“The final piece of the puzzle, aside from me, is a full dragon skeleton. And your Death magic, of course.”
“That last item might be a bit of a problem,” I said. “A fully intact dragon skeleton is the one thing we don’t know the location of.”
A smile came across Yumo-Rezu’s face. “That, at least, is a problem you will no longer have to worry about. I can sense the bones of dragons wherever they lie, like a shark detecting blood across vast distances in an ocean. The only problem you will have will be moving the dragon skeleton; it will be huge and immensely heavy. I’d say that the only thing that could lift the heaviest dragon bones is another dragon, but we don’t have one of those.”
I grinned. “It’s not going to be nearly as much of a problem as you might think, Yumo-Rezu. Come around the other side of the tower with me, and allow me to refresh the mortal section of your memory.”
We walked through the chamber to the balcony on the other side of the tower, and a great smile of pride broke across my face as I took in the sight of my army spread out across the battlefield. Darkness had almost fallen, but there was just enough dusk light remaining to take in the magnificent sight. The Warlock’s troops who hadn’t been completely obliterated in the battle had joined my force as undead warriors, and my army was now forty thousand strong.
“Ah yes, some of those undead Jotunn will be ideal for hauling heavy dragon bones,” she said. “And the kraken, if it were a land creature, would definitely be strong enough to haul the whole thing. I still can’t believe that you pulled that off!” It was strange hearing the mixture of speech patterns from Yumo-Rezu. Sometimes, she spoke like a youthful assassin, and other times like an ancient and wise goddess. It was a little disconcerting to say the least.
“I can’t take all the credit for it,” I said. “Without your sister’s Wind magic, the kraken would still be lurking in the depths of Gongxiong Harbor.”
At the mention of Rami-Xayon, a sour expression came over Yumo-Rezu’s face. As quickly as it had appeared, it vanished.
“Yes, well, anyway, the undead Jotunn will do. Give me a minute or two to locate an intact dragon skeleton.”
She closed her eyes, and I could sense power pulsing from her being. I imagined that when she’d been at the height of her powers, when she’d had dragons and her Dragon Sword, and tens of thousands of followers, she had to have been one of the most powerful deities who had ever existed; a queen of gods. Now, however, she needed to make way for a king of gods.
After a few moments she opened her eyes and pointed to the distant snow-capped mountains.
“Up there, among the highest peaks, frozen deep in a glacier, is a fully-intact dragon skeleton,” she said. “It will be difficult to get to, and I’m not yet sure how we’re going to extract it from a block of ice the size of a great castle. But without it, you cannot resurrect a dragon. We must travel to the glacier and extract that skeleton.”
I stared at the jagged white peaks in the far distance, like the serrated teeth of a primeval predator biting at the darkening sky. If that was where we needed to go, then that was where I’d be heading.
I turned around to address my party. “You all fought bravely today, and I know you gave this battle your all. Get yourselves a good night’s rest; at first light, we’re going to find those dragon bones!”
Chapter Two
“These are some of the highest peaks in the world!” Yumo-Rezu said to me, shouting over the howling blizzard. “There are places here where the snow hasn’t melted for tens of thousands of years!”
“And that fucking dragon just had to die all the way up here, huh?” I said, leaning into the buffeting wind and blasting snow.
“It’s precisely because the terrain is so inhospitable and remote that this skeleton has remained intact!” Yumo-Rezu said. “Every other dragon skeleton has been broken up and stripped by treasure hunters, with the pieces carried off to distant corners of the world.”
“This is true,” Friya said, also yelling over the tempest. “Dragonbone is worth a thousand times its weight in gold. A fully intact skeleton could literally be a king’s ransom!”
“How much further?” Rollar yelled. Frost and icicles had turned his huge beard white. Even he, Friya and Drok, who were accustomed to the snow, frost, and ice of the Northern Wastes, were having a tough time with the blizzard. Layna, Anna-Lucielle, Isu and Elyse, as well as the twin sisters, who weren’t used to such extreme weather, were having an even rougher time dealing with the snowstorm. It seemed to have started just as we’d begun our trek into the mountains. We’d been pushing on for most of the day, and had to have covered a great distance, but in the face of the worsening snowstorm it felt as if we weren’t making any progress at all.
“I don’t know!” I shouted. “Put your heads down and keep going! We aren’t stopping until we get to the skeleton!”
Because of the blizzard’s ferocity, using Talon to do some aerial scouting was out of the question. As strong a flier as the undead harpy was, the force of the wind was simply too much for her to handle. The only guide we had was Yumo-Rezu’s sixth sense, which she’d described to me as feeling like an iron filing being pulled by a lodestone.
I had a contingent of my undead Jotunn striding up the steep mountain pass ahead of us as a buffer against the wind, and Rami-Xayon had called up her own Wind
