Song of the Dragon

that there were no young nor old among the dwarven dead.”

“Indeed?”

“Yes, indeed,” Drakis continued. “So, I think they must have gone somewhere, Jugar. There must be dwarves somewhere-and a great many of them, I wouldn’t doubt.”

“This-Braun-friend of yours seems uncommonly clever,” Jugar sniffed.

“My point is that you should go and find them,” Drakis said, nodding toward the mountains. “You’ve done enough for us.”

“Nonsense!” Jugar laughed. “We’ve only just started down our road!”

“My road, not yours,” Drakis said. “Why have you even come with us this far? I half expected you to leave us at Togrun Fel. .”

He nearly had, Jugar thought to himself.

But now he wavered.

Jugar gazed at the distant outline of the Aerian Range to the east and sighed with great satisfaction. He pulled the Heart of Aer from his pocket, fingering its cold facets as he tumbled it over and over with the fingers of his hand. There beneath the mountain, he thought, his people waited. There, deep in the dark roots and secret places farther below than elves or men ever suspected, his fellow dwarves waited for the return of the Heart of Aer and through it the healing of their race.

But healing was not what Jugar had in mind.

Vengeance, retribution, justice, pain-that is what filled his thoughts and schemes, along with the growing conviction in his soul that Drakis could be the means by which he could achieve all his dark and cold desires. Could Drakis be the real thing? If he was, then Drakis could be the means of spilling enough elven blood to satisfy even Jugar’s thirst for revenge.

All he needed was for Jugar the Fool to guide his steps a little longer-and a little farther north.

“Sometimes it’s a good idea to take a road you’ve never walked before and see where it leads, Drakis,” Jugar said through a gap-toothed smile. “I’d like to walk yours a bit longer and see where it takes me.”

“Drakis?”

The human warrior and the dwarf returned from the ridge to the small encampment. Ethis tended a cheery fire that was somehow almost entirely devoid of smoke. Jugar moved quickly to the flames, warming his hands. Drakis would have joined him, but the Lyric rushed up to him before he could take another step.

The pale face of the Lyric was staring at him. “Drakis, it is long past time you returned. There is a journey before us, and you are our guide.”

Drakis took the Lyric’s offered hand. “Thank you. . and you are?”

The Lyric flashed a bright, roguish smile. Her emerging hair was almost white in its lightness, a fuzzy nimbus framing her pinched face. “You are still confused from the journey. You will remember me as Felicia of the Mists.”

“Yes,” Drakis nodded, trying to remember just who the Lyric last thought herself to be. “The. . uh. . Princess of the Isles.”

“Princess of the Erebusian Isles,” the Lyric corrected with a light laugh. “Fear not, good Drakis; we raiders of the Nordesian Coast are far more forgiving than our frightening legends make us out to be. When we reach the coast, our cousins who sail the Bay of Thetis will show you such hospitality that you will never again forget my true name!”

“I shall look forward to it,” Drakis said, but his words seemed to fade toward the end as his eyes tried without success to take in the vista that lay just beyond the Lyric.

The morning sun cast long shadows across a low, jagged terrain that gave way quickly to a seemingly infinite plain of grassland marred only occasionally by a grouping of solitary trees or the flash of water through the shimmering waves of the warming air. To his right, distant purple peaks rose above the line of dense trees that ran from the east behind him and continued to form a great arch that vanished into a hazy and indistinct horizon to the west. The sky itself seemed larger to him stretched over such a vastness so flat that he felt he might almost fall off of it.

Ethis looked up, his face now the typical blankness that characterized most of the chimerian race. “Good morrow, Drakis.”

Drakis ignored the chimerian. “Jugar, since you’re determined to be here with us. . perhaps you could tell us just where are we?”

“We are precisely where you asked that we should be,” the dwarf said brightly. “We are beyond the northern border of the cursed Hyperian Woodland and now stand on the verge of Vestasia itself! We have traveled just short of eighty leagues and seemingly overnight.”

“That far?” Drakis asked. “How is that possible?”

The dwarf looked up from the campfire and smiled. “My good Drakis, it is a miracle-nothing short of a miracle of the gods-that we have been brought here. Carried by the demons of Queen Murialis for reasons of her own and deposited as you yourself requested here across the northern boundaries of her most terrible and feared kingdom! I had hoped to skirt the western slopes of the Aerian Range and avoid any danger that her minions might present, and yet here we are and a week’s journey the richer for it! And fortunate-fortunate indeed-for all our possessions remain with us with not a piece of lint nor thread subtracted from the lot as one might expect from the faery folk! A week’s worth of travel in a single day-thanks to the capricious whim of the Faery Queen.”

“Hardly capricious,” Ethis added, his eyes fixed on Drakis. “Drakis negotiated our passage for us. It seems Murialis is a reasonable monarch after all.”

The human warrior eyed Ethis critically for a moment but decided not to let the comment escalate into an argument. Drakis had done nothing that brought them through the strange woods of Murialis except to let the Faery Queen believe that he might be this mythical fulfillment of some ancient prophecy that everyone seemed to know about except him. Ethis had been the one who had saved them, bringing them into the faery realm and insuring that they weren’t summarily killed. If Ethis had his reasons for letting the rest of the group think that Drakis had been the big hero, then an argument over who had actually saved them would have been foolish.

They were in enough trouble without fighting among themselves over anything; so Drakis turned his mind to other things.

Vestasia, Drakis thought. It felt different from the Hyperian Plain that they had crossed with such trepidation just the week before; though it had been deserted, Drakis felt it was a land where civilization had once flourished and could return again to tame the broad plain and cultivate its expanse. The overwhelming impression that the warrior had of the grass-and-rock choked flatlands before him was that it was entirely wild, forbidding and savage. It was a badlands with its own natural law that defied anyone from the outside who wished to impose any rule other than that of unstoppable, deadly nature.

“Beautiful, is it not?”

Drakis turned toward the deep voice. “You think it beautiful?”

Belag seemed to stand taller than ever. His great, flat snout was raised as though sniffing the wind for the scent of prey. RuuKag stood behind him but presented a completely different demeanor; his shoulders were hunched forward, lowering his head with the curve of his back as he looked over the plain.

“Yes, beautiful,” Belag said, a smile pulling at the corners of his mouth and baring his fangs as he spoke. “This place is known among my race as the ‘Land of the Shamed.’ It is the place where cowards come to die in exile from their clans. It is supposed to be a cursed place. .”

“It is a cursed place,” RuuKag said abruptly.

“Cursed? How is it cursed?”

“It does not matter. You are with us, Drakis,” Belag continued. “It is sung of in the prophecy that where you walk, the cursed lands shall be made whole beneath your feet.”

“You seem terribly pleased at the prospect of crossing this cursed place,” Ethis observed.

“I find the open land calls me,” Belag said drawing in a deep breath. “It brings into my mind the great plains of Chaenandria where my father and his father’s fathers hunted our prey and fought our battles down through all our songs of glory. RuuKag and I can run in the open. .”

“I have no desire to run,” RuuKag grumbled.