Anthology - The Realms of the Dragons II

Tombli snorted. "A sort-of-dragon?" He spun back on the Calishite and shouted, "Cheating son of a djinni! One hundred golden lions and not a falcon more!"

While Tombli and the Calishite fell back into vicious bargaining, Saskia knelt before the cage. The wyrm's gemstone eyes were timeless, utterly indifferent to the concerns of man. Its scaled kin had reigned long before the press of cities and farms, and would exist long after the last eldritch tower crumbled to dust.

Free me, sister.

Saskia flinched. She hadn't heard Uthgardt spoken since she had fled her home. The dragon hissed with impatience. Again the words leaped into her mind.

Free me!

As a girl Saskia had been plagued by dreams in which entire flights of great wyrms filled the skies. Worse, her dreams had worked tiny miracles on the world around her. When Saskia had nightmares, lights danced across the northern skies, sentries reported watch fires flaring blue and red, and rusting blades were made bright. The tribe's aging shaman, terrified of what he couldn't explain, declared her visions to be portents of evil and did everything in his power to purge her of the wicked taint. But every ritual and ceremony failed and in the end Saskia was branded a witch, damned by an untapped potential she couldn't control.

Free me!

"No," Saskia said, her voice a fierce whisper. Her eyes narrowed to shards of ice and her words slipped into Uthgardt. "I sacrificed fortunes to your troves, swore my spirit to your totem and placed my body upon your altar." She spat on the ground. "Your kin denied me."

Before Saskia could stand, the dragon's long tail shot between the bars of the cage. It struck once, as delicate as a lover's caress, slashing a crimson arc across her cheek.

Saskia fell backward, her blood flaring as the dragon's poison charged through her veins. The weight of her own body bore down upon her like a coat of wet furs. Her head lolled weakly and her fingers went numb. As the sky darkened, her ears were filled with the thunder of a roaring drum.

Once more the voice leaped unbidden into her mind.

We did not deny you. You denied us.

Saskia slept and as she slept, she remembered.

She was standing on a steep slope, knee deep in drifting snow. Before her rose a towering chain of granite peaks that stretched to the sky.

The Spine of the World.

Behind her the mountains fell away through rolling clouds of snow and blowing ice. A relentless wind hammered her body, threatening to pluck her from the mountain and hurl her into the whirling white abyss. Her cheeks were black with frost, her fingers and toes were numb with cold, and her eyes burned from days of seeing nothing but endless expanses of white.

Kicking and punching holds into the slope, Saskia continued her climb.

A tenday ago the elders of her village had given her a choice: leave the tribe forever or submit to the Trial of the Dragon. Saskia had chosen the trial: to travel alone through the wilderness, without weapons or provisions, to the summit of the Uthgarheis, the lonely peak that ruled the Spine of the World. There, atop all of creation, she would be met and judged by the spirit totem of her tribe.

Uthgar had favored her early in the trial, sending a goblin war band tripping and snorting across her path. It had been easy enough to ambush their scouts. Armed with a goblin waraxe Saskia was able to kill a snowbound caribou, taking its hide for warmth and smoking its fatty meat for rations. Arriving at the base of the Uthgarheis, she rested for a day then started her climb along the rocky southern ridge.

That was two days ago.

She hadn't slept since beginning the climb. The caribou hide was frozen stiff around her, and her bundle of smoked meat had begun to dwindle. Still she pressed on, climbing ridge after icebound ridge. To give up was to accept that she was a witch, a corrupt soul given over to wickedness and evil. Saskia knew that couldn't be true, and meeting with the elder spirit would prove it.

On the third day she summited the slender pinnacle of rock that crowned the Uthgarheis. Delirious with exhaustion and triumph, she crawled before the shelter of a fallen cairn and collapsed, too tired to see if the Elder Spirit was waiting for her.

The howl of a thousand starving wolves woke her from her sleep. Sitting up, Saskia looked to the north. A dark storm rolled toward her, sliding across the sky like a black avalanche. Shards of blowing ice cut her cheeks and day turned to night.

The first gusts tore away her meager shelter. Shouting a war cry, Saskia raised her axe high and buried it into the rocky ground. She held on with the last of her strength and cried to the Great Worm for mercy.

Saskia had thought she had survived the Great Worm's Trial.

It hadn't begun.

Eight days later Saskia stumbled back into camp, frozen in body and numb in soul. The Great Worm never came. She slept for days, slipping in and out of a delirious fever that made her skin hot to the touch. When the fever finally broke, the tribe's shaman came to her tent and told of her the Great Worm's death. The Elder Spirit had been killed by a company of villains only two days after she began her quest. They had gutted his lair, taken his hide like savages, and carried away the dragon's wealth on the backs of slaves and mules.

Her trial had been in vain. Like a foolish child wishing on falling stars, her passionate prayers had gone unheard.

The next morning Saskia left for the south, swearing never to return.

Saskia stretched out on the ground, her long limbs sore from inaction. Dawn would be coming soon, but sleep eluded the barbarian. Left in its place was the anxious exhaustion so common to the cities of man. Of all the curses visited on civilized folk, that was the worst: to go through their waking hours half asleep and their sleeping hours half awake.

Saskia's dreams had returned. Nightmares of massive golden drakes that blotted out the sun with their blinding wings, silk-scaled terrors the color of soot, white dragons that drove winter's hoarfrost before them. The dragons swooped out of the northlands like a winged plague, storming the walled cities of man and laying waste to all in their path.

At one point in every dream, the largest and oldest dragon, his scales mottled with age, would beckon to her with a single claw, his clouded eyes smoldering like the embers of a dying fire. Then two words would thunder inside her mind: Join us.

Even the memory was enough to make her start. Yes, Saskia thought, sleep could wait.

Saskia exhaled hard and she gazed longingly into the clear sky. Hunting with her father she had learned to track the stars as they made their course across the heavens, but entire tendays passed without her noting the changes of Selune. She had come south hoping to outrun her curse, but all she had lost were the things she valued most. Saskia knew she couldn't stay with the Chimeras any longer, but where was a barbarian to go after being cast out of her tribe?

The crash of metal broke the night's fragile peace. Saskia pulled herself up and followed the muffled ringing back to its source.

Tombli was in the stables, waging a one-sided battle against the caged pseudodragon. He rained blows down upon the cage with a war club, his drunken laughter filling the night.

"Dance, mighty wyrm!" Tombli commanded. "Earn your keep!"

The pseudodragon's barbed tail had been amputated the day after it attacked Saskia. It was defenseless before the dwarfs cruelty.

Saskia slipped silently into the dark shadows of a stall.

The dwarf took the key from his belt, jangling it just out of the dragon's reach.

"Come on, pretty thing. Show me a little wrath."

"No?" Tombli asked with disappointment. Unable to fit the ring back onto his belt, the drunk dwarf cast it aside and traded the club for his jeweled dagger. "Worthless lizard. Better to sell your vitals to the mages and tan your hide for my boots."