“What’s that?” yelled Lyrilan.
“How long since you’ve traveled this way?”
“Three years… Tyro and I visited Udurum to represent our father at the Feast of Summer.”
D’zan grunted. “Does summer ever come to the north?”
Lyrilan grinned. “Not the summer of your native shore, Prince! But it does get far warmer once we’re down from between these dreadful peaks. We can look forward to a warm fire and dry bedding at Steephold.”
Some grumbling came back to them from the head of the column, some message passed from soldier to soldier, a swirling rumor among the ranks. D’zan could barely see Tyro topping the slope ahead, reining his steed beneath the whipping sun banner.
“Something is wrong,” Lyrilan said. He spoke with a sergeant, who leaned from his saddle to talk over the moaning wind. When the scholar turned back to D’zan, his face was worried. “Steephold has fallen.”
D’zan blinked against the words, not the wind. “Fallen?”
“Come, let us join my brother,” said Lyrilan, spurring his mount forward through the ranks. D’zan followed, a hollow sensation rising in his stomach. Their horses climbed the rocky incline until they reached the level ground. Tyro’s stallion stood alongside those of his captain and two lieutenants.
A wide bowl of flat terrain spread before them, hemmed on all sides by soaring white pinnacles. The pass proper continued along the bowl’s edge, dropping into a downward grade at its northern edge. In the bowl’s middle lay a heaped pile of ruined stone, massive blocks of basalt and granite scattered like childrens’ toys. A few walls of the toppled fortress still stood in awkward fragments. The husk of the inner keep that was the heart of Steephold lay beneath a million tons of rock – the remains of mighty towers that had crushed roof and walls. The stones were slick with mud and the purple-brown stains of dried blood. The ruins were fresh – only days old.
Tyro and his captain rode through the gaping hole where the main gate had been, horses picking their way among the rubble-strewn courtyard. The mighty gates themselves lay splintered into fragments. Lyrilan and D’zan followed, mesmerized by the heaped mounds of devastation. If there were bodies, they had been hauled away somewhere. They found no bones until Tyro dismounted and turned over a block leaning against a pillar. In the space between lay the corpse of a human soldier in the black-and-silver livery of New Udurum. The collapsing pillar had smashed his skull to pulp, but his body bore the deep marks of claws. Whoever dragged the dead from this spot had missed this fellow.
“An officer of the Udurum legions,” Tyro said. “Dead now four, maybe five days.”
Lyrilan looked about at the silent mountainsides, as if the very stones might rise up and continue the assault. “Fifty Uduru guarded this place,” he said. “Fifty Giants, seasoned warriors… What could have done this?”
D’zan’s mind raced back to the demon in his tent, squeezing the life from him, breathing death into his face. He reached behind his shoulder and grasped the hilt of the Stone’s blade. The Sun God’s ward had saved him from death, there could be no doubt. Lyrilan had agreed, when D’zan told him the whole story. The Giants of Steephold – and the Men who were also here – they had no wards.
“Something terrible,” said Tyro, remounting his horse. “We’d best not camp near these ruins. Bad luck… and s luighcavengers probably roam here after dark. The scent of blood is still strong.”
“There must be more bodies beneath these walls,” said Lyrilan.
“The castle has fallen before,” said the Uurzian captain. “The Uduru rebuilt it at Vod’s command. They’ll rebuild it again.”
“Not soon enough to do us any good,” said Tyro. He raised his arm to signal the standard-bearer.
The quake struck before he uttered a word. The horses reared and screeched in panic as the ground trembled. The mountains breathed an awful sigh of agony, and the earth beneath the crumbled fortress moaned. Men fell from their horses, and D’zan would have tumbled if Lyrilan had not reached out to grab his hand, their mounts swirling in a dance of fear. Rocks and gravel jumped, and the great stones shook, the rubble shifting and sliding as if something beneath were tearing its way through toward daylight.
“Below the fortress!” yelled Lyrilan in the roar of earth and wind. “The Giants had sealed a cavern leading to-”
Fragments of towers and walls erupted toward the ashen clouds with the sound of a splitting continent. A black whirlwind rose from the wreckage, taller than any Uduru, shedding a blanket of rock and dust from its scaly back. Clouds of dust and pulped stone rolled across the legionnaires, filling nostrils, mouths, and eyes. A bememoth pulled its body free of some deep cavern, crawling through the ruins in a blast of heat and smoke. Now its ear- splitting roar filled earth and sky. Somewhere beneath that ultimate sound, the cries of terrified men and horses rang as well. An appalling reek filled the air – burning feces, rotted flesh. The ancient stench of Serpents.
D’zan lost hold of Lyrilan’s arm and fell from his saddle. His back met the stony ground, and consciousness fled for a moment. Then he blinked in the dust and saw the vast creature crawling spans away from him, spitting a gout of flame into a mass of howling soldiers. A massive wall of scales like black iron. He caught a glimpse of its eyes, flame-red orbs of primeval hate. One of its dozen legs, six on each side, came down upon a fleeing horse. Ebony claws sank like spear blades into the steed’s round belly.
D’zan scrambled to his knees. Where was Lyrilan? Tyro? The captain? He pulled the greatsword from its scabbard and ran for cover. The beast – it was a Serpent, an Old Wyrm, he knew that – seemed intent on the mass of Uurzians. It had lain beneath the ruins, waiting for them. No… waiting for me. Could it sense him now, crouching like a coward behind a pile of broken stones?
Brave Uurzians rushed past their charred and screaming comrades, a forest of eager spears. The beast bellowed again, and avalanches of snow fell from nearby peaks. Men died squirming between its gnashing teeth, or pulped beneath its stamping claws. The front of its body rose high, six front-legs hanging in the air, dripping with bones and blood. It vomited burning pitch among the Uurzians, who ran or ducked behind oval shields. Most were caught in the flame and burned to death in an instant.
A thicket of spears protruded from the Wyrm’s pale underbelly as it dropped back to the ground, snapping with its terrible jaws. Some men scrambled toward its back end, where its tail lashed likeil d a massive whip, sending men through the air, braining them against piles of jagged masonry. D’zan saw a beefy Uurzian hacking at its rearmost leg with an axe. The man severed a single claw before the great head turned around and snapped him up.
Lyrilan lay senseless where his fear-stricken horse had bucked him. Any second now the Serpent’s legs would trample the unconscious Prince to death. Dragging the great blade behind him, D’zan ran with head down toward Lyrilan’s body. As the Serpent reared up again, spewing another gout of flame into a fresh rank of screaming Uurzians, he wondered if Lyrilan was already dead. If so, he might die trying to rescue a corpse. The heat from the sides of the beast’s blast-furnace mouth swelled over him, the biting chill of winter vanished. This warmth gave him a strange courage. He grabbed Lyrilan with his free arm, dragging him back along a cloven wall to the shadow of the fallen stones. Now the beast moved forward into the ranks that assailed it, legs tromping the burned carcasses of men and horses. It ignored the spears and the bites of tiny blades as it gnashed, tore, and ripped through the legionnaires.
Lyrilan was breathing. Thank you, Gods of Earth and Sky. Some blood in his hair – his head must have struck a stone. Where had his horse gone? Was it burned to a crisp with all the gentle Prince’s papers and quills? Enough time for that later… if they survived. D’zan peeked over the pile of stones, looking for Tyro.
The Serpent’s thrashing limbs knocked down the remains of an outer wall. It writhed and roared its hot thunder, and more men threw themselves into the death of its claws and teeth. Tyro’s commanding voice, a tiny sound, rang across the fray. The beast raised up its head and forelegs again, and the Prince called, “Run! Run!”
D’zan saw the pattern of its breathing now, the rearing that was a precursor to flaming breath, and the soldiers scattered before the rush of its flame. When the last of the gout spilled from its tongue, a volley of arrows peppered its snout. A unit of archers had fallen into place along the pass. Now the cavalrymen ran back toward the beast, stabbing at its exposed belly, Tyro at the vanguard. D’zan knew himself a coward then. How could Tyro face such a monstrosity? How could any man? They must have already given themselves over to death. Why be afraid if you welcomed death?
D’zan raised the big blade. I, too, will die like a man. He could not wield the weapon with much skill, but his target was so huge it would not matter. This great length of iron would sink deep into that thing’s belly. He left Lyrilan lying hidden behind the rubble and crept forward toward the Serpent’s right flank. He forced himself not to look away when its claws and fangs tore the guts from men, red and streaming across the ground.
