DemonWars Saga Volume 2: Mortalis - Ascendance - Transcendence - Immortalis (The DemonWars Saga) (219 page)

The dragon’s eyes narrowed to threatening slits.

“I desire to ride upon your back this night, that you and I, as allies, will topple the fortress of Garou. But I will not do that, Agradeleous, until I have your word that when I am done with you, you will return to your lair and bother the race of man no more.”

“And what will I have from you, Brynn Dharielle, the Dragon of To-gai?” the wurm hissed.

“Treasure,” Brynn answered, nodding deferentially toward Juraviel. “Finely worked pieces, and delivered by To-gai-ru bards, who will sing to you and tell you great tales—proper reward for your service to our cause.

“But it must be to
our
cause, Agradeleous, and not to your own!” the woman added fiercely. “That is the leash I demand about your neck.”

“You demand?”

“I demand!” Brynn countered with striking intensity, her eyes widening and sparkling with inner fires that seemed to more than match the dragon’s own.

Agradeleous fell back a step, and for one horrible moment, both Brynn and the elves expected the beast to pounce upon her and devour her. Then came the dragon’s laughter, grating and mighty bellows.

And then it stopped, suddenly, and Agradeleous stared back at Brynn. He moved with awesome speed toward her.

But not to throttle her or devour her. Rather, Agradeleous fell to one knee before her in the sand.

“Climb on my shoulders, Dragon of To-gai!” he said. “Let us show our enemies how feeble their fortress walls are against the power of Agrad … against the power of To-gai!”

“I have your word?”

“Tell me when I may go and rest. I am growing weary of this adventure already.”

Brynn looked over to Juraviel, who wore a perplexed, but ultimately pleased, expression.

T
he air was still that night, crisp and clear and with a thousand stars twinkling above, but no moon shone over the desert sands. And so it was dark, and so none noticed that some of the stars seemed to wink out momentarily, briefly blocked by a moving line of blackness.

Alone astride Agradeleous, Brynn did not light her sword. Riding her engine of destruction, the woman glided down quietly toward the mighty fortress, repeatedly checking the leather straps she had secured about the dragon as a makeshift saddle.

“Straight and strong,” she whispered to the great wurm, though she doubted
that he could hear her words against the rush of air.

The dragon folded back his wings and dropped like a gigantic spear toward the dark mound of the fortress. Just before impact, Agradeleous swooped back up, opening wide his great leathery wings and landing hard against the side of the fortress, his huge clawed feet digging deep footholds in the soft sandstone, shaking the castle so forcefully that waves rippled across the oasis pond fifty feet away.

Cries began immediately from within the place, and when Brynn lifted her sword and set it ablaze, her soldiers ringing the fortress took up great cheers and war shouts.

Brynn held on tight as the dragon went into a frenzy, his great tail smashing at the walls, his forelegs and great maw tearing at the stone. An arrow came out at him from one nearby slit, bouncing harmlessly off his scaly hide, and the dragon responded by putting his mouth against the slit and breathing a burst of great fire within.

How the howls inside increased!

But the resistance from within erupted suddenly, as well, with many arrows coming out, buzzing in the air about Agradeleous and Brynn, clipping off the dragon’s thick scales to poke and stick against his leathery wings. That only increased the dragon’s fury, and he leaped up from the side and dropped back down, again and again, shaking the whole of the place, weakening the integrity of the thick walls. His tail continued to smash hard, as well, and wherever he saw an opening, the dragon breathed his fire.

“The gate! The gate!” Brynn bade, for she had purposely brought Agradeleous in against the front side of the place, with a definite plan for opening it wide.

The dragon hopped a few more times, smashing and tearing, then finally seemed to hear the shouting woman. He snapped his snakelike neck, sending his maw hard into the soft stone just above the iron gate, and there he focused much of his wrath, burrowing through the soft stone, biting and gnashing until at last his teeth clamped on something more substantial.

With a great heave, Agradeleous retracted his head, pulling the slab of iron right through the soft stone, then snapping his head high and to the side, launching the great gate of Garou Castle far into the night, to splash into the oasis pond.

Agradeleous’ head snapped down even lower and he filled the castle entryway with his killing fire.

And then he thrashed some more, and a great slap of his tail at last toppled a portion of the wall, dropping great chunks of stone on the helpless defenders inside.

But the stubborn Behrenese kept up their rain of missiles, which now included great spears hurled from ballistae.

“Fly free!” Brynn ordered the dragon.

Agradeleous continued to thrash, snapping his head into the opening left by the toppled wall, grabbing one man up in his toothy maw.

Brynn winced, hearing the bones crunch under the weight of that terrible bite,
and then the man was gone, just like that.

“Fly free!” she yelled again, and the dragon spun out and slammed his tail against the weakened wall once more, knocking a larger chunk free to topple inside. And then, to Brynn’s great relief, Agradeleous leaped away, his great wings beating the air to lift them far away in short order.

Brynn closed her eyes and allowed herself to breathe. The dragon had obeyed.

Then the woman opened her eyes and looked back to the battered castle, to see the opened gate area and the even larger gouge in the wall to the side. Smoke was rising from both openings, and from the roof as well, from fires no doubt begun by Agradeleous’ breath. Now, seeing Brynn’s sword held high as she and the dragon flew away, her army began its charge.

By the time Agradeleous set Brynn down beside the elves and Runtly, and she was able to ride her pony back to the oasis, the fighting was done, the fortress taken, and the few defenders left alive had been herded together in a small circle.

Brynn rode to that circle and dismounted. Then she walked about the terrified, overwhelmed Behrenese. “Supply them and send them on their way,” she told her warriors, and then to the prisoners, she instructed, “Go and tell your countrymen of the fate of Garou Oasis. Tell them of the Dragon of To-gai, of the fate that will befall them, all of them, unless the Chezru Chieftain declares To-gai free. There are no castle walls strong enough to defy me.”

And then she walked away.

Chapter 30
 

“F
ROM
A
LZUTH
?” the C
HEZRU
C
HIEFTAIN ASKED
,
REFERRING TO THE NEXT CITY
in line south of Pruda, and, to his thinking, the next city in line for the Dragon of To-gai. Only a couple of weeks before, Yakim Douan had heard of the fall of Pruda, and now, hearing that frantic men had arrived bearing news of another disaster, he expected that Alzuth had fallen.

His new attendant, a skinny and tall Shepherd named Took, shook his head slowly. “Garou Oasis, God-Voice,” he said quietly.

The others in the room, Yatols who had come in with reports of increasing pirate activity and other unsettling events, began to whisper nervously. The Chezru Chieftain motioned for them to remain calm, but his own expression showed that he, too, was a bit unsettled by the unexpected news. For Garou Oasis was not along the plateau line directly south of Pruda, as he had expected the Dragon of To-gai to run, but was farther inland, farther east, and along the southwestern road out of Jacintha.

Yakim Douan slumped back in his chair, his face tight with concentration.

“God-Voice, what does it mean?” Yatol De Hamman asked desperately. “Does the Dragon of To-gai intend to charge at Jacintha?”

Again, the Chezru Chieftain patted his hand reassuringly in the air. “Show the emissaries in,” he instructed Took, and the man bowed repeatedly, skittering for the door, and returned in a moment with three dirty men, one of whom, Doyugga Doy, Yakim Douan recognized as an ambassador from Garou.

“God-Voice,” Doyugga said, prostrating himself on the floor before the Chezru Chieftain. “I beseech you! She is mighty beyond words! Her horse can change into a great dragon, wielding fire as she wields fire! And the barbarians follow her without regard to their own lives! They are mad, God-Voice! Mad, I say!”

“The oasis was overrun?” Yakim Douan asked calmly.

“Crushed!” the man replied. “They swept in like a sandstorm. I think that they were sand, yes, magically transformed sand, sweeping in on fast winds. My master, Yatol embrace him, brought in all of the villagers, as many as our fortress could hold, but the Ru leader turned her horse into a dragon and smashed down our walls! And then her warriors flew in on the wind, as many as grains of sand!”

The other Yatols began talking amongst themselves nervously, exclaiming “dragon!” or “sandstorm!” repeatedly, but Yakim Douan was less impressed. He had been hearing these stories over and over again, about every war that had been fought in the last few centuries. Without fail, those fleeing exaggerated the strength of the enemy, if only to put aside any blame they might otherwise have to shoulder for running away in the first place.

Still, Yakim Douan understood that he had to take this threat seriously, though he doubted that the To-gai-ru, even if all of their tribes had combined into a singular force, could have any chance of doing much harm at all to mighty Jacintha.

But there remained the issue of this dragon …

“You saw the wurm yourself?” he asked Doyugga, and the man’s head began to bob.

“God-Voice, it was as large as a great house! Its breath was fire, its tail thunder! Its claws dug the stone as easily as if it was mud! It pulled my friend Yuzeth, Yatol embrace him, right from out beside me, crushed him in its great jaws and swallowed him! I saw, God-Voice, I saw!”

He was bobbing up and down and sobbing uncontrollably as he recounted the story, and so Yakim Douan motioned for a pair of guards to come and gather him up and drag him out of there.

“Where is Yatol Tohen Bardoh?” the Chezru Chieftain asked his attendant.

“He marches north along the plateau ridge, and should make Dharyan in a few days, God-Voice.”

“Will you send him, too, into To-gai?” came a question from Yatol De Hamman, and only when Yakim Douan fixed him with a threatening stare did he seem to realize that he was way over the line of good judgment. The fact that Shauntil and fifteen thousand Jacintha warriors were running about the seemingly empty steppes of To-gai, while this Dragon and her army were cutting a swath of destruction across Behren did not sit well with Yakim Douan—and Yatols offering sarcasm on the matter might well find themselves hanging by their necks outside the Chezru temple.

Yakim Douan’s stare reminded the upstart and angry De Hamman of just that.

“Send word to Governor Pestle to turn Yatol Bardoh and his forces straight east for Jacintha,” the Chezru Chieftain commanded. That brought murmurs of discontent among the gathered Yatols, most of whom commanded cities in the western provinces of the country, and who would depend upon that great combined force now led by the fearsome Bardoh for protection from the Dragon of To-gai.

“They wish to lead us on a fruitless chase about the desert, but Yatol will show me the way to them, and this unpleasant business can be finished once and for all,” Yakim Douan said to quiet them. He glared at Yatol De Hamman before the man could utter a word.

“You were going to note that Yatol led me errantly in sending Shauntil into To-gai?” he asked.

The man blanched. “No, God-Voice. Never would I—”

“Spare me your lies, Yatol,” Douan replied. “I understand your fears.”

“If you were in our tentative position, you would feel the same,” Yatol De Hamman said defensively. “The pirates that Yatol Peridan has coddled have been bought by the Dragon of To-gai’s ill-gotten gains, and now attack my coastline mercilessly.”

“No,” the Chezru Chieftain insisted. “If I were in your position, I would trust in
Yatol, and hold all confidence that this Dragon of To-gai would soon enough run out of tricks and out of luck. I will find her, and I will destroy her and all of her followers. And if there is truly a dragon, a great beast of mythology, flying beside her, then I will destroy it as well, and what a fine trophy its horned head will make upon my wall!”

That brought some murmurs of excitement, even a bit of laughter, from the gathered Yatols. But Douan ended it abruptly by fixing Yatol De Hamman with an imposing stare. “And when I am done with her and her followers, I will indeed send Yatol Tohen Bardoh into To-gai, to join with Chezhou-Lei Shauntil to punish the upstart To-gai-ru for the trouble they have caused to me.”

The next day, a report came in from southern Behren that a band of outlaws had attacked a small settlement before being hunted down by the local Yatol’s forces. One of the captured raiders had invoked the name of the Dragon of To-gai, and had carried a pouch bulging with coins bearing the Pruda stamp.