“Find a pile of turnips and hide in it until this whole thing blows over,” Vaste said. When he had every eye in the room upon him, he shrugged and elaborated. “Nobody likes turnips. I presume the dragons are at least sensible enough to be alike in that regard.”
“So our alternatives at present are to attack the dragons,” J’anda said, “or to hide in discarded vegetables.” His fingers clenched his staff. “I know which I pick.”
“Ooh, is it the vegetables?” Andren asked.
“No,” J’anda said, “I don’t like turnips, either.”
“Far be it from me to suggest treachery is ever the best way to deal with anything,” Nyad said, “but I share Cyrus’s concern that the titans coming north is merely a matter of time. If they conquer the Kingdom, the rest of Arkaria will surely follow shortly. Even a combined force of all armies would have great difficulty standing up to them on the march with magic at their disposal.”
“That seems personally motivated at least in some small measure,” Erith said.
“And if your Sovereignty was under threat to be overrun with—I don’t know,” Nyad said, blushing, “gnomes digging into your tunnels and invading, I think you’d be personally motivated to help them, too.”
“I know I’d be the first to volunteer to help in that case,” Vara muttered.
“This titan threat’s not going away,” Longwell said, breaking his silence. “Not without us doing something.” He shook his head. “If this gets the dragons in the fight and gives us a chance … well …” He lowered his head. “I’m sorry, but there are lives on the line here. More than a few. Probably the entirety of the north’s, in the long term.” He blinked away. “And in the short … the last survivors of Luukessia. And that’s a personal motivation for me, in case anyone wants to call it out.” He flushed.
“I’ve got an idea,” Vaste said, snapping his fingers, “we pit the scourge against the titans.” He waited, but all that greeted him was horrified silence. “Okay, fine. The dragons it is.”
“All in favor?” Cyrus asked, and he watched the hands rise one by one, as though this were too solemn an occasion to trust to a voice vote. Curatio’s was the only one not raised, though none were raised high. “And so it is,” Cyrus pronounced, and the chamber stayed silence, “we battle with dragons.”
57.
“I wish you all the best with your bold endeavor,” J’anda said, tipping his head to Cyrus, “and I will see you in just a few short days.”
“I like how you chose ‘bold’ instead of ‘crazy,’” Cyrus said. “I’ve gotten no shortage of the latter since we started planning this, after all.”
The foyer of Sanctuary was packed, the strike army Cyrus had assembled to undertake the mission to the Dragonshrine filling it nearly from one side to the other. He figured there were somewhere on the order of a thousand people, but there seemed to be room enough to pack plenty more into the spaces if he had felt compelled to bring more.
“I do not feel the need to tread where others do,” J’anda said with a glimmer in his eyes that reminded Cyrus of the old him, the enchanter as he had been before Luukessia, where he’d drained so much of his own life that he’d aged well before his time. “I’m sure you will be fine.”
“I worry more about you,” Cyrus said.
“Do not worry about me,” J’anda said, shaking his head. “With Mendicant and Ryin to help me, I will be fine. You, on the other hand …”
“I have plenty of help,” Cyrus said, turning to look up to the balcony, where the other officers waited for him, watching the spectacle of the army below as final farewells were said. Cyrus had chosen carefully, and it was happy coincidence that he’d found little need to include many Luukessians in the army. The majority of them were cavalrymen, after all, and they had no need of that where they were going.
“But you don’t have me,” J’anda said, shrugging lightly. “At least not—”
“I’ll miss you, too,” Cyrus said, and clapped him lightly, once, on the shoulder before moving toward the balcony stairs. “See you in a few days.”
“Indeed you will,” J’anda said, nodding as he turned about, his massive staff preceding him, and headed for the stairwell.
“Are we ready, Guildmaster?” Curatio asked stiffly as Cyrus joined the officers up top. From here, he could look down and see the great seal of Sanctuary that perfectly coincided with the teleportation portal mounted under the floor.
Cyrus looked the healer up and down. “Are you sure you want to come?”
“I would be remiss if I did not,” Curatio said, more than a little stiffly. “I am the Elder. I have responsibilities.”
You had responsibilities as acting Guildmaster, too, Cyrus thought but did not say. That didn’t keep you from hurling the medallion down last year. “Odellan?” Cyrus asked, and the elf stepped forward. “Are we ready?”
“Your army awaits, Guildmaster,” Odellan said, giving a stiff nod over the balcony.
Cyrus strode to the rail and watched the last farewells exchanged, and loved ones and companions moving out of the center of the army’s loose grouping. “What do you think? Do I need a speech?” he asked quietly.
“Let’s go kill some dragons!” Andren shouted, and the call was taken up in the foyer with several thousand raised voices. “Nope, I think I got it for you.”
“All right, then,” Cyrus said and nodded to Nyad. The elven princess stood back a little ways from the balcony, looking a little peaked. “Take us to the Ashen Wastelands, Nyad.”
“Aye,” she said and steeled herself visibly. The light of a teleport spell burst from her hands and cracked around them, carrying them off in a cascading light storm of fury.
When the light faded from Cyrus’s eyes, he was greeted with strangely familiar dark skies. Clouds filled the horizon from end to end, grey as any day he’d ever seen, and near enough to night as to make him wonder how it had been mid-afternoon only a moment earlier.
He took a step and felt the soft ground envelop his boot. He glanced down and saw ash, indeed. He took another step experimentally, and the ash came up almost over the toe. “Well, this is going to be a long walk.”
“Six days,” Vaste moaned, stepping up to look out over the horizon with Cyrus. “Why couldn’t the dragons have built a portal nearer to their most sacred and holy shrine?”
“Because that would have doubtless opened it up to assaults of the sort we are about to perpetrate,” Odellan said, stepping up beside them.
“Yes, but it would have been so much kinder to my tootsies,” Vaste said, pointing at his feet.
“All right, Army of Sanctuary,” Cyrus said, making his usual motion, “fall in.”
They walked through the rest of the day, treading in ash, mountains barely visible both before and behind them on the horizon. Cyrus could see nothing to their left or right, to the east or west, and could scarcely tell direction but for the faint hint of the sun somewhere beyond the clouds.
The air carried the stink of something burnt, and coughing was a common thing to hear from the army behind him. Cyrus led the way until the darkness grew so complete that they could not go any farther, and they halted for the night, eating cold provisions and bread conjured before the night grew dark enough that spell light would have lit the wastelands and alerted dragons to their presence.
When they bedded down, they buried themselves in ash in the way that Cyrus had once seen a child on a beach cover herself over. In the night they heard the shrieks of dragonkin, of drakes and wurms, wyverns and other lessers of their sort. Cyrus heard the flap of wings overhead once, as did, he suspected, everyone else in the army.
They slept poorly, and continued their march the next day covered in ash. Their target was plain upon the horizon, and they scarcely needed Curatio to guide them once they knew what they were looking for. Cyrus stayed at the fore, his black armor grey from its coating, reminding him more than once of Cass Ward.
After three days, the silence began to
feel oppressive. No conversation was carried out above a whisper, per the orders of Cyrus and Ehrgraz, when he had laid out the plan. “Echoes carry in the wastelands,” Ehrgraz had said, “and the last thing you need is to draw attention to you small people by talking in big voices.”
Cyrus had acceded to the dragon’s wishes, and now he saw the wisdom in it. Fewer dragonkin passed in the day, and always the army halted when they were sighted, dropping and hiding among the piles of fallen ash. It was easy to blend in, and after three days, Cyrus almost believed Vara’s natural skin tone was a deep grey.
“This is a bit much, isn’t it?” she asked when they ate lunch.
“Whatever it takes, right?” he replied, but saw her face fall as he said it.
On the fourth day, they crossed an acidic stream, clogged with the dusty grey ash that filled the land. It held a putrid smell, and as they crossed it, Cyrus wondered at its toxic properties. It seemed to run toward the sea that he knew existed far, far off to the west, but he did not hold much hope that it would become much cleaner at its mouth.
On the fifth day, the shrine on the horizon seemed so close they could almost reach it if they ran. Cyrus kept the pace steady, but not quick, and he could feel the restlessness growing in his army as the time passed and the miles grew long.
“They want to be done with this grim land,” Odellan said to him as they started to settle for the night. “The army grows sick of the march.”
“Aye,” Cyrus said, nodding. “This isn’t exactly like anything we’ve ever done before, is it?”
Odellan smiled, cradling his carved helm on his lap with one hand while he held his bread in the other. “It’s always a new adventure with Sanctuary, isn’t it?”
“Like I said when I asked you to join,” Cyrus said with a faint smile. “Though I doubt you knew what sort of adventure you were in for.”
“No, indeed not,” Odellan said with a low chuckle. “And to think I had figured killing the God of Death was an unusual week for you. If only I’d known …”
“You would have run away and joined a mercenary company?”
“I don’t think so,” Odellan said with a shake of the head. “I probably would have run twice as fast to join Sanctuary.” He grew serious. “There is no one doing as much to defend the Elven Kingdom that I swore loyalty to as Sanctuary is, whether they see it or not.” He waved at Nyad, who was already covering her robes in ash in preparation to lie down for the night. “I mean, you have the King’s heir as one of your officers, and we’re about to attack dragons in a somewhat mad effort to redirect the attention of the Kingdom’s greatest threat.” He shook his head. “I might be doing more to uphold my oath here than I ever would have as an Endrenshan, or even an Oliaryn of the Elven Kingdom.”
The night was long and quiet, the stillness almost maddening after nights of drakes and wyverns flying over them constantly. Cyrus was prepared for this, he thought; Ehrgraz’s notice about the zone of desolation around the temple assuring him that there would be no traffic, no patrols to discover them this late in the expedition. It was still a hard night, even with Vara close at his side, their armor pressed against each other, yet separating them.
The dawn of the next day was barely one at all, the sun slipping behind the sea of clouds that covered the sky before Cyrus even noticed it. Rising, he found the shrine the largest point on the horizon, and only half a day’s journey at that.
“Come on,” he said, still keeping his voice low, and he pressed the army forward.
The ash clung to them, hung in the roof of Cyrus’s mouth, and no matter how many times he spat and washed it with water, more seemed to flood in through his nose. He wondered if he would ever be rid of it, even after leaving this place far, far behind.
The shrine drew ever closer, and yet like an object just out of reach of the fingertips, felt impossibly far away. The noon hour came and left, and Cyrus’s mind made him believe that he was no closer than he’d started the day. The shrine was clear, though, strangely familiar architecture wrapped around a steep-sided volcano, the top smoking, adding its own small contribution to the ash that filled the wasteland.
“I had a friend,” Curatio said, “an elven craftsman, one of the old ones, like me—he assisted the dragons in building the temple structure around the volcano.” Curatio pointed. “The dragons … they liked elvish architecture, but their claws don’t allow for great detail in building. Their eyes appreciate it at a scale they can’t hope to deliver on their own.”
“Why is this place so important to them?” Cyrus asked, trudging along in ash.
“You have to understand,” Curatio said, his hood up and grey as everyone else’s in this expedition, “the dragons believe differently than we do. Their focus is on nature and the elements, the elemental powers of earth that correspond to each type of dragon that is out there.” He looked slyly at Cyrus. “You didn’t think they were all fire-breathers before this, did you?”
“I knew they weren’t,” Cyrus said with a shake of the head. “Or I’d heard it, anyway. I guess I never gave it much thought.”
“There are fewer of them than you would think,” Curatio said. “Of the old kin, anyway. Their bastard offspring—drakes and wyverns and such—they’re the footsoldiers of the dragon army. The type we’re about to face … they’re the real thing.” He shuddered.
By the time the dark began to fall, and Cyrus called the halt, they were within a mile of the shrine. Even in the dark, he could see the colonnades, the three tiers of the immense structure that wrapped around the volcano at its heart. The first two reminded him just a little of the Coliseum in Reikonos, but the last looked like claws reaching up the side of an egg where it jutted out of the second level, cresting a few hundred feet below the volcano’s exposed peak.
It was another poor night of sleep for Cyrus, this close to the goal and forced to wait until the morning. Vara slept silently in his arms, apparently not nearly as worried as he. The ash in his mouth was beginning to remind him of the smell of dry death, choking him every time he thought he was about to fall asleep.
And then the morning came, and after a silent breakfast that felt strangely like it might be their last, Cyrus marshaled his army and marched them under the great arch and into the most sacred shrine of the dragons to make war.
58.
The wide first floor was empty, a maze of columns and silence that left Cyrus listening hard, even as he watched Vara do the same before she shook her head, flakes of ash falling out of her hair, which was no longer gold. The smell of burning was heavier here, and Cyrus followed the map in his head as laid out by Ehrgraz, circling around the first floor of the dragon shrine. It took the better part of an hour for them to find the massive staircase, but once they had, it only took a few minutes to ascend the mountainous steps with Falcon’s Essence as their aid.
In the hallway above, Cyrus took stock of his surroundings. The corridor was gargantuan, stretching up above him, the size of several dwellings stacked atop one another. The perimeter looked out through the wide columns that had been visible from outside, but the interior was not the rock of the volcano, but rather square lines of carefully laid blocks, layered to create living quarters in this place for its inhabitants. Cyrus could see the great door to the nearest of those ahead, but it did not open like a traditional door, with a knob and hinges to allow it to move to one side. This one opened up, hinged like a contraption he’d once seen in Reikonos to allow dogs to pass out of houses, a cutout door at the base of a larger one.
This was no door for a dog, however, being big enough to fit a house through. Cyrus led the way over to it, exhibiting a confidence he did not feel. When he reached it, he stood with one hand placed upon it, the elven craftsmanship obvious in its attention to even the small details. The door did not scrape the ground, and there was barely enough room between it and the floor for Cyrus to place his boot in the gap.
He took a breath, deep in, letting his anxiety flow out. He did not dare sp
eak for fear of warning the inhabitants of these quarters of their arrival before he came crashing in with his army. Instead, he waited for them to assemble behind him, and when it was done, he beckoned forward a few strong men, and they lifted together, holding the door up long enough to allow the army to fill in, for others to take up the burden, and then Cyrus came back to the fore.
The room they found themselves in was a natural wonder, made of smooth rocks that looked as though they’d been taken from a mighty river and layered one atop the other. Their natural shapes made the floors and walls uneven and rough, and Cyrus felt unsure in his footing. In the corner of the room slept a dragon in the middle of a small pond. It moved, rustling, and the sound of splashing followed, a small wave of water cresting out of the nest of the water dragon.
Cyrus held a hand up in front of his lips, listening to the water splash and ripple from the dragon’s last movement. He made his way over to his quarry, as quietly as possible, boots clinking lightly against the uneven stone floor.
He had barely made it halfway there when the dragon did more than stir; it rose out of the water and spread its wings, eyes sprung open and taking him in with all his followers. It was smaller than Ehrgraz, and when it opened its mouth, the dragon language came pouring out along with drips of water big enough to fill a pot.
“Hello, Wellsheverr,” Cyrus said, noting the surprise in the dragon’s eyes as he used the name that Ehrgraz had given him. His army filled in behind him, and he felt a hope spring up, a confidence that this would be the first victory of many today. “Time to spring some leaks.”
Cyrus started forward in a charge, but his hope died as a blast of water shot from the dragon’s mouth hit the ground just before him. Without warning, without a chance to prepare himself, Cyrus lost his footing and was swept away, flung through the air without grasp on anything, until he hit something—a wall, perhaps—and unconsciousness overwhelmed him.
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