Legends of the Dragonrealm, Vol. III

they too late? Had the Quel acted as the Crystal Dragon had been tempted to do?

Cabe was no longer certain he wanted to see the contents of the tall sphere.

“Hold the artifact before you. Be prepared.”

For what? How? Why do those who say that never really explain?

The Dragon King eyed the spherical prison. He started to reach toward it, then hesitated. The reptilian nose wrinkled. Again, the Dragon King reached toward the sphere and again he paused. His expression went from wary expectation to puzzlement to growing fury.

“Thissss shell holdsss nothing! It issss barren!”

The warlock lowered the artifact in his arms. “Barren?”

“Empty.” Long, narrow eyes burned into the warlock’s own. “The Vraaaaad hasss essscaped!”

Cabe stared at the prison. He had misinterpreted the scorch traces. The marks were not the work of the Quel, but rather Plool himself working from within the trap. Both the warlock and his armored captors had underestimated the skills and tenacity of the eccentric Vraad.

“A Vraaaad loossse . . .” The Dragon King was talking to himself. “But I dare not . . . do I? I musssst . . . unlesssss . . .” He blinked and seemed to study Cabe anew. “Yessss . . .”

A taloned hand reached forth. The malevolent sphere tore free of the sorcerer’s grip and flew to its master. It came to a halt only a foot or two from the dragon’s snout and hovered there, waiting.

Cabe relaxed a little, realizing now that it was the device that had interested the Dragon King, not him. “What will you do?”

“What musssst be done. I musssst withdraw what I have unleashed. It will not sssstop . . . stop . . . the wolf raiders, but it will deal with that thing from Nimth!” Now that he had decided on a course of action, the Crystal Dragon sounded almost human in his speech patterns. There seemed no predicting how he would act from one moment to the next. Cabe hoped that this new attitude would remain for a time. “I must risk it. I will not allow that curse to reenter the world. When all that is Nimth is thrust back through the doorway, he will be weakened. He will be so weakened that the threat will become negligible!”

Weakened . . . with all traces of Nimth gone . . . What was it that bothered Cabe about that? Something about Plool and teleporting. Something . . . Of course! “Your Majesty, if you could hear me out. Instead of what you do, let me try to find Plool first. He can be made to see reason. If you do what you plan-”

“It will be done.” The finality in the drake lord’s voice left no room for compromise. In his eyes, a single Vraad was more a threat than a legion of Aramites. It almost appeared to be a personal vendetta, as if the Dragon King had dealt with Plool’s kind before. Could that be?

What was it that hid behind the mask that was the Crystal Dragon?

The glittering titan closed his eyes. Before him, the dark contents within the sphere shifted and turned. It was a trick of the eyes, of course. The artifact was only a doorway. Perhaps what the Crystal Dragon did disturbed some small area of Nimth, but he certainly could not control the entire world. That much was evident from his fear of anything Nimthian, especially a lone Vraad.

Cabe was torn. On the one hand, he wanted the madcap entity called Plool removed from his world because of what chaos the Vraad might be able to cause even restricted to this one region. On the other hand, the warlock despised what he considered murder. Plool was deadly, but Cabe would have preferred to try to turn the bizarre mage first. Plool was Plool only because of where he had been born.

He had to try again. If his words failed to convince the Dragon King, would he be tempted to action? Was everything else worth risking for a creature he barely knew? “Your Majesty?”

The Crystal Dragon did not hear him.

“Your-” Cabe Bedlam’s mouth clamped shut. Suddenly the walls surrounding them had come alive with faces, but not all the same. There were copies of his own, some of them older, some of them younger. He saw the face of the Gryphon and wondered at that. There were others, though, and with a start, Cabe eyed the face of what could only be one of the raider leaders. A tall man with a short beard, much like the wolf raider D’Shay, whom the Gryphon had killed years ago. His face was ghastly, a drawn, scarred thing. Yet, what bothered him most upon sighting that face was the expression, for in many ways it resembled a human variation of the present expression on the Dragon King’s reptilian countenance.

Then, among all the other faces, he saw one that made him forget even that of the wolf raider leader. It was a face he had seen only in a vision, but one that had remained with him. A bear of a man, a leader, who wore armor of dragonscale. It was the face of a conquerer, one who brooked no defeat. There was something so compelling about the figure, something that reminded him of Shade. It was the man he had thought of as his father when the vision had controlled him. It was . . . whose father?

Cabe stared at the entranced drake lord. The thought was ludicrous. It was.

Dragon Kings do not live that long . . . and he is a Dragon King at that.

The Crystal Dragon hissed and his eyes flew open. His gaze shifted from the sphere to the wall . . . and to the image of the gaunt, scarred figure that Cabe had taken for the Aramite commander. Their eyes seemed to lock.

The sphere exploded.

XIII

A shiver ran through the sleepers. They did not wake, but something in the spell that had kept them under for so long had changed. What it was would have been hard to explain in any terms save perhaps to say that now they did not sleep so deep.

Not deep at all.

What are they doing down there with that blasted toy? Orril D’Marr stalked across the dark, fog-enshrouded camp trying to keep the men organized. Those who were supposed to be getting some precious sleep were still awake for the most part, the mist and rumors keeping many of them too wary to even lie down. The soldiers on night duty, meanwhile, were turning and slashing at shadows and ghosts in the fog. Sentries kept reporting sightings of creatures that did not, could not, exist.

All of this was taking him from his more important tasks. D’Marr had stolen a few precious hours of slumber for himself so that he would be alert for the project he had planned for this night. Tonight he had been planning to open the way to the hidden chamber and finally find out what it was that was so precious to the beasts that they were willing to suffer at his tender hands for it. The explosives were ready and he had chosen the blast points. There would be little damage to the areas nearby and none at all to his master’s precious chamber.

That was if he ever had the opportunity to set the explosives. With both his lordship and the blue devil down below, still working after all these hours, Orril D’Marr was the senior officer available. That meant that he had to maintain control, which amounted to running around and beating the other officers until they began acting as their ranks demanded. The officers were his duty and the men beneath them were their responsibility. He did not have time to go running from soldier to soldier.

Something is happening. The fog swirled about, a violent storm of shadow and light. Sometimes, the area was lit for several minutes, as if the sun had risen and finally managed to slice through the mist. At least it had thinned a bit, he thought. Even when it was properly dark it was possible to make out shapes several yards away. Whether that change was due to some success on Lord D’Farany’s part or was simply a natural occurrence, the young officer did not care. He was only glad it was happening.

D’Marr hated this place, but the damned heat and sunlight was preferable to this mess. So far this night, two men had simply disappeared and a third . . . well, there were some things that made even him queasy.

And that patrol scattered, more than a dozen men lost there, too. Oddly, that both irritated and excited him. The reports spoke of a huge dark stallion with a rider, the latter having a dozen different