by Mel Odom
Then Sokadir was there, firing bright arrow after arrow into the dragon and breaking its forward momentum. Thalanildim tried to stand its ground, digging its claws into the muck and screaming in anger.
Holding Seaspray high, Quarrel slammed the flat of the blade against the swamp. Immediately a dark wall of water rose before her and cascaded into the dragon, knocking it down onto its back.
Steam boiled up, filling the black sky with a huge, hot fog that nearly obscured Wick’s sight. As he watched, Thalanildim’s fire extinguished except for a few fleeting coals.
Bulokk ran through the water, carrying Boneslicer high. He was in waist-high water when he swung the axe and chopped off Thalanildim’s head as the dragon tried in vain to get to its feet. A final death shivered through the dragon’s body, shaking it to pieces that scattered over the swamp.
It never moved again.
Looking back to shore, Wick discovered that no goblinkin or Razor’s Kiss thieves remained alive or willing to fight. He threw up twice, saw that it attracted turtles, fish, and something with lethal-looking tentacles, and he ran for the shore.
“Little warrior!” Cobner met Wick in a huge bear hug as soon as he reached the shore. “You’re alive!”
“I am,” Wick agreed, hugging the big dwarf back fiercely and not minding that he couldn’t quite catch his breath. “And so are you.”
Then Cobner held Wick at arm’s length as if he were a child and Cobner was the proud father. “You’ve done went and killed your second dragon!”
“Actually,” Wick said, “it was already dead.”
“Well, it was looking right lively there for a time.” Cobner put Wick on the ground and beamed. “Looks like I’m a dragon behind you.”
“Believe me,” Wick said, “the next one we find, you can have all to yourself.”
Cobner roared with laughter.
“Did we lose anyone?” Wick asked.
Cobner sobered some then. “Tarlis. The pirate from One-Eyed Peggie. But no one else, thank the Old Ones. We’ve been blessed this night, little warrior.”
“We were,” Craugh said, coming over to join them. The wizard stood on shaky legs, but he stood. One side of his face was bruised and lacerated and looked like it would need a few stitches, but he appeared to otherwise be in good health. “You brought us this far, Wick.” The wizard clapped the little Librarian on the shoulder.
“And he even ripped the heart out of an undead dragon to do it,” Cobner added proudly. “I told him them lessons I’ve been giving him on how to fight would stand him in good stead. He’s becoming a regular champion hero.”
Nodding toward Bulokk and Quarrel, who were walking out of the swamp, the dwarf helping the human, Wick said, “There are the real heroes. If they’d given up on their destinies, those weapons would have never been found. Or they wouldn’t have had the ties Craugh needed to use to find Sokadir.”
Alysta came and sat on the ground near them, wrapping her tail around her paws. “Where is Sokadir?”
All of them looked around, but the elven warder had disappeared into the night.
A Note From Grandmagister Edgewick Lamplighter
We spent days in the Forest of Fangs and Shadow looking for Sokadir, but we never found him again. He had completely disappeared.
Craugh tried to use the connection between the three weapons, but none of the visions worked again. Later, he supposed that it was because there was actually a fourth component of the spell: Thalanildim itself. After all, Lord Kharrion had helped design the vidrenium in Dream, and it had been crafted with the dragon in mind.
We traveled back through the Forest of Fangs and Shadows largely without incident. We decided not to go back through Laceleaves sprawl and went instead toward Darbrit’s Landing.
Unfortunately, though we had laid to rest the threat of Lord Kharrion’s Wrath, we were no closer to the solution of who betrayed the defenders at the Battle of Fell’s Keep. We found one of the abandoned sprawls (the one where you’re obviously reading this journal, my apprentice) and I wrote this journal.
We stayed here for several days, healing from our injuries and burying poor Tarlis. We also hoped that Sokadir would return, but he didn’t. While I was here, though, I went back through my research notes, something I always do when I don’t find a proper solution to a problem I’ve not solved—and something I hope I’ve taught you to do.
While I was doing that, I deduced who had to be the one who betrayed the defenders at the Battle of Fell’s Keep. In the end, there was only one person it could be. I knew that it had to be someone versed in wizardry. Someone who was at the Battle of Fell’s Keep. And someone, as it turned out, who had knowledge of what was being created in Dream. This was the person who went to the Cinder Clouds Islands and managed to steal the bow reinforcements Master Oskarr had made. Someone who could be invisible when he wanted.
This person, as it turns out, was also at Dream under a ficticious name. He was an elf, and he called himself Banir and claimed he was from Silverleaves Glen. But what gave him away was that one of the journal keepers whose work survived Dream’s destruction was a very vivid writer. He wrote down descriptions of everything. Including this imposter’s very extraordinary physical feature.
Banir the elf had mismatched eyes. One was purple, but the other was dark brown. I thought that—
AFTERWORD
“Grandmagister … Juhg, isn’t it?”
Startled, Juhg looked up from his reading. Although he hadn’t yet finished Grandmagister Lamplighter’s final postscript, he knew where his mentor had been going with his deductions. There had been only one place to go, only one person that all the specifics fit.
Juhg stared at the empty space in front of him, not too terribly surprised to find the voice apparently came from empty air.
“Prince Larrosh,” Juhg said tiredly. He blinked against the bright morning sunlight, surprised that the dawn had come without him knowing. But he had been totally engrossed in translating the book.
“Ah, you know me.” Larrosh swept off his cloak of invisibility and touched Juhg’s chin with the tip of his longsword. “That is Grandmagister Lamplighter’s book?”
Juhg saw no reason to lie. Larrosh already knew what was in the book. He just obviously hadn’t known where it was.
“After Craugh came here a few months ago, intent on finding Sokadir again after so many years, I thought perhaps Grandmagister Lamplighter had put everything together,” Larrosh said.
“There isn’t much,” Juhg said, “that gets by Grandmagister Lamplighter.”
Larrosh laughed. “I did. Once.” He lifted the cloak and rendered himself invisible again. “That’s how I got by your men below, taking out the guards one by one till my warriors could take them all prisoner.” He revealed himself again and gestured with the longsword to the door. “Why don’t we join them?”
Juhg started to close the journal and put it away.
’I’ll take that,” Larrosh said, and snatched it from him.
“Your warriors are with you?” Juhg went to the door and started down the rope ladder.
“Of course. What use would a prince be without his warriors?”
“Do they know you betrayed your brother and are responsible for the deaths of your nephews?”
“Go ahead and tell them,” Larrosh challenged. “They won’t believe you. Sokadir is a myth to them. I’ve been their prince for the last thousand years. What are you going to offer them as proof? A book written so that they can’t read it?”
Juhg didn’t say anything. Some of his dismay lifted when he saw Raisho and the others were still alive, though tied securely and sat in place like children. To his surprise, Craugh was also there.
“Craugh,” Juhg called.
The wizard looked up. His hands were tied behind him and a strange glowing necklace hung at his chest. One eye was swelled shut and his face was heavily marked by a beating. Since some of the bruises were faded yellow with age, Juhg knew that the beatin
gs had been going on for a while. He couldn’t believe that he would ever see the wizard so … helpless.
“It’s my fault, Juhg,” Craugh said. “I made the mistake of underestimating him.” He nodded toward the necklace. “He’s made me helpless.”
Larrosh grinned. “I kidnapped him from your ship using a spell similar to the one Grandmagister Lamplighter used to get the weapons from Kulik Broghan’s all those years ago. Mirrors are wonderful, deceitful things. You can tell yourself what you see in there is the truth, or that it’s lying to you. It’s really up to you what you believe.” He shrugged. “If I’d wanted to, I could have set fire to your ship or holed her and sent you to the bottom. My bog beasts almost had you in Shark’s Maw Cove.”
“I’ll know how to ward against such a thing next time,” Craugh vowed.
Larrosh spun on him. “There won’t be a next time. This ends here. Now. I have the book that was hidden in this place, and I have the books you found in the other places.”
“Then what’s to become of us?” Juhg asked.
Larrosh looked at him. “You came here to murder the prince of Laceleaves. You’ll be killed, of course.”
“What ye did at the Battle of Fell’s Keep was despicable,” Raisho said. “Ye deserve to be ’anged.”
“And who will hang me?” Larrosh taunted. He shook his head. “What I did at the Battle of Fell’s Keep was to protect my people. If I hadn’t made the deal with Lord Kharrion, if I hadn’t helped him in Dream and again in the Painted Canyon, he would have let his goblinkin hordes tear Laceleaves Glen apart. I protected them.”
“By betraying those heroes,” Juhg said. Anger burned through him. He’d been a slave for a time, and he knew firsthand how cruel and unjust the world could be.
“When you can’t save everyone, you take care of your family and your people first,” Larrosh said.
“You thought Lord Kharrion was going to win.”
“Lord Kharrion should have won. What happened when the Unity beat him was an aberration. Craugh should never have been able to do what he did.”
“You sacrificed your own nephews,” Juhg said. “You weren’t saving your family first. You thought you were saving yourself.”
Larrosh looked a little uneasy in that moment. “They wouldn’t listen. Sokadir wouldn’t listen.”
“Worse than that,” Craugh said hoarsely. “You allowed Sokadir to believe his own son betrayed him and those defenders at the Battle of Fell’s Keep.”
“I didn’t—”
“That’s what you did!” a loud voice accused.
Drawn by the voice, Juhg looked up and saw Sokadir kneeling high in the tree above them. The elven warder’s face was impassive, as though carved of stone, but his purple eyes gleamed with fire.
“You told me Qardak’s binding of the weapons to strengthen our wards failed,” Sokadir said. “You told me it was because he had been tainted by Lord Kharrion while he’d been studying at Dream. But it was you who had been tainted, brother.”
“The goblinkin would have destroyed our homeland,” Larrosh argued. “What I did, I did to save our home.”
The elven warders started talking among themselves in frantic voices. From what Juhg understood, most of them had never before seen the absentee prince.
“You betrayed men who were heroes,” Sokadir said. “You branded one of the bravest dwarves I had ever known a traitor. You killed my sons!”
“How,” Juhg asked, “did you get Deathwhisper?”
“My son. Qardak. He told me he had the bow reinforcements made for me. I didn’t know they were from Master Oskarr’s forge until I saw his weapon and Seaspray. Then I saw his mark on the weapons his warriors carried, and I knew he spoke the truth when he told me he’d made them.” Sokadir’s voice broke. “I couldn’t believe my son was a thief. Then Qardak told me that the bow’s parts were made of the mystic metal he’d worked on in Dream, and that Master Oskarr must have stolen that.”
“That metal was lost, not stolen,” Juhg said, “when Dream was destroyed. Master Oskarr never knew what he had. He only knew he’d traded mermen for it.”
“I’ve had enough of this,” Larrosh snarled. “Everything you’re talking about, it’s a thousand years old. It doesn’t matter now.”
“It matters now,” Juhg said, “because the lies about the Battle of Fell’s Keep still manage to haunt the relationship between dwarves, elves, and humans. At a time when we should be uniting and pooling our resources, we’re remaining apart.” That was one of the things about Greydawn Moors that he truly loved in that moment. Nowhere else, even though it had been threatened before the Vault of All Known Knowledge had been destroyed, did the peoples of the world live together in such harmony. “We’ve waited a thousand years for the truth about that battle. The lies that were woven that day still bind our future and threaten the lives of every human, dwarf, elf, and dweller that lives.” He looked at the elven warriors surrounding them. “If we don’t pull together, you’ll all be overrun by the goblinkin at some point.”
“Don’t listen to him! He’s lying! That’s all outsiders ever do!” Larrosh turned to the guards. “Kill the assassins! Execute them all!” He drew his own sword.
“Stay your hands!” Sokadir thundered. “I am the prince of Laceleaves Glen, and it is my order you will obey!”
For a moment, many of the younger guards looked undecided. Then the eldest among them took control and told them to stand down.
“Kill them, I said!” Larrosh shrilled. He rushed at Craugh, his blade lifted to pierce the old wizard’s throat.
Juhg launched himself without thinking, staying low and grabbing the elf’s feet. Larrosh tripped and sprawled, coming around instantly to try to slit Juhg’s throat. Juhg dodged back, once, twice, then rolled to his feet and stood ready, breathing in, determined to try one of the Kritkov dwarven grappling techniques he’d read about and taught to some of Varrowyn’s warriors at the Vault of All Known Knowledge.
Movement drew his attention overhead and he watched as Sokadir dropped gracefully through the branches until he landed on the ground before Juhg.
“No,” Sokadir said. “You’ll not cause anyone else’s death.”
“Then by blood right, I challenge you for the right to rule. Right here. Right now.”
Without a word, Sokadir handed Deathwhisper to Juhg, then drew his own longsword and fighting knife. He stood and waited. “You don’t want to do this, brother,” he said softly. “I will banish you, but I won’t take your life. Even after all you’ve done.”
Larrosh laughed bitterly. “You won’t take my life?” He cursed and started circling. “Do you know where I should be? Ruling at Lord Kharrion’s side, is where I should be. He was going to make me a king.”
“Of goblinkin?” Raisho snorted. “One day they would ’ave rose up an’ et ye. Mayhap fed ye yer own tripe afore they did.”
“Don’t do this,” Sokadir whispered.
“Why? Are you afraid?”
“I don’t want to kill you.”
“Well, I want to kill you!” Larrosh lifted his hand and purple embers gathered around the ring he wore.
Without warning, the heavy necklace Craugh had worn sailed through the air and landed around Larrosh’s neck. The purple embers died and faded away.
“Well,” Craugh said, standing and dusting his hands off. “I had no further need of that. You’ll find, Larrosh, that I’m not as ill-informed as I’ve let you believe.”
Panic and anger filled Larrosh’s brown eye and purple eye then. He grabbed the necklace and tried to pull it off but it wouldn’t budge. “When I am prince,” he told the elven guard, “kill the wizard first.” He turned and attacked Sokadir with sword and knife, cutting hard and fast.
Although Juhg had read books on bladework and seen several swordfights, none of them were anything like the lightning display that ensued. Afterwards, he thought there were seven moves in all, perhaps nine, strike, riposte, and counter. But at the end, Sokadir
plunged his sword through his brother’s heart and slashed Larrosh’s throat with his knife.
Larrosh stood in wide-eyed shock for a moment, but he was already dead. Then he fell and slid off Sokadir’s blade.
Tears streamed down Sokadir’s cheeks as he turned to face the guards. “I am your prince once again. Free those men and make a litter for my brother.”
Days later, after Larrosh had been given a sky burial and the stories had all been finally told and made sense of while Craugh mended from his wounds, Sokadir escorted Juhg, the wizard, Raisho, and his crew back to Darbrit’s Landing where Moonsdreamer still sat safely at anchor.
Prince Sokadir had agreed to go back to Greydawn Moors to tell the story of what had happened at the Battle of Fell’s Keep after he’d spent time going among his people again. Juhg had already decided to put the Novices to work making copies of the book he would write on the way back to Greydawn Moors that told the entire history of the search for the truth, and of the truth itself. As those copies were made, they would be placed in the Libraries he was building. He also planned to enlist readers to read the stories out loud to the public.
Gradually, the story would be told, and it would serve two functions. The truth would be known, and others might be made curious to learn to read so they might read it for themselves.
That, he thought, was going to be the hardest part: making sure what he wrote and drew was compelling enough to keep those readers turning the pages. Still, it was about honor and betrayal, mixed with wizardry and mystery, and those were always favorites.
“Do you think it will matter?” Sokadir asked as Raisho gave the order to prepare to sail. Going down the Steadfast River would be much easier than coming up it.
“We’ll be telling the truth,” Juhg said, “about something that has affected the life of everyone living out there today. It’ll matter. The truth always does. That’s one of the things that Grandmagister Lamplighter always taught me. The truth is stronger than the strongest man. Stronger than the best wizardly spell.”
