Michael Mathias - The Sword and the Dragon

Milly hid her face in one of Willa’s large closets.

“Who can say the ways of the fairy folk Highness. Surely not I.” she called from inside.

Willa found a black leather belt and buckled it around the velvety lavender gown she had chosen, and then took the cloak Milly offered.

“It’s not the ways of pixies that concern me, Milly,” Willa said, while bunching her hair into a ponytail. “Pixies can’t turn door knobs by themselves.”

Willa’s grin showed that she was just teasing her maid servant. Suddenly, her face turned serious, and she looked sternly into Milly’s eyes.

“I want you to gather a pillow sack full of your dearest things, and then report to Lady Andra. Do it just as soon as I leave, and tell her I said to take you to the tunnel herself.”

A half hour later, Queen Willa came up from the endless switchbacks of stairs, up to the wide roadway-like top of the outer wall. It took a few moments for her to catch her breath and gather her bearings, long enough for her to locate the General and Master Targon.

In her cloak, with the hood up, no one bothered to acknowledge her, much less direct her. This was fine with her. She didn’t want to distract the men. Looking around at them, she decided that she could have come up to the top completely naked, and not a one of them would have been able to peal their eyes away from what was holding their attention.

When she gained the side of her advisers, she was finally close enough to see for herself. Out and down from her vantage, standing boldly, within bow range, row upon row of soldiers stood in perfect formations. Thousands of men, among them huge ladder towers, and great battering rams, stood at the ready. Catapults, and wagon loads of head-size boulders for ammunition, were spread evenly just out of bow shot, in a row parallel to the wall.

“Look,” General Spyra pointed down, and then helped the Queen lean out past the arrow crenellations, to see what it was he was trying to show her.

Below them, and a bit to the right, directly in front of that particular set of gates, stood half a dozen soldiers at attention. They had so many arrows sticking out of them, that they resembled porcupines, yet none of them had fallen. In front of them, was a pyramid stack of three barrel kegs.

“What of the other gates?” Willa asked.

She felt as if she were sinking in sand, and had the weight of the world pressing down on her shoulders.

“The same,” Spyra answered, with little or no emotion in his voice. “Around ten thousand men, who are unhindered by our arrows, and ready to set all of the outer gates on fire with those casks of oil.”

“Curse the gods of the heavens and earth,” Willa said to herself, fingering the horn that she had snatched from her bedside table as she left her room.

Just then, a small, mule drawn wagon, pulling a load of supplies up one of the long, slow sloping ramps that ran on the inside of the wall, broke free from its tethers. Men shouted, and screamed to make way, as the cart wobbled, and scraped against the wall on its unhindered way down the ramp. Men dove and leapt out of its way, as it gained careening speed, then smashed into the next mule cart, which was halfway up the slope. A man, and a mule were crushed to death, and a few men were injured from the tumbles they took, while trying to avoid a direct hit.

Queen Willa decided not to mock the gods anymore, and also decided that never in all of her life had she felt more helpless than she did just then.

“What is it that you and Hyden Hawk have come up with?” she asked Targon, with her last bit of hope hanging in the balance.

“There is a plan,” Targon answered, with a doubtful look on his face. “But it cannot even be started until he returns.”

“Returns?” She didn’t understand.

With an expectant wince at what her reaction would be, Targon explained.

“He has gone into the Tower.”

“Wha – What Tower?” Willa asked.

The sand she felt like she was sinking in was about to suck her under, because she knew the answer to her question before he spoke it.

At least ten would-be heroes had gone into Pratchert’s Tower in her lifetime. Not a single one of them had ever been heard from again. According to the records, over a hundred wizards, sorcerers, mages, and fools had tried to beat Dahg Mahn’s trials over the ages. None of them had succeeded.

She didn’t even think, before she took the Horn of Doon from inside her robe, and put it to her mouth. The loud blasting sound it made startled General Spyra, who almost tumbled over the edge of the wall. It was all Targon could do to wrestle him back to safety. The scene before her only served to confirm that, without a doubt, it was indeed a time of great need.

Vaegon sat patiently beside the big, bland block of Wardstone, waiting for something to happen. On top of the stone, Ironspike lay in the exact place, where it had melted itself a snug cradle, into the semi-smooth surface a few thousand years ago. A depression, shaped roughly like a war hammer, and a few smaller ones shaped like large arrowheads, were empty alongside the sword.

Nothing had happened when Vaegon placed it there, nothing at all. He had half expected a flare of light, or a telling glow, or maybe even a hum, but there was nothing to indicate that the great sword was replenishing its power. He had slept for awhile and was now a growing restless. Dugak’s long, powerful snores filled the cavern. The sound reverberated off of the stone walls, and came closing in on the elf.

If there was one thing that Vaegon, or any other elf for that matter, didn’t like, it was being enclosed underground. The smoky torch flame, wavering in its crude sconce by the entryway, was the only movement. Save for the grotesque shadows it threw across the roughly hewn walls.

“There’s no breeze, to sway the grass and the trees, even if there were grass and trees to be swayed…” Vaegon sarcastically butchered the words, while singing a verse of an old elven tune in a soft, musical voice. “There are no songs, for the birds and the bees are all gone, and all they left here is the decay…”

Worse than the dead air, and the suffocating feeling, was the fact that this wasn’t just a cavern: it was also a catacomb. There were no corpses in this particular room, but just outside, there was a tunnel lined with rooms, just like this one, and they weren’t so empty.

Vaegon shivered at the thought, and forced it away. He didn’t want to think about it. He didn’t want to know. All he wanted was to get back into the open, to see the sun, the moon, or the stars overhead, and to breathe in the fresh air. He had been sitting there so long, that he wasn’t sure if it was night or day anymore.

He decided that when Dugak woke, they would go. There was no way he, or the dwarf, could tell if the sword had been replenished. The important thing was that he now knew where the cooling stone was hidden so that he could bring Mikahl here if…No, he corrected his thought. Not if, but when, Mikahl recovered from his injuries.

Vaegon stood, looked at the sword, and seeing that it appeared no different than it had the last time he had looked, let out a frustrated sigh. He began to pace the dusty gravel floor of the chamber, trying to fight off his claustrophobic feelings, and his unease, in general. The crunch of his footfalls gave him a strange comfort, in the otherwise silent catacombs. He was sure he would have felt much better if he still had his elven vision. Seeing in the darkness is one of the things he had taken for granted all of his life. He could still make his way in the dark without the torch, but with his vision he could have…Could have what?

“No use in might’ve been, foolish elf!” he said to himself out loud. “It’s the lot I’ve been left with so I must accept it and move on.”