Kitiara examined the ring carefully. It was a signet ring. A signet in the shape of a five-headed dragon.
“Whew, boy,” said Kitiara. She wiped the sweat from her brow. The five-headed dragon, ancient symbol for Queen Takhisis. Kit hesitated a moment, then slid the scroll from out the ring. Carefully, gingerly, she unrolled it, took a quick look at what it said.
Immolatus, I command you to obey the summons I send to you by this messenger. Four times before you have spurned my command. There will not be a fifth. I am losing patience. Take upon yourself human form and return to Sanction with the bearer of this, my ring, there to receive your orders from General Ariakas, soon to be general of my dragonarmies.
This order scribed by Wyrllish, High Cleric of the Black Robes, in the name of Takhisis, Queen of Darkness, Queen of the Five Dragons, Queen of the Abyss, and soon to be Queen of Krynn.
“Oh, damn!” said Kitiara. “Oh, damn it all.”
Propping her elbows on her bent knees, she bowed her head in her hands. “I’m a dolt! An idiot! But who would have guessed? What have I done? How did I get myself into this?
“So much,” she added, lifting her head to look at the corpse, her crooked smile straight and hard and bitter, “for all my hopes, all my ambitions. This is where it will end. On the side of a mountain, my bones fused to the rock. But who would have guessed Ariakas was telling the truth? A dragon. And I’m to be its goddam messenger!”
She sat for a long time on the summit of the desolate mountainside, gazing out into the empty blue sky that seemed so near, watched the sun slide from the sky, looking as if it were setting beneath her, so far was she above the horizon. The air was starting to cool off rapidly. She shivered, the gooseflesh raised on her arms beneath the finespun wool tunic she wore underneath her chain-mail corselet. She had brought with her a woolen cloak, lined with shaggy wool, but she did not unpack it.
“The air is liable to warm up soon,” she said to herself, and a hint of the crooked smile returned. “Too soon and too warm for comfort.”
Shaking off her lethargy, she pulled the cloak from her bag and, wrapping the sheepskin around her shoulders, she settled down to study—with more attention—the map given her by General Ariakas. She located all the landmarks: the mountain peak, which was split in twain, as if by some giant axe blade; a jutting crag, thrusting out of the side of the mountain, looking like a hooked nose.
Now that she knew where to look, she located the cave without too much difficulty. The opening to the dragon’s lair was hidden beneath the overhang, not far from where she sat. A short walk over some rough terrain, but not difficult to reach. Solinari was waning this night, but would shed light enough for her to find her way among the rocks. Kit rose to her feet, looked down the side of the mountain. It had been in her mind to take the easy way out, to simply step off the edge and into the void below. The easy way out … the coward’s way out.
“Lie, cheat, steal—the world winks at such faults,” her father had once told her. “But the world despises a coward.”
This might be her last battle, but she was determined it would be a glorious one. She turned her back on the sun and looked ahead, into the gathering darkness.
She had no plan of attack; she couldn’t see that a plan would be of any great use. Nothing to do except barge in the front door. Placing her hand on the hilt of her sword, she set her jaw, gritted her teeth, and took a determined step forward.
An immense beast appeared at the edge of the lip beneath the overhang. Spreading its wings—massive wings, wings that dwarfed the eagle—the beast took flight, soaring into the air. Red scales caught the last of the afterglow, glinting and gleaming and sparking like cinders flying up from the blazing log or a gentlewoman’s rubies, cast into the sunlight, or drops of blood. A snout; a tail, long and sinuous; a body so ponderous and heavy that it seemed impossible the wings could lift it; a spiked mane, black against the garish, dying light; enormous, powerful legs and feet with long, sharp claws; a seeking eye of flame.
For the first time in her twenty-eight years of life, Kit tasted fear. Her stomach clenched, sending hot bile surging into her dry mouth. Her leg muscles spasmed; she nearly collapsed. Her hand on her sword hilt went wet and nerveless. The only thought her brain could think was “run, hide, flee!” If there had been a hole nearby, she would have crawled into it. At that moment, even the leap into the void off the side of the mountain appeared to her to be a wise and prudent thing to do.
Kitiara crouched down in the shadow of the boulder and huddled there, shivering, the cold sweat beading on her forehead. Her chest was tight, her heart raced, she found it difficult to breathe. She could not take her eyes from the dragon, a sight that was awful, beautiful, appalling. He was forty feet long, at least. Stretched out end to end, he would have covered the parade ground and still lapped over into the temple.
She feared the dragon had seen her.
Immolatus had no idea she was there. She might have been a gnat plastered against the rock for all he knew or cared. He was flying out into the night to hunt. Several days had passed since his last meal, a meal that had, by great good fortune, come to him. After dining on the messenger, Immolatus had been too lazy to seek more food until hunger woke him from his pleasant dreams, dreams of plunder and fire and death. Feeling his shriveled stomach flapping against his ribs, he waited hopefully to see if another toothsome morsel might enter his cave.
None did. Immolatus fretted a bit, deeply regretted having indulged in sport with one of the soldiers, chasing the terror-stricken man down the cliff face, watching him burn like a living torch. If the dragon had been thinking ahead, he would have kept his captive alive until he was ready to dine again.
Ah, well, the dragon mused grumpily. No use crying over spilt blood. He took to the air, circled once around his peak to make certain all was well.
Kitiara held perfectly still, frozen like a rabbit when it sees the dogs. She ceased to breathe, willed her heart not to beat so loudly, for it seemed to echo around her like thunder. Kit willed the dragon to fly away, fly far away. It seemed he would do so, for he wheeled as if to catch the warm air currents rising up the mountainside. Kit was close to sobbing with relief, when suddenly her throat constricted.
The dragon shifted his flight. He sniffed the air, his huge head with its red eyes turning this way and that, looking for the scent that made his mouth water.
Sheep! This blasted sheepskin cloak! Kitiara knew as well as if she had been sitting between the dragon’s shoulder blades that the beast smelled sheep, that he had an appetite for sheep for dinner, but would not be too disappointed to discover his mistake—a human in sheep’s clothing.
The huge snout turned in her direction, and Kitiara could see the sharp fangs as the mouth opened in anticipation.
“Queen of Darkness,” Kit prayed, asking for help for the first time in her life, “I am here by your command. I am your servant. If you want this mission to succeed, then you sure as hell better do something!”
The dragon drew nearer, darker than night, blotting out the first pale stars with its enormous wings. The deeper the darkness, the redder its baleful eyes. Helpless, unable to move, unable even to draw her sword, Kitiara watched death fly closer.
There came a frantic bleating, hooves beat against rock. The dragon dove. The wind of its passing flattened Kit against the boulder. The wings gave a single flap, a death cry echoed among the rocks. The dragon’s tail twitched back and forth in violent pleasure. The dragon wheeled in the sky, flew back over her. Warm blood dripped onto Kitiara’s upturned face. A freshly killed mountain goat dangled from the dragon’s claws.
Immolatus was pleased with his catch and his luck—he had never before known a mountain goat to venture this near his cave. He hauled the bleeding carcass back into his cavern where he could dine at his leisure. He wondered a little about the strong scent of sheep he had detected on the mountainside, an odd scent, mingled with human, but he much preferred goat meat to mutton an
y day. Or human, for that matter. There was generally little meat on human bones and he had to work hard for what was there, ripping away the armor to get at it, armor that always left the taste of metal in his mouth. Back in his lair, he settled his large body onto the rocks, which should have been treasure—or so he always thought resentfully—and tore into the goat.
For the moment Kitiara was safe. Weak with relief, she huddled on the ground beneath the boulder, unable to move. Her muscles, tight with adrenaline, remained clenched. She could not loosen her hand from the hilt of her sword. By sheer effort of will, she forced herself to relax, calmed her racing heartbeat, caught her gasping breath.
First, she had a debt to pay. “Queen Takhisis,” Kitiara said humbly, looking up into the night sky sacred to the goddess, “thank you! Stay with me, and I will not fail you!”
Her score settled, Kitiara pulled the sheepskin more closely around her and, lying in the starlit darkness, thought back on her talk with General Ariakas, a talk to which she had paid scant attention. She forced herself to try to remember what he had told her about dragons.
8
THE GOAT HAD BEEN A NICE, PLUMP ONE. PLEASED WITH HIS MEAL and the fact that he hadn’t had to work overly hard to catch it, Immolatus settled down upon his rocky bed. Imagining his rocks were piles of treasure, he went back to sleep, sought refuge once more in his dreams.
Most of the other dragons dedicated to the service of the Queen of Darkness had been pleased when Takhisis woke them from their long, enforced sleep. Not so Immolatus.
His dreams of the past century had been dreams of fire, of driving hapless humans and elves, dwarves and kender before him, of blasting their miserable dwellings to kindling, of scooping up their children in his great maw and crunching down on their tender flesh, of toppling castles and impaling screaming Knights upon his sharp claws, claws that could tear through the strongest armor. Dreams of sifting through the rubble, after it had cooled, picking up the sparkling jewels and silver chalices, magical swords and golden bracers, piling them onto the few wagons he had taken care not to set ablaze and then carrying the wagons in his claws back to his lair.
His cave had once been stuffed with treasure, so stuffed that he could hardly squeeze his own body inside. Huma—that wicked devil-Knight Huma and his accursed wizard Magius—had put an end to Immolatus’s fun. They had nearly put an end to Immolatus.
The Dark Queen, curse her black heart, had called on Immolatus to join her in what was supposed to have been the war to end all wars. A war wherein the irritating scourge of Solamnic Knights would be obliterated, their foul kind wiped from the face of the long-suffering world. The Dark Queen had assured her dragons that they could not lose, that they were invincible. Immolatus had thought this sounded like fun—he was a young dragon then. He had left his treasure trove and gone to join his brethren: blue dragons, red and green, the white dragons of the snow-capped south, black dragons of the shadows.
The war had not gone as planned. The cunning humans had invented a weapon, a lance whose bright and magical silver metal was as painful to the dragon’s eyes as its sharp tip was deadly to the dragon’s heart. The horrid Knights carried this terrible weapon into battle. Immolatus and his kind fought valiantly, but, in the end, Huma and his dragonlance forced Queen Takhisis to retreat from this plane of existence, forced her to make a desperate pact. Her dragons would not be put to death but would sleep the centuries away and, so as not to upset the balance of the world, the good dragons, those of silver and of gold, would also sleep.
Immolatus’s right wing had been torn by the cruel lance, his left hind leg ripped by the horrible lance, his stomach slashed by the infamous lance. The dragon limped back to his cave, his blood falling like rain on the ground, and there he found that, in his absence, thieves had stolen away his treasure!
His bellows of outrage split the mountain peak. He vowed, before he went to sleep, that he would never again have anything to do with humans, unless it was to rip off their heads and munch on their bones. He would have nothing more to do with the Queen of Darkness, either. The Queen who had betrayed her servants.
His wounds healed during his centuries-long sleep. His body regained its strength. He did not forget his vow. Seven years ago, the spirit of Queen Takhisis, now trapped in the Abyss, had come to her dragons, had called upon Immolatus to waken from his long sleep and join her once again in yet another war to end all wars.
The spirit of Queen Takhisis stood in his cave, his pitifully empty cave, and made her demands.
Immolatus tried to bite her. Unable to do so (it is difficult to sink one’s teeth into a spirit), the dragon rolled over and went back to sleep, back to his lovely dreams of mangled humans and a cave filled with gold and pearls and sapphires.
But sleep wouldn’t come or, if it did, he wasn’t allowed to enjoy it. Takhisis was always about, annoying him, sending messengers with orders and dispatches. Why couldn’t the woman just leave him alone? Hadn’t he sacrificed enough for her cause? How many of her messengers did he have to torch to make his point?
He was recalling fondly the last human he had watched go up in smoke, was smiling over the memory of the scent of roasting human flesh, when Immolatus’s pleasant dream shifted. He began to dream of fleas.
Dragons are not bothered by fleas. Lesser animals are bothered by fleas, animals not blessed with scales, animals with skin and fur. Yet Immolatus dreamed of fleas, dreamed of a flea biting him. The bite was not painful, but it was annoying, stinging. The dragon dreamed of the flea, dreamed of scratching the flea, and drowsily lifted a hind leg for the purpose. The flea ceased biting, and the dragon settled down, once more at peace, when that damnable stinging began again, this time in a different spot. The flea had jumped from one place to another.
Now seriously annoyed, Immolatus roused suddenly and angrily from his sleep. Early morning sunlight brightened his cavern, filtering through an air shaft that opened into the side of the mountain. Immolatus twisted his huge head, eyes glaring around to discover the pest, which was somewhere on his left shoulder, his jaws snapping to make short work of it. Immolatus was astounded to see, not a flea on his shoulder, but a human.
“Eh?” he roared, taken completely by surprise.
The human was clad in armor and a sheepskin cloak and sat perched upon Immolatus’s great shoulder, sat there as coolly as one of those god-cursed Knights astride a war-horse. Immolatus glared, shocked beyond measure at such audacity, and the human jabbed the point of a sword painfully into the dragon’s flesh.
“You have a loose scale here, my lord dragon,” said the human, lifting the scale, which was the size of a large piece of flagstone and about as heavy. “Did you know that?”
His mind fuddled with his dream and the soporiferous effects of goat meat, Immolatus sucked in a deep breath, prepared to blast this irritating creature into the next plane of nonexistence. The brimstone breath caught in his throat, however, as his mind woke up a bit more and informed him that he would not only fry the unwelcome intruder but his left shoulder as well.
Immolatus gargled a bit, swallowed the flame that had been bubbling in his stomach. He had other weapons, a goodly number of magical spells, although these required effort to use on the dragon’s part, and he was too lazy to bring to mind the complicated words required for their casting. His best and most effective weapon was fear. His enormous red eyes—their pupils were larger than the human’s head—stared into the dark eyes of the human, and he brought into that small mind images of her own death. Death by fire, death by tooth and claw, death by rolling over on her and squashing her into a bloody pulp.
The human wavered beneath this assault, she shivered and grew pale, but, at the same time, the sword blade bit deeper.
“I don’t suppose, my lord,” said the human, with a slight quaver in her voice, a quaver she controlled and suppressed, “that you’ve ever cut up a chicken for a stewpot. Am I right? I thought so. A pity. Because if you had cut up a chicken, my lord, you wou
ld know that this tendon, which runs right along here”—jab, jab, poke, poke with the sword blade—“controls your wing. If I were to cut this tendon”—the blade dug in a little deeper—“you could not fly.”
Immolatus had never cut up a chicken—he generally ate them whole, several dozen at a time—but he was well acquainted with the construction of his own body. He was also well acquainted with injuries to his wings, injuries that left him a prisoner in his cave, unable to fly and to hunt, suffering the pangs of hunger and of thirst.
“You are powerful, my lord,” said the human. “You are skilled in magic. You could kill me with a snap of your jaws. But not before I have inflicted a considerable amount of damage on you.”
By now, Immolatus had lost his irritation. He had overcome his rage. He wasn’t hungry, the goat had seen to that. The dragon was beginning to be fascinated.
The human was respectful, deferring to him as “my lord.” Most appropriate and suitable. The human had been afraid, but she had conquered her fear. Immolatus applauded such courage. He was impressed with her intelligence, her ingenuity. He wanted to continue their conversation, which he found intriguing. He could always kill her later.
“Climb down off my shoulder,” he said. “I’m getting a crick in my neck trying to see you.”
“I am sorry for that, my lord,” said the human. “But you must see that moving would put me at a considerable disadvantage. I will deliver my message from here.”
“I won’t harm you. For the time being, at least.”
“And why would you spare me, my lord?”
“Let us say that I am curious. I want to know why in the name of our fickle Queen you are here! What do you want of me? What is so important that you risk death to speak to me?”
“I can tell you all that from where I sit, my lord,” said the human.
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