Legends of the Dragonrealm, Vol. III (19 page)

Orril D’Marr was too young to really recall the keepers when they had been at the apex of their glory. He only knew the stories and the few survivors he had seen. He knew that without the will of the Ravager and the work of his most trusted servants, the keepers, the empire had begun to crumble. Part of him had always wondered at the speed of that decay. Why had the great armies so depended on a tiny minority in their ranks?

Seeing D’Farany, he thought he understood. A keeper at the peak of his power was an army unto himself.

The Pack Leader still smiled. His eyes stared upward at the spiderweb of energy pouring into the crystalline artifact. Blue sparks drifted from his fingers whenever he moved his hands. His
eyes
gleamed blue.

With each passing second, the glow surrounding both the Pack Leader and his newfound toy became less bearable. D’Marr turned away, but found himself facing the blinding glow in a thousand reflections. He turned farther, seeking some respite, something that did not reflect the light.

What the raider found instead was the very passage he had been searching for.

A gaping mouth, it was so blatant a sight he could not understand how it had taken him even this long to notice it. He took a step toward it, but then something caught him by the foot, nearly sending him crashing to the harsh floor. The Aramite regained his balance and glanced over his shoulder. He saw the desperate Quel, the inhuman eyes wide, struggling to roll over to him and somehow stop the raider’s advance. D’Marr smiled briefly at the pathetic sight, but a sudden change in the Quel’s eyes, a change from fear to burgeoning hope, shattered the smile and sent the raider’s attention flying back to the secret entranceway.

It was already fading. The same crystal-encrusted wall was slowly re-forming, growing more solid with each passing breath. The Quel suddenly forgotten, D’Marr raced toward the vanishing passage. The wall was still transparent, but that was rapidly changing. Reaching out in desperation, he slammed a hand against it, but his efforts only rewarded him with pain. It was too late to cross through. The split-second delay caused by his gloating had lost him his opportunity.

Still, he had a moment, but only a short one, in which to glimpse what secret lay behind the cursed wall. It was a harried glimpse, made the worse by the lessening transparency of the stone and crystal. Nonetheless, he was able to make out shapes, hundreds of shapes, in a cavern that must have been nearly as immense as the one in which the city lay.

D’Marr saw no more than that. The wall became completely opaque, the stone and crystal completely innocent in appearance.

He slowly turned back to the others and was not at all surprised to find that Lord D’Farany had
just
completed his work. The tentacles of energy had withdrawn; if not for the blue glow about the top of the Quel device, the chamber would have looked exactly as it had before they had entered.

“Not the same . . .” the Pack Leader was muttering. Despite his words, however, a smile had crept across his scarred visage. “Not the same, but so
very
close . . . I will just have to accept that.”

His eyes were
still
focused.

“My lord, I shall remove the tooth, yes?” D’Rance looked exceptionally eager. D’Marr momentarily put his discovery aside and started to mouth a protest. He knew, through careful observance, that the northerner had some trace of power. Was it possible that he had more? Did he have the will and ability to control the keeper talisman? That would take more skill than the Aramite had suspected him of having.

His words of protest never left his lips, for Lord D’Farany was quicker to respond. His eyes bore down on the blue man and D’Marr had the distinct pleasure of watching his rival cringe under the intensity of those suddenly alive orbs. “Your readiness to assist me in all is commendable, Kanaan, but you may leave it where it is. There is no more secure place for it now than where it presently stands.”

D’Rance assumed a more servile position. “Yes, my lord. I meant nothing by it, my lord.”

The Pack Leader had already dismissed him from his attention. Now those eyes focused on the peculiar scene of the Quel lying on his side far from where he had been earlier positioned and Orril D’Marr standing near the wall,
much
too far away from the prisoner that he had been charged with guarding. “And you, Orril?”

The raider wondered how he was to convince Lord D’Farany of what he had seen. An entire cavern lay hidden from the invasion force, yet only he believed—
knew
, rather—that it was there. The Pack Leader and the blue devil had been so engrossed in the spectacle above them that they had missed the unveiling of the Quel’s secret.

“Forgive me also, Lord D’Farany. Sorcery is not my realm. I admit to having been somewhat . . . overwhelmed . . . by the results. I’ve seen things I’d never expected to see.”

“
Wonderful
things . . . and there will be so much more . . .” The Pack Leader gazed down at the Quel creation, his eyes filled with great fondness. “We shall do so much together, the two of us . . .”

The eyes were losing focus.

With a last gentle touch, the Pack Leader separated himself from his prized possession and, to neither subordinate’s surprise, departed without a word. Kanaan D’Rance remained behind only long enough to look from the device to his rival before he disappeared into the tunnel after the Aramite commander.

D’Marr stared thoughtfully at the wall that had, so far, beaten his efforts to unmask it for what it was. He would have to find another way in than this place, that was all. Perhaps there was another chamber that also shared a wall with the hidden cavern. It would be a simple matter of exploration, of hunting. He excelled in hunting, no matter what the prey. Then, with the aid of his explosive toys, he would create for himself a new and
permanent
way inside. There would be no magic to stop him then.

From the mouth of the tunnel, a wave of black armor flowed into the room. It was the guard contingent Lord D’Farany had brought with him. The ranks split as each man entered, one line moving to the left side of the chamber and the other to the right. D’Marr signaled two of the soldiers to take custody of the Quel. The captive departed without protest, but inhuman eyes watched the young officer until the depths of the tunnel swallowed the creature. The other guards shifted their ranks to make up for the slight loss to their number.

I will have to make measurements
, D’Marr thought, returning with anticipation to the project ahead. Too much powder and the explosive would bring down not only the wall but the rest of the cavern as well.
Best to find the proper spot first. Then I can judge how much will be needed.

There were already men mapping the complex system of caverns and tunnels that made up the Quel domain. While far from complete, he was certain that their charts already revealed enough for his present concerns. With so much importance placed on this particular section of the underground world, it had only been logical to map it first.

He had much work ahead of him, but Orril D’Marr was pleased. He was on the verge of shattering the last hope of the beastmen and discovering what great secret lay in that cavern behind the wall.

The guards came to even greater attention as he passed them on his way out of the chamber, but the raider officer paid their fear of him no mind this time. His only thought was on the coming success of his project and the look on the blue man’s face when D’Marr revealed to Lord D’Farany the most closely guarded of the underdwellers’ mysteries . . . whatever it was.

THEY DID NOT
know how close they had come.

The Crystal Dragon stirred himself from the self-imposed stupor. Trust the wolf raiders to be both predictable and unpredictable. He had been certain that they would somehow seize control of the Quel’s domain. He had been fairly certain that they would have
some
success with the subterraneans’ mechanisms. What he had not been prepared for was the
level
of that success. The invaders already had a grasp of the abilities of Quel might. Given just a little more time, they would grow adept. A little more . . . and they would dare to confront him.

He should strike before they grew too strong. He should risk himself, for delaying the inevitable only made the later consequences worse.

How? How do I sssstrike? It mussst be effective but taking the least effort and concentration possible! There cannot be too much risssk. That might lead to . . .
If only there had been time to rest. That would have changed everything. They would have been insects to crush beneath his huge paws.

The glittering leviathan twisted his neck around and sought among the treasures he had accumulated over time. Some were there because of simple value, some because of purpose. Carefully he scoured the vast pile. There were times when he had thought of organizing it again, storing it anew in the lower cavern chambers, but that would mean leaving the protection of his sanctum and doing so might prove the final, fatal blow.

Sssomething . . .

Then, to one side of the pile, almost separate from it, the Dragon King sighted the answer to his plea. It was not what he had wanted, not in the least, but the longer he stared at it the more the dread monarch knew it was his only choice. Massive, daggerlike talons gently picked up a small crystalline sphere in which it seemed a tiny, reddish green cloud floated. There was something unhealthy about the cloud, for the colors did not speak of life, but long and lingering decay. The sphere was no larger than a human head, which made it tiny indeed for one such as he, but he had learned care in using this gargantuan form, for even shifting to the manlike image his counterparts preferred was dangerous now. Each transformation distracted him, made him more vulnerable to . . . to the danger of losing himself. Now especially he dared not transform. It might be just enough, combined with his lack of rest, to defeat his long efforts.

He was careful for another reason. What the cloud represented could not be accidentally released full-fledged upon the world, not even for as short as a single blink of an eye.

But what of a tiny fragment of its evil? Might that do?

With the tenderness of a parent holding a newborn babe, the Dragon King brought the sphere to near eye level. A distorted image of his monstrous face glared back at him, but he forced himself to ignore it as he always did.

“Yessss, you could aid me. You could act where I cannot. You could blind them; lead them assstray. Perhaps you could even remove this blight on my kingdom.” The Dragon King laughed bitterly. “A blight to plague a blight. So very apt.”

He continued to contemplate the sphere. The cloud swirled, briefly revealing a hellish landscape. The crystal artifact was not a thing designed to contain but was rather a door of sorts . . . a door to a nightmare that the drake lord had lived with since almost the beginning.

“Nooo . . .” whispered the crystalline-skinned dragon. “Not yet. I mussst consssider thisss firssst . . . yet . . .” He twisted his head to one side and looked at the deadly cloud from another angle. “If only the decision were not mine anymore.”

Lowering his paw, the Dragon King summoned up the images of the raider camp. He stared long and hard at the army and its leaders, memories of another time and another invasion slowly seizing hold of him.

“Ssso very much alike they are,” he hissed. “Asss if the world hasss gone full circle.”

The malevolent cloud in his paw shifted violently, almost as if it were reacting to the words of the drake. The Crystal Dragon did not notice the change, caught up as he was in both the sights before him and the phantoms stirring anew in his mind. The scenes reflected in the multiple facets blended in with those phantoms, creating a myriad collection of twisted and misremembered pictures.

“Full circle,” the Crystal Dragon muttered again. “Asss if a door to the passst had opened up . . .” The gleaming eyes narrowed to little more than slits as the drake lord became further enmeshed in the visions. “A door open . . .”

In the sphere, a storm began to rage.

VIII

IT WAS NOT
until well into the day that Cabe and Darkhorse were finally able to shake off the effects of the mishap with the magical staff. They had dared not enter Legar in such condition and so the two of them had been forced to simply wait. Cabe used the time to first compose a carefully worded message to be sent by magic back to Gwen and the children and then to rest; Darkhorse chose to make use of the wait by constantly grousing about time ever wasted. It was not that the wait was not necessary. Even the demon steed knew better; he could simply not stop himself from complaining over and over again. The warlock knew deep down that what drove his companion to such impatience and bickering was the ebony stallion’s own knowledge that with nothing else to occupy his thoughts, the haunting memories of Shade would return. Darkhorse was seriously trying to free himself of his obsession, but it was a monumental task even for him.

Thinking of memories, Cabe could still not recall the night before without shuddering a little. Darkhorse often forgot that as mighty as his friend was, the warlock was still guided by human instincts and preconceptions. Plummeting earthward from such a height had nearly been too catastrophic an event for the mage’s heart. With his own skills in question, he had been forced to rely solely on the eternal. Even as good friends as they were, Cabe could not completely put himself into the care of a being who could never truly understand death as men did.

Fortunately, this time Darkhorse
had
known what he was doing. The shadow steed had landed hooves first on the ground, but the warlock had felt only the slightest of jolts. Such a landing would have shattered the legs of a real horse and killed both animal and rider instantly. Yet Darkhorse had ridden off into the nearby hills the moment he was certain that his passenger was secure and safe.