by Greg Curtis
“The trick will be to have them there waiting where the enemy tunnels break through, so that they can take the fight back to them.” It was more than a trick in truth, it would be a miracle if he built them here, and Alan already knew the answer. He would have to go to the dwarven cities and create them on site, something no doubt, he would be told off about at great length. Yet the reality was that while the elementals could run as fast as a horse could gallop, with only three days that might not be fast enough. He could fly far faster.
“Can you tell your people to expect my armies?” He was sure that they could, the dwarves had their own methods of communicating great distances underground even if they didn’t have a link to Sera or the ability to fire talk. They could tap codes into the great veins of ore and rock that ran under the ground with their little silver hammers, which others could hear.
“Yes of course.” That was about as far as the mine master got before the explosion of arguments began as the rest realised what he was intending. For some reason he was considered too valuable to risk these days, hence his virtual imprisonment in the lair of late. But that could no longer be allowed. Even as the others began telling him not to even think about leaving the new lair he vaulted lightly on to the railing. This draglet form might not be great for walking, but he could pounce like a cat when he wanted to.
“Tell your people to expect me at Silvercliffs within two days. My elementals will be with them soon after.”
With no more than that he leapt into the air, unfurled his wings as he always wanted to, and took to the skies with a whoop of pleasure. He didn’t fly often enough, and while he might be stuck in this form he knew that he was denying himself perhaps the greatest of joys of being a draglet, when he spent his days in the lair.
Of course there was always the landing to look forward to. And the northern lands were cold. It wasn’t as if this particular shape could wear woollens.
This might not be the most pleasant of trips after all, even if it was a chance to escape the lair for a few days.
Chapter Twenty Eight.
The mountains were cold, exactly as Alan had expected, or should have, and yet perched at the top of one, even surrounded by nearly a hundred infernos that he’d summoned as he’d flown there, he still found the bite of the chill surprising, especially when night had fallen. It seemed that if his new form had a weakness it was a vulnerability to the cold. But that was something he’d simply have to deal with.
The flight had been fast and despite his fears, safe, as he’d encountered nothing more dangerous than a few birds, though admittedly he’d given the enemy stronghold a wide berth. He was pleased with that and had flown several hundred leagues in only two days. It seemed the draglet form was a capable flyer.
When he’d arrived, surprisingly enough not that tired, he’d found a peak midway between Silvercliffs and Deepbend with a suitable platform for him and his small army of infernos to settle on without trouble. Then, as the night had drawn over, he’d begun summoning his new armies, and even though it was not yet dawn, at least several hundred diamonds were heading to both the nearby dwarven cities, running as fast as only they could. Meanwhile he was heating himself up with occasional bursts of fire which he warmed the rocks all around him with his flame, waiting impatiently for the dawn and the sunshine.
Sera had called of course, concerned about her little pet and he’d told her what he was doing and where he was, which she’d no doubt already been told, and since then he’d heard nothing but silence as he concentrated on his work. She in turn he hoped, would have told the dwarves and they would be awaiting his armies. His worry was that they would still be too late. Actually that was his second worry. The first was that the bone dragons would find him, though with so many infernos to protect him, they shouldn’t have had much of a chance to reach him. Besides, he was far faster and more agile in draglet form than they were. The Goddess had been determined to keep him whole when she’d given him the shape and he was grateful for her care.
Somehow he put those fears out of his mind and concentrated on his work, summoning the diamonds and sending them off, and for hour after hour it seemed his work was going well. By the time dawn finally began creeping up he could see little rivulets of sparkling glass reflecting the light of the moon, running down the sides of the mountain heading for the two nearby cities, and knew he was doing well. He hoped the dwarves were doing as well directing their new reinforcements, but they were natural warriors, perhaps even more skilled in tactics and war then humans, and he suspected they would use them to their best advantage.
“Why?” The word was the sound of rock scraping over rock, of the wind moaning in the deep, of water running through infinitely deep and dark canyons, and for a while Alan didn’t even recognise it as language. It was just a noise. But a few moments later he did, and it was then that the hairs on his back suddenly stood on end. More important than the question was the speaker, and he started looking all around him, hunting desperately. He couldn’t find him.
“Why?” Maybe a minute later, and just when Alan was beginning to believe that he had imagined it, trying to tell himself it had only been a rockslide in the distance amplified by his fears, the speaker asked again, and he knew it was real.
“Why what?” Even as he asked, as he shouted his question into the night sky, Alan knew he shouldn’t have responded. It was a mistake. Now his enemy knew he was there, and Alan knew that this was his enemy. No friend could make his skin crawl so. But it was too late to undo his mistake. All he could do was ready himself for whatever was coming.
Even while he waited for the speaker to answer him, Alan summoned a couple of light elementals to take up positions on the taller rocks all around him. He wanted to be able to see who was speaking, though a part of him didn’t want to. Still, for all the light the elementals could shed as they became a pair of blinding beacons in the still dim pre-dawn light, he could see nothing. That worried him more than anything else.
“Why do you defy me?”
“I do what’s right. Why do you do evil?” It was a bold claim, perhaps more than he should have said, and yet it felt like the right thing to say, and maybe, just maybe the question would give him a little time. And he needed time. Time to think, time to act and most of all time to speak with others who might understand more of this nightmare, and there was one above all others he knew he had to tell.
“Sera.” Silently he called the queen’s name as quickly as he could, hoping that she would hear him and respond despite his disobeying her. Though she hadn’t specifically forbade him from coming here, that was only because he’d left before she could be told and he doubted she was happy with him. In fact she’d sounded somewhere between annoyed and resigned when they’d spoken a day or so before. But as long as she was listening.
“Little one.” He felt her words in his thoughts almost immediately, and was comforted by them. Not just by the affection she had for him as she had for all her people, but simply for the fact that he wasn’t alone any more. He didn’t want to be alone, especially if he was about to die, and he knew he was in terrible danger even if he didn’t quite know what that danger was or where it might be coming from.
“I think the enemy has just made contact with me.” It sounded foolish as he said it, even to him. The necromancer had never made contact with anyone as far as he knew. Not even with his three former countrymen who had sent him away the first time. At least not according to the writings they had left behind. So why was he suddenly speaking to him? And how did he even know where he was? Or that he was even there?
“Little one?” Sera sounded shocked as was he, but before he could even explain the necromancer did it for him.
“Such smallness. I am what’s right. Evil is to oppose me.” The strange thing was that Alan believed the voice completely, or at least that the necromancer believed it himself. He was Huron, and for him power was all that mattered. In his own little realm he was simply doing what was right for him to do
.
“By the Mother!” Sera had started speaking through him, and though he hadn’t known she could do that, he was grateful for it. At least someone knew what to say. He had no clue. Meanwhile that gave him a chance to concentrate on his magic, and he knew he needed some defence. Yet before that he needed to be able to see his enemy.
“Your time has passed child. Your flesh has left this realm, while all that remains of your soul hangs in a dark place somewhere between this world and the next. All the power in the universe would not let you return to life. You cannot return.”
It was the work of only a few seconds to summon half a dozen air elementals, and then to cast a spell of true sight upon them even as he sent them out, scouting. If the enemy was coming in truth, if he had any physical form, they would find him, even in the darkness. Meanwhile, as he recalled, he still had a small army of infernos to protect him. They should be able to hold off even his bone dragons.
“Who are you to say such things to me?” The enemy was angered by her comments, and it showed in the way the ground suddenly started shaking, but for some reason Alan wasn’t worried. Maybe it was simply because he had Sera with him in spirit, or maybe he was simply beyond fear.
“I am Sera child. I was there when your people were young. I was there when you murdered one another and destroyed the world all around you. I was there when the world was slowly restored to health, and I am still here now. I will be here still when you are no longer even a memory. Do you deny me little one? Do you dare?” The strange thing was that she wasn’t angry, she was merely speaking the truth as she understood it, and she was mostly just saddened by the thought that he didn’t understand such a simple truth.
Regardless of whether he understood her or not, her words gained Alan some time as the silence stretched while presumably the necromancer thought them over. He might be powerful but he wasn’t quick. Alan took that time to work on his armies, summoning a small force of storm elementals. Even if they weren’t as lethal as infernos, they could wreak havoc among bone dragons, simply by preventing them from flying, and somehow he could imagine a small army of them heading his way, hurriedly.
“Sera. Queen of the dragons. You feared us. You feared me.”
“I feared nothing except the damage you could do to the world, the harm you caused. Things have not changed even now that you are dead.”
This time the enemy’s response was a little quicker, and barely thirty heartbeats later the ground started screaming with rage, echoing the fury of the necromancer himself. Whatever else he was he was powerful, and angry. The rumbling did not stop for many long minutes. But that just gave Alan more time to keep summoning, while the queen practised the patience of the dragons.
“I am not dead!” The necromancer screamed it at him, the earth all around Alan tearing itself apart with his fury, as he denied the truth, and perhaps it was that very denial that had made the enemy so powerful. He denied death itself.
“Yes you are child. Dead and gone. You died thousands of years ago, after the battles you and your kind waged had torn the life and the magic out of the land. There was nothing left for you to feed on. Nothing even to breathe. Not even the power to let your heart keep beating.”
“But something of your essence continued and became embedded in the land itself. A shadow perhaps, an echo, a memory, even a ghost, little enough not to be noticed normally but when the land itself was also a mere shadow of itself, clinging to life, enough. Your hatred, your knowledge, your war, it merged somehow with the skeleton of the lands that you all but destroyed. And as it slowly recovered, so did the strength of your remains.”
“You are not Agrin little one, just a fraction of his memory and his hatred, bound into the land itself. I wish I had realised that before.” The queen was sad and Alan didn’t quite know why. But then neither did he quite understand what she was saying. That the necromancer was in fact dead after all. That somehow the land itself where he had died, had become him after his death as it had absorbed his memory and assumed his war. It made little sense to him.
“I am Agrin!” He screamed it once more, the land all around shaking like a leaf in a thunderstorm, and Alan was all but deafened by it. But if the queen was right, then maybe he didn’t have so much to fear from it as he thought.
“No. Agrin is gone. You are but an echo of him.” Or maybe he realised as the land itself started tearing itself apart all around him, maybe there was actually more to fear. Agrin, the necromancer, was neither alive nor dead, nor even undead. He was nothing, and yet he could still make his impact felt on the world. And how did you fight such a thing? If he was alive you could kill him. If he was dead you could dispel his ghost. And if he was undead you could destroy his walking corpse. But how did you fight nothing?
On the other hand, he realised as he watched a strip of land surely a hundred paces long and ten wide simply curl itself up out of the ground like an earthworm reaching the surface, you could at least flee. He leapt into the air as fast as he could, guessing the intention of the necromancer well before he struck, and he was still barely quick enough as the huge tendril of living rock and clay simply came smashing down on the terrace where he’d been, smashing everything apart.
The impact was loud enough to be heard in the afterlife, and the damage was shocking as both the tendril and the terrace turned to rubble beneath him. But not nearly as shocking as seeing that after the first tendril had destroyed itself, two more had started instantly rising to take its place, chasing him. Desperately he started climbing, reaching for more height as he watched these new tendrils in turn start climbing and climbing. Snakes of rock and clay growing out of the ground at impossible speeds, reaching out for him, and though they wobbled as they grew higher, they refused to topple.
In time though they stopped growing, having reached whatever limit they had to obey, and whatever life it was that animated them, departed, and Alan knew sense of relief. But even as he kept climbing, determined that if they should start growing again he would be well out of their reach, he kept looking down and wondering how a spire of rock and clay could be so tall and thin, and how it could keep itself from falling. But stranger than that, he could suddenly make out one more feature of the rock columns that shocked him. They had hands at their very peaks! They weren’t truly columns at all, they were the necromancer’s own arms, reaching up out of the ground to grab him with their stone fingers. How could that be?
“Sera?” She was still with him of course. She would never leave her own in times of danger. But he knew she was troubled. He could feel that much in her thoughts.
“Keep flying high, and head far to the west, away from the mountains, well away from his direct reach. Maybe find the cities of the gnomes as a base. Do what you must there, and then return to the lair. There is much to discuss.” With that she was gone, and he knew she had things to do urgently, the most important of which was trying to work out what the necromancer actually was and how to stop him.
Alan had work to do too he realised. He had to raise the rest of his army somewhere further away, and then hope that it would be enough to destroy the necromancer’s army. And then maybe, to return to the lair and figure out what the necromancer actually was.
Chapter Twenty Nine.
The meeting had been running for many hours, and was likely to run for many more, as all the leaders and most learned among the mortals, and the dragons tried to make sense of the inexplicable. But there was no sense to be found.
Neither alive nor dead, nor even undead, the necromancer was as nothing any of them had ever imagined, and fighting him they knew was going to be a nightmare. After all how did you destroy something that didn’t actually exist?
You could kill someone that lived, you could banish the ghost of the deceased, and if the enemy was truly undead, it could be destroyed, but their enemy was none of these. For a start it seemed he no longer had a body, or rather the land itself had somehow become his body. That was impossible by all known laws of magi
c. Yet Sera told them the truth of what she had witnessed through her pet druid, and everyone knew she was right. It was just that no one knew what to do about it.
Round and round the debate had raged. Scholars had held the floor one after another, arguing for theories that had already been found wanting. But then so too had the theories of those who argued against them.
All sorts of suggestions had been raised, only to be discarded as useless, and the only one that still remained after all the others had been rejected, was the one that the dragons could never countenance. Destroy the entire plateau. Level the plateau and all the mountains that surrounded it, turn it into dust, and pray that if they could do such a thing, and that was by no means certain, it would destroy whatever the necromancer was. That was by no means certain either.
Meanwhile as the debate raged, nearly the entire assembly of New Huron had gathered in the alcoves surrounding the royal chamber and were standing there, leaning over rails, watching the gathering with mixed emotions.
For many the strongest feeling was that they needed their powers. With them they could have fought the necromancer, they could have destroyed him. But as Ashiel knew, and secretly they did too, they had failed five thousand years before when they had had all their magic, and when there had been untold millions of their people. What chance would they have stood now when he seemed to be beyond all such things as life and death and they numbered only a few thousand? She knew it was a useless thought, borne more from a feeling of helplessness and fear than anything more.
