camouflage, hang down around her. She had left her horse back with Donegan and the others, who marched along some hundred feet behind her. Maryin’s job was to detect any potential ambushes, and to keep them moving toward the dragon. Given the dirt flying high into the air a few moments earlier, the knight had every reason to believe she had completed that task.
She had found another few tracks not far back, for the beast had apparently set down, but then she came upon a great hole, not far from the bank of a small pond. She crouched at the rim, considering the tunnel at the bottom.
“Did you go to ground, wyrm?” she whispered under her breath.
Maryin lingered for a few moments, then, hearing the approach of her companions, she straightened, glanced around, and moved her hand out from under the protection of her cloak, raising her fist high into the air.
She glanced at the water, not realizing that the eyes of the Witch-King looked back at her. Behind her, Sir Donegan slowed his contingent and approached with some caution. He walked his horse up beside the knight scout.
“Into the tunnel?” he asked, inspecting the hole. “Or is it a ruse, and the beast has gone under the pond?”
Maryin pulled back her cowl and shrugged. “I’m finding nothing to say it is and nothing to say it isn’t.”
“A wonderful scout you are.”
Maryin smiled at him. “I can track almost anything, and you know it well-even that little lass who thought to sneak into your room. But you cannot expect me to track a dragon that keeps taking to the sky. Do you think its beating wings will flatten grass from on high? Do you think the beast will cut a wake through the land as a boat might do across a lake?”
Sir Donegan laughed at her endless sarcasm and the wicked little jab against him. He still had a bone to pick with Maryin over that wench incident, for Donegan had been anticipating the visit, and the interception had not been appreciated. But that was a fight for another day, and a thought came to him.
“Has the water risen?”
Maryin looked at him, curious, then caught on and moved to the pond’s bank where she began inspecting for signs of a recent swell. The pond wasn’t very large, after all, and surely the displacement would be noticeable in the event a creature as large as a dragon had entered its depths.
A moment later, Maryin stood straight again and shook her head.
“And so the wyrm did not enter the pond,” Donegan said with a sigh. “Good enough, then.”
“There are no tracks from the hole to the water, and if the beast had taken to the air for any distance, we should have seen it-or should have heard the splash when it dived in. My guess is that the dragon, confident and oblivious to our pursuit, took to the tun-”
She hunched forward, and Donegan leaped back. Behind them, horses and soldiers bristled. From the hole came a low, throaty growl, a resonating rumble befitting a beast of a dragon’s stature.
“Form up!” Sir Donegan commanded.
He turned his charger and thundered back to the ranks. Maryin pulled her cowl back over her head and face and appeared to melt into the shadows at the pool’s edge.
The growl continued for a few moments, then gradually receded.
Lances were lowered, swords were drawn, and wizards and priests prepared their spells.
Then it was quiet once more. And through the long hush, no great monster sprang from the hole.
When Donegan and the others finally dared to approach, they stood on the edge of the deep, wide, funnel- shaped pit, looking to the broad tunnel at its base, which ran off both east and west.
“It would seem that we have found our wyrm,” Sir Donegan told his troop.
“Are we certain that a dragon dug this pit?” another knight asked.
“There are spells that can facilitate such things,” Fisticus the wizard replied. “As there are beasts.…”
“A dragon?”
“There is little turmoil a dragon cannot create,” Fisticus explained. “Such a wyrm as the one that attacked Palishchuk those days ago would have little trouble boring through the soft ground of the Vaasan summer.”
Sir Gavaland, another Knight of the Order, said, “One would think that if the dragon meant to announce its presence in such a manner, it would have burst forth to attack us in that moment of surprise.”
“If it knew we were here,” Donegan replied.
“The growl?”
“A purr of satisfaction before settling down to sleep?” the wizard offered. “Such beasts are known to growl as often as a man might sigh or yawn.”
“Pray it is a yawn, then,” said Donegan, “and one announcing that the beast is ready for a long and sound nap.” He looked around at his soldiers, grinning from ear to ear beneath his upraised visor. “One from which it will never awaken.”
That brought a host of nods and grins from the rank and file.
Off to the side, Maryin neither nodded nor grinned. She knew what was coming, and what her role would be, before Sir Donegan even motioned to her to enter the pit. It occurred to her that perhaps she would do well to don her heavier plate mail and hire an elf to handle the scouting.
Under the water, Zhengyi nodded with contentment as he watched the troop disappear over the pit’s rim. His spell mimicking the dragon’s roar had been well placed through use of his complimentary enchantment of ventriloquism, or so it would seem.
The Witch-King knew that he should be away at once-back to the south and Damara, where the battle raged-but he lingered a bit longer in the pond, and when all of the soldiers had gone into the pit save those few left to guard the horses, he emerged again on the northeastern bank.
The three fools standing with the horses still stared at the pit, oblivious to the danger, when the Witch-King came calling.
She knew that her elven cloak could protect her from prying eyes, but still Maryin felt vulnerable as she edged her way down the enormous tunnel-certainly high and wide enough for a dragon to charge through it. Lichen covered the walls, emitting a soft light, like starlight in a forest clearing. Though thankful for that illumination-for it meant she had to carry no torch-at the same time she feared the glow might make her just as plain to the wyrm’s clever eyes.
She felt the beast’s presence before she smelled or heard it-a pervasive aura of fear hung in the air.
Maryin went down to all fours and crawled along. No retreat would be fast enough if the beast spotted her, so her only hope lay in not being detected at all.
She rounded a bend and held her breath as she peered into a distant chamber. There it was, and it was not the beast that had recently attacked Palishchuk. For even in the dim light, she could see that its scales glistened black, and not white.
She retreated slowly for some time, inching out backward. Then she turned and ran, two hundred yards or more up the tunnel, to where Donegan and the others waited, including the armored horses of the knights Donegan and Bevell.
“A large black,” she explained in as soft a voice as possible while she drew the chamber’s layout for them in a patch of soft dirt.
Fisticus and the other wizards went to work, coordinating the spells they would need to fend off the acidic breath of a black dragon.
“A white would present fewer challenges,” the lead wizard complained. “Our spells to defeat its freezing breath are more specialized and complete.”
“Perhaps I can borrow some fence paint and change the beast’s color while it sleeps,” came Maryin’s sarcastic reply.
“That would be helpful,” Fisticus shot back without hesitation.
“Enough,” Donegan scolded them both. “Black dragons are comparable to whites-at least it’s not an ancient red awaiting us.”
“We have spells specifically to defeat the fiery breath of a-” Fisticus began.
“And any red worth its scales would have mighty spells to dwarf your own,” Donegan interrupted. “In this
