chests and girding their loins. The growling, hissing sivak draconians presented an impressive array of fangs, talons, and silver-bladed weapons.
“I am not afraid!” Ankhar lied-loudly, which was his favorite way to lie. “You fear me, or die!” He waved his emerald-tipped spear for good measure.
A blast of fire erupted from the ground in front of him, sending the half-giant tumbling backward. The blaze shot upward as if exploding from a deep hole, crackling and burning, radiating heat that forced Ankhar to raise a hand just to shield his eyes. He only barely managed to hold on to his spear as his jaw dropped at the sight of a slender, wingless draconian standing in the place where the column of flame had shot upward.
“You are Ankhar!” declared this new draconian. He was smaller than the other winged monsters, but there was something that suggested command about him. His eyes, slit with vertical pupils, nevertheless gleamed with intelligence, and his voice had a sibilant quality. And he knew the half-giant’s name.
“Who are you?” demanded the one who called himself the Truth.
“I am Guilder,” the creature replied easily, stepping forward, extending a taloned paw in a gesture of greeting. “Aurak draconian, master of these sivaks, and lord of this valley. I greet you in friendship and respect.”
Guilder held that paw extended. Ankhar, watching suspiciously, switched his spear to his left hand and took the paw in his own-and immediately felt a numbing, chilling paralysis take root in his palm and start to run up his arm. Magic! He pulled his hand away with a roar of alarm. Weakness seeped through his flesh, and a wave of dizziness surged up through his mind.
“Take them!” cried Guilder, pulling his paw free, dancing away from the suddenly staggering half-giant. The aurak crowed in triumph and chanted words to a magic spell, wildly gesticulating.
His mother laughed shrilly, a cackling sound that made the half-giant wonder if she were going insane. Whose side was she on anyway? The aurak was still casting a spell, making grotesque sounds that rose to a crescendo and-Ankhar feared-a coming convulsion of magic.
Abruptly the sound of the aurak’s spell-casting ceased, though he continued to work his jaws, frantically. But there was a glimmer of fear in the creature’s slit eyes as the shaman’s spell of silence disrupted the casting of whatever sorcery he had been preparing.
As one of the silvery draconians charged him from in front, Ankhar raised his spear by instinct more than plan, still holding the weapon awkwardly in his left hand. The green stone at the head of the weapon pulsed brightly, a flash of light brighter than the sun. The weapon almost seemed to draw the suddenly frightened draconian onto the weapon. Ankhar took heart from that flaring brilliance and thrust the spear forward with a triumphant bellow.
The green stone wedge pierced the draconian’s chest and exploded through its back, halfway between those two suddenly flailing wings. “Die, wyrmling!” roared Ankhar, pulling the spear free. The draconian tumbled back and fell to the ground. Wings flapping, it thrashed and kicked for a moment, but its struggles quickly faded and it died in a spreading pool of black blood.
The other sivaks growled and barked and squawked, obviously dismayed. Several feinted lunges at the half- giant but retreated before he could parry against them. He spun through a full circle, feeling the strength returning to his numbed right arm. He still held the heavy shaft of his spear in his left hand, shaking it over his head, roaring challenges and taunts at the reptilian band. With his chest thrust out and his muscles flexing, he felt his mastery over the craven creatures and, like his mother, laughed out loud at their hissing, clacking, and flapping.
“Look at Arcen!” The aurak, Guilder, gasped in surprise as Laka’s spell of silence fell away. He was pointing at the dead sivak, now sprawled motionless on the ground at his feet.
Slowly, with a strange rippling through its flesh, that silver-white body began to change. The shape writhed, its talons drawing back into the fingers and toes, its wings shriveling and shrinking. Ankhar was familiar with the gruesome death throes of lesser draconians-the baaz, who became hard stone statues when slain; or the kapaks, whose flesh dissolved into searing acid. But the sivak was strange and different: the draconian was changing shape.
With a violent convulsion, the scaly flesh of the creature’s skin ripped apart. Its chest thickened, and its dragonlike face smoothed, the jaws shrinking until it resembled a more humanoid creature. With a gasp of disbelief, Ankhar suddenly realized that he was looking at the very image of himself! The corpse was wearing strange, ornate garments-nothing like the half-giant’s leather tunic and leggings-but he was too stunned to take note of the garb.
“What foul sorcery is this?” he demanded, taking a step backward.
But the other draconians were not listening. They all recognized the image of Ankhar the Truth-but it was an Ankhar wearing a golden crown and wrapped in the robes that signified he was a great king. The aurak, Guilder, threw himself to the ground, pressing his face forward to kiss the half-giant’s muddy boots.
“My liege!” he cried. “Forgive me!”
“Hail Ankhar!” croaked another of the draconians, the sivak called Gentar who had first confronted him. The draconian placed the tip of his great long sword on the ground and leaned the hilt toward the great lord. “Allow us to serve you, O mighty one!” he croaked.
“My power is my Truth!” bellowed the half-giant. “Est Sudanus oth Nikkas!”
“And we,” Guilder said, speaking with bowed head from bended knee. “We will follow your Truth to the far ends of Krynn!”
Deciding that they did not want to risk magically transporting themselves into the middle of a battle, Selinda and Melissa teleported safely to the yard of a country inn that the princess knew that was several miles south of Vingaard Keep. They arrived unnoticed and, in the early morning light, simply walked up the lane without being seen by anyone in the barely stirring household.
The two women were dressed in simple shawls and easily passed as farmwives when encountering dairymen or laborers on the dirt road that curled gently down the valley of the Vingaard River. That great flowage, a mile wide, spread to their right, but the keep itself and the town around it was obscured from their view by the ridge of low hills just south of Apple Creek.
They walked along in silence and after about an hour came to the crest of those hills. They both stopped and stared. The silhouette of Vingaard Keep loomed before them, but it was a sad, twisted mockery of the once elegant fortress. Only one tower could be seen, standing aloof and proud, with many black gaps where the once-beautiful windows had been. The other two towers were gone, replaced by stumps of rubble.
There was a picket of Crown Army guards at the crest, a dozen men-at-arms who stood near the road, watching to the south. They had clearly been observing the women for the past hour, but just as obviously did not perceive them to be any threat. In fact, they ignored them as they moved past until Selinda stopped and turned. She spotted the sergeant of the detail, a grizzled knight who was a decade or two past his prime, and approached him.
Curtsying respectfully, she begged his pardon for interrupting him at his duties.
“No problem! No problem at all, little lady. What can I do for you on this fine morn?”
“Is it safe to approach the castle? Does the battle still rage?”
The sergeant chuckled genially. “Not so much of a battle, really. The poor beggars were ready to quit at the first sight of the emperor’s bombard. But he wouldn’t let ’em-turned the cowardly curs right back to their walls, he did, when they tried to yield. He had to teach them a lesson, you know.”
“He turned them down? When they offered to yield?” Selinda tried to keep her voice level even as her stomach heaved with nausea. She felt Melissa take her hand, the priestess squeezing it hard, trying to give her strength.
“Well, he had to, you see. Had to teach them the lesson.”
“And now? Where is the emperor?” asked Selinda.
“Why do you want to know so bad?” asked the guard, suddenly suspicious. “You are a pretty thing, I’ll say. But you know he’s married, don’t you?”
“I had heard that, yes,” said the emperor’s wife. “I’m curious, that’s all. Do you think he will knock the rest of the castle down?”
“I don’t think so. The lord’s daughter came out to see him, in the wee hours it was. She went up and begged him to stop. She was up there with him a long time, but when she rode away, he called for a ceasefire. You can see they’re taking the gun down… right there.”
