Saskia fell backward, her blood flaring as the dragon's poison charged through her veins. The weight of her own body bore down upon her like a coat of wet furs. Her head lolled weakly and her fingers went numb. As the sky darkened, her ears were filled with the thunder of a roaring drum.
Once more the voice leaped unbidden into her mind.
We did not deny you. You denied us.
Saskia slept and as she slept, she remembered.
She was standing on a steep slope, knee deep in drifting snow. Before her rose a towering chain of granite peaks that stretched to the sky.
The Spine of the World.
Behind her the mountains fell away through rolling clouds of snow and blowing ice. A relentless wind hammered her body, threatening to pluck her from the mountain and hurl her into the whirling white abyss. Her cheeks were black with frost, her fingers and toes were numb with cold, and her eyes burned from days of seeing nothing but endless expanses of white.
Kicking and punching holds into the slope, Saskia continued her climb.
A tenday ago the elders of her village had given her a choice: leave the tribe forever or submit to the Trial of the Dragon. Saskia had chosen the trial: to travel alone through the wilderness, without weapons or provisions, to the summit of the Uthgarheis, the lonely peak that ruled the Spine of the World. There, atop all of creation, she would be met and judged by the spirit totem of her tribe.
Uthgar had favored her early in the trial, sending a goblin war band tripping and snorting across her path. It had been easy enough to ambush their scouts. Armed with a goblin waraxe Saskia was able to kill a snowbound caribou, taking its hide for warmth and smoking its fatty meat for rations. Arriving at the base of the Uthgarheis, she rested for a day then started her climb along the rocky southern ridge.
That was two days ago.
She hadn't slept since beginning the climb. The caribou hide was frozen stiff around her, and her bundle of smoked meat had begun to dwindle. Still she pressed on, climbing ridge after icebound ridge. To give up was to accept that she was a witch, a corrupt soul given over to wickedness and evil. Saskia knew that couldn't be true, and meeting with the elder spirit would prove it.
On the third day she summited the slender pinnacle of rock that crowned the Uthgarheis. Delirious with exhaustion and triumph, she crawled before the shelter of a fallen cairn and collapsed, too tired to see if the Elder Spirit was waiting for her.
The howl of a thousand starving wolves woke her from her sleep. Sitting up, Saskia looked to the north. A dark storm rolled toward her, sliding across the sky like a black avalanche. Shards of blowing ice cut her cheeks and day turned to night.
The first gusts tore away her meager shelter. Shouting a war cry, Saskia raised her axe high and buried it into the rocky ground. She held on with the last of her strength and cried to the Great Worm for mercy.
Saskia had thought she had survived the Great Worm's Trial.
It hadn't begun.
Eight days later Saskia stumbled back into camp, frozen in body and numb in soul. The Great Worm never came. She slept for days, slipping in and out of a delirious fever that made her skin hot to the touch. When the fever finally broke, the tribe's shaman came to her tent and told of her the Great Worm's death. The Elder Spirit had been killed by a company of villains only two days after she began her quest. They had gutted his lair, taken his hide like savages, and carried away the dragon's wealth on the backs of slaves and mules.
Her trial had been in vain. Like a foolish child wishing on falling stars, her passionate prayers had gone unheard.
The next morning Saskia left for the south, swearing never to return.
Saskia stretched out on the ground, her long limbs sore from inaction. Dawn would be coming soon, but sleep eluded the barbarian. Left in its place was the anxious exhaustion so common to the cities of man. Of all the curses visited on civilized folk, that was the worst: to go through their waking hours half asleep and their sleeping hours half awake.
Saskia's dreams had returned. Nightmares of massive golden drakes that blotted out the sun with their blinding wings, silk-scaled terrors the color of soot, white dragons that drove winter's hoarfrost before them. The dragons swooped out of the northlands like a winged plague, storming the walled cities of man and laying waste to all in their path.
At one point in every dream, the largest and oldest dragon, his scales mottled with age, would beckon to her with a single claw, his clouded eyes smoldering like the embers of a dying fire. Then two words would thunder inside her mind: Join us.
Even the memory was enough to make her start. Yes, Saskia thought, sleep could wait.
Saskia exhaled hard and she gazed longingly into the clear sky. Hunting with her father she had learned to track the stars as they made their course across the heavens, but entire tendays passed without her noting the changes of Selune. She had come south hoping to outrun her curse, but all she had lost were the things she valued most. Saskia knew she couldn't stay with the Chimeras any longer, but where was a barbarian to go after being cast out of her tribe?
The crash of metal broke the night's fragile peace. Saskia pulled herself up and followed the muffled ringing back to its source.
Tombli was in the stables, waging a one-sided battle against the caged pseudodragon. He rained blows down upon the cage with a war club, his drunken laughter filling the night.
'Dance, mighty wyrm!' Tombli commanded. 'Earn your keep!'
The pseudodragon's barbed tail had been amputated the day after it attacked Saskia. It was defenseless before the dwarfs cruelty.
Saskia slipped silently into the dark shadows of a stall.
The dwarf took the key from his belt, jangling it just out of the dragon's reach.
'Come on, pretty thing. Show me a little wrath.'
'No?' Tombli asked with disappointment. Unable to fit the ring back onto his belt, the drunk dwarf cast it aside and traded the club for his jeweled dagger. 'Worthless lizard. Better to sell your vitals to the mages and tan your hide for my boots.'
The barbarian stepped from the shadows, bringing both fists down on Tombli in a blow that would have felled an ox. The dwarf staggered two steps backward then lashed out blindly with his blade, the dagger cutting a glowing green line in the darkness. Grummond had warned Saskia of Tombli's wicked blade, a serpentine dirk that wept poison, but the barbarian hadn't believed such a thing was possible.
The dwarf regained his balance and charged her with a roar. Saskia plucked the club from the ground and broke it against the dwarf's head as he rushed passed. Tombli fell to one knee, then pulled himself back up, his hard black eyes aflame with rage.
Saskia settled into a crouch and readied herself for another charge.
Growling a prayer, Tombli drew a short rod of iron from a pouch and stabbed his dagger toward the sky. He was answered with a resounding crack that shook the air. Saskia fell to the ground, every muscle in her body contracted into painful knots.
'Think to fight me, barbarian?' Tombli spat out a mouthful of blood. 'You and the wyrm are one and the same: feeble pets, without tooth or guile.'
Finally the pseudodragon came alive, hurling itself at the bars of its cage with all the fury of a true drake. The cage crashed to the ground, but the stout bars held.
'Gnash all you like, lizard,' Tombli snorted. 'Those bars are enchanted cold iron, and the finest turn-picks in Sembia would think twice before trying that lock.'
Saskia strained in vain against the dwarf's spell. Tombli saw the frustration rising in her blue eyes and began to chuckle.
'Grim spell, isn't it? No one ever forgets their first time. I like to follow it with something I call 'Abbathor's Flowering.' ' The dwarf whispered a soft prayer and laid the tip of his dagger against the bare skin of her neck. A shock shot through her body, tracing blue lines of lightning along the veins under her skin. Her veins pulsed once, twice, then burst through the surface of her skin.
Saskia tried to scream but her jaw was clenched shut. Frustrated by her helplessness she could only moan
