Anderson, Kevin J - Gamearth 01 (33 page)

"I sssee you! Ssstealing my treasure!"

"No, not at all," Delrael said. Bryl marveled at how rich and controlled the fighter managed to keep his voice. But he could see Delrael's white knuckles and how his hands trembled with well-contained fear. "We don't want your treasure."

"Then why are you here!" the dragon demanded, eyes blazing. "Why don't you run?"

"We, uh, came to see you, Tryos!" Bryl said, his brain trying to function as fast as his mouth. He and Delrael would have to work together now for their lives.

"Yes, we journeyed many hexes just to see you." Delrael rubbed his leather jerkin and preened himself. Bryl had a terrible fear that they were both tangling themselves deeper and deeper.

"For what purpossse?" Tryos leaned forward to glare at them. Hot and rotten breath swirled the air. "Why sssee me?"

"We needed to ask you something
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" Bryl started, but his wits ran dry. He turned to Delrael, pleading. Through the exchange, Tareah held herself quiet, as if afraid that anything she said would be counted against them. She appeared to have perfect confidence in Delrael.

"What? What would you asssk?" The reptilian tail twitched, slamming back down with enough force to crush a human head.

Bryl's shoulders sagged in defeat. His lips remained dormant, despite his hope that they would speak of their own accord

"Ssspeak up!" Tryos said.

Then Delrael cleared his throat. He slapped his hands together, getting down to business. He took a step forward. The dragon's eyes shifted to the man, and Bryl felt as if a knife had been taken away from his throat.

"We need your help, Tryos."

The dragon blinked in surprise, drawing himself back.

"Would you please help us?"

Bryl wanted to pull his wispy hair out in frustration. But Delrael spoke with great force, pretending to know what he intended all along.

"Tryos, you are our last and only hope. An evil ogre and his dragon have captured our Stronghold. You are much larger, much greater
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we know you could defeat this enemy dragon!"

He turned around, spreading his hands to indicate the piled treasure.

"You obviously understand the joy of personal possessions. Gold, jewels, things of value. That's what Gamearth is all about, right? Quests and adventure, build up the highest score you can before you die."

Tryos bobbed his head up and down. "Be bessst. Get ahead. Be Number One dragon. Better than all others. Bessst!"

Delrael nodded. "Will you help us regain what is right fully ours? The ogre has a treasure pile of his own
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we'll give it to you."

Bryl felt stiff from standing in terror for too long.

Then Tryos snorted, raising one jagged eyebrow ridge. "Ogre? Dragon?

Who isss thisss dragon? What isss hisss name?"

"The ogre is Gairoth. He lived by a cesspool in the swamp terrain," Delrael answered. "The dragon is Rognoth
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"

"Rognos!
Rognos
!" The dragon went into hysterics, launching himself in the air, blasting angry fire at the walls. "He isss my brother! Foul! Bad!

Runt of the hatching!"

Bryl cringed, astonished at what Delrael had unleashed. But at least the fury had been deflected away from them.

Tryos brought himself under control, snorting and grinding his fangs together. He settled back to the ground, but his tail pounded an impatient rhythm on the rippled stone floor. His eyes blazed with green fire.

"Rognos isss a disssgrace! Black sheep! Shame to my hatching! Worm! I hate him
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Rognos
!" Tryos hurled another battering ram of flames at the ceiling.

"Thisss Ssstronghold
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bigger than my Rokanun? Rognos have more land than me?"

"Oh, much bigger, I'd say. Hexes and hexes, as far as you can see. And no one to stop him." Delrael sighed. "It's a shame."

Bryl cringed, afraid of what ideas might be tunneling through the dragon's mind.

"Kill Rognos! He isss bad!" Tryos roared, overpowering both of them.

"Show me the way to Ssstronghold!"

Bryl tried to be optimistic, tried and failed. If Tryos came back to the Stronghold with fire and thunder, it might scare off Gairoth's ogres -they should never have been fighting together anyway. It went against their nature.

That left Bryl and Delrael to contend with Gairoth
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and Gairoth had defeated the half-Sorcerer before. The ogre had no doubt mastered the Air Stone by now.

But Bryl had the Water Stone this time.

Even with the wildest of advantages, even if they somehow defeated the ogre army and got rid of Gairoth and Rognoth
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what if Tryos did decide to make the Stronghold his new home? The problems got worse and worse ... without even considering that the Outsiders wanted to stop Playing Gamearth.

Tryos flapped his wings and stomped a clawed foot on the hardened lava floor. "I will kill Rognos! Now! Take me to Ssstronghold."

The dragon crawled forward, slogging his way through the treasure pile, scattering coins and gems. He heaved himself up and curled his tail around to them like a long scaly ramp. Delrael took Tareah's hand and marched forward, maintaining his confident facade. He led her toward Tryos. She looked skeptical, still not believing that her rescuers had come.

Tryos glared at them with his slitted eyes. "Treasure ssstays here. You sssaid you did not want treasure!"

Delrael covered his expression of shock with a muffled cough. "But we must take
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"

"Leave treasure here! Come back later. Now we go kill Rognos!"

Bryl touched the fighter's arm to keep him from arguing. He turned away from Tareah's sad face. "We'll have to come back for her."

Bryl climbed the dragon's wide tail, pulling himself up the sharp ridges as if they were steps. He motioned for Delrael. The man turned to Tareah, picked her up and gave her a hug. She looked surprised for an instant, then responded. "We'll come back for you," he said into her ear.

"I can't rescue myself," Tareah answered. "There's nowhere to go. I could walk out, but I'd never get off the island."

Then she spoke quietly to him. Bryl heard most of the words, but over the hissing of the lava pool and the rumbling of his own breathing, the dragon would not have heard.

"One thing to remember
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Tryos is vicious if he thinks you're trying to trick him. But he's very bad with directions. He goes off on his forays and spends more time trying to find his way back than in treasure-hunting."

Delrael nodded and turned to scramble up the dragon's tail. He used his
kennok
leg without thought. Bryl wondered if they should have told Tareah about the balloon, but he didn't think any one person could handle the balloon alone.

"Luck!" she called.

Bryl tried to wave, but Tryos shoved his way back to the grotto entrance and spread his wings, making the half-Sorcerer cling to whatever handhold he could find.

"There's the Stronghold!" Delrael shouted to make himself heard over the rushing cold wind and the heavy beat of the dragon's wings. He pointed down to where he could make out the fenced-in hexagon of the Stronghold proper and the scattered dwellings in the village. Everything seemed flat from this height, like a giant map. He had to find Steep Hill by following the outline of the stream that skirted the hill and zigzagged along the village, separating the dwellings from the unclaimed forest terrain.

Delrael stared over the curved edge of the dragon's wing to look down at the Stronghold. This was worse even than being in the balloon. "Somehow or other, we got here."

During the night and all the previous day, Delrael and Bryl had taken turns crawling up to Tryos's ears to tell him he had veered off in the wrong direction again. But now they could see the forested hills, the stream, the grassland, the fields, the village. The jagged shadow of Tryos skimmed over the ground at an angle below them.

For two full days without stopping, Tryos had flown north and west, fueled by his anger and hatred toward Rognoth. They flew higher and faster than Professor Verne's balloon had gone, and the landscape flowed under them like a mosaic of hexes. The wind numbed Delrael's ears. "Land isss big!" Tryos said.

"Yes. Too bad it's all Rognoth's!" Delrael called back. Tryos narrowed his reptilian eyes and sped forward.

Bryl and Delrael sat on the dragon's wide back, tucked between two of the great plated ridges along Tryos's spine. As they had passed over the wide, shining Barrier River, Delrael felt proud of himself and what they had done.

He pointed it out to Bryl, a gleaming silver channel a full hex wide, two in some places.

Bryl sat, wind-blown, with haunted-looking eyes. He chewed his nails in fear. They would soon be confronting Gairoth. Delrael was concerned too ... but he felt the most alive, the most
real
when he engaged in quests and battles.

They had been gone for nearly a month, but below them Delrael could see that the scattered crops around the village had not suffered severely. Other than a proliferation of weeds, the fields could take care of themselves for a few weeks in the summer. The crops had been tended after all, despite Gairoth's presence
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he thought of the veteran Tarne leading groups of characters out of the forests under the shelter of night, pulling weeds by moonlight. Delrael felt proud of him.

The thatched roofs of the village remained intact, with only a few unrepaired patches where the wind had torn shocks of straw from the frames.

Delrael had expected to see all the dwellings burned to the ground by the invading ogres; he wondered what could have kept the ogres so busy that they had had no time to release their destructive tendencies. Did Gairoth rule them with such an iron fist? And, if so, why did they tolerate it instead of simply wandering back to their own homes in the swamps?

Tryos curved his neck and swooped downward. The ogre-infested Stronghold and the deserted village waited for them. Delrael rubbed his father's silver belt for luck. He wished he had been able to retrieve his old Sorcerer sword
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it would do nothing against the dragon, but perhaps against Gairoth...

Circling the area, Tryos let out a blood-curdling scream of challenge.

Delrael had expected to see the ogre army scattering for cover at the appearance of the enormous dragon, but the Stronghold seemed deserted. Tryos landed within the hexagonal stockade near the center of the training field.

Wood shavings and mulched tannery refuse, originally strewn on the ground to cushion the falls of trainees, blew in the air, stirred by the bellows of the dragon's wings.

Delrael leaped to the ground. How could he have imagined an entrance more grand? It was like the golden age of the Sorcerer wars.

With weak knees, Bryl scrambled off the back of Tryos. He felt very old again. The dragon barely paused, however, and turned to them with his spotlight eyes.

"I go find my brother! Rognos! Kill him!" Blasting fire at the overhanging black pine trees on the hill, Tryos launched himself into the air, flapping his immense wings and stirring up a great breeze behind him. He didn't even seem tired. "You get Gairos," he called back.

His horny claws glinted with silver hooks as he pulled his limbs upward and tucked them close to his armored belly. "I'm sure glad he's on our side," Delrael said.

"For the time being," Bryl mumbled.

Delrael took a deep breath and turned. He could feel eyes staring at him from the windows of the outer buildings and the main hall. Everything seemed too quiet, too deserted, like a baited trap.

The Stronghold had suffered from the ogre occupation. The two main storehouses were smashed, and the grain pits under them had been nearly emptied. Siya's garden plots were trampled and torn. Some of the outer dwellings looked disheveled and poorly used. The weapons storehouse seemed intact, probably because ogres had no use for tiny human weapons. Several of the windows in the main hall hung open with shutters knocked off the walls.

Delrael could imagine Gairoth and his ogres ransacking everything to seek other treasures like the Air Stone.

The training area where Tryos had landed was packed and pounded but relatively unharmed; maybe the ogres slept there, sprawled out on the mulched ground, snoring under the starlight. A few of the wooden sword posts had been knocked over in splintered stumps. Both of the hanging sacks had been torn down, and their straw stuffing drifted loose on the ground. The front gate of the Stronghold wall lay smashed on the ground, untouched since Gairoth's victorious entrance a month before.

Then, suddenly and silently, things stirred in the confines of the main hall. Two dozen ogres, virtually identical, emerged from their hiding places behind the woodpiles, in the ruined storehouses. They glanced at the sky to see if the great dragon would return.

The door to the main hall crashed open. Gairoth emerged.