“How far do you think it is?” Barakas suddenly asked. His voice was flat, nearly emotionless. That hardly meant he was in a quiet mood. Of late, the patriarch had become mercurial, going from indifference to rage at the blink of an eye. Many Tezerenee wore marks of his anger.
Lochivan answered the question, as he always did. Reegan might be heir apparent, but he lacked subtlety, something needed for times like this. Besides, Lochivan knew the answer that would suffice; it was the same one he had given his father for the past three weeks. “Not far enough to escape our grasp forever. Not by far.”
“True.” The Lord Tezerenee’s eyes did not focus on the lush lands below, but at the glittering sea near the horizon. His prize lay not on this continent but across the stunning expanse of water in another land. He had even given it its name, one that had spread to this place though he himself could not think of it as anything but “the other continent.” Across the seas lay his destiny, his Dragonrealm.
“Father.” Reegan spoke quietly, but his unpredicted interruption could only mean that he had some news of importance to convey. Reegan would never dare speak to his father without a very good reason for doing so.
Barakas looked at his eldest son, who indicated with a curt nod that the others should turn their attention to their left. The dragonlord shifted so as to see what had caught Reegan’s eye and gritted his teeth when he saw the reason.
One of the Faceless Ones. It was a parody of a man, having no features whatsoever, not even hair or ears. It was as tall as a normal man and wore a simple, cowled robe. It was also facing-if one could use the term-the three riders, watching them with its nonexistent eyes and unperturbed by the fact that the trio was now staring back.
“Let me cut it down, Father!” Reegan’s voice pretended at disdain, but a barely noticeable quiver revealed the fear that the creature stirred within his breast. Lochivan, too, was discomforted by the sight of the harmless- looking being.
“It is forbidden to do so,” Barakas reminded his son, his own voice taking on a steely edge. He, like his sons, would have desired nothing more than to crush the interfering horror beneath his mount’s clawed feet or cut it to ribbons with his sword. Anything to wipe its existence from this world.
“But-”
“It was forbidden by the Dragon of the Depths!” the patriarch snapped, referring to a being he had, over the past decade, come to think of as the Tezerenee dragon totem come to life. When the Tezerenee had faced annihilation at the hands-talons-of the bird creatures in that other land, the god had burst forth from the ground wearing a body of stone and molten earth. It had scattered the Sheekas, or Seekers, as the Vraad preferred to call them, with only words. It had taken the surviving clan members and sent them to this continent to join their fellow Vraad, utilizing only the least of its power in the process.
Two things that the Dragon of the Depths-the Lord Tezerenee’s own name for the entity-had commanded had remained with Barakas. One was that there might come a time when the Tezerenee would return to the Dragonrealm in triumph. Lord Barakas yearned for that day. The other thing touched him in the opposite manner. His god had ordered that the Faceless Ones be left unharmed. They were to be allowed to do what they desired or else.
For the Tezerenee, that was almost unthinkable. They shared more than a legacy with the unholy creatures; they shared a common origin, at least in the physical sense. It was one that kept them from ever truly feeling comfortable among their own people, even though most of the other animosities had died over time.
Barakas took up the reins of his mount. “Let us be gone from here! This place no longer soothes!”
Reegan and Lochivan acquiesced with great eagerness.
Steering their drakes around, the three urged their animals back in the direction of the city. They had some slight difficulty at first, for these animals were not mindbroke as had once been the way. Mindbreaking back in Nimth had been a simple process by which the Vraad had taken the will of their mounts and shattered it, leaving an emptiness that the master could fill as he deemed necessary. It had always made for very obedient steeds. Unfortunately, mind-breaking now had a high casualty rate and the Tezerenee could ill afford to lose many drakes. Unlike the western continent, where the Tezerenee had intended to go, drakes were fairly scarce on this continent.
Another fault among many that this place had, as far as Barakas was concerned.
The mounts finally gave in to their riders and, building up speed, raced up and over the winding landscape. The crimson cloaks that Barakas and Reegan wore, designating them as clan master and heir apparent, respectively, fluttered madly behind, looking almost like bloodred dragon wings. The refugees’ city lay in a valley and so much of their trek was downhill, though smaller hills forced them to take a route that twisted back and forth often. Here, the drakes held an advantage over their equine counterparts. Their claws dug into the slope, preventing them from stumbling forward and throwing their riders to their death. Horses had their own advantages, true, many more than the reptilian mounts, but a riding drake was more than just a beast that carried a Tezerenee from one point to another. It was a killing machine. Few things could stand up to the onslaught of a dragon, even as simpleminded a one as the mount below the patriarch. The claws would slice a man to segments; the jaws could snap a victim in two without strain.
Most important, they were the symbol of the Tezerenee.
The city soon rose before them, from the distance looking like little more than one massive wall. The new inhabitants had rebuilt the encircling wall first, making it almost twice the height of its first incarnation because their overall loss of power had made them fear everything. The city itself had been a vast ruin when the Vraad had first come, an ageless relic of the race from whom they-and countless others, it appeared-had sprung. Those ancients had been far more godlike than the Vraad could have ever hoped to be, easily manipulating their descendants into a variety of forms. They had sought successors to their tired, dying race. In what could best be described as irony, their final hope lay in one of their earliest failures-the Vraad. The Lord Tezerenee’s kind had been abandoned to their world, a construct of the ancients, where it was supposed they would kill themselves off. Instead, the Vraad had outlasted nearly everyone else. Only the Seekers still held on, but they were already in their decline, so the Dragon of the Depths had said.
To Lord Barakas, the rebuilding of the city was a waste of effort that he had only condoned while he bided his time.
“Dragon’s blood!” Lochivan swore, pointing at the path ahead. “Another!”
Near the very gates of the city there stood a figure identical to the one that they had left behind no more than moments before. For all Barakas knew, it was the same being. They had the power to flaunt. The Faceless Ones were, after all, all that remained of the minds of the very ancients who had built the city. They still sought, in their own mysterious way, to manipulate the future of their world-meaning the Vraad. The Lord Tezerenee gritted his teeth; it was by his doing that they had been given physical forms through which to interfere further.
Of their own accord, the gates swung open in time for the returning Vraad. The Faceless One, like his predecessor, remained passive as they neared. Barakas could not help touching his own face as they rode past the still figure. The skin Barakas touched felt like the skin he had always known, but it was of the same origin as the body that those ghosts now wore. Every Tezerenee, save one, wore a shell created by the now-lost combined magical might of the clan. Even a few non-clan members, outsiders whose loyalties had extended to the patriarch, had such bodies. It had seemed like the perfect solution when no way had been found to cross from Nimth to the Dragon-realm in a physical manner. Through the aid of one Dru Zeree, the only outsider Barakas respected, the Vraad had rediscovered the secret of ka, or spirit travel. The ka, guided by others, could cross the barrier that the bodies could not. There was only one major stumbling block: the spirits needed a suitable host.
It was Barakas himself who had come up with that solution. Though they could not cross, the Vraad could influence their future world through sorcerous means. It meant a dozen or more individuals acting in concert for even the slightest of spells. For the arrogant Vraad, that was an impossibility that only the Tezerenee, who were used to working with one another, could overcome. Under the patriarch’s masterful guidance, they had created an army of golems whose ancestry could be traced to the larger, more majestic cousins of the very mounts he and his sons now rode. Those soulless husks were to have waited for the tide of Vraad immigrants, but things had gone wrong after only a few hundred had been molded. First, those to whom the task of manipulating the spell of formation had fallen vanished without a trace; Barakas suspected that the ancients had been at fault there, also. Then the damned ghosts had stolen most of the bodies for themselves.
The creature was lost from sight as the riders moved farther on into the confines of the city. The patriarch drew no comfort from that. As far as he knew, there were probably half a dozen more of the horrors observing him
