R. Salvatore - The Ancient

It was no more than a diversion, anyway, and Bransen soared up and over. The surprised Samhaist turned his blade upward to try to intercept, but Bransen was too high. He landed behind the Samhaist, turning as he descended, and as the man tried to turn, Bransen shot his arm through the gap in the man’s bended elbow, then knifed his hand up behind the Samhaist’s neck, catching a firm grip. He turned with the Samhaist, staying right behind him and up against him, and as soon as the man tried to reverse back the other way, throwing back his shoulder and arm instinctively to break his momentum, Bransen similarly knifed his other arm in the same manner as the first. Now with both of his hands clamped behind the Samhaist’s neck, “chicken-winging” his opponent’s arms out behind him in the process, Bransen easily turned the man and tripped him up.

They fell together, the Samhaist facedown and with no way to free up his arms to break his fall. Bransen added to the impact by shoving out with his hands just before the Samhaist’s face hit the ice.

Bransen sprang up, running right over the man to grab the fallen sword. He was content to leave it at that, but of course, the powries were not. They came in stabbing and slicing, pounding the poor fool back to the ice in short order, so they could dip their berets in his spilling blood.

Through the open door went Bransen. Milkeila came in right behind. “We need to find Badden’s place of power,” she said. “There must be one greater than all the others.”

Before Bransen could agree, Cormack rushed past and shouted, “Brother!” Both Bransen and Milkeila turned his way. The pair then followed Cormack’s gaze to the side where a group of miserable prisoners huddled, most prominent among them a man wearing Abellican robes.

“Jond,” Bransen breathed, and he thought again of his hesitation back on the ledge, and his serious considerations of just turning around and going south to find Cadayle and Callen.

The Highwayman’s face flushed with shame, and even more when Brother Jond called out, “Bransen Garibond, have you come to save us, friend?”

Friend. The word bounced around Bransen’s mind, an indictment made all the more damning because Brother Jond didn’t even understand that it was one. Cormack had reached him by then, working the ropes to free the man and the others around him.

“Not one will be able to aid us in this battle,” Milkeila was saying when Bransen finally joined the couple at the prisoners’ side.

“Well found, friend,” Bransen said to Jond, and he couldn’t suppress his horror at seeing the man’s maimed face, scarred slits where his eyeballs once were.

The blind monk followed the voice perfectly and fell over Bransen, wrapping him in a hug, sobbing with joy and appreciation.

“No time,” Milkeila said. “That beast is outside, killing my people! I am certain that his power is concentrated in here through some conduit to the magical emanations beneath this glacier.”

“A dragon is he!” one of the other miserable prisoners proclaimed.

“Horror of horrors!” another chimed in.

“Whenever Ancient Badden appears to us, he comes down the ramp across the foyer,” Brother Jond blurted, shaking his head and pushing Bransen back to arm’s length, as if trying to sort it all out.

Bransen recognized the desperation on his face, the need to help here, to try to repay Badden for the injustice that had taken his sight.

“Please! Help me!” came a cry from behind, and all turned to see the Samhaist Bransen had clobbered, crawling on his elbows toward them, the four powries close behind. “Help me!” he said again, reaching plaintively toward the human intruders. As he spoke, Bikelbrin came up beside him, spat in both his hands, and took up a heavy club, lifting it for what was sure to be a killing blow.

“Hold!” Cormack yelled at the dwarf, and he rushed back. “He can tell us.”

The warriors of the tribes increased the number and ferocity of their attacks on the dragon. As one, they dismissed their fear and threw their spears, or rushed to engage the beast whenever it swooped low enough for them to reach. They hardly cared for the trolls, then, for next to this monster, those creatures seemed no more than a nuisance.

But the dragon seemed unbothered by it all, seemed pleased by it all. Toniquay and the other shamans, chanting more fiercely to inspire and protect and strengthen their charges, throwing whatever offensive magics they could conjure at the beast, understood better than their noble and ferocious warriors.

And in that understanding, they trembled with fear.

For the dragon not only seemed impervious, but seemed to grow, in size and in strength. No spear penetrated its scaled armor, and no warrior stood against it for more than a few heartbeats. Tearing claws and snapping maw, thunderously beating wings and snapping, clubbing tail drew a line across the Alpinadoran ranks, laying men and women low with impunity.

“How do we even hurt it?” Toniquay heard himself asking. Hoping to answer just that, the shaman completed his spell, bringing forth a bird sculpture he had just magically fashioned from the ice. He held it up before his lips and blew life into the small, crystalline golem, then thrust out his arm, launching it away at the dragon.

The gleaming ice bird flashed overhead, gaining tremendous speed before crashing hard into the dragon.

If the great beast even noticed the animated missile, it did not show it, and the ice bird exploded into a million tiny and harmless droplets of water.

Toniquay winced, and then did so again as he saw another man lifted into the air in the dragon’s rear talons. Those mighty feet squeezed powerfully and with such force that the poor warrior’s eyeballs popped from their sockets, blood and tissue flushing out behind.

Toniquay could only suck in his breath in horror.

They hustled up the ice ramp, Brother Jond leaning heavily on Bransen and the four dwarves bringing up the back of the line, carrying the captured and battered Samhaist by the wrists and ankles.

The ascending corridor wrapped around to the right as it rose, crossing over one landing and then another, both circular and both centered by the same wide icy beam that seemed the main support for this part of the castle structure.

“I’m not thinking he’s long for living,” Mcwigik said, and the people in front paused and considered the poor fellow, and winced as one as the dwarves just let him drop face down on the floor.

“Don’t ye even be thinking of it,” Mcwigik warned them, and Bransen laughed at the accuracy of the dwarf’s guess, for he too could clearly see the silent debate between the two over whether or not they would use their healing magic to help the man.

“We cannot just let a fellow human die,” Milkeila remarked, as much to her fellow humans as to the dwarves.

Ruggirs walked up beside Mcwigik, stared hard at the humans, then stomped on the back of the Samhaist’s neck. Neck bones shattered with a sickening crunch and the Samhaist twitched violently once or twice before lying very still.

“Yer magic’s for meself and me boys, and don’t ye even think o’ using it on one of them that we’re fighting when there’s fighting afore us,” Ruggirs explained.

“Yach, but it’s not looking like he was hurt that bad after all,” Pergwick said from behind the angry Ruggirs, and Bransen understood the statement to be for the sake of the humans and nothing more, a way to accentuate Ruggirs’s point.

“But ye was right, Mcwigik,” Pergwick went on. “He weren’t long for living.”

Mcwigik waved his hand at the humans, bidding them to move along.

They wore expressions of shock (even outrage, in the case of Milkeila and Brother Jond), but they did indeed move along, for they hadn’t the time to discuss the powries’ tactics.