“Then we will have to free the hostages,” King Urstone said. “Perhaps that is why we are here. The Powers conspired to draw us here, lest some greater doom fall upon us.”
“You would fight the Knights Eternal,” Madoc grumbled, “in the dark, in a fortified position? That’s madness. You’ll foil our mission!”
The High King bit his lower lip. “Those small folk slew one of the Three. If we learn how they did it, we may be able to win this war once and for all.” He gave Warlord Madoc a stern look. “The world has changed. We have more than just our own people, our own vain ambitions to think about. We will attack an hour after dawn, in the full light of day, and hunt the wyrmlings down. If any of the Knights Eternal are still abroad, we’ll take off their heads. If done by the light of day, it might take weeks before they can rise again. No word of what happens here must reach Rugassa.”
HIDDEN TREASURE
One cannot be perfect in all things, but one can become perfect in some things.
Thul ransacked the prisoners’ packs, pulling out spare garments, studying trinkets and mementos, then casting everything aside as if it was excrement. The Knight Eternal’s cowl and robes hid his face, but his disgust showed in every angry move.
The prisoners lay frozen upon what was left of the floor of the house, scorched as it was from the battle. The touch of the grave was upon them, and they lay paralyzed, like mice that have been filled with scorpion’s venom.
The spell would wear off by dawn.
“I see only three packs here,” Vulgnash said. “Where is the fourth?”
Thul glanced around, looking for sign of a fourth pack. “Perhaps it fell when we pulled the walls off,” Thul answered.
“Find it,” Vulgnash said.
Thul growled in resentment, and then walked around, carefully studying the ground. “I don’t see one. I think…the wizard is their leader. He would not carry a pack. He would make the others carry.”
Vulgnash could not argue with that. No wyrmling lord would stoop to such menial chores. He climbed down to the ground level and grabbed some withered vines, long tendrils of morning glory that had been burned by the sun. When he had several feet of them, he leapt in the air, flapped up to the prisoners, and threw the vines upon Fallion in a twisted heap.
“Bind them firmly,” he commanded.
The vines began to slither, twisting around the hands and feet of each prisoner, clamping legs together, cinching the arms tight against the chest.
When the prisoners were firmly bound, Vulgnash knelt and studied their weapons. He touched the fine reaver-bone bow that Jaz had held, and recoiled in horror. There was life in that bow, the blessing of a powerful undine.
He kicked it over the edge of the house with his boot, studied the other weapons. They were similarly accursed. He kicked them all into the bushes behind the little shop. “Rust upon you, and rot,” he hissed, casting a spell. In a month the fine steel would be nothing but mounds of corrosion, the bow turned to dust, and the wooden staff would be food for worms.
Thul turned away from the packs, went and hunched over one of the small humans, the smallest of the women. Vulgnash glanced at him, saw Thul reaching down to place a finger over each eye.
“Do not feed on her!” Vulgnash hissed.
“But she is sweet!” Thul said. “Besides, we only need the wizard.”
“We need them all,” Vulgnash countered. “We must get the wizard to accept a wyrm. Sometimes, a man cannot be tortured into it, but he will break if another is tortured in his place.”
Thul growled deep in his throat, whirled, and went back to the packs, began hurling things around in his rage.
There was a clanking, the sound of some bits of metal, copper perhaps, banging against one another. Thul dumped a bag of rods upon the floor, sniffing at them. “What are these?” he asked. “I smell wizardry.”
Vulgnash strode to him, knelt and peered at the rods, thinking that perhaps they had stumbled upon a human harvester, and that these were his harvesting spikes. But the rods were not made of iron. They were made of corpuscite. Each rod was about the length of a hand, from the bottom of the palm to the tip of the middle finger. Each was about the diameter of a small willow frond.
And at the tip of each was a rune, one of the primal shapes that had formed the world from the beginning.
Vulgnash picked one up, studied the rune. It was easy to decipher for those who were wise enough to see: swiftness. Attached to the rune were others- seize, confer, and bind.
He had never seen such a device, but instinctively Vulgnash knew what it was. The rod had been created to transfer attributes from one being to another.
“This is a weapon,” he told Thul in rising exhilaration, “a marvelous weapon.”
With mounting excitement he poured out the other branding irons, studied each one in turn: resilience, memory, strength, beauty, sight, hearing, smell, song. A dozen types of runes were represented, and Vulgnash immediately recognized that he could make others that the creators had not anticipated-greed, cruelty, stubbornness-the list was endless.
“But can you make them work?” Thul demanded.
Vulgnash could not wait to try. But first he had to get the prisoners back to Rugassa. His wings could not carry so much weight. He’d have to take the prisoners overland.
“Take these rods to Zul-torac,” Vulgnash commanded. “He’ll know what to do. I’ll bring the prisoners to Rugassa in three days.”
“Yes, Master,” Thul said. He grabbed up the small branding irons, raced to the edge of the platform, and his crimson wings unfolded and caught the air. In a moment he was gone, rising up into the starlight.
Fallion lay petrified, a bone-numbing cold coursing through his body, his legs and arms unable to move, bound tightly. He was so cold, he could hardly think. He could do little in the way of making plans. He acted only on instinct.
He sent his senses out, questing for a source of heat. The sun had gone down long ago. There was no heat left in the stones around him, nor in the Knight Eternal.
Even his friends were perilously cold. He could not draw from them, not without killing them.
Wyrmlings came from the fort then, filling his field of vision. They were like men in some ways, monstrous men as pale white as bone, with misshapen skulls, huge and powerful.
One of them heaved Fallion over his back like a carcass, then carried him down the ladder and out along the stone street until they reached a wagon. Upon it lay a huge stone box. There were no horses or oxen to draw the thing. Instead it had handles on the front. The cruel contraption was a handcart, powered by the sweat of brutish wyrmlings.
The wyrmling shoved the stone lid off the box with one hand, a feat that should have required several strong men, then tossed Fallion in without ceremony. Moments later, Talon, Jaz, and Rhianna each tumbled in beside him, and the lid scraped closed.
Fallion could feel the cold begin to wear off. The numbness in his hands was fading; he clenched and unclenched his hands, trying to get the blood to flow.
He reached out with his mind. He could feel heat from the wyrmlings. A dozen of them surrounded the little carriage. He tried to use his flameweaving skills to siphon off their body heat.
He did not need much, just enough to burn the cords that bound his hands.
