Warlord

by Robert J. Crane

  “What the hell is going on over here?” Vaste asked as he and Cyrus came up to the spot where Vara and Curatio were quietly standing their vigil. “You look someone died—” The troll paused. “Oh. Oh, gods. Someone died, didn’t they? Some poor, unfortunate warrior whose name none of us even knows—”

  “Vaste,” Cyrus said, voice low and hushed. “It was Nyad.”

  The troll’s eyes flickered, his lids closing and opening rapidly. “I’m sorry?”

  “Nyad was up front to cast fire spells to keep the cold at bay,” Cyrus said, his voice low, as Thad, Longwell and Odellan trotted up. He knew each of them was catching his words as he threw them out. “She was hit by the dragon’s breath, and … she got tripped over by one of the warriors at the fore.”

  “Who was it?” Vaste said tightly. “I want to remember this clod’s name. Forever.”

  “It doesn’t matter,” Cyrus said. “It was an accident. Gren’averr did it, not the warrior.”

  Vaste clutched a mighty hand together. “If he weren’t already dead, I’d kill him.”

  “You could resurrect him if you feel that strongly about … whatever it is,” Andren said as he and Erith joined the circle. “What are we mad about?”

  “Nyad is dead,” Vaste said in a voice that suggested he was without life of his own.

  “And there’s no way to … piece her back together?” Odellan asked, looking as ashen as the lands they had just traveled through.

  “There’s not enough left of her to properly fill a coinpurse,” Vara said with a muted savagery.

  “Good gods,” Erith said. “Nyad? Truly. We’re not just … joking or something?”

  “Do I look as though I’m in a joking mood?” Vaste asked, menace in his voice giving it a quiver. He half turned, and in his profile Cyrus saw danger, his anger on a thin leash. “What do we do now?”

  “We go on, of course,” Thad said, frowning. “We’re not done yet.”

  “We just lost the heiress to the Elven Kingdom,” Vaste snapped at him. “Continuing is hardly a foregone conclusion.”

  “We go on,” Cyrus said, and every head snapped to look at him. “We gain nothing by leaving now. It certainly doesn’t honor her sacrifice, and we have … people counting on us.” He set his jaw.

  “Fine, then,” Vaste said in a voice that suggested it was anything but. “I’m going to go pound on the dead corpse of that ice dragon with my staff for a while. Let me know when we’re ready to kill the next one.” And he spun and left before anyone had a chance to respond.

  The rest of the Council stood in shocked silence for a moment after that then began to break up, separating into smaller groups. Cyrus could hear the hushed voices, the quiet surprise, the disbelief as the word started to spread beyond them and into the army.

  “Are you sure about this?” Vara asked, under her breath, from just behind his ear.

  “No.” Cyrus did not turn to face her. “But we’re going on anyway.” The chill in the room felt suddenly unbearable, and he was filled with a desire to say anything but, to take her in his arms and have a wizard cast them home, where he could strip off his armor and throw it to the ground along with his sword, leaving it all behind forever. He did not say this, though, but he was certain Vara could hear it anyway.

  63.

  When they went charging into the next room, they found a dragon very much awake, and very quick to respond to them. This dragon, called Groz’anarr, was brown-scaled like the earth he represented, and even before he came at them, he swung his spiked tail into one of the boulders piled around his quarters and sent it rolling into the ranks of the frontline warriors charging at him. Cyrus dodged it, watching it spin past and slam into the armored forms behind him, drawing screams of pain as it struck and rolled through, chewing bodies under it as it went.

  Gods, let their armor protect them, Cyrus thought as he sprung off the ground with Falcon’s Essence as his aid.

  The smell of earth was thick in the chamber, like fresh upturned dirt and rock dust. It would have been nice to have Fortin for this one, Cyrus thought, but knew that leaving the massive rock giant out of the expedition had been the most expedient course.

  The flat, blunt face of Groz’anarr wavered, then decided on Cyrus as his target. He took a breath as Cyrus drew closer, and when he opened his mouth, a stream of rocks as wide as Cyrus’s thighs came shooting out as though propelled from a trebuchet. One of them clanged off Cyrus’s armor, spinning as it ricocheted. It left a numbness where it had struck, not so hard as the punch of a god, but most certainly noticeable and definitely fatal without armor as protection.

  Groz’anarr saw the impact of his attack and switched targets immediately, directing his breath toward the advancing Sanctuary horde. He sprayed into a field of warriors advancing at a run, and Cyrus watched them bowled over as surely as if the dragon had sent another boulder through their number. Cyrus, for his part, advanced toward the dragon’s head, heedless of the danger.

  Spells were impacting all along the dragon’s flank as he turned sideways to snap at Cyrus. The dragon moved quickly, but not so quickly that Praelior did not give Cyrus advantage. He dodged as the dragon halted its breath and snapped at him. Cyrus landed a swipe against its nose as he passed, and it bucked its head and smacked him in the back as he ran past it, dragging Praelior into the side of Groz’anarr’s face.

  The dragon’s attack was offhand and somewhat lucky, but it did not stop Cyrus from being staggered nonetheless. It knocked him off balance, sending him stumbling on air, knees wobbling and trying to catch himself. He failed and hit the air in an ungainly face-plant, spared injury or pain by virtue of the Falcon’s Essence spell. Cyrus fought back to his feet and turned his head to look, anticipating another dragon attack.

  Warriors were crouched around Groz’anarr’s legs now, hacking away at his scales to some effect, mystical swords carving swaths of damage with their blades. The dragon paid little attention to this, however, as his head was engulfed in a swarm of arrows like nattering insects in his face. A few of them stuck out of the wound Cyrus had made, and Groz’anarr swung around to direct his attack toward the rangers below, stomping away from the warriors at his belly.

  “No!” Cyrus shouted, getting to his feet and propelling himself into motion, chasing the back of the dragon’s retreating head. The beast’s long strides carried him past and through the scattering frontline warriors, toward a patch of green cloaks crouching near a series of boulders, Martaina in the front.

  The bombardment of arrows did not slow as the dragon drew nearer the rangers, slinking along like a lizard with his belly near to dragging the ground. “Scatter!” Cyrus shouted, but it was too late.

  Groz’anarr unleashed his breath of rocks only thirty meters from the formation of rangers, and few enough bothered to seek cover. Cyrus watched Calene Raverle dodge behind a boulder, but she was one of the few. In some he saw the steadfast defiance, the courage that sprang from wanting to face down their foes. On one elf, he watched the movement of lips throwing out some curse, and in a few others he saw surprise as the first rain of rocks came down and the rangers finally began to react.

  Martaina was at the fore, and she moved at the last second, throwing herself to the ground. The blast of rocks struck her on the hip as she dove, and Cyrus saw blood, though whether it came from her or the rangers behind her, he could not tell in the chaos that followed. Screams filled the air, filled his ears, and he saw at least one head completely destroyed, splattered as surely as if a titan had landed a foot upon it. Another ranger seemed to dissolve into red as if a strong wind had blown him apart, and yet another, a dark elf, exploded in dark blue, his chainmail falling to the ground as if uninhabited.

  “NOOOOOO!” Cyrus screamed, slamming into the dragon’s head with nothing but rage. He hit the scales at full sprint, his Praelior-enhanced speed and reflexes allowing him to strike with the force of a boulder dropped off a cliff. Groz’anarr’s long neck dipped from the impact, then slamm
ed down to the ground as Cyrus’s momentum carried him forward. Scales burst free from the back of the dragon’s neck and flew through the air like tossed rocks, and while Cyrus staggered, he came back to his feet as Groz’anarr’s head wobbled back up.

  This time, he faced the dragon head on, and in a flash he saw Nyad in his mind, the icy statue, shattered forever, and it spurred him on in another charge. Cyrus ran at Groz’anarr’s face, ignoring the mouth and focusing on the punch-drunk eyes. He saw the dawning awareness just before he hit, the late-term attempt to simply open its mouth and swallow him, and he corrected for the lazy motion, slamming shoulder-first into the dragon’s nose, knocking asunder more scales and not even bothering to plunge Praelior into flesh as he shoulder-charged the bastard.

  This time Cyrus did not give ground; he merely slammed into the dragon’s nose and held his position, letting the force of impact run through him as though he were a wall. The dragon’s face gave against his anger, and Groz’anarr’s neck snapped back some twenty feet while Cyrus held his place in the air. This time the dragon’s eyelids fluttered.

  Cyrus howled with rage and charged again. He knew that Groz’anarr, in his present state of near-unconsciousness, would not be able to avoid his attack. This time he caught the dragon under the chin. His head snapped back harder this time, the sound of breaking bones running down the thin neck. Groz’anarr’s head fluttered like a leaf for a few seconds, and then dropped without ceremony to the ground, landing on a boulder, deep purple blood oozing out from under his head. His eyes were fixed, a deep green, staring straight ahead, unmoving.

  “Sacred shit,” the unmistakable voice of Calene Raverle said from below him. “Our Guildmaster just beat a dragon to death.”

  “He is not dead,” Curatio said from somewhere below. Cyrus’s eyes found him with the healers, standing short next to Vaste’s immense bulk. At the mere statement, however, Vaste started forward in determination, long strides eating up the distance to the dragon’s head, where he drove his staff through the dragon’s almost unnoticeable ear, with its trickle of purple blood, slamming through the canal and burying it almost up to the crystal at the tip. The troll then stirred the staff around like a brew in a cauldron, his muscles straining and the effort showing on his face as he flushed a deeper green before he ripped the staff back out of the canal, covered entirely in purple gook.

  “Now he is dead,” Curatio pronounced somewhat flatly.

  “Martaina!” Andren’s shout drew Cyrus’s attention back to where the rangers had been attacked. He stalked over to where the healer already crouched over the fallen body of Martaina, who clutched at her hip, which was bleeding profusely.

  “I’ll be fine,” Martaina said, face tightly suffused with pain.

  “Of course you will,” Andren said soothingly. “You’re so tough—”

  “I mean I’ll be fine once you heal me!” Martaina spat. “What are you waiting for?” She writhed and grimaced, blood spurting from between her fingers.

  “Oh, right,” Andren said and thrust his hand aloft, spell light flickering from it. Within a few seconds, Martaina had ceased her writhing, soothed and settled, and then she went stiff, her eyes flickering around the area where she had fallen.

  “How many did we lose?” Cyrus asked, low, taking the last few steps to stand by where she lay.

  “I count six,” Calene said, coming out from behind a boulder. She nodded with her head to where armor and cloaks lay, remains so obviously destroyed by the dragon’s breath spread before them among a few other wounded.

  “Damn, that could have been you,” Andren said under his breath.

  “But it wasn’t,” Martaina said stiffly, and Cyrus could hear the familiar guilt of a surviving commander in the way she said it.

  “Martaina!” Thad’s voice echoed as he pushed through the crowd thickening into a line around the site of the ranger fallen. “Oh, thank the gods.” His hand fell to his chestplate, where the red had been scraped from his armor.

  “Should we even bother to have an officer meeting about this?” Vaste asked in Cyrus’s ear, whisper-quiet. Cyrus had not even heard the troll’s approach.

  “To what purpose?” Cyrus asked coolly.

  “I don’t know,” Vaste said sarcastically, “maybe to discuss the sheer number of people we’ve lost today? To consider, for perhaps sixty seconds before charging foolishly ahead, whether the price we are paying is going to be even close to worth it? Or we could just have a talk about other ideas that could have become inspired by these losses, alternatives to this mess we find ourselves charging headlong into?”

  “Do you have any ideas?” Cyrus asked, and waited for the troll to shake his head. “Anything to stop the advance of the titans?”

  “There is no titan advance, Cyrus,” Vaste said, the anger in his voice threatening to burst out of a whisper. “Perhaps we should reconsider and come back when there is.”

  “It’ll be too late,” Cyrus said, shaking his head. “Once they figure it out, the north is done.”

  “If we keep going, we may be done,” Vaste said.

  “We’re not done,” Cyrus said quietly.

  The troll waited for just a moment before replying. “Well, maybe we should be.” And with his bit said, he walked away, slapping his staff into the eye of Groz’anarr as he did so, as futile—and as understandable—a gesture as Cyrus could imagine.

  64.

  The next dragon lay up the stairs, on the top level of the temple. It took the battered Army of Sanctuary almost an hour to make their way up to that dragon’s chambers, Cyrus carefully following the instructions given by Ehrgraz. He knew what rested behind the door before he came to it, but held out his hand for a quiet regroup a few hundred meters from that door, not willing to face it without a break first.

  “What are we up against next?” Vara asked, settling next to Cyrus on the hard stone floor. It was flat and surprisingly cold to the touch, when Cyrus took his gauntlet off to wipe the accumulating perspiration from his palm.

  “Weck’arerr,” Cyrus said. “A poison dragon.”

  Vara frowned. “Poison? How poisonous is this thing?”

  “Corrosive, supposedly,” Cyrus said. “The way Ehrgraz explained it, his breath can burn through flesh in much the same way as fire, but slower.”

  “That sounds like a wicked sort of alchemy,” she said, shaking her head. “I have heard of similar solutions created by potion, but to imagine a dragon with that sort of substance at his command defies my imagination.”

  “We face creatures several times our size,” Cyrus said with a sad smile, “dragons that live in cities and shrines, even gnomes and goblins and trolls, things that are so much different. Hells, you and I are a human and an elf, and while we mostly look alike save for our ears—”

  “And I am much prettier than you.”

  “—and that, of course, but there are differences.” He still smiled at her wistfully. “Even the closest related of our races is dramatically different. Our world is a … peculiar place, I would say, filled with wondrous and horrid creatures.”

  “That was quite the little speech,” Vara said, eyeing him.

  “Well, I didn’t get to give a motivational one before we came here, so I suppose the need to fill the air with my words leaked out in the form of dull introspection instead.”

  She leaned against his arm and held still for a moment before she asked her question. “Do you want to talk about the deaths?”

  “Not now, no,” Cyrus said, meeting her gaze and finding earnest concern in those blue eyes, bright as a sky he had not seen in a week. “But later, I’m sure I will.”

  She nodded once, then stood, shuffling past Scuddar In’shara, who sat only ten feet away, his robes gathered around him, Calene Raverle sitting across from him, the two of them saying not a word, but looking at each other intensely. “Stop it, you two,” Cyrus said, drawing the attention of both of them, “your staring contest is quite disturbing to those of us watching.”
>
  “It’s a tradition of the desert,” Calene said with youthful jubilance that did not match Cyrus’s current mood. “Staring into the eyes of your battlefield compatriots before a fight. Builds trust.”

  “If you don’t trust him yet,” Samwen Longwell said, plinking the end of his lance into the rock next to where Cyrus sat, “I don’t think staring into his sun-yellow eyes for a space is going to do much more other than perhaps blind you when you look away.” He paused, looking down at Cyrus. “How are you doing, Guildmaster?”

  Cyrus glanced away from Calene and Scuddar to return Longwell’s eye contact. “Hanging in there. And you?”

  Longwell squatted down, his armor squealing as he did so, dropping the grip on the haft of his spear to its base. Cyrus watched the tip waver, but it did not once threaten to fall even once. “Better than you, I’d wager.”

  Cyrus smiled wanly. “And why should I not be in finest form, Samwen? Am I not a warrior, bred for combat, here in the middle of most inspiring battle?”

  “I was wrong in what I said to you when last we spoke.” Longwell lifted the lance up a half-inch and tapped it back down again. “It was unfair, and it was unkind.”

  “It was inconvenient,” Cyrus said, looking away, “as most truthful things are. Your people have suffered—”

  “My people volunteered to join Sanctuary,” Longwell said, looking straight ahead, “to earn their keep. And Sanctuary has paid them well, seen them through, helped give us a home. For me to complain about the sacrifice war entails was foolish, minimizing the sacrifice that the dead have made. It was a willing one, and for me to say what I said cheapens it, as if those men didn’t have a will of their own to do what they did.” He turned his head. “Nyad had a will of her own. The rangers in that room back there, they had wills of their own as well. We all do, and we’re here.”