Progress was slow and exhausting, not to mention painful, but Simon was within a couple of feet of the portal when a spine-tingling howl echoed through the massive hall, bringing a rain of metal flakes and a few heavier pieces of the roof tumbling down around the wizard.
“Oh crap,” he muttered.
He looked over his shoulder just in time to see the metal door slam open, smash into the wall and tear off of its hinges. The kallorian stood there, its horrible head and heavy torso filling the doorway.
Blood painted its jaws, but whether it was its own or Ethmira's, Simon couldn't tell. Horribly, the arrow still stuck out of its ruined eye as it looked around the room, searching for its prey.
The single glowing red eye locked on to Simon's and it howled again, a sound of hatred and hunger, and it leaped forward, maw agape.
“Crap. Crap, crap, crap!” the wizard shouted as he scrambled toward the portal, cuts and slashes be damned.
It was a near thing. His frantic scrabbling and shoving feet got him to the fading gateway just as the kallorian made a great bound upward, slashing at him with its razor-sharp claws.
Simon staggered through the portal at the same time as a horrific wave of pain shot up his leg. He stumbled forward and fell on his face, expecting the sharp metal to slash him to ribbons.
Instead, he landed in thick, sweet grass and rolled a few times before he came to a stop, staring up at a clear blue sky.
Waves of pain that pulsed up his right leg in time with his heartbeat made him sit up and look down, expecting to see himself bleeding out. But, although he did have a long cut that had ripped open his pants and ran down from the side of his leg from knee to ankle, the wound was shallow and the bleeding was light.
He lay back and closed his eyes, breathing a long sigh of relief. The smell of crushed grass and rich earth filled his nostrils and he sucked in the scents, feeling almost intoxicated by the sweetness.
Home, he thought. I'm home.
Chapter 5
It must have been early in the day because the sun was still rising from the east. Simon eventually felt strong enough to stand and forced himself to his feet.
His leg had stopped bleeding, although the cuts on his fingers still dripped a bit. He ignored them.
The one good thing about having lived to middle age before he'd Changed, he thought, was that pain wasn't as scary as it had been when he'd been as young as he looked now.
He had landed in a rolling meadow filled with long grass and dotted with small trees. A forest surrounded the glade, but after his time in the elven realm, Simon thought that it looked small and not very inspiring.
The trees might have grown to heights of fifty feet or more but he was used to forests that towered overhead for hundreds of feet. He doubted that most earthen forests could compete.
He also had absolutely no idea where he was. He could see a few fir trees as well as elm and maple, but that told him nothing. If only he could Gate home, but...
Simon caught himself and laughed at his own stupidity.
“You're home, you idiot,” he said out loud. “Your powers should have returned.”
He raised his hands and looked at them. Bruised and bloody, cuts scattered across his fingers, they were still whole and he wiggled them tentatively.
Could he still cast spells? Was he still a wizard? Surely living in the elven realm hadn't destroyed his talent. Had it?
“Only one way to find out,” he murmured.
Simon searched the grass around him until he found a small length of wood. It was a dry old branch about a foot long. The breeze was light and the wizard pushed back his long mane of hair as he held up the stick and stared at it intently.
Try the simplest form of magic first, he thought. If it doesn't work...well, one step at a time.
He frowned at the branch, focusing all of his energy on it.
“Fire,” he whispered.
The stick trembled in his nervous grip as he stared at it. At first, nothing happened. It was merely a length of pale, dried wood. But as Simon kept his will focused on it with laser-like intensity, a small wisp of smoke began to curl up from its tip.
The smoke grew thicker and then, with a bright flash, the branch burst into flames.
“Woo-hoo!” Simon shouted with glee.
He flung the stick straight up and it burned to ash in a flash of fire. He wrapped his arms around himself and laughed in joyous relief.
I'm me again, I'm me again, he kept thinking with almost hysterical relief.
He wasn't sure why, but he'd been halfway convinced that months of being without magic might have changed him forever.
Months in the elven realm, he told himself as the happiness faded, to be replaced with a dose of cold reality. Years here on Earth.
How many? He didn't know for sure. Ethmira had said three, but even the elves couldn't be positive. It might have been more; much more.
Ethmira. Simon prayed that the blood he'd seen on the mouth of the kallorian had been its own and not his friend's. He might never know. If the time lines were stretching between the realms, his Magic Mirror spell might not be able to make a connection. But he'd try to reach her at his first opportunity.
Right now it was time to go home and learn how much time had really passed since he'd been away.
Kronk will know, Simon told himself. And Aeris. I hope that they've kept the tower in good repair.
A pang of worry struck him as he remembered his last moments on Earth. His two elemental friends had tried to hold back Lacertus, the godling who had been chasing him. They hadn't succeeded, and now Simon wondered if they were okay. He'd thought about them many times since, but had tried to put the situation out of his mind, mainly because there had been nothing that he could do about it.
Now though, now he was home and the worry came crashing down upon him once more.
I have to see them both, he thought. Right now.
He adjusted the pack on his back and realized with a pang that he'd somehow managed to lose his elven bow during his headlong scramble toward the portal back in Dellis Varna. All he had left was the pack and the quiver tied to his belt.
“Damn it,” he said bitterly. “I'd finally become comfortable with a weapon and now I've lost it.”
Worse still, it was one less connection with the elves and Ethmira and he felt the loss keenly.
With a tired shrug, he tried to let it go and thought about his one true weapon instead.
“Mortis de Draconis,” he said with a smile. “Slayer of Dragons. Oh, I've missed you.”
His hand itched for the feel of the staff again. Just another reason to stop standing around like an idiot and get back home.
“Okay. Here goes.”
Simon closed his eyes, concentrated as hard as he could, and fixed a picture of his tower firmly in his mind.
He held it there until he could almost see it when he opened his eyes again. It was locked into place and he nodded once. Time to go.
“Gate!”
The sensation of being sucked into the nothingness of the Void was something that Simon hadn't missed. It wasn't painful but it felt, somehow, alien; like something that human beings were never meant to be exposed to. But it was certainly efficient.
Simon slowly counted to ten in the icy blackness, the usual amount of time it took to get anywhere using a Gate. On ten, light exploded around him and he stumbled forward, almost falling as his eyes adjusted. He stood still and waited to regain his equilibrium, swaying a bit like a near-sighted drunk. When he could see again, he looked around slowly, trying to get his bearings.
And there it was. He was standing in the middle of yet another field of waving grass. It was after noon to judge by the position of the sun and the grass was a richer shade of green. The breeze was sweeter and warmer and it all felt very familiar.
Across the field, a hundred feet away, a square, gray stone tower surrounded by a high wall stood proudly against the blue sky. He was home.
�
�Home,” he whispered. “Home again. Oh man, you look good.”
The light-colored stone of the wall and tower glowed so brightly that Simon had to shade his eyes as he tried to take in the details of the building. It looked the same but he couldn't really tell from where he stood. But instead of rushing forward, he advanced slowly, taking it all in.
The thick grass pulled at his legs as he walked and he was careful to watch his footing. Insects hummed and buzzed around him and everything felt so normal; it was as if he had never left at all.
Three years, Ethmira had said. He'd been gone three years. But looking at the tower, it felt more like three hours. Things looked exactly the same. Or did they?
When he got to within a few dozen feet of the main gates, Simon stopped abruptly. He had thought that they were standing open when he first arrived, but they weren't. They were broken. Smashed outward and barely hanging off of their rusted, iron hinges.
“Crap,” he hissed angrily. “Lacertus' doing. I forgot that he crashed through them when he chased after me.”
But why hadn't Kronk and the other earth elementals who worked for him fixed them? Why leave them sadly twisted and broken like this?
Simon carefully slipped in between the gates and moved into the yard that surrounded the tower. And stopped again.
“Goddamn it.”
The ironclad door of the tower was gone, ripped off of its hinges. He looked around and spotted it lying forlornly in the uncut grass against the surrounding wall.
The edges of the doorway were ragged, pieces of the rock wall broken off. The interior was exposed and he could only imagine how much damage had been done by the weather over the past three years.
He'd worry about that later. What suddenly struck him were thoughts of his livestock, especially his three horses; Chief, Tammy and Sunshine, and Sunshine's offspring; Sunbeam. He rushed around the tower to the right, hurrying to the stable behind the building.
Empty. The stable door was open and the place itself smelled dusty with disuse. There was no sign of the horses.
Simon was actually relieved. Maybe Chief had led his small herd to safety. The big stallion was perfectly capable of something like that. His Change had not only given him new colors and a pair of deadly horns, but had made him quite intelligent.
And the wizard noted with a shiver that there were no remains anywhere; more proof that the horses had made it to safety.
He left the lonely stable and walked across the yard to the small rear gate. It too was open, but still intact. He must have left it open on the last day he was here; a habit he'd had that allowed the horses to come and go as they pleased from their stable to the pasture outside of the wall.
Simon walked through the gateway and stopped to look around, scanning the area intently.
The pasture was richly green, grass waving in an early summer breeze. Birds were singing and the smell of young trees and new flowers was thick in the air.
But there were no signs of cows or horses and his chickens were long gone. The small lake behind the tower was rippling in the wind, sparkling and inviting.
I could use a swim, Simon thought absently as he searched for his missing animals.
He walked through the thick grass toward the line of fencing that bordered the field to the west. When he could get a clearer view of the wooden fence, he grinned and actually laughed a little with relief.
A section of fencing about ten feet wide had been knocked down. Any hoof prints had been erased over time by rain and snow, but the wizard was convinced that the animals, probably led by Chief, had escaped the enclosure.
They may have been content to remain in the pasture until autumn had thinned out the supply of grass and they'd been forced to search for more food, he thought. Certainly with the lake available, they hadn't had to worry about water.
The cows had been wild when he'd first rounded them up and Simon was sure that they had returned to that condition. He wasn't worried about them.
But the horses had been raised by a human. They had lived through the Night of Burning and had Changed, just like he had. Had they managed to survive in the wilderness? Maybe even thrive? Or had some monster hunted them down and devoured them?
That thought made Simon almost physically ill.
I'll have to search for them, he told himself. Better yet, I can send Aeris and maybe some of his fellow air elementals to seek them out. They had a talent for that sort of thing.
He turned back toward the tower.
First things first though. He had to examine the tower and find out if it was still livable. And if it wasn't, he'd better get started making it so.
An hour later, Simon stood on the roof of the tower and ran his fingers through his hair. He was dirty, covered in dust and grime, and sweaty after searching through the entire building from top to bottom.
It was a mess; worse than he'd hoped but not as bad as it could have been. He allowed himself a moment to sit down on the edge of the parapet and relax. He sighed loudly, thinking about the work ahead.
It had finally occurred to him that his elemental friends must have been banished back to their own realms when he had escaped to the elven lands. Usually it took the death of the summoner to break the connection to their elementals. But leaving one universe for another would probably have the same effect.
A small, insidious part of him kept saying that Kronk and Aeris might have been killed in their battle with Lacertus, but that still wouldn't explain the disappearance of the other elementals who had worked for him and Simon had dismissed that thought with some relief.
But of course the ultimate test of his theory was to try to summon his friends back to his side. Besides that fact that they would make the task of repairing and cleaning the tower so much faster and easier, Simon simply missed them.
Kronk's inherent cheerfulness and endless optimism coupled with Aeris' sarcasm and keen mind had made his life bearable for a half-dozen years and he wanted them back in his life.
As long as they want to come back, he thought with a tinge of concern. After that fight with the godling, maybe one or both had had enough of him and his crazy life. Simon wouldn't blame either one if they had. But he had to know, and he decided to try to summon them while the sun was still up. The night was a lonely and dangerous time on the New Earth now; better to get this done before it got dark.
He had found that the main floor was a total mess. The door had been open to the weather for three years, after all, and an amazing amount of leaves and trash had found its way in.
Not to mention a few animals, he thought and sighed again. Raccoons probably. Maybe skunks or squirrels as well. Every cupboard had been opened and his pots and pans, as well as plates and silverware, was strewn across the floor. His clothes hanging in the standing closet near the door were tattered and moldy, and smelled damp and rotten. They would all have to be thrown out.
Oddly, his old kettle was still hanging in the fireplace. It looked a bit rusty, but he could clean it up with a little elbow grease.
Unfortunately, the couch and his comfy chair were write-offs. Both were rotting and had mold on them as well and he felt a pang of regret at the thought of destroying them. Nothing had brought Simon more pleasure than sitting in that chair in front of the fireplace, curled up with a cup of tea. He would be snug and warm, and Kronk and Aeris would usually be with him. That was always the image that came to mind when he thought of home.
He pushed himself away from the parapet and began to pace around the top of the tower, thinking hard.
The chair can be replaced, he told himself. Furniture isn't important. What makes a place truly a home is more than bricks and mortar, furniture and decorations. It's the people that you share your life with there; your friends and family.
“Right,” he said loudly. “Time to see if I still have either of those left in my life.”
The one thing that Simon had found intact on the main floor was something that was more valuable to him than all the
comfy chairs in the world. He looked at the staff in his right hand as he leaned against it and smiled with renewed relief.
“Mortis de Draconis,” he said to it. “I don't know how you made it through all this in one piece, but am I happy to see you.”
The staff glowed in the sunlight, its length of pale metal and wood covered in dwarven runes. Whether because of magic or simple good fortune, the weapon had been lying in a corner almost invisible under a pile of dry leaves. Picking it up and wiping off the dirt had made Simon feel almost like himself again.
“You and me against the world again,” the wizard told the mute staff. “Now, let's see if we've still got the old mojo.”
He moved to the center of the roof, grounded the staff and took a deep breath.
“Kronk, I need you!” he cried, his voice echoing down through the tower.
The sound faded away and Simon looked around expectantly.
Nothing.
No sense of the earth elemental's presence, no feeling of power in the air. Nothing had happened at all.
After waiting for a few minutes, the wizard moved the staff to his left hand, wiped his sweaty palm on his pants and transferred it back to his right.
“Damn it,” he said softly. “This is bad. Either he doesn't want to return or the magic isn't working.”
Or he was destroyed in the fight with Lacertus, his inner voice whispered insidiously.
“Shut up,” he growled at it. “Fine then. We'll try for Aeris instead.”
This time, Simon held up his staff and concentrated so hard that his vision was tinged with pulses of red.
“Aeris, I summon you!” he shouted, a note of desperation in his voice.
The echoes died and still there was nothing; no response.
He folded his legs and sat down on the hard roof with a thud.
“Well,” he said to the staff as he laid it down beside him. “That's it then. Either they can't or won't come back. And if they don't want to return, can I really blame them for that? It was a crazy, scary life that we led; dragons, undead, monsters, even a frigging god.”
The Dragons of Bone and Dust (Tales from the New Earth Book 7) Page 6
