“Insithryllax,” a deep, powerful voice swept over the stagnant water.
Marek looked up at the source of the voice: a tall, thin man with skin the color of freshly turned soil. His head was shaved clean, and he was dressed in traveling clothes of thin oiled leather and fine shimmering silk. His eyes betrayed his nature, being a human’s eyes, save for the triangular irises.
“Insithryllax,” Marek said with a beaming smile. “It’s a lovely name, really.”
The dragon in his human form drew one side of his lips up in a thin, tight smile.
“Well,” Marek went on, “since I have you here, sir, I must inform you that I have been sent here by the Tharchion of Eltabbar to collect one thousand pieces of gold in lawfully levied taxes owed by the Swamp Scale Tribe. Am I to understand that you are holding that gold on their behalf?”
Insithryllax laughed, and Marek all but bathed in the sound of it, it was so beautiful.
“You aren’t afraid of me,” Insithryllax observed.
The dragon’s eyes twitched from side to side, noting the Thayans moving to surround him. The warriors had their weapons ready, and the few surviving mages were poised to cast spells.
“Aren’t they darling?” Marek said with a smile.
“Indeed,” replied the dragon. “Are they yours?”
“For the time being.”
The Thayan agents looked at each other, uncertain, waiting for orders, not understanding what they were hearing.
“You’re a black, aren’t you?” Marek asked.
Insithryllax shrugged in the affirmative.
“Show me?” asked Marek, his mouth beginning to water.
The dark-skinned man began to twitch, then he shook, then he spasmed. Loud popping noises assaulted Marek’s ears, and the man fell to all fours, his face dipping into the fetid water. When his head tipped up again to look at the Red Wizard, the human face was gone, and in its place was something that looked more like the lizardmen.
“Sir…” one of the warriors, the dashing young sergeant in fact, said.
He, like the others, was stepping back, the ring around the transforming thing growing larger and thinner with each step.
“Take no action without my direct command,” Marek ordered.
By the looks on more than one of their faces, he had some reason to doubt they’d all wait once the dragon fully revealed itself.
More cracking, popping, grunting, and shaking stretched across several increasingly tense moments, and soon a massive wyrm stood in the rippling swamp water. Insithryllax’s batlike wings stretched two dozen feet from tip to tip. On the end of a long, scaled neck was a head like a lizard’s, with forward-curving horns protruding from either side of his head. A tongue as long as Marek’s arm flicked from between teeth as wide and as sharp as kitchen knives.
Marek Rymiit found that he could hardly breathe.
“You knew you would find me,” the dragon rumbled, his voice shaking the Red Wizard’s eardrums, “didn’t you, human?”
Marek smiled and bowed in answer.
“And you’ve readied yourself, I suppose?” the great wyrm asked.
Again, Marek smiled and bowed.
“We’ll speak again in a moment,” said the dragon.
It drew in a deep breath, its chest filling out, almost bulging.
“Sir!” the handsome sergeant shouted, the beginnings of a thin, almost feminine wail sullying his last word.
Two of the surviving wizards began to cast spells but never finished them.
The dragon opened his great jaws and poured a black mist from his throat into the air around him. Spinning, Insithryllax swept the mist across the Thayan agents. When the mist touched their flesh, it sizzled and popped. Some of them turned and tried to run, but they couldn’t get nearly far enough away. Exposed flesh began to slough off so that at least three of Marek’s people lived long enough to touch their own skulls with rapidly disintegrating fingers, their last screams rattling out through mouths devoid of tongue or lips.
Marek was barely able to finish his own spell for the gorge that rose in his throat, but by the time the dragon had come full circle and his team was dead, Marek Rymiit was done with his casting, and the dragon presented a brief moment of vulnerability.
The wyrm’s eyes came around to meet Marek’s and the Red Wizard could see a change come over them. It was subtle. Only a trained few could spot it, but there it was.
Marek smiled and said to the dragon, “I guess that makes us even.”
“Yes,” the mighty creature said, his voice like thunder rolling across the Thaymount. “Even…”
Marek let his smile fade away.
“We can start fresh now, can’t we?” Marek said.
The dragon blinked once then said, “Fresh… yes.”
“We can be friends,” said Marek.
“Friends,” the dragon replied, his great head bobbing up and down.
Thanks to Marek’s spell, the dragon’s mind, though not quite enslaved to the Red Wizard, was open, vulnerable, and trusting.
Marek Rymiit smiled again, managed to keep himself from laughing, swatted a mosquito that flew too close to his neck, and said, “Very best friends, forever and ever.”
The dragon nodded again and waited for instructions.
6
2 Kythorn, the Year of the Wanderer (1338 DR) Fourth Quarter, Innarlith
After having missed Pristoleph’s right ear by the width of two fingers, the arrow sank into the soft wood of a rain barrel, burying itself two thirds the length of its shaft. Water sprayed then trickled out from around it.
Pristoleph ran as fast as he could for the closest open door. Once again, he had found himself in a dark alley at night, deep in the city’s poorest precinct, running for his life. If he’d bothered to keep count, it would have been the one hundred and forty-seventh time, and he was only twenty.
Flickering firelight painted the damp flagstones in front of the door, and the clang and clatter of a busy kitchen harmonized with the clap of his boots. Pristoleph knew that he’d be an easy target silhouetted in the light of the doorway, but there was nothing for it. There was nowhere else to go. He would just have to rely on the pursuing whychfinder’s human eyesight and fatigue from the long chase to save his life. The arrows had grown, increasingly less frequent, and even less accurate, over the past few minutes.
He passed through the doorway and an arrow sprouted from the door frame.
Pristoleph thought he could hear the whychfinder curse his poor aim, but the noise of the kitchen covered any further sounds from behind. Only a few of the dozen or so scullery maids bothered to even glance at the young man as he sprinted through their workspace. Pristoleph gave them no more of his attention than was necessary to avoid their knives, elbows, cleavers, and the cats, rats, and assorted urban game they were butchering for their guests.
The curtain that separated the kitchen from the common room didn’t slow him at all, but he had to quickly side step in order not to collide with a serving wench carrying a tray of brim-full flagons. The tray seemed too heavy for the slim young girl, but she carried it just the same and with such dexterity that she could spin out of Pristoleph’s way as he brushed past.
The inn was crowded and reeked of stale mead, mold, burned meat, and sweat. Tables ringed by men all shouting at once over games of dice filled the center of the huge room, while private booths along the walls revealed suspicious glances, nearly public intimacies, and the Fourth Quarter’s regular trade in flesh, fantasy, and
