Mithas! Life; hear!
Est paxum kudak draco My sword is broken of Dragons
Draco-Human Dragon-Huma oparu sac temper me now
Draco-Humah Dragon-Huma coni parl ai fam Grant me grace and love
Saat mas Solamnis When the heart of the Knighthood vegri nough wavers in doubt
Coni est Lor Tarikan Grant me this, Warrior Lord
Sularus Humah Honor is Huma
Karram Humah Glory is Huma
Solamnis Humah durvey Solamnic Knight Huma survives
Karamnes Humah durvey Glorified Huma survives
Mithas! Life; hear!
Humah dix karai! Huma's death calls me!
Ex dix! His death!
Oparu est dix! Temper me with such death!
Solamnis Lor Alan Paladine! Paladine, lord god of knights!
Humah mithas est mithasah! Huma's life is all our lives!
Draco-Humah durvey! Dragon-Huma survives!
OGRE UNAWARE
Through most of a day — from when the sun was high overhead until now, when the sun was gone behind the dagger-spire peaks of the Khalkist Mountains and night birds heralded the first stars glimpsed above — through those hours and those miles he had trailed the puny ones, thinking they might lead him to others of their kind. Now they had stopped. Now they were settling in on the slope below him, stopping for the night, and his patience was at an end.
Crouching low, blending his huge silhouette with the brush of the darkening hillside, he heard their voices drifting up to him — thin, human voices as frail as the bodies from which they issued, as fragile as the bones within those bodies, which he could crush with a squeeze of his hand. He heard the strike of flint, smelled the wispy smoke of their tinder, and saw the first flickers of the fire they were building — a fire to guard them against the night.
His chuckle was a rumble of contempt, deep within his huge chest. It was a campfire to heat their meager foods and to protect them from whatever might be out there, watching. Humans! His chuckle became a deep, rumbling growl. Like all of the lesser races, the small, frail races, they put their trust in a handful of fire and thought they were safe.
Safe from me? His wide mouth spread in a sneering grin, exposing teeth like sharpened chisels. Contempt burned deep within his eyes. Safe? No human was safe from Krog. Krog knew how to deal with humans — and with anyone else who ventured into his territory. He found them, tracked them down, and killed them. Sometimes they carried something he could use, sometimes not, but it was always a pleasure to see their torment as he crushed and mangled them, a joy to hear their screams.
There were a dozen or more in the party below him. Four were armed males, the rest a motley, ragged group bound together by lengths of rope tied around their necks. Slaves, Krog knew. The remnants of some human village ransacked by slavers. There were many such groups roaming the countryside in these days — slavers and their prey. Small groups like this, usually, though sometimes the groups came together in large camps, to trade and to export their prizes to distant markets. Those, the big groups, he enjoyed most, but now he was tired of waiting.
He studied them; his cunning eyes counted their shadows in the dusk below. The slaves were grouped just beyond the little fire, but it was their captors he watched most closely, marking exactly where each of the armed ones settled around their fire. Experience had taught him to deal first with the armed ones. He carried the scars of sword and axe cuts, from times when armed humans had managed a slash or two before he finished them. The cuts had been annoying. Better, he had learned, to deal with the weaponbearers quickly. Then he could finish off the others in any way that amused him.
For a long time now, ever since the beginning of the strangenesses that some called omens, humans and other small races had been wandering into the territory that Krog considered his — the eastern slopes of the Khalkist Mountains. Chaotic times had fallen upon the plains beyond, and the people of those plains were in turmoil. Krog knew little of that, cared less. Every day, humans and others were drifting westward toward the Khalkists, some fleeing, some in pursuit… and they all were sport for Krog.
Below him on the slope, the humans' campfire blazed brightly, and the humans gathered around it. He watched, and repressed the urge to rush down at them, to hear their first screams of terror. Let them have a minute or two to stare into their precious fire. Let them night-blind themselves so they would not see him until he was among them. It would make his attack easier, with less likelihood of any of them fleeing into the darkness.
Stare into the light, he thought, licking wide, scarred lips with keen anticipation of the pleasures to come. Stare into the fire, and…
He raised his head; his grin faded. He stared into another fire, a fire that sprang from a glowing coal in the overhead sky and grew until it seemed to fill half the sky. Searing light far brighter than firelight, brighter than the light of day, billowed out and out until the entire eastern sky was ablaze with it. Sudden winds howled high above, shrieks and bellows of anguish as though the very world were screaming. The radiance aloft grew and intensified, instant by instant, a blinding blaze of sky in which something huge, something enormous and hideous, coalesced, spinning and shrieking, and plunged downward to meet the eastern horizon in a blinding blast of fury.
Stunned and half blinded, he stood on the slope, barely aware of the sounds all around him — birds taking terrified flight, small creatures scurrying past, the screams and shouts of the terrified humans just down the slope. Panic and fear, everywhere… then silence. A silence as complete as the recesses of a cavern seemed to grow from the world itself as the brilliant, distant light dimmed beyond the horizon. A slow, agonizing dimming, like the reluctant ebbing of a hundred sunsets, all at once descended.
Out of the silence came a sound that was not a sound as much as a tingling in the air, a mounting of invisible tensions. Past the eastern horizon, where the immense flare still lingered, lightning danced and black clouds like mountain ranges marched up the sky, one after another. The inaudible sounds grew and grew, becoming a torrent of vibration that strummed the winds and made rocks dance on the slope. In the distance, gouts of brilliance spewed upward, rising above the clouds to shower the eastern world with marching storms of fire.
Shouting and screaming, terrified creatures rushed past him, the largest among them less than half his size and wide-eyed with fear. The humans from the slope below, slavers and enslaved, fled together in panic. They ran within arm's reach of him, and he barely noticed them as they passed. Dazed and dazzled, he stared out across a landscape gone insane, a landscape where distant mountains writhed and shattered and sank from view, where serpentine brilliance danced in a fire-lit sky gone black with climbing smoke, where the horizon heaved upward like a tidal wave, rushing toward him.
Winds like hammers swooped down from aloft and struck him with a force that sent him tumbling backward, arms and legs flailing helplessly as oven-hot gusts rolled him uphill a dozen yards and dropped him into a heaving pit. His club was wrenched from his fingers and flew skyward, carried by raging winds. Struggling, fighting for balance, he got his feet under him and climbed, drawing himself over the edge of the chasm just as it closed with stone jaws behind him.
In a bedlam of howling, furnace winds, shattering stone, and deep, bone-jarring rumbles from beneath the ground, he lay gasping for breath, then raised stricken eyes as the nearer mountains to the west began to explode.
Huge boulders rose into the sky like grains of flung sand, then showered back down onto the slopes, bounding and rolling downward, bringing other debris with them as they came.
He struggled upward, dodging and dancing, flinging himself this way and that as monstrous rock fragments
