wrong. If they surrendered to the inevitable, the warlock would leave them be-maybe-but if they continued to oppose him, he felt he was justified in removing them in whatever way necessary.
Shade realized that the drake lord was speaking. “What was that you said?”
“I asked you what you think you are doing, human! Is this how you vent your frustrations?” The Dragon King pointed toward the spot Shade had been staring at moments before.
The warlock returned his gaze to the effigy-or to where it had once lain. Now, there was only a pile of fine dust. Very fine dust. Shade looked down at his hands. They literally glowed with the use of the powers.
“I am Vraad,” he whispered to himself. “Vraad is power.” The words had been spoken millennia before by many, all of whom, save Shade, were dead now. It had almost been a litany to the race, and his remembrance of it was yet another sign of what was happening to him. Still, it bothered the spellcaster that he had reduced the ancient statue to ash without realizing it. A warning beat briefly against the walls of his mind, but the pain drowned it out. He looked up at the impatient and somewhat nervous Dragon King. “Merely a little carelessness on my part.”
The drake’s burning red eyes narrowed. “Yesss. That is what got you into your predicament originally, is it not?”
“Watch your tongue, drake lord. It might dart too far out of your mouth once too often.”
The Silver Dragon hissed anxiously. Because Shade had found a need for him, he had grown overly confident about his power. Only now did the drake realize that there were limits to which he could push the spellcaster. Both knew that the alliance was temporary at best. Quickly, the would-be emperor turned the conversation back to an earlier subject. “What do you ssseek in the book? Most of it makes little sense.”
“A key, of sorts. I really don’t know what. Not yet, but soon. Soon I’ll be my old self again.” A vague line that was what now passed for his smile surfaced briefly, faltered, and died. Shade wrapped his cloak about him and, as the Dragon King rose in the sudden realization that something was amiss, vanished.
Through his own words, the warlock had just rediscovered the purpose, the goal, of his search-and why he dared not let anyone, even Darkhorse, stand in his way.
VIII
THE PAIN INFLICTED upon him was like such he had not suffered in centuries. The human called Mal Quorin claimed it was on order of the king, but Darkhorse, in his more lucid moments, suspected that Melicard knew only vaguely what his underlings were doing. Something in the feline features of the counselor, as if he were toying with his prisoner the way the creature he so resembled toyed with its prey, told Darkhorse that.
It was obvious that the sorcerer was reluctant to question his rival and that alone spoke volumes as to their respective positions of influence with the king. Drayfitt’s loss of face was the shadow steed’s doing, made doubly worse by the successful destruction of the spellbook by the entranced mage. For that, even Drayfitt had exercised a bit of vengeance.
They had abandoned him for other matters some time back-how long, Darkhorse could not say. Now, the eternal recovered slowly in his accursed cage, his present form little more than a blot of shadow darker than the rest. Had he been human, he would have died several times over and that fact had not escaped him. With one part of his mind, he plotted the torture of his foes; with the other, he cursed himself for his stupidity and lack of foresight. Drayfitt had taken care with his original spell. Had the stallion delved deeply, he would have discovered the thin magical bond that still tied him to the sorcerer, a tie that the elderly human had used to recapture him. His escape, it seemed, had been no more than a farce.
So close! Shade was no doubt laughing at him even now. He had come so close, actually confronting the warlock. Darkhorse knew he should have come in striking, beating down Shade before the warlock had a chance to think. Hesitation had cost him the battle and his freedom.
Once more, he re-created the equine form he favored. A hollow victory, creating a form again, but a victory nonetheless. With nothing else to do, Darkhorse began a slow and thorough scan of his magical prison. Perhaps this time…
Nothing. If anything, Drayfitt had tightened the control of the pattern, used the power of the cell to cancel out the shadow steed’s own abilities to the point where even eye contact would not help. The aged sorcerer was a survivor and learned readily from his mistakes.
Odd, he wondered, that Melicard’s spellcaster would have access to a Vraad artifact at the same time that both Shade and the Silver Dragon were searching for such things. What was the connection? What did Shade want with a work from so ancient a time? Surely not to summon a true demon. Its power would be insignificant compared to his own. Was this latest madness just the product of his unstable mind? The warlock had undergone yet another personality change; in centuries past, he had done stranger things during various incarnations. These rapid and continuous changes, however, smelled of something different, something gone awry. When would they stop? Which “Shade” would be the final result?
Significant questions weaved in a hundred different directions like a swirling mass of tentacles, confusing and unanswerable for the most part. He soon realized there was little point in pursuing them for now, though he knew that forgetting them entirely would be impossible.
More time passed. All the while, Darkhorse stubbornly continued to raise, revise, and reject options as they occurred to him. There was no way that he could physically-so to speak-pass through the boundaries. His magical abilities all seemed useless while he languished in his prison. He did not even know what was going on; the Dragonrealm might be on the brink of destruction-
Darkhorse did not breathe, though he often pretended to for appearance. Nevertheless, he came close to holding that nonexistent breath when it occurred to him that, though his magical abilities were muted, there were natural ones-unnatural by human standards-that he might make use of. Regardless of his careful work, Drayfitt could not hope to completely understand the nature of the ebony stallion.
There were many over the centuries who had called the legendary Darkhorse the Child of the Void. They were closer and farther from the truth than they knew. Darkhorse was a creature of the border regions between reality and the Void who only wandered that empty realm, much akin to the mist dwellers who guarded the secret paths that crossed into and out of the world like portals. Through practice, Darkhorse had made himself stronger than most, though that had tied him to reality and lost him some mastery over the Void. He did not regret that; there was so much more to the multiverse. Had it not proved necessary in his prior struggle with the warlock, the shadow steed would have chosen never to return to the dismal domain he had dwelled in for so long.
Yet, it was the Void to which he now turned in hope.
While willing himself back into the form of a horse had proved difficult after his ordeal, the act of literally separating himself into two parts was sheer agony. The strain alone threatened to overcome him. Despite the horror, however, he was willing to suffer that pain and even the permanent loss of that smaller portion of self. What mattered most was learning what he could in the hope of using it to engineer his escape. There might even be a clue as to how he could stop Shade, though his hopes in that respect were less than nothing after what had happened.
He willed one of his hooves into a wide circular shape a little less than a foot in diameter. That was the easy part of his task. The second was far worse, a strain on his already worn consciousness. There was also the danger of losing too much of his essence. He planned to separate a tiny portion of himself from the main body. It was a dangerous thing, risking his very identity in the process, for a piece of his “self” would be lost along with his essence. Humans who had lost a limb might claim to have lost a part of who they were, but with Darkhorse it was literal. It would take him years to fully recover.
Straining his concentration to the limit, he forced the reshaped hoof to expand away from his leg. Slowly, as the two masses separated, the ankle grew thinner and thinner until it was little more than the thickness of a twig. Darkhorse felt his mind separate into two distinct “selves,” one greater, one lesser. With one last effort, they broke the remaining physical link between the fragment and the main body.
What must be done… He wondered why such a thought would come to him unbidden-then paused in sudden guilt as he realized it was a fading thought from another, that piece of “self” he had sacrificed. Darkhorse stared at the black spot for several seconds before he could bring himself to work the rest of his plan. With great reluctance
