Jeff Crook: Dark Thane

The elven city of Qualinost was gone. In its place, a vast steaming lake hissed and bubbled with yellow vapors that reeked of chlorine gas—and something worse. Here and there, a crumbled crystal spire jabbed up through the haze hanging over the lake, proving that this was not a dream. It was a nightmare come to life. The entire city of Qualinost, wonder of the western world, was drowned in a hideous swamp of greasy black water.

The dwarves choked on the gasses rising from the lake as they stood on a forest hillock overlooking the site of the destroyed city. Water lapped along the flotsam-choked shore at the bottom of a steep bank some forty feet below. At first they wondered at what they saw. The waters were littered with debris from the shore to the edge of sight—broken bits of furniture, shattered trees tossed up by the flood, and whole rafts of leaves and twigs that looked solid enough to walk atop. There were other things that they could not at first discern—low humped shapes that rode just beneath the surface of the water. Their horror swelled as the chaotic jumble of shapes began to resolve into the recognizable outlines of elves, goblins, and dwarves, floating in the water along with the other wreckage of the city, some facedown with their backs humped in the water, others facing skyward with milky, sightless eyes. By the thousands, they had drowned in the flood of water that filled the city, and now the bodies of enemies and allies alike bumped side by side in the greasy water. With tears streaming from his eyes, Tarn wrenched his gaze away from what lay below them and turned his attention to the sky. He half expected to see Beryl’s hideous, bloated form circling overhead, reveling in the destruction of the city and all its occupants.

However, the sky, though hazy, was empty of dragon shapes. It was blue, peaceful, without even a dark cloud or portent.

Tarn crept back to the relative safety of the trees while he continued to scan the skies. He couldn’t bear to look anywhere else. He half hoped that a dragon would materialize to attack them so that he could die an honorable death along with all those he had sent to their doom beneath Qualinost. He doubted now that any of his dwarves could have survived. The disaster must have come upon them without warning.

The dwarf king sagged against the bole of an enormous tree and glanced around at the horrified faces of his companions. Some stood as though struck blind, no longer even seeing what was before them. Others, like Tarn, could no longer bear to look and had turned away, beards trembling with the anger, horror, fear. Only Mog continued to stare out across the lake. The dwarf captain moved slowly up to the edge of the bank and glanced warily down at the shore. With a cry, he leaped. Tarn feared Mog had been driven out of his mind by the horror of the lake. He rushed after him, but as he reached the lip of the bank, he saw that Mog had only climbed down to the water’s edge. Some piece of flotsam had caught his eye, and now he was dragging it out of the greasy water.

“Mog!” Tarn hissed. Even though there was no one around to hear, he felt reluctant to shout. “Let the dead lie. Come back at once!”

The dwarf continued to struggle with his prize. Finally, he wrested it free from an entangling mass that Tarn realized had once been a fine carpet in some noble elf’s home. The object that Mog dragged from the lake was nearly as big as the dwarf and a dull olive in color. Its outer surface was pitted and cracked like weathered stone, but the underside was a soft pearly pink. It took a few moments for Tarn to realize what the thing was, but Mog had known as soon as he had spotted it at the water’s edge.

“It’s a dragon scale!” the Klar captain said as he struggled up the slope, dragging it behind him.

“It can’t be,” Tarn said. “It’s too big.” Even as he said it, he knew that he was wrong. It was, indeed, an enormous dragon’s scale, many times larger than the scale of any dragon native to Krynn. Tarn had only seen a few loose dragon scales in his life, but none were anything like this one.

The captain clambered up next to him and flung the thing on the ground. Tarn knelt and ran his hand along the rough, cracked edge, feeling the stonelike texture.

“It must have come from her! ” Mog hissed. He flipped it over, revealing the pink underside. A ragged bit of bloodless flesh clung to the upper flattened edge of the scale. Mog drew a dagger from his boot and sliced off a piece of the stringy, waterlogged flesh. He held it up to his nose then tested it with his teeth. He turned and spat.

“Dragonflesh!”

A hissed warning sounded from the trees. Looking up, Tarn saw one of the guards pointing across the lake. He crouched lower, peering through the haze rising off the horror-filled water. Something had crept out of the forest on the far side and stood at the water’s edge. Something else joined it. The two began to creep along the shore, bending low as though sniffing the ground. Batlike wings rose from their backs, and long tails snaked behind them.

“Draconians,” Tarn said.

“Looks like someone survived after all. Probably looking for something to eat,” Mog growled then shuddered at the thought of the scavengers’ banquet floating in the lake. “We should leave.”

Tarn gazed around at the woods, the hills, the broken crystal spires rising from the lake. He was reluctant to depart without first discovering the fate of his army. Maybe some dwarves had survived. He couldn’t allow himself to believe that everyone had perished. If any did survive, they would head for the dwarves’ nearest stronghold, the fortress straddling the pass between the elven and dwarven lands.

“To Pax Tharkas, then,” he said.

Mog nodded. As Tarn scurried back to the relative safety of the trees, Mog heaved the huge dragon scale onto his back. Staggering for a moment to balance its weight, he followed his companions up the slope into the wooded hills.

Tarn paused to wait for him at the edge of the trees. “Are you going to carry that all the way back to Thorbardin?” he asked grimly.

Mog nodded under his burden. “This is proof of Beryl’s death,” he said.

“You don’t know that,” Tarn said. “We can’t assume anything.”

“I’ll make a shield out of it, then,” Mog grunted as he started off, pushing his way through the forest undergrowth. “Dragonscale armor is worth its weight in steel.”

“Reorx knows, we paid enough for that one,” Tarn muttered into his beard as he stared back at the lake. More bodies than he could count filled the water as far as he could see.

Crystal Heathstone paused and set aside her hammer, pushed down the leather mask protecting her face from the heat, and dragged the heavy leather gloves from her hands. Behind her, red coals pulsed and waned from the air pushed by a bellows pumped by a young male dwarf of her household. He leaned over to check the quality of her work then shook his head ruefully. He let the bellows fall, exhaling a last gasp into the forge coals.

She flung her gloves on the floor. “My forge skills never were much to brag about,” she said, “but no one here in Thorbardin knows how to make a decent pair of shears. I promised Aunt Needlebone I’d make her some shears, but these will never work.” She dragged a battered pair of tongs out of a barrel and lifted the still glowing but hopelessly warped shears from the anvil.

“This is pathetic,” she said laughing as she plopped them steaming into a bucket of water. “How many is that I’ve ruined, Haruk?”

The apprentice thoughtfully stroked his wispy blond beard. “Eleven? Or is it twelve? I forget, Mistress. Why don’t you just send me to the Hylar market to buy a pair?”