Michael Stackpole - When Dragons Rage

The Aurolani forces certainly seemed to have some very specific goals in mind. The vylaens had been reorganized into little cadres of magickers. Each one had a crawl in charge of things. The fortress’ ruins had been gridded off, as nearly as the prince could determine, and a full-scale magickal survey was under way.

He had to assume they were looking for a fragment of the DragonCrown.

Once their survey indicated there was something in the area, work crews of human captives and gibberkin were brought in to excavate. The digging would last for as little as a couple of hours to a maximum of two days. He’d inspected some of the abandoned digs, and the effort seemed to be pretty well focused at the start, then developed into a broader, more systematic approach that opened a hole in layers.

It did strike the prince as bizarre that their magickers were having trouble locating the fragment they wanted. While Erlestoke himself was completely unable to work magick of any sort, he did have an understanding of it. Somehow the search parties had something that allowed them to focus on the item they were searching for. They worked spells based on the link between that thing and the target, and the magick revealed a location to them.

The link between objects had been made quite apparent to him the first day he’d seen a crawl. In his haste to get to Castleton and to get the crawl’s body away for examination, he’d abandoned Malarkex’s sword in the ruins. They’d left their headquarters and plunged deeper into the undercity but, somehow, when he awoke the next morning, the saber was once again in his scabbard. Jilandessa had cast a couple of spells and detected some sort of a link between the blade and the scabbard, and while Erlestoke really didn’t like the sword, he could see the virtue of having a weapon that returned to him.

He’d smiled at her and extended his right hand. “Would be much nicer if it would come to my hand when I commanded.”

The elf had nodded. “It would, but do you really want to be linked to that blade that way?”

The prince agreed he did not.

The appearance of the crawls was not the only adjustment of Aurolani forces at Fortress Draconis. A sullanciri had been left in charge with Chytrine’s departure. Ferxigo had actually spent time at Fortress Draconis with the urZrethi garrison before she joined the Aurolani tyrant. Her knowledge of Fortress Draconis was dated, but having an urZrethi in charge of operations that involved excavating a mountain made perfect sense.

Between her and the crawls a new layer of leadership appeared. Erlestoke had seen one and Ryswin the other: two tall, humanoid creatures that wore thick woolen cloaks of red with massive hoods that hid their faces. No one who had seen them was sure what they were, but the bumps and spikes concealed rather poorly by their cloaks suggested that either they were very tall men wearing unusual armor, or yet another new concoction of creature. They had been seen giving orders to crawls at various digs, but nothing provided clues as to their true identities.

The mystery of what they were would doubtlessly have consumed Erlestoke’s time, save that Fortress Draconis itself was proving to be a challenging enigma. Erlestoke, in the five years he had spent in the garrison, had learned everything he could about the place. The Draconis Baron, Dothan Cavarre, had been quite generous in providing him with information. Erlestoke had even gone so far as to imagine that Cavarre might be grooming him as a replacement—though he also assumed that only death would sever the baron’s association with Fortress Draconis.

The prediction had proven true, and his body had been hung from the Crown Tower’s dragon skull until picked clean by carrion birds. Aside from the pangs of his friend’s death, Erlestoke regretted the loss of the Draconis Baron’s wealth of knowledge about the place. While the baron had told Erlestoke much of the fortress’ secrets, he clearly had not told him everything.

In vacating their hideout, Erlestoke and his people had moved deeper and discovered a variety of chambers, both worked and natural, where they could take refuge. They’d chosen a likely one that first night and the sentries reported nothing unusual on their watches. Erlestoke’s had passed uneventfully; but when they gathered to move on, they discovered that the passage they’d used to reach their haven had been cut off with huge blocks of stone.

Magick was the only explanation for how the stone had moved, but Jilandessa had a hard time identifying the spells used. “Shuffling blocks that big and so silently would take an incredible amount of power. I don’t know of a sorcerer capable of doing that.”

Ryswin smiled. “If there is, and he’s here, we have to hope he’ll be on our side.”

They left their sanctuary and explored along the other pathways that had opened up. In the depths they discovered a large amphitheater with a semicircular arrangement of stone terraces. In the center stood a raised circular platform. It clearly had once been a meeting place, and Erlestoke speculated that it had belonged to one of the various secret societies. That one or more had facilities at Fortress Draconis made sense, since the garrisons were drawn from all over the world.

This one, however, had been transformed. The terraces would normally have served as seating for the society’s members and, at six feet in width, could have accommodated a considerable crowd. As Erlestoke studied the place, he could easily imagine the hearty shout of assent to some proposal, or the bass murmur of a ritual invocation echoing through the place.

Now the terraces did, in fact, accommodate a crowd, but one of far different sort than intended. On each level, with their feet pointing inward, lay stone effigies of Fortress Draconis’ defenders. The images had been exquisitely crafted and showed each person in serene repose. Walking down the stairs Erlestoke saw a few individuals memorialized there whom he’d seen blown to bits by Chytrine’s thunderballs. On the side of the slabs upon which they lay their names had been inscribed in their native script.

The dead all lay together, unsegregated by nation or race. Ryswin knelt beside a comrade, laying a hand on her cold stone forehead and using the other to hood his eyes. Others spread out, finding comrades and weeping, or noting the presence of others just to confirm their fate.

Toward the top Erlestoke found Pack Castleton. His effigy showed him carrying a quadnel, which brought a smile to the prince’s face. He traced a finger over the man’s mask and along the stone representation of a ribbon Erlestoke himself had affixed to it. “Rest well, my friend. You have earned it.”

Jullagh-tse Seegg, a rust-red urZrethi, shifted her shape so a pair of long, slender legs let her step easily up the stairs to reach him. “I see many here, but not the Draconis Baron.”

Erlestoke shook his head. “Perhaps whoever has done this needs his bones.” He surveyed the room, estimating numbers, then frowned. “This place could hold four thousand, maybe, and it’s only three-quarters full. That means a lot more have survived.”

Ryswin joined them. “That, Highness, or the caretakers are behind in their work. If you are right, that would mean there are a thousand of us still lurking in little groups here in the fortress. That’s fewer than Chytrine’s troops, but far more than I would have ever imagined.”

“Highness, over here!” Jancis Ironside beckoned him with her mechanical left arm. She stood on the steps leading up to the central dais. “You have to see this.”

The whole of their company moved toward the center of the chamber and mounted the steps. As Erlestoke’s eyes came even with the platform, they widened, because where he expected a flat surface he found something entirely different. As he approached, the platform shifted, the flat disk suddenly developing lumps that slowly resolved themselves into walls and the ruins of buildings. Toward the center rose the Crown Tower. At various points the rock retreated to form pits and within a couple of minutes, a miniature model of the fortress had laid itself out.