The Dragonswarm

by Aaron Pogue

  I trusted my life to him. I hit the broad street at a full sprint and saw the flash of recognition in the gate guard's eyes. I saw them widen in confusion even as I came abreast of him. Then he heard the shouts in the town square. He turned his eyes that direction, making the connection, but I was already past him.

  He had a crossbow at his station. I didn't slow. I ran on, a hundred paces down the road, but I did not hear the strained twang of a crossbow firing. I did not feel the searing heat of a crossbow bolt tearing flesh. There was sufficient other pain to bring me down, but for my life—and for the lives of everyone in Isabelle's house—I had to win free. So I ran on, grateful to the guard who had not done his duty.

  A hundred paces down the way the road turned south and I kept on straight. I hopped the split-timber fence of old Bredgeman's fallow fields, and kept straight on until there was no glow of fire or life to light the night behind me.

  I kept running as long as I could, and when my burning lungs and aching legs forced me to stop, I collapsed in the dirt by the side of a strangled little stream. I gulped desperate drinks of moss-slick water, and fought to catch my breath. For several minutes I lay panting, but then I forced myself up again, forced myself to trudge on.

  I turned south, making my best guess by the light of the stars. I'd meant to head for the ruins, and that would have been quite a long way on foot even sticking to the road. But now I had no choice. I was far enough from the path to avoid detection, but it would not be safe to return to the road for days yet.

  So I forged a path through fields of cold-shocked wheat and unharvested corn, and I left Teelevon behind. I didn't think—I was far too tired to think—only kept moving. South and east, I learned when the moon finally rose to trace its arc across the sky. I bent my path more perfectly south and tried to guess how I might find my way to the fortress.

  But that would not matter for most of a day. First I needed to find my way to somewhere safe. I needed rest. I needed refuge. For three years now I'd been a fugitive from the king's justice, but that night beneath the stars I felt like one for the first time. That thought drove me on, far beyond all reason. That thought gave me strength long after my legs should have given out.

  I moved cross-country in the darkness, climbing up hills and fording streams and pressing on as though drawn by a magnet. When dawn broke I was still walking, still searching for some bolthole where I could be sure the king's hunters would not find me. I ignored the pain in my feet and legs, ignored the weariness that kept trying to drag my eyes shut. I scoured every slope, every visible bit of land, and at last I found some suitable cover.

  It was a spill of stones on the edge of an empty field, probably hauled there and piled up by some farmer's overtaxed mule. Some of them were as much as a pace tall, most considerably smaller, but all together they formed a pile six paces long and three paces tall at its highest. Bracken grew thick across it, and tall grass crowded around it.

  I fell automatically into the wizard's sight as I approached it. I could carve myself a space within. Not now, of course. I would need rest first. But I could make a shelter none but me might find. I searched out the shape of its structure, making certain it would work, even as I trudged slowly in a circle around it, scanning with my mundane senses. For now, I needed only a shadowy corner to catch some rest. Two hours, perhaps three, and then I could have the strength needed to make a more secure lodging.

  I saw darkness where no darkness should have been: in my wizard's sight. It lay long and low in the lee of the piled stones. Mind fuzzy from the long exertion, I mistook it for an ordinary shadow and stepped toward it automatically. I stretched out a hand to brush the tall grass aside, and then the shadow moved. Too late, I understood.

  It was a drake, scarcely larger than the one I'd decapitated in the ruins of the fortress. This one was the brown and orange shades of autumn leaves, but my eyes fixed on the teeth, the great fangs as long as my hand, and the three-inch claws on its forelegs that were sharp enough to score stone. Those were white but stained with blood. I thought of the farmer who had piled these stones. I hoped the blood had been the mule's.

  And then the thing attacked me. It darted forward, and I thought of summoning a sword. I thought of swinging for it. I thought of conjuring a wall of earth to block its path. I thought of all the things I'd done so easily to dispatch the other drake before, but my weary mind and broken body could not do any of them. Some primal panic gave me enough sense at least to back away, but my legs tangled and I barely kept my feet. I stumbled, my strength all gone, and wavered there while the child dragon snaked toward me.

  I watched the fangs. They seemed the most sensible attack. The claws could eviscerate me if the beast got them to me, but the long neck made a bite the easiest move. It darted to my left and I tried to run right, but I made it half a pace before the monster hissed and struck at me from behind. I heard it coming. I tried to dive forward, to roll away, to escape from certain death.

  I felt the shock and stab of pain as the beast's blunt nose slammed hard against my skull. Light brighter than a wizard's glow flashed behind my eyes, and my arms and legs went limp. I felt the shock of hitting the ground. I felt the stubble of cut grass harsh against my cheek. I felt the young dragon crunch up right behind me, its talons carving sun-scorched earth, but I could not even turn my head. Pain washed up, turning my vision red, and then it ebbed away, and then it came again, red and green and brown. I might have screamed. But then it turned to black.

  I woke to find myself stretched out on my back. The pain was still there. It was everywhere. I saw the drake crouching, almost curious, by my right arm, and another like it down by my left knee. The first snaked its head forward to bump me under the right shoulder, to prop me up, and then I felt at last the beating blasts of winter air driven down against my face.

  I looked up and saw the adult dragon hovering there, scales as red as hearthstone coals, and the drake supporting me raised my shoulders higher. I saw the dragon swoop down closer to me, saw its talon reaching, and then I heard a voice like devastation thunder in my mind.

  He is awake, it said. It broke my mind and drove me into blackness once again.

  The next time I woke, perfect darkness pressed close around me. My muscles ached with exhaustion and a thousand other pains screamed at me, but I could not yet process them all. Whatever rest I'd gotten had done little to clear my head. I found myself sitting up, arms wrapped around my knees, my back and head both leaned against a hard stone wall.

  I blinked uselessly, but there was no light here at all. Memory and fear piled up in my mind. I had spent too much time trapped in darkness. I tried to rise, still leaning on the wall for support, but I'd made it less than a pace up the wall before I cracked my head against a ceiling that felt like stone.

  Light flashed behind my eyes, and my knees gave out. I fell back into the same position. I stretched an arm out in front of me, but I bruised my fingertips on cold stone just short of my arm's length. Without moving I could trace every edge of my stone prison.

  Panic gibbered in the back of my mind, but I was too tired to give it much ground. Instead I fell forward, face down to the cool stone floor, and stretched the aching muscles in my neck and back. Then my shoulders and sides. I curled up on my back and stretched my legs up above me until they touched the ceiling. I put my toes against it and pushed hard to stretch the protesting muscles in the back of my legs.

  The ceiling shifted. Without even trying, I pushed it up a quarter inch, and a brief flare of light fell into my cage. The grating sound of stone on stone filled the little space, too, screaming in the stillness. I relaxed again, letting the cover stone fall back over me, and lay for a long time in silent darkness. I strained my ears for any sound of my captors approaching, but all I could hear was my own frantic breathing.

  I tried to slow my pounding heart, to work through calming exercises I'd mastered long ago, but my pulse only thundered louder in my ears. Faster. I strained to hear outside m
y prison, I waited anxiously for the stone to slip aside again and reveal my captors. But nothing happened. There was no sense of time in that place, only the wild tattoo of my heart, and soon I was flinching at every beat. Then at last my fear took hold. I fought against it, but the fear won out.

  My breath escaped me in a whimper, and still no one came. It became a sob before I could stop it, and I would have wailed my terror if I'd had the strength to fill my lungs. I curled up on my side, arms wrapped around my legs, and trembled in the darkness. I tried a dozen different times to reach for my wizard's sight, but it required inner calm, and I was a shattered mess.

  In time, it passed. Perhaps I faded into sleep, perhaps I simply found my peace. There was little difference within the darkness. I know I lay in utter silence for a great age, and then at last I caught my breath. I flexed my fingers and closed my eyes and worked the exercises I had learned at the Academy. My breath caught as I felt the immensity of the mountain around me. I lay imprisoned beneath the floor of a great cavern, and outside the cavern was earth as far as I could stretch my mind.

  I shivered. Buried in the heart of a mountain, I felt incredibly small. But I cut that thought short, measured my breath, and turned my attention back to my surroundings. I looked for my captors, for the pulsing glow of lifeblood. I looked at the black cavity of the cavern above me, searching, but there was only emptiness.

  And then a piece of the emptiness moved. Then, for the first time, I recalled the drake that had surprised me on the edge of a farmer's field. I remembered it propping me up for a grown dragon swooping in to strike. I looked on the vast blackness above me, and I saw that it moved.

  No. It roiled. I could almost see the empty spot of blackness thrown by a dragon in motion, large enough to be the adult I'd seen before, but as I tried to track its flight across the cavern's ceiling, it passed another Chaos shadow flashing the other direction. Everywhere I looked, there was motion. I tried to count, but there was no sense of perspective, no distinction between one living darkness and the next. There might have been a dozen or a thousand there.

  A prisoner of dragons. I had never heard of anything like it. I shifted in place so I could crouch on my knees, then turned my attention back to the space above me. Beyond the dragons, behind them, the cavern yawned wide. It was easily a hundred paces in all directions, perhaps more. At one end of it, a sudden, sharp edge dropped off into a terrifyingly deep chasm. At the other end a wide, shallow pool danced with the soft azure sheets of still water.

  And in the heart of the cavern was a blazing inferno. Not fire, not real light, but the blazing flash of pure power shaped by the oldest magics of man. Silver, gold, and steel. Coins and gemstones, relics and treasures. I could not see the shape of any given item with the wizard's sight, but I could taste the human purpose that had imbued them with such focused energy.

  It was not the treasure store of a king; it was the wealth of a nation. The nearest edge of it was perhaps thirty paces from my prison, but it climbed into a mountain of precious metals. It blazed in the darkness. It called to me. I raised my fingers to the wide, flat stone that sealed my cage and, as carefully as I could, pressed up and to the side.

  Stone on stone screamed again in the silence. I moved it perhaps a finger's width, and for all my care it still dragged and scraped. I swallowed a curse, blinked my eyes, and then lifted the stone away with my will. I lowered it to the earth without a sound, but I felt the strain of it in my fingers and wrists. I paid it little mind. My eyes were drawn to the hoard.

  Even without the wizard's sight, the gold shone in the darkness. A thin, strangled light reached the cavern's interior through a wide cave mouth set high in one wall, but the treasure gathered the light, focused it, and threw it back bright and clean. The hoard glowed within the darkness.

  A handful of it would have been enough to buy me a life of luxury. If I could have filled a pack from it, I might have been as wealthy a man as Isabelle's father. If I could have loaded a farmer's cart, I could have shamed the king. And still I would not have touched a tenth part of the dragons' store.

  The thoughts came unbidden and went mostly ignored. I looked upon a sparkling treasure like I had never imagined, but the darkness hanging over it devoured all my attention. To my wizard's sight it hung like a great cloud of smoke, hovering above the pyre of perfect gold, but fear shattered my concentration and I looked up only with the eyes of a man.

  I trembled.

  Sprawled atop the hoard was a dragon. Dark and red as midnight embers, as heartblood in a pool. I remembered the adult red that had come for me on the edge of the farmer's field. Long and strong, wider at the shoulders than the beast that had aided me at Teelevon, but as I looked up at this monster, that same red dragon went flashing by above. Larger than a house, with a belly full of fire that could have routed armies, but the adult dragon looked like an insect buzzing around the monster that sat upon the hoard.

  One insect in a swarm. There were indeed dozens of them, in all the shades of earth and fire. Greens and blues and browns, reds and blacks and one sleek yellow almost as bright as the gold. There were drakes, too, upon the ground. I only noticed when one bumped me between the shoulder blades with its snout and sent me stumbling three steps forward. Then I looked about frantically and saw them gathered in a wide, loose circle. All around me. All around the hoard. They watched.

  In the vast height above—above a neck as tall and thick as the Masters' Tower at the Academy—the monster at the heart of the cavern cocked its head and stared down at me. I wanted to run. Even with an army of drakes behind me, a swarm of adult dragons capable of tearing me to shreds, I wanted to try an escape. I wanted to flee the horror hanging over me. I couldn't. I couldn't move at all.

  The yellow flitted lightly to the ground just before me, on my right, and a heartbeat later the red I'd seen before slammed to earth on the left. Both stalked closer, heads low, eyes fixed on me. High above, a sharp huff moved the air, like a snort from a fortress-sized warhorse. Even without flame, I could feel the heat of it in the air. I could not even flinch away.

  Then a voice spoke into my mind. At last, it said, thunder booming out over the terrified turmoil of my thoughts. You are smaller than I expected.

  If I could have moved, I would have been on my knees, palms pressed hard against my ears, screaming at the pain that voice burned into my mind. But I could only stare, up and up at the monster's face, and then I understood.

  "It was you." I meant to speak the words aloud, but my mouth would no more respond than my legs or arms. Still, the words formed in my mind, and the two adults crouching before me bobbed their heads in unmistakable nods.

  I have scoured the world for you, the monster said. It was the voice I'd heard from the little drake at the ruined fortress, the voice I'd heard from the adult red on the edge of the farmer's field, but here at last I understood. It was a voice as vast and terrible as the monster that crouched upon the hoard.

  "How?" I asked. "How did you find me? How did you know me?"

  You belong to me, it said. It snorted again, and I felt another blast of hot air. I could feel the monster's anger, too. It folded around me like a blanket wrapped too tight. I tried to see the shape of it within my mind and felt my brows crease.

  It was not my fear that paralyzed me, but the monster's anger—emotion strong as steel, crowding me out of my own mind. My lips peeled back as I forced a calming breath. And another. With meticulous care, I pressed back against the monster's presence in my mind.

  Then, at last, I fell to my knees. I cried out, and in the same instant the ring of watching drakes shrank away from me. Pain like white-hot lances jabbed inside my head, again and again, stabbing at the walls I'd tried to build. I screamed in agony, and the two adults standing over me reared like frightened horses and beat at the air with half-extended wings.

  I nearly fell prostrate, but I drove a fist hard against the stone floor and held myself up. I bloodied my knuckles and bruised the bones, but
in the same instant I caught my breath. That pain was real. That pain was mine. I narrowed my eyes and focused on the flash of agony and poured my will into it. I built new walls around that point, built a sanctuary of identity around my injury, and though the monster hammered at it again and again, it could not break me.

  I let my eyes close and drew a breath. I pushed against the stone and rose to my feet. I exhaled, long and slow, and straightened my shoulders. I could feel a fury like a thunderstorm pounding against my mind, but I wrapped myself in quiet, perfect darkness and waited. I raised my chin. I smiled.

  At last the assault relented. I nodded once and opened my eyes.

  The drakes were gone. The adults who had come to stand over me had left as well, though I saw the yellow soaring once more in the slow, chaotic swarm that hung around the monster's head like a nightmare halo. That head was closer now, barely ten paces above me. It hung over me like an avalanche. It snorted, and the furnace blast knocked me back three paces.

  You are not my equal, it said. You are my prisoner. You are my toy.

  "I can hold your mind at bay," I thought. "I am more than you imagine."

  A sound like a forest fire's roaring crackle rattled in my head, and I recognized it as the monster's laughter. Your eyes are far too small, it said. You retain some shred of sanity by power stolen from me, and you think that is a victory?

  I barely saw the blur of motion as the monster lazily flicked its tail. Thirty serpentine paces of plated muscle rolled in an easy arc, curling forward around the mountain of gold, around the monster's body, and the tapered end of it whipped toward me. It hit me like a battering ram, crushing my right elbow against my ribs and flinging me across the hard stone floor. I landed hard and scraped across rough stone.