Brian Thomsen - Realms of Magic

"Are you accusing me of murd-"

"But look who got the last laugh!" I shouted, latching onto her hot little hand and dragging her unceremoniously after me toward the bustling dining hall. "You didn't lure the rich and powerful folk of Faerun, but only more magical charlatans such as yourself. You've traded grubs and garbage for ore flesh and feces!"

I couldn't have timed it better. As though on cue, the magic failed again, and before my outflung hand, we both saw the filthy, debased, rank, and horrible creatures that sat around troughs and mangers in that barn. Scrofulous magic-users all, whose gold coins were nothing more than transmuted river stones, whose paper notes were merely mildewed leaves, whose august nobility was only a beautiful mask cast over their true tired, warty, awful flesh. Their powerful magics had temporarily made real what was false, and the lie of their lives had shriveled their true selves as full-plate armor shrivels the body inside into white, wrinkled nothing.

"And how dare you act as though the great finder,

Bolton Quaid, has not solved this mystery of yours? The reason your illusion magic is failing is that it is surrounded by more illusion magic. One illusion piled atop another piled atop another makes for a swaying emptiness that must and will fall. It's your worthless guests and their worthless bark and twigs, all dressed up in magic to look like creatures of import, that has made your worthless barns and hovels and caves show for what they truly are-no great pleasure dome of the Thunder Peaks.

"How dare you hire me-me!-thinking a nonmagical dolt from the docks would be too stupid to see through your schemes?"

I was so pleased with having solved the mystery that I'd missed the biggest illusion of all. Literally, the biggest.

She lurked just behind me now. -From the green whiffs of caustic breath, I knew even before I turned what I would see, but still the sight shocked me into trembling numbness.

A great green wyrm. She towered over me in the toothy cavern of her lair. Not Xantrithicus, for this was a she-lizard-but perhaps his mate, Tarith the Green. Her ver-million scales gleamed like ceramic plates across her bunched haunch, which rose easily the height of my head. Above that was the lizard's mighty rib cage, expanding now in an in-drawn breath in preparation to poison me and all the critters clustered fearfully in the barn behind me. Atop that bulging set of ribs were two long and wicked arms, clawing eagerly at the air, and then a mange-scruffed neck, and then a huge red-fleshed set of jowls. The eyes that sat atop that smoldering snout were the same green eyes with which Olivia had so enticed me when I arrived-the same, except for their size, like twin turkey platters.

This time, it was the hook that hid the wyrm.

I knew I was dead. My feet were rooted to the smooth, chill floor of the cavern, and my once-so-proud tongue lay like a dead thing between my clattering teeth. I would not escape. I could not escape. Oh, if I were a lucky man, the magic would return now, so that she would shrink to her human form… but good luck was too much to hope for.

She reared back, lungs full, and the reptilian muscles along her rib cage slid obscenely beneath her scales. I felt the gagging green gas billow, sudden and fierce, over me, burning eyes I'd instinctively shut, and nose and lips, though I held my breath.

No, a guy from the Dock Ward of Waterdeep can't count on good luck. Thankfully, though, he can count on a wily scamp of a partner.

The cloud suddenly ceased, and some of the thin fumes traced backward toward the open maw of the dragon as she gasped for air. I cracked my eyes just enough to see Filson straddling the creature's tail and yanking one plate-sized scale up against the grain. It had to be more surprise than pain that had made the wyrm gasp, but whatever it was, I had my opening.

Snatching a loose timber from the rotting side of the barn, I heaved the thing up toward that sucking gullet. My aim was true, and the decaying wood lodged itself in the creature's throat. Had there been people in the barn behind me instead of filthy, sorcerous subpeople, I might have taken a moment to shout for them to run. As it was, it didn't matter. They were running anyway.

Instead, I repaid Filson by dashing around the struggling bulk of the beast and snatching him from the tail. My feet had just touched ground on the other side of the huge appendage when the beam-bearing mouth of the dragon slammed down where we had just been. Filson was yammering something, but there was no time to listen, no time to think. He had his own legs, and I made him use them as the two of us bolted for the far end of the cavern.

We heard a huge hack and cough behind us, and the rotten timber shot out like a ballista round over our heads to strike the stone wall and obliterate itself there.

"Back to the rooms!" I shouted to Filson, thinking the caverns that held the suites would be too small for the dragon to navigate.

Filson nodded his agreement, and we shot out toward where the stairs should have been. They weren't stairs, though, but the picked-clean skeleton of a coiling dragon neck. The head lay upside down where the desk had been, and from it curved yellowed vertebrae up to a ledge of stone, where the half-rotted corpse of the great wyrm lay. The belly of the beast had been slit lengthwise, and the green scales flayed back from the midline to expose the layered rotting matrix of dragon organs.

Xantrithicus. She'd gutted her own husband to get the Dragon's Pearl from his stomach, then turned his corpse into an inn for the wealthy and powerful. I could not have known it from where I stood, but something told me in that moment I had, indeed, slept last night in a dragon's heart.

She'd done it all for the Dragon's Pearl. The Dragon's Pearl!

"Come on," I shouted, and motioned for Filson to follow.

Not a moment too soon. The profound thunder of the dragon's clawed feet came upon the cave floor like cannon-shot against a wall. The kid and I pelted toward the descending cave that led to the vault and the pearl, though with the rumble and rattle beneath our feet, each step forward was shortened by a half jolt back. *Tou can't escape me, Bolton Quaid!" raged the dragon. I derived some small satisfaction from the raw sound of her voice. The log had more than done its work. "You can't escape this place without magic."

I planned on getting myself a little magic-sooner rather than later. We'd reached the descending shaft and just started down it when that great coiling neck of the dragon shot forth, the mouth opening wide like another cavern of stalactites. Her muzzle smashed against the opening.

I dived down the sharp slope, but Filson wasn't with me. Out of the corner of my eye, I saw that my stouthearted partner had glory instead of survival in mind. He leapt the other way, landing in the dragon's mouth. Scrambling up the creature's forked tongue, he brandished his little shiv as though it were a great sword. The tiny knife bit into the red roof of the dragon's mouth, and though it sunk to its handle, the wyrm could not have felt more than the smallest pinprick.

Surely, Filson would die for his courage.

And he would have, had the dragon bitten down on him instead of venting a great gust of poison gas from her lungs. The sneezelike blast blew Filson, shivless, off the creature's tongue and out of its mouth, flinging him into me, where I had landed in a crouch and was preparing to rush for the vault door. Stuck together by the wind, we were hurled down the passage to strike the very door I sought.

In the face of that gale, it was tough to grasp the lock. It was tougher to do so without gasping to inhale breath, which would have been instantly deadly. But I succeeded, spinning the thing, rushing through the combination I'd memorized when Olivia opened the lock.