Return of the Sorceress (9 page)

“Get inside, both of you!” Eric shouted. He started running toward the back of the cottage, presumably to find Jirah. Filled with dragonfear, he moved haphazardly, body trembling.

“We won’t be any safer in there than we are out here!” Nearra
said. “The dragon can tear our home apart as easily as if it were a pile of sticks!”

The dragon swooped low over them, and Nearra and her mother were knocked to the ground by a blast of air. The dragon arced upward and began gaining altitude once more. Nearra helped her mother stand.

“We need to make for the forest!” she said. “A creature that size will have a hard time getting between the trees!”

“How do you know this?”

“Believe me, Mother, I’ve had some experience with dragon attacks.” Nearra glanced upward and saw that the dragon was slowing in its upward climb, that meant it was going to come driving down toward them any moment.

“C’mon! We can’t stand around here talking!” Nearra tried to tug her mother along after her, but she resisted.

“We can’t leave your sister and father!”

Nearra felt the same way, but she knew they’d all stand a greater chance of survival as two pairs instead of one foursome.

Just then Eric and Jirah came running around to the front of the cottage. Both gripped axes used for cutting wood. They were tools, not weapons, but even if they had been battle axes forged from the finest steel in Ansalon, they would’ve been useless against a creature the size of the blue dragon.

“Are you mad?” Nearra shouted. “You can’t fight a dragon with those! We have to run!”

Eric stared up at the dragon. His gaze was filled with terror, but his jaw was set in a determined line. “This is our home. I built it with my own two hands, and I’d sooner die than let it be destroyed without a fight! Take your mother and your sister and run! I shall deal with the beast!” Eric’s voice quavered, but his grip on the axe remained sure and steady.

Jirah wasn’t managing her fear quite so well. Her face was
chalk-white and her eyes were wild, like those of a trapped animal desperately looking for escape. Nearra tugged at her sister’s arm. But Jirah wouldn’t move.

The blue dragon paused at the apex of its flight. The gigantic beast was so far above them that it looked no larger than the small lizards Nearra found in the woods as a child. The sky around the dragon suddenly grew dark and storm clouds began to form. They were dark, angry clouds colored a pure, deep black. If it was possible for something like a cloud to be evil, then these were.

The dragon flapped its wings and hovered in place. Great gusts of wind buffeted Nearra. So strong was the sudden gale that she was forced to huddle against her mother and sister to keep from being knocked to the ground.

The blue dragon peered down at them, arcs of blazing white energy crackling from its eyes. And then the monster opened its mouth and a sizzling burst of lightning shot from its tooth-filled maw.

Nearra screamed as the bolt raced to earth and struck the roof of their cottage. The dry thatch caught fire instantly and flames rose into the air.

“No!” Eric shouted. “Come down and face me, and I’ll show you what a woodsman’s axe can do!”

The wind was howling so loudly now that Nearra could barely hear her father’s words. The dragon must have heard Eric, though, for the beast stopped flapping its wings, folded them against its scaly sides, and dived toward them.

“Come on!” Nearra still had hold of her mother’s hand and now she grabbed Jirah’s as well. She pulled as hard as she could, and they allowed her to lead them away from the blazing cottage—perhaps because they’d realized the foolishness of staying where they were, but more likely because they were too overwhelmed with dragonfear to resist her.

As she pulled her mother and Jirah away, Nearra called back to her father.

“Run!”

But Eric just stood there, axe held high, looking up at the rapidly approaching dragon. Perhaps he stayed because he was paralyzed with fear, or perhaps out of determination to strike back at the monster that had destroyed his home and now threatened his family. Perhaps a bit of both.

At first, it appeared that the blue dragon intended to crash into Eric, but at the last instant before it reached the ground, the dragon spread its wings and halted its dive. For a moment, Nearra hoped that the dragon had decided for some reason to spare her father, but then the beast opened its mouth and once again a bolt of lightning blasted forth. But this time the blue-white energy arced downward to strike Eric.

The flash of light was so intense that Nearra had to avert her eyes. When she opened them, she saw a glowing purple afterimage of her father holding aloft his axe. But that image was no longer a reality. Her father—or what remained of him—was a steaming, blackened husk lying on the ground.

Lanni wailed and Jirah began to weep.

“No!” Nearra screamed. She had only just found her father again … now to lose him in such a horrible fashion … “Maddoc!” she shouted to the heavens. “This is your doing! It has to be!” She clutched her hands into fists and felt a warm tingling sensation of power begin to build within them.

She let go of Jirah and Lanni and stepped forward to confront the blue dragon. Tendrils of lightning shot back and forth between its sharp teeth, making them glow an eerie blue-white.

She willed the power of the dark sorceress within her to come forth, to take her over completely if that was what she had to do to destroy the monster that killed her father. She looked into
the blue dragon’s eyes. They were two pits of darkness, cold and absolute, just like the storm clouds that now covered the sky from horizon to horizon.

Though Nearra’s hands felt as if they were on fire and she ached to release the power she’d summoned, she hesitated, though she wasn’t sure why. There was something bothering her, a thought that seemed to drift upward from somewhere deep in her mind. Maddoc’s greatest desire was to obtain the secrets of Asvoria’s ancient magic … He
wanted
Nearra to wield the sorceress’ power,
wanted
Asvoria’s spirit to take her over. And she couldn’t allow that, no matter what.

Nearra took a deep breath, then concentrated on allowing the warm tingling in her hands to diminish. It did so, slowly fading until her hands felt perfectly normal once more.

The dragon looked at her with its awful black eyes.

“You’ll regret that, girl,” the beast growled in Maddoc’s voice, and then it yawned wide and a burst of lightning came for her so swiftly that she didn’t have time to even think about screaming, let alone begin to do so.

    T
hey’ve gone,” Shiriki said.

“My cousin, you have an absolute genius for stating the obvious,” Kuruk replied.

Kuruk and Shiriki had picked up the trail of the companions after the beasts had finished with Bolthor and dispersed. The two elves had followed the trail to the bank of a small pond. Between them were the blackened remains of a fire, along with a pile of fish bones.

Ignoring her cousin’s sarcasm, Shiriki knelt down and touched her fingers to the soot. She rubbed a bit of black between her thumb and forefinger then held it up to her nose and sniffed.

Kuruk crouched low and picked up a fish bone. He touched it to the tip of his tongue and considered.

“They left an hour ago,” he said.

“Closer to one and a half.” Shiriki wiped her fingers clean on the grass then stood. She knew Kuruk’s analysis was the more accurate of the two, but she didn’t like to acknowledge that his senses were superior to hers.

Kuruk dropped the fishbone back onto the pile and stood. Shiriki waited for him to challenge her assessment, but all he did was lick fish oil from his fingers and smile.

“Where do you suppose they’re headed?” he asked.

While Kuruk’s senses were keener than hers, Shiriki was the superior tracker of the two. She stepped away from the burnt-out fire and walked around the area, keeping her graze trained on the ground, reading bent blades of grass and depressions in the soil as easily as a child deciphering an alphabet.

“They went east,” she said at last. “And the centaur was with them.”

Kuruk harrumphed though he didn’t seem especially surprised by the revelation. “What lies in that direction?”

“Depending on how far one travels, the whole of Krynn could be said to be east,” Shiriki said. “But if you mean what’s to the east
near
here, I can only think of one thing: Cairngorn Keep.”

Kuruk frowned. “What could they want there?”

Shiriki shrugged. “The human male is Maddoc’s adopted son. Perhaps the boy is leading his companions there in search of sanctuary.”

“And they have an hour, I mean, one-and-a-half hour’s head start on us,” Kuruk said.

“They will be forced to avoid certain routes because the centaur is with them,” Shiriki pointed out. “Her equine legs will prevent her from climbing some of the steeper hills between here and the wizard’s keep. They will be forced to detour around them.”

Kuruk groaned. “I can see where you’re going with this, and my wounded leg is already throbbing.”

Shiriki punched him on the arm, far harder than necessary. “You are a Kagonesti warrior and a servant of Takhisis. What’s a little climbing to one such as you?”

“A gigantic pain in the posterior, my cousin,” Kuruk said, then sighed. “Let us waste no more time. The sooner we resume our pursuit, the greater chance we will have of arriving at Cairngorn Keep before our quarry.”

“And then?” Shiriki said, grinning.

Kuruk grinned back.

“And then.”

Nearra opened her eyes and looked around. She sat cross-legged on the floor of a small, unfurnished room lit by candles set into brass wall sconces. A dozen paintings hung on the walls, each encased in elaborate gold frames. The paintings were blank, save the one directly in front of her. It was a rendering of a blue dragon attacking a woodland cottage. Huddled near the cottage were four people and though the figures were so small that it was difficult to make out the details of their features, Nearra knew that she was looking at a painting of herself and her family. She stood to examine the image more closely, but before she could, it began to fade until the painting was blank like all the others.

A door opened and Maddoc shuffled into the room, followed by Oddvar.

“As you’ve no doubt guessed by now, your little dive off the tower was interrupted, thanks to my griffin,” Maddoc said. “Did you really think you could escape me that easily?”

Nearra sighed. “I had rather hoped.” She looked back at the blank painting. “What is this place?”

Maddoc smiled. He trembled all over, as if he were so weak he could barely stay on his feet. “Merely a place where you could rest and recover from the sleep spell I cast upon you.” A sly tone crept into his voice. “Why do you ask?”

Nearra knew that whatever had happened in this chamber had been the result of another of the evil wizard’s spells, but if Maddoc wanted to play games, so be it. However, she wasn’t about to play along.

“Has the sorceress’ spirit emerged?” the Theiwar asked his master.

Maddoc fixed Nearra with a penetrating gaze, and she had the feeling that he was somehow peering into her mind.

“Well?” the wizard asked Nearra. “Did she?”

Nearra thought rapidly. If Maddoc were able to tell which personality was in control of her body, then he wouldn’t need to ask. She gave the wizard what she hoped was an enigmatic smile.

“You tell me.”

Maddoc scowled. “This isn’t amusing anymore. There are spells I could cast that would allow me to determine the truth, but they are somewhat involved, and take a certain amount of time to perform adequately.”

“Right,” she said. “And you looking like you’ve got one foot and a couple extra toes in the grave.”

Maddoc’s eyes narrowed, but he didn’t deny Nearra’s charge. “I admit that I am not currently up to my full strength. But that’s due in large part to the last enchantment I worked.”

“The sleep spell, you mean,” Nearra said.

Maddoc shook his head and Oddvar laughed.

“No, I cast another spell while you were sleeping,” the wizard said. “I reapplied the paralysis spell, the one that will completely immobilize you if Asvoria emerges and wields her powers. And she won’t be able to counter it so easily this time; I’ve had months to research ways to make the spell much stronger than when I last cast it upon you.”