5
9 Uktar, the Year of the Snow Winds (1335 DR)
THE SURMARSH, THAY
Marek had no interest in all the killing and sword-play. A simple spell rendered him invisible, so he could stand apart from the fray, watching his people dispatch one lizardman after another.
The lizardmen shone with slime and bog water. Their green-and-yellow scales twitched over tightly bunched muscles. Long snouts like a crocodile’s snapped at the Thayans, and unsettlingly humanlike hands tipped with terrible claws ripped and pawed. Marek couldn’t help but notice that when the lizardmen bled, their blood was as red as any human’s.
He’d been sent deep into the untamed marsh in the northern reaches of the realm on what he was certain was a suicide mission. Though since he hadn’t sent himself there, it was more properly a homicide mission, and he was the victim.
I’ve made as many enemies as friends, Marek Rymut told himself as a Thayan warrior died gurgling at the hands of one of the humanoid reptiles. I guess that means I’m doing something right.
With a mumbled incantation and a casual swipe of his hands in front of him, he stopped the lizardman in its tracks. The warrior’s blood dribbled into the brackish water, mingling with the green-yellow slime floating on the top. Little fish appeared from below the murk to gum the droplets of blood.
The lizardman’s breathing grew fast and shallow, and Marek was concerned that the thing might pass out. Having cast the spell, Marek could be seen, but there were so few of the lizardmen left, and enough of his own people still wading through them, that he was comfortable with his own safety.
The cold swamp water leaking into his boots, however, was quite a bit less than comfortable.
“If you understand me,” Rymut said to the lizardman, “say so now or I’ll kill you and find one of your kind that does.”
The lizardman thought about it for a few beats of its racing heart then said, “I … understand.”
Rymut smiled, remaining silent, and watching while one of his people-a young woman named Zhaera who was a promising little necromancer-was disemboweled by a lizardman’s ragged claws. The yellow-gray ropes that came out of her body splashed into the swamp water and glistened in the sunlight filtering through the trees above. Flies landed on them and took off again quickly, taking their little nibbles even as the guts sank into the swamp. It took her a few seconds to die, but Marek imagined she was happy to be able to see the lizardman who’d killed her fall before the blade of the strapping young sergeant who was ever so handy with a battle-axe.
“If not Thay,” Marek asked the paralyzed lizardman, “whom do you serve?”
The lizardman’s lips curved and Marek could see strips of human flesh festering between its triangular teeth.
“Speak, lizard,” Marek Rymut urged. “Whatever you fear from your new master, I can assure you will be tripled at the hands of the Red Wizards. Speak, then I will release you, you can go back to serving your proper masters in peace, and I can leave this stinking, insect-infested hell hole once and for all.”
“A dragon …” the lizardman hissed, reluctant to explain further.
Marek raised an eyebrow and said, “A dragon? Oh, do tell.”
The lizardman stood twitching silently for a moment.
“This dragon has a name, I take it?” Marek asked, noticing only in passing that the last of the lizardmen had fallen to a Thayan blade.
“Insithryllax,” a deep, powerful voice swept over the stagnant water.
Marek looked up at the source of the voice: a tall, thin man with skin the color of freshly turned soil. His head was shaved clean, and he was dressed in traveling clothes of thin oiled leather and fine shimmering silk. His eyes betrayed his nature, being a human’s eyes, save for the triangular irises.
“Insithryllax,” Marek said with a beaming smile. “It’s a lovely name, really.”
The dragon in his human form drew one side of his lips up in a thin, tight smile.
“Well,” Marek went on, “since I have you here, sir, I must inform you that I have been sent here by the Tharchion of Eltabbar to collect one thousand pieces of gold in lawfully levied taxes owed by the Swamp Scale Tribe. Am I to understand that you are holding that gold on their behalf?”
Insithryllax laughed, and Marek all but bathed in the sound of it, it was so beautiful.
“You aren’t afraid of me,” Insithryllax observed.
The dragon’s eyes twitched from side to side, noting the Thayans moving to surround him. The warriors had their weapons ready, and the few surviving mages were poised to cast spells.
“Aren’t they darling?” Marek said with a smile.
“Indeed,” replied the dragon. “Are they yours?”
“For the time being.”
The Thayan agents looked at each other, uncertain, waiting for orders, not understanding what they were hearing.
“You’re a black, aren’t you?” Marek asked.
Insithryllax shrugged in the affirmative.
“Show me?” asked Marek, his mouth beginning to water.
The dark-skinned man began to twitch, then he shook, then he spasmed. Loud popping noises assaulted Marek’s ears, and the man fell to all fours, his face dipping into the fetid water. When his head tipped up again to look at the Red Wizard, the human face was gone, and in its place was something that looked more like the lizardmen.
“Sir …” one of the warriors, the dashing young sergeant in fact, said.
He, like the others, was stepping back, the ring around the transforming thing growing larger and thinner with each step.
“Take no action without my direct command,” Marek ordered.
By the looks on more than one of their faces, he had some reason to doubt they’d all wait once the dragon fully revealed itself.
More cracking, popping, grunting, and shaking stretched across several increasingly tense moments, and soon a massive wyrm stood in the rippling swamp water. Insithryllax’s batlike wings stretched two dozen feet from tip to tip. On the end of a long, scaled neck was a head like a lizard’s, with forward-curving horns protruding from either side of his head. A tongue as long as Marek’s arm flicked from between teeth as wide and as sharp as kitchen knives.
Marek Rymut found that he could hardly breathe.
“You knew you would find me,” the dragon rumbled, his voice shaking the Red Wizard’s eardrums, “didn’t you, human?”
Marek smiled and bowed in answer.
“And you’ve readied yourself, I suppose?” the great wyrm asked.
Again, Marek smiled and bowed.
“We’ll speak again in a moment,” said the dragon.
It drew in a deep breath, its chest filling out, almost bulging.
“Sir!” the handsome sergeant shouted, the beginnings of a thin, almost feminine wail sullying his last word.
Two of the surviving wizards began to cast spells but never finished them.
The dragon opened his great jaws and poured a black mist from his throat into the air around him. Spinning, Insithryllax swept the mist across the Thayan agents. When the mist touched their flesh, it sizzled and popped. Some of them turned and tried to run, but they couldn’t get nearly far enough away. Exposed flesh began to slough off so that at least three of Marek’s people lived long enough to touch their own skulls with rapidly disintegrating fingers, their last screams rattling out through mouths devoid of tongue or lips.
Marek was barely able to finish his own spell for the gorge that rose in his throat, but by the time the dragon had come full circle and his team was dead, Marek Rymut was done with his casting, and the dragon presented a brief moment of vulnerability.
The wyrm’s eyes came around to meet Marek’s and the Red Wizard could see a change come over them. It was subtle. Only a trained few could spot it, but there it was.
Marek smiled and said to the dragon, “I guess that makes us even.”
“Yes,” the mighty creature said, his voice like thunder rolling across t
he Thaymount. “Even …”
Marek let his smile fade away.
“We can start fresh now, can’t we?” Marek said.
The dragon blinked once then said, “Fresh … yes.”
“We can be friends,” said Marek.
“Friends,” the dragon replied, his great head bobbing up and down.
Thanks to Marek’s spell, the dragon’s mind, though not quite enslaved to the Red Wizard, was open, vulnerable, and trusting.
Marek Rymut smiled again, managed to keep himself from laughing, swatted a mosquito that flew too close to his neck, and said, “Very best friends, forever and ever.”
The dragon nodded again and waited for instructions.
6
2 Kythorn, the Year of the Wanderer (1338 DR)
FOURTH QUARTER, INNARLITH
After having missed Pristoleph’s right ear by the width of two fingers, the arrow sank into the soft wood of a rain barrel, burying itself two thirds the length of its shaft. Water sprayed then trickled out from around it.
Pristoleph ran as fast as he could for the closest open door. Once again, he had found himself in a dark alley at night, deep in the city’s poorest precinct, running for his life. If he’d bothered to keep count, it would have been the one hundred and forty-seventh time, and he was only twenty.
Flickering firelight painted the damp flagstones in front of the door, and the clang and clatter of a busy kitchen harmonized with the clap of his boots. Pristoleph knew that he’d be an easy target silhouetted in the light of the doorway, but there was nothing for it. There was nowhere else to go. He would just have to rely on the pursuing whychfinder’s human eyesight and fatigue from the long chase to save his life. The arrows had grown increasingly less frequent, and even less accurate, over the past few minutes.
He passed through the doorway and an arrow sprouted from the door frame.
Pristoleph thought he could hear the whychfinder curse his poor aim, but the noise of the kitchen covered any further sounds from behind. Only a few of the dozen or so scullery maids bothered to even glance at the young man as he sprinted through their workspace. Pristoleph gave them no more of his attention than was necessary to avoid their knives, elbows, cleavers, and the cats, rats, and assorted urban game they were butchering for their guests.
The curtain that separated the kitchen from the common room didn’t slow him at all, but he had to quickly side step in order not to collide with a serving wench carrying a tray of brim-full flagons. The tray seemed too heavy for the slim young girl, but she carried it just the same and with such dexterity that she could spin out of Pristoleph’s way as he brushed past.
The inn was crowded and reeked of stale mead, mold, burned meat, and sweat. Tables ringed by men all shouting at once over games of dice filled the center of the huge room, while private booths along the walls revealed suspicious glances, nearly public intimacies, and the Fourth Quarter’s regular trade in flesh, fantasy, and intoxicants.
“Pristoleph?” a female voice called over the din.
He didn’t stop running, snaking a course through the tightly packed revelers, but he turned his head at the voice and saw a familiar face.
“Nyla,” he said between panting breaths.
It had been two years since he’d last seen Nyla, and they hadn’t parted on the most amicable terms. The woman insisted that Pristoleph owed her a tidy sum of gold that wasn’t due her. Harsh words had been exchanged, and she’d ended up in the tent of a rival of Pristoleph’s, serving the artillerymen mostly, after their hard days at practice with their trebuchets.
Until, that is, Pristoleph killed said rival and sent Nyla on her way with a threat he couldn’t quite remember just then, but of which he’d meant every word.
“Stop that son of a-” she shrieked, then stopped abruptly when someone barreled into her from behind.
Something made Pristoleph stutter-step to a halt and turn.
Nyla went down face-first and hard, the too-heavy tray in front of her, and the man who’d run into her sent her down even harder, having lost his footing and come up full onto her slim back. They both fell faster than gravity alone would have mustered, impacting with a deafening clatter of broken clay flagons, tearing fabric, and snapping bones. The last thing Pristoleph saw of them was the bottom of the whychfinder’s boots as he finished his ungraceful arc and sprawled all arms and legs amongst the rapidly withdrawing crowd.
Mead went everywhere, dousing more than a handful of men, none of whom were terribly happy about it. A few of them bent to grab up the sprawling soldier, and all eyes went to the source of the ruckus.
Pristoleph was fairly sure no one but he saw a bow slide along the sawdust-covered floor to end up at his feet. He bent to retrieve it, then moved toward the center of the disturbance, dodging the elbows and legs of the men who were delivering a wild but sound beating to the fallen whychfinder.
“Hold!” Pristoleph shouted.
All but two of the men stopped, turned quickly, and blanched at the sight of Pristoleph, who swaggered into their midst. The other two got a couple more solid blows in before their fellows grabbed them by the elbows and turned them away.
“Pristoleph,” one of the men said, nodding, his eyes on the floor.
Pristoleph ignored the man-a stevedore and part-time rapist named Rorgan-and didn’t bother identifying any of the other men, all of whom were quickly going back about their business.
He stopped and looked down at the young soldier writhing on the floor. His tabard was soaked with blood and mead, and his chain mail scraped the worn wood floor. He fumbled for a dagger at his belt, which Pristoleph quickly relieved him of. He grabbed the whychfinder by the collar and dragged him, arms and legs twitching, mumbling through broken teeth and swollen lips, in a beeline for the front door.
“My eye!” Nyla screamed from behind him. “For the love of all that’s holy, my eye!”
Pristoleph paid the shrieking, pain-crazed woman no mind. Instead, he pushed the wounded soldier through the door and into the relative quiet of the late-night street. The few passersby might have been momentarily startled, but in the Fourth Quarter, no one got into the middle of fights that spilled out of inns. It was too easy a way to end up dead, maimed, or worse.
He laid the man out on the floor of the alley next to the inn, leaned up against the wall, and worked to calm his breathing. The whychfinder opened the one eye not swollen shut and regarded Pristoleph without the slightest hint of recognition at first. By the time Pristoleph was able to breathe easily again, the soldier stared at him with undisguised fury, though he didn’t try to rise from the alley floor.
“Why?” Pristoleph asked the man. “After a year and a half, why?”
“I don’t know why,” the soldier said.
“Why me?”
“You deserted,” the soldier answered.
“They don’t send a whychfinder after every conscript who chooses life over lord,” Pristoleph said. “You know why you were sent after me.”
The whychfinder managed a crooked smile and Pristoleph could tell that the expression pained him.
“The captain misses his whores,” said the soldier, “and if you kill me, he’ll send another right after me. He’s got more whychfinders than camp-followers these days.”
“I’m out of that line of work,” Pristoleph said. “I’ll let you live so you can tell him that.”
“He won’t care, but I’ll let you spare me just the same.”
Pristoleph forced a smile and said, “You won’t find me in this neighborhood again. You won’t find me on the streets.”
“Going somewhere?”
Pristoleph’s smile faded as the soldier started to laugh. He reached down to his belt and drew the whychfinder’s dagger.
“Yes,” he said, and the whychfinder stopped laughing. “I’m going somewhere.”
Pristoleph killed the man with his own dagger, left it waving slowly back and forth in his chest, and disappeared into the shadows.
6 Alturiak, the Year of the Lion (1340 DR)
THE CITY OF AMRUTHAR, THAY
The map was a series of illusions that hung in the air of the broad circular chamber and produced the only light in the room. Marek Rymut let his eyes drift across the shimmering blue line that represented the southern coastline of the Vilhon Reach. He reached up to cut the coastline with the tip of his finger. He guessed that the width of his fingernail eclipsed maybe five miles of coastline between the cities of Hlath and Samra.
A group of Red Wizards settled into positions around the circumference of the room, each accompanied by one or two trusted bodyguards and a secretary.
Marek looked around the room and returned the silent, nodding greetings of friend and foe alike. Though it had been over four years since he’d returned to civilization with Insithryllax in tow, most of the Red Wizards still gave the transformed dragon wary looks. Some, Marek knew, were hoping the series of powerful enchantments that held the dragon in thrall would one day fail and leave Marek Rymut at the wyrm’s mercy. Others, he hoped, saw Insithryllax as an ally as dependable as Marek himself. It was just that balance upon which the Red Wizard’s life teetered.
“I will make this brief,” said the tharchion as he swept into the room through a rapidly fading dimension door.
What little noise there had been in the room-the shuffling of feet, a stifled cough, or whispered commands to assistants-dropped away. The tharchion held up one nearly skeletal arm and with a crooked, knobby finger, pointed to a floating point on the great map.
“Reth,” the tharchion said, “Tovek.”
The Red Wizard named Tovek, a confused expression crossing his brow for just a split second, bowed in response as the coastal city of Reth blazed with a fierce orange light that picked it out from the dull blues and greens of the translucent map.
The tharchion’s finger followed the coastline southwest and settled on the city of: “Iljak, Toravarr.”
Toravarr, no less confused than Tovek, bowed to the tharchion.
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