Mickey Zucker Reichert - Shadows Realm (2 page)

The storm, too, seemed to have gained intensity. It howled a song luxuriant with ancient evil, feeding off the same Chaos Bolverkr had mustered. Too late, the Dragon-mage realized the reason, and he shouted his defeat to winds that hurled the cry back into his face. At last, he knew his enemy as a renegade mass of Chaos-force. His rally had accomplished nothing more than luring the tempest to his person and opening his protections to its mercy.

The Chaos-force speared through Bolverkr, cold as Hel-frost. He staggered, catching his balance against the door frame as the storm pierced him, seeking the soul-focus of his very being, itself the primal essence of the elements. Fire and ice, wind and wave, earth and sky swirled through his blood, beyond his ability to divine an understanding. It entered every nerve, every thought, every fiber, and seemed to rack Bolverkr’s soul apart. It promised ultimate power, the mastery of time and eternity, control of creation and destruction, of life and death. It played him without pity, no more trustworthy than the Northern winds whose form it took. It suffused him with pleasure, drove him to the peak of elation and held him there, tied to a blissful swell of power.

For all its thrill, the tension grew unbearable. Bolverkr felt as fragile as crystal, as if his spirit might shatter from the power which had become his. Ecstasy strengthened to pain. He screamed in agony, and the Chaos-force transformed his cry into a bellow of wild triumph. Sound echoed through the wreckage of Wilsberg. Then Bolverkr exchanged torment for oblivion.

Bolverkr awoke with numbed wits and a pounding headache. From habit, he tapped a trifle of life energy to counteract the pain. The throbbing ceased. His thoughts sharpened to faithful clarity, bringing memory of the previous morning, and realization drove him to his feet. The sun shone high over the ruins of the farm town that had been his home. Straw and boulders littered the ground. Bodies lay, smashed beneath the wreckage, half-buried in mud, or hanging from shattered foundations of stone like the broken puppets of an angered child.

Tears filled Bolverkr’s eyes, blurring the carnage to vague patterns of light and dark. Grief dampened his spirit, leaving him feeling awkward and heavy. Faces paraded through his mind: Othomann, the old tailor who had spent more time weaving children’s stories than cloth; Sigil, a plain-appearing woman whose gentleness and humor won her more suitors than the town beauties. One by one, Bolverkr pictured the townsfolk, and one by one he mourned them. The shadows slanted toward sunset before he gained the will to move. Only then did he realize he still clutched a piece of his door frame in fingers gone chalky white. Slowly, he turned toward his mansion, heart pounding, deathly afraid of what he might find.

Through water-glazed vision, Bolverkr stared at the rubble of the mansion. Magically warded rock and mortar had crumbled as completely as the mundane constructions of peasant cottages. Half the southern and western walls remained, clinging to a jagged corner of roof. Gray fragments covered the hillock, interspersed with the occasional glimmer of metal coins and gemstones. Only splinters and shards of wood remained of Bolverkr’s furniture, much of which he had proudly carved with his own hands.

A pile of rubble blocked Bolverkr’s view of the single standing corner. He sidled around it, suddenly confronted by Magan’s corpse. She lay in an unnatural pose, mottled white and purple-red. Flying debris had flayed her, chest to abdomen, and blackflies feasted on piled organs. Bolverkr felt as if he had been suddenly plunged in ice water. Horror gripped him. Mesmerized, he shuffled forward. His foot slipped in a smear of blood and flesh, and he stumbled. Flies rose around him in a buzzing crowd. Bolverkr twisted to see what had tripped him. It was another corpse, no larger than his hands and still connected to its mother by a bloodless umbilical cord.

With a frenzied sob, Bolverkr turned and fled. After three running strides, his heel came down on a craggy hunk of granite. His leg bowed sideways. Pain shot through his ankle. He fell, arching to avoid sharp fragments of stone jutting from the grass. Off-balance, he crashed to the ground and rolled over the side of the hillock.

Bolverkr tumbled. Rock, wood, and bone bruised his skin. He clawed for a grounded rock or plant. Debris loosened by his attempts skidded toward the ground for him to bounce over a second time. Three quarters of the way down the side, his hand looped over a root. It cut into the joints of his fingers. Quickly, he released it, using the moment of stability to turn his crazed fall into a controlled slide. He jarred to a halt, facedown, by a pile of bodies. The air hung heavy with the salt reek of blood and death.

Bolverkr swept to a sitting position. His gaze flicked over the ruins of Wilsberg, and his tears turned from the cold sting of grief to the hot fury of anger. It had taken him fifty years to find the peace of a lifetime. Half a century of peasant distrust had elapsed in misery until one generation passed to the next and the children accepted Bolverkr as a kindly old man, a fixture on the hillock over their village. The term “Dragonrank” meant nothing to them; they were too far removed from the sorcerers’ school in Norway to have heard of its existence.
To them, I served as a timeless oddity.
Bolverkr watched blood trickle across his palm, and though it was his own, it seemed to him more like that of the entire town.
So long to create the dream, and so quickly shattered.

Thoughts raced through Bolverkr’s mind, age-old memories of the crimes of his peers. He recalled how Geirmagnus, a man from the future with no magical abilities of his own, had discovered and taught the first Dragonrank mages to channel Chaos-force into spell energy. Then, the sorcerers had called volumes of Chaos from external sources, blithely ignorant of its cost. He remembered how the excess Chaos had massed, taking the dragon-form that gave the Dragonrank sorcerers their name, steadily growing, feeding off the Chaos they summoned for spells more powerful than any known before or since. One such feat gave Bolverkr and his peers the ability to age at a fraction of the rate of normal men. Too late, they realized their mistake. As the chaos-creature grew more powerful, nothing could slay it but the strongest Dragonrank magic. And the calling of Chaos for that magic served only to further strengthen the beast until its presence threatened to disrupt the very balance of the world.

Cruel remembrances fueled Bolverkr’s rage. He blinked away the beads of water clinging to his lashes. The mad blur of corpses transformed in his mind to the faces of his ancient friends. He recalled how, in desperation, the mages had forsaken external Chaos sources for their own life energies. The younger sorcerers never learned the techniques of mustering Chaos. Their elders tried to resist marshaling the great volumes of entropy they had used in earlier days; but, having tasted of ultimate power, they slipped back into the old ways. All except Bolverkr. He alone remained true to his promise, and he alone the dragon spared. Singly and in groups, he watched his friends die, clawed to death by the chaos-creature’s fury until Geirmagnus trapped it, though he was mortally wounded by Chaos in the struggle. The quest for peace brought Bolverkr to Wilsberg while the pursuit of knowledge drove the younger mages to found the Dragonrank school that Bolverkr had never seen. As generations of sorcerers came and went, he was forgotten or presumed dead.

That storm was no work of nature.
Bolverkr’s hands clenched to fists, and he stared at the blood striping his knuckles scarlet. Tendrils of Chaos-force probed through the breach he had opened in his mental barriers; where it touched, its power corrupted. Rage boiled up inside the sorcerer, fueled and twisted by the Chaos that had ravaged Wilsberg and, now, found its master. The seam blurred between the meager remnants of Bolverkr’s natural life aura and the seeming infinity of Chaos, and it quietly goaded him as if it was the master and he the source of its power. It twisted his thoughts, filling gaps in information, leading to one conclusion:
Someone loosed Chaos against me, and that someone is going to pay!

Bolverkr leaped to his feet, bruises and aches forgotten. He waded through the wreckage of Wilsberg, the sight of each familiar corpse invoking his ire like physical pain. By the time he reached the town border, Chaos roiled through his veins. A small voice cried out from within him,
Why me? Why me? Why me?
Then, the last vestiges of Bolverkr’s grief were crushed, replaced by a blind, howling fury more savage than any he had known. Once a separate entity, the Chaos-force remained, poisoning his life aura, all but merged with it. Chaos promised spell-energy to rival the gods: death, destruction, and vengeances beyond human comprehension. It showed him shattered human skeletons on a shore red with blood, skies dense with tarry smoke, its breath lethal to the men of Midgard.

Not yet fully swayed to Chaos’ influence, Bolverkr shuddered at the image, and horror sapped his anger.

Quickly, the Chaos-force amended its simulation, instead showing Bolverkr a clear night speckled with stars. Two men lay chained to a block of granite, their faces twisted by fierce grimaces of evil. Prompted by the Chaos-force, Bolverkr knew these as the men responsible for the destruction of Wilsberg. Understanding whipped him to murderous frenzy. He struggled for a closer look, but the Chaos-force teased him, holding the perception just beyond his vision. Bolverkr shouted in frustration, forgetting, in his rage, that a simple spell could obtain the same information. Instead, he raced without goal into the afternoon, seeking a target for his fury.

Once beyond the borders of the town, Bolverkr ran along a well-traveled forest trail; wheel ruts and boot tracks from the spring thaw dimpled its surface. Branches of oak and maple rattled in a light, autumn breeze, its gentleness a mockery after the tempest that had gutted Wilsberg. Shortly, the creak of timbers and the clop of hooves on packed earth replaced the rasp of air through Bolverkr’s lungs. He paused, breathless, as a half-dozen wooden horse carts appeared from around a bend in the pathway. A man marched at the fore of the procession, his chin encased in a crisp, golden beard and his face locked in an expression radiating kindness and demanding trust. The horses appeared gaunt. A layer of grime stained their coats, but their triangular heads remained proudly aloft, ears flicked forward in interest.

Bolverkr knew the commander as Harriman, Wilsberg’s only diplomat. He wore briar-scratched leather leggings beneath the blue and white silks that proclaimed his title. Returning from their quarterly trading mission to the baron’s city of Cullinsberg, the men aboard the wagons laughed and joked, glad to be nearing their journey’s end. The odor of alcohol tinged the air around them.

The Chaos-force seethed within Bolverkr, and he stumbled forward in blind, convulsive rage. Greedily, he seized its power, shaping it to a spell he had not attempted for over a century. Ignorance and lack of practice cost him volumes in energy, but he tapped his new Chaos power with ease.

Harrimans’s gaze fell across Bolverkr’s tousled gray head and harried features. He signaled his men to a sudden stop. The wagons grated to a halt.

Grimly, Bolverkr dredged power through the self-made opening in his mind barriers. Chaos-force coursed through his body, wild as a storm-wracked tide. Driven by a once alien, Chaos-provoked need for destruction, he channeled its essence, calling forth a dragon the size of his ruined mansion. The beast materialized through a rent in the clouds. Sunlight refracted from scales the color of diamonds; yellow eyes glared through the afternoon mists. It struck with all the fury of its summoning. Unfurling leathery wings, it hurtled like an arrow for the wagons.

Harriman and his charges stood, wide-eyed, stunned by the vision of a monster from legend bearing down upon them. One screamed. The sound tore Harriman from his trance. Rushing forward, he drew his sword and thrust for the dragon’s chest. It swerved. The blade opened a line of blood between scales. Its foreleg crashed against Harriman’s ear. The blow sprawled the nobleman, and the dragon’s wings buffeted him to oblivion.

Bolverkr quivered with malicious pleasure, hardened by the Chaos-force whose rage had become his own. A gesture sent the dragon banking with hawklike finesse. A horse reared, whinnying its terror to the graying heavens. Its harness snapped with a jolt, overturning the cart. Richly woven cloth was scattered in the mud, and the odor of spices perfumed the air. Another horse bolted, dragging a wagon that jounced sideways into a copse of trees where it shattered to splinters against tightly-packed trunks. Before the others could react, the dragon renewed its assault. Fire gouted from its jaws. The remaining wagons burst into flame, and the jumbled screams of men and horses wafted to Bolverkr like music. A man staggered from the inferno, his clothes alight, then collapsed after only two steps. At Bolverkr’s order, the dragon whirled for another pass.

Again, the dragon swooped, spraying the burning wreckage with flame. Strengthened, the fire leaped skyward, an orange-red tower over the treetops, splattering cinders across a row of maples. A wave of heat curled the hand-shaped leaves. Branches sputtered. Wind streamed acrid smoke, stinging Bolverkr’s eyes. The crackle of hungry flames replaced the pained howls of men and beasts. Soon, nothing remained but the diminishing blaze, unrecognizable, charred shapes, and the dragon circling the rubble, awaiting Bolverkr’s next command.

Though no less potent, Bolverkr’s Chaos-inspired rage became more directed. The identities of the men in his vision, the men responsible for his terrible loss, became as tantalizing as forbidden fruit. He dispelled the dragon with a casual wave. Turning on his heel, he left the fire to burn itself out on the forest trail.

Something stirred at the corner of Bolverkr’s vision, and he went still with curiosity. His hard, blue eyes probed the brush, finding nothing unusual. The movement did not recur. Unused to the amount of power he now wielded, Bolverkr approached with the caution of a commoner. Raising a hand, he brushed aside hollow fronds. Stems rattled, parting to reveal Harriman, protected by distance from the dragon’s flames. Blood splashed his short-cropped hair. The dust-rimed, blue silk of his tunic rose and fell with each shallow breath. Just beyond his clutched hand, his sword reflected highlights from the dying fire.