scoured dimension after dimension.

  Decades passed on Krynn, while time raced by beyond the portals. When Khellendros at last found her, in The Gray, he returned to Krynn to locate a body suitable to house her lost spirit. He returned as a massive dragon, one century old by Ansalon standards. With his greater size, came greater power. But he had lost the power to return to The Gray.

  “How many artifacts shall it require, faerie?” Khellendros hissed.

  Fissure stroked his chin. “The ancient magic is powerful. I would say six such pieces should contain enough energy to open a portal and to allow us access to The Gray.”

  “I have two,” the dragon stated. “We must attain four more.” Then Khellendros pointed a talon toward the wyverns. The creatures looked toward the dragon and the huldrefolk, then down at their feet. “Free them, then get them out of here. They are useless.”

  “I promised you other sentries, Portal Master. Smarter ones.”

  “See to it that you keep your promise, faerie.”

  The huldrefolk stood and approached the wyverns. Their heads and tails weaved back and forth, reminding him of a pair of excited puppies.

  “Free please?” the smaller one pleaded. “Hungry. Thirsty.”

  Fissure stooped and touched the cave floor. A pale blue glow spread out from his fingertips and raced forward to surround the wyverns’ clawed feet. Stone was Fissure’s element. He mentally ordered it away from the creatures, and as the rock turned to putty and then parted, the wyverns flapped their wings maddeningly, carrying them above the floor. They were careful not to touch any part of the cave for fear they would be ensnared again, and they watched as Fissure resculpted the stone to look as though it had never been disturbed.

  “Free,” the larger said with a hint of glee to its deep voice.

  “You are truly free,” the huldrefolk said. He rose and pointed to the tunnel that led to the desert above. “You are free to return home.”

  “To forest?” the larger asked. “To cool forest? Shady forest?”

  “Hot Here,” the smaller said. “Go cooler place? Dragon say so?”

  Khellendros rumbled loudly. “Go!” he hissed. He watched the wyverns fly from his lair, colliding with each other as they competed to be the first to leave the cavern. “And you should be going as well, faerie. You have duties – help me to gain the ancient magic.”

  Like a mole, Fissure burrowed quickly through the stone, leaving a ridge behind him to mark his passage. Up and out of the tunnel he hurried. A moment later the stone ridge behind him shimmered and again went flat.

  The Blue drummed a talon against the floor. He had places to go, too – away from this lair. Malys had contacted him earlier, requesting his presence. She wanted to know more about creating spawn, for she was gathering human
specimens to begin the process herself. Khellendros was furious that she’d discovered his spawn so early in his game. But there was no turning back time and making her oblivious to his scaly children now. So he had agreed to show her how to do it. He had said the process was to be his gift to her.

  I shall teach you, Malys, he thought. And then you shall show all of the other overlords – as is your plan – but I shall also show Gale, a lesser blue dragon you have not included in your schemes. There will be more blue spawn than any other color created by the other dragons. Khellendros wrinkled his scaly brow. It had been some time since he had heard from the younger dragon, his lieutenant Gale had attacked Majere’s ship – as Khellendros had ordered – many days ago.

  The dragon glided from his lair and out into the morning sun. He stretched out on the sand, and let its intense, blessed heat seep into his scales. Khellendros would bask here for a few hours, then he would visit Malys. Later, he would get around to contacting Gale. He didn’t feel like bothering with the lesser dragon just now. The Blue deserved some time in the sun. Yes, later he would take the younger dragon to his desert stronghold, show him firsthand how spawn were created, let him enjoy the screams of the captive humans and realize just how much power dragons held in Ansalon.

  Chapter 6

  SAND TO FLESH

  Fissure sat cross legged on the desert sand, his gaze drifting to the lone barrel cactus he spotted. Stark green against all the trackless ivory, it looked like a blemish on the face of the Northern Wastes. He reached a slender gray finger up to scratch his bald head. “A giant walking cactus as a guard for the Storm’s lair?” he mused aloud. “It could hurl needles and... no, that would be no better than the wyverns. What to bring the Blue?”

  An hour passed and still the huldrefolk contemplated the matter. The sun was climbing above the horizon. Soon the temperature in Khellendros’s desert would be intense and unrelenting.