dwarves were innocent. They were innocence personified. They could never be anything else.
Clonogh shoved thoughts of gully dwarves aside and concentrated on someone who was truly evil-the power-mad tyrant, Lord Vulpin. Clonogh’s loathing of the man raged within him. Vulpin held Clonogh’s life in his hand. And Vulpin did taunt him, constantly.
The man was half of a double evil. The other half was Vulpin’s sister, Chatara Kral. Clonogh knew their origins. Both Vulpin and Chatara Kral were spawn of the Dragon Highlord Verminaard, archenemy of the Dragonlance War.
They were like their sire, those two-both crazed by an insatiable thirst for conquest. It was their manipulations-both of them, that had brought Clonogh to the state he found himself in now.
As always, when cataloging his enemies, the mage cursed old Piraeus, that long-dead sorcerer who had yielded up the secrets of magic to him so long ago, yielded them all but one! Somehow Piraeus had withheld from Clonogh the power to resist the ravages of his own spells. Just in a matter of months now, Clonogh had become old, incredibly old, old beyond death but unable to die.
Piraeus, before he died, had tricked him. Magic always demands a price, and Piraeus had known that. It was a necessary part of any spell, a secret inflection, a directing code to cause the spell to draw its energies from elsewhere, other than from its user. But in Piraeus’s revelations the shielding magic had been withheld. Instead, in each spell the old trickster had substituted a different sort of inflection-the shield-code of a dragon spell.
The code worked … but only for dragons. It was useless to anyone else, except in the presence of dragon magic.
Clonogh wished he could see Chatara Kral beheaded. He wished he could see Vulpin disemboweled. He wished the sky would fall on all gully dwarves. He wished that the ancient mage Piraeus might burn forever in the torments beyond death.
Mostly, he wished that he could wish. If only he could have captured that bumbling Aghar who carried the Fang of Orm in its grimy hand, he could have forced a wish from it. The Wishmaker responded to innocence. And nothing, he realized now, was more innocent than a gully dwarf. The creatures were detestable, despicable and deplorable, of course, but more than anything else they were
One wish! A single wish, made by an innocent, could have saved him! It would have been enough. That wish would have restored his own youth and delivered his enemies to him for his amusement.
But wishing without the Wishmaker did no good.
Beyond the tower, all around him, he heard the sounds of battle. Chatara Kral and the Gelnian hordes were not settling in for a long siege. That would have required patience. No, they were attacking the Tarmish stronghold in force. The air was filled with the crashing of hurled stones, the clatter of weapons and the voices of men striving in mortal combat.
Unable to do anything about his plight, so weak and frail he was hardly able even to move his fingers, Clonogh closed his eyes in resignation. Then he opened them abruptly. Somewhere, around him, arcane forces were brewing. He could sense them, feel them in his bones, forces nearby, near enough that their power wafted over him.
Magic! But not his magic. Not the sorceries that he could command or had known when he had the strength to exercise spells. The magic here was not human magic. It was a powerful, alien magic as different from his own as iron bonds differ from silk threads. Dragon magic! Somewhere within his mind’s hearing, a dragon had cast a spell.
With the last of his will, Clonogh focused his thoughts, concentrating on the sorcery he sensed, drawing its tuned vibrations into himself, willing its shield powers to fill the holes in his own magic, to mend him and brace him and make him complete.
The power of the dragon spell flowed around him and he drew from it as a sponge draws water, absorbing those patterns that he required.
In a moment it was gone, but the moment was enough. Like a leech in stagnant waters, Clonogh had ridden the turbulent energies and sucked from them the sustenance he required. For an instant he marveled that it had come at such a time-in his hour of greatest need, magic had turned for him, and his grasp on it had been sure. It was almost as though some god had intervened, he thought. But the thought did not linger. He had other things to think about now. A glance at his pale, skeletal hands told him that he still appeared incredibly ancient. But now it was only appearance. Within the husking shell of him, he was as powerful as any youth.
Energized and rejuvenated, feeling strong and fit, Clonogh stood and gazed around through renewed eyes. A catapult’s stone crashed against the tower, spraying its interior with shards and dust, but Clonogh cared nothing about it. An energy like steel veils flowed about him, and nothing touched him. He strode to the west wall, pulled down a tattered tapestry there and with strong hands tore it into segments, which he bound around his nakedness with pieces of sash.
Beyond the shattered doorway, at the top of a descending circular stair, he found a dead mercenary clad in the colors of Lord Vulpin’s tower guards. The man seemed to have been trampled by a horse. Clonogh took the man’s boots and put them on his own feet, then paused curiously, gazing down at the corpse. With only the slightest hesitation, the mage pointed a finger and muttered a minor spell. Before his eyes, the guard’s body writhed and shriveled, collapsing inward upon itself until only skeletal remains lay there.
Clonogh took a deep breath, stood thoughtfully for a moment, then nodded. “Good,” he muttered. He had made a strong spell, and for the first time, the spell had done him no harm. He was protected now by dragon magic.
A memory presented itself in his mind, the memory of that old mage whose secrets Clonogh had taken from him so long ago. That old mage who, even in death, had avenged himself by tricking his killer.
“I win,” Clonogh said. “Now I truly have the power!”
Beyond the tower, a battle raged. All along the ramparts of Tarmish, men struggled frantically to maintain their defenses. Below, beyond the walls, hordes of Gelnians stormed forward under the cover of their bombarding catapults and trebuchets.
Another great stone impacted the tower, and whole sections of it collapsed, but Clonogh sang a spell and the portion where he stood-the floor beneath his feet, the portal and the stairwell-remained intact. Like a bizarre, misshapen finger pointing at the sky, the wreckage of Lord Vulpin’s tower stood above scenes of chaos. The structure was only a skeleton of itself now, but it remained sturdy. Vaguely, Clonogh marveled at the ancient engineering that had raised such a structure.
Of more immediate interest, though, was the Fang of Orm, somewhere below, probably still in the hands of some detestable gully dwarf scurrying through the rubble. For that relic, Lord Vulpin had robbed Clonogh of his spirit. For that same relic, Chatara Kral had ordered the mage tortured. For the Fang of Orm and the power to use it, a few minutes ago, Clonogh would have given his soul. Now it meant less to him, though he still wanted it. Now he had magic of his own, unburdened by the pain of instant aging.
What he wanted now was revenge. And in the Fang of Orm rested delicious vengeance.
A chorus of screams arose now from below, and Clonogh turned full around, watching with bemused interest as a great dragon swept from the sky to glide across the ramparts of Tarmish. In its wake, on the ground, attacks and defenses collapsed as men by the hundreds ran in all directions, trying to escape. Dragonfear spread and rippled among them. Where Crealic mercenaries manned repelling catapults atop a wall, the dragon swept low, its huge claws ripping downward to destroy the defenses. Spears and javelins bounced harmlessly from its armored scales, and men tumbled from the wall, along with the wreckage of their machines.
Clonogh frowned. Somehow, it seemed, Chatara Kral had induced a dragon to help her. But then the dragon, completing its sweep of the walls, turned its attention outward, trailing wreckage in its wake as it slashed through the Gelnian attack.
Puzzled, the mage watched from his high perch. The dragon veered here and there, smashing into concentrations of troops almost at random. And always, where it went-gliding low on great, flaring wings-it left a widening wake of fleeing men in its path. Spears and arrows arose from the human masses. Many bounced harmlessly off the dragon’s armored scales. Others missed, to fall back among the humans below.
Around and around the attacking fields the huge beast flew, dipping and diving here and there while armed men ran screaming from it. Then with beating wings it rose above the walls and again descended upon Tarmish.
