Fortress Draconis (31 page)

Then the pain broke so sharply Kerrigan was certain he must have heard it snap. He opened his eyes, then peeled his hand away from his shoulder and found unblemished skin there, all pink and healthy. He breathed quickly, but painlessly, his chest heaving. He brought his right foot out first, then his left, and staggered to his feet somehow.

He looked down’at Lombo. “Woundsour no more.”

The Panqui looked at him, then sniffed. “Man have elf magick?”

Kerrigan nodded confidently. “I do.”

Lombo exploded from the ground and hit Kerrigan with a flying tackle that folded the youth over his right shoulder. Kerrigan would have screamed if he could have, but the blow drove the wind from his lungs. Before he could say anything or do anything, the Panqui had scampered up the beach, along the trunk of a fallen tree, and into the branches thirty feet above the ground. They raced along one branch, then Kerrigan’s stomach lurched as the Panqui leaped out, through the air.

Another branch and lots of foliage slowed their fall, then they swung up and around. Branches creaked and groaned as the Panqui moved through the trees. The creature’s tail didn’t grasp tree limbs, but Kerrigan got ample view of it swishing this way and that, counterbalancing them as they flew between trees.

Kerrigan had no idea how far they had traveled, or in what direction, when Lombo dropped from a tree into a clearing. Sturdy structures built of logs and thatched with woven branches formed a square. The long buildings had open sides, but the eaves hung low enough that most rain would be kept out. Groups of Panqui moved within the buildings, and some children chased around in the dust between them, teasing a dog that had been tied to one corner pillar. Several Panqui lounged in woven hammocks, using their tails to impart a gentle swing.

Lombo peeled Kerrigan off his shoulder, then spun the youth around and drag-marched him over to one of the buildings. In a hammock there lay an older Panqui— Kerrigan made that assessment based on the increased amount of silver striping the creature, and the pure white of its head hair and ear tufts. Several other Panqui attended it. Kerrigan adjudged them to be female because of their pendulous breasts.

Lombo squatted near the hammock and peeled a wet bit of cloth off the elder’s right shin. A mass of mashed roots and herbs had been tucked into a wound, but beneath it Kerrigan could see the broken ends of a bone sticking up through the skin. The moment the cloth came off the youth caught the pungent scent of decay.

“Woundsour bad.” Lombo flattened his nostrils. “Elf magick.”

“I don’t know.” Kerrigan glanced around and began to shiver. “I have worked it on me and on others, but humans or elves. I’ve never done a Panqui before.”

“You have to do it, Adept Reese.” The voice came from deeper within the longhouse and was accompanied by the rustle of chains. “I did what I could, but it was not enough.”

Kerrigan peered into the shadows. A haggard and grey-faced Orla leaned back against a post. A metal collar had been fitted around her neck. Nestled in her lap was the red-haired girl, her knee bandaged and, given the lumpi-ness of the dressing, packed with herbs. “Magister Orla, why do you let them chain you?”

She shook her head. “My back is broken. I can’t run. Neither can she.”

Kerrigan started toward her, but Lombo barred his path.“Xleniki.”

Orla sighed. “Heal the old one and they’ll let you work on us. If you don’t, we’re all dead.”

Kerrigan shivered. “And if I fail?”

“Dead is dead, Adept Reese.”

Kerrigan nodded and approached the old Panqui. Xleniki’s eyes remained closed, his breathing shallow and ragged. The magicker forced himself to breathe deeply. “Magick will hurt him to heal him.”

Lombo nodded once, solemnly.

“Kerrigan, no.”

He glanced at Orla. “What, Magister? You said I had to heal him.”

“Yes, but you have to take the pain into yourself. The shock of it could kill him.”

“But, his leg, it’s broken. The wound is infected.” Kerrigan blinked his eyes. “It will hurt. It will hurt a lot.”

“These are Panqui. Do you think dying at their hands will hurt less?”

The youth swallowed hard and reached down with his right hand. The Panqui’s flesh felt warmer than he expected, and even hot at the wound. Kerrigan knew that was from the infection, but he pressed his hand to it nonetheless. The old Panqui stirred a bit, but Lombo appeared at the head of the hammock and rested his massive paws on the older creature’s shoulders.

Kerrigan again closed his eyes and began to invoke the elven spell. He pushed his awareness into the Panqui’s flesh. It felt to him similar to a bare foot descending into thick mud that oozed up between the toes, then a rising scent suggested it was not mud but feces. A shiver ran through him and he wanted to pull back because things felt so alien and wrong.

It was that same sense of the alien, though, that kept him there and made him plunge deeper. Having just used the spell to save himself, the memory of what his wound and pain had felt like was still fresh in his mind. He catalogued the differences between that and this wound, then located the similarities and used them to push even deeper. Finally he found the flow of pain, which pulsed bright and strong, all razor-edged and saw-toothed.

Though every fiber of his body fought against it, Kerrigan severed that flow and pulled it into himself. He forced the magick back through that channel, speeding the pain’s flow by constricting it, then letting it skitter through his body. It shook his limbs and ground his teeth. Needles of agony pierced him more thoroughly than the arrow had, and the one lancing into his loins voided his bladder. His shuddering muscles sent quivers through his flesh and sweat drenched him. It coursed down his back, moistened fleshy folds over his chest and stomach, and dripped from his nose and chin.

His mind tracked every twinge, every jolt, every breath, every indignity from the warmth of urine running down his leg to the whimpers escaping his throat, but he set them aside. The keenest bit of him reveled in the strangeness of the Panqui physiology. The nature of the creature he was healing fascinated him. Where he started the spell working one way and the body resisted, he shifted and shifted again. He found the Panqui were hearty beasts who normally healed very quickly, so he was able to push Xleniki’s body to a greater rate of recovery. He changed and refined the spell as he worked, trimming bits here, adding bits there. He drew on the energy his body created with his shivers and shudders, pulsing more power into the spell. .

The pain soared through him, but Kerrigan didn’t let it beat him. The wonderment he felt at working on the Panqui let him track the pain and view it dispassionately, for even it was yet another tidbit of information, a morsel of knowledge that only he possessed. The desire for more drove him on and with a certain reluctance and melancholy he realized the pain was slackening and that he had accomplished his goal.

His eyes opened and he pulled his hand away from the old Panqui’s leg. The wound had closed, the flesh had sealed, and not so much as a trace of a scar marred it. Kerrigan smiled and wanted to say something, but his tongue felt leaden in his mouth, and his chest tightened.

A wave of fatigue crashed over, dragging his eyelids down. He tried to clutch onto the hammock, but his fingers refused to tighten. He felt the burning rasp of fibers against his flesh, and his world went black before he could ever feel the shock of hitting the ground.

[ eaning against a merlon in early morning, Will realized

Lhe’d been wrong when he’d thought of the black dragon’s flight being like that of the seagulls. The birds hung in the air, their tail feathers flicking right and left, steering them to new updrafts, then they folded their wings and dove down onto the bodies littering the coast. Some of the birds perched on floating corpses, while others squabbled over beached carrion.

Human. Gibberer. Vylaen. It didn’t seem to matter to them what they feasted on. Crabs fought for the corpses nearest the shoreline, and out in the ocean, turtles and other fish plucked at bobbing bodies. Will didn’t see any sharks out there anymore. Their strikes, which had still been visible at dawn, had become sluggish as the sharks gorged themselves.

Will would have shivered, but what he was watching was in no way as chilling as the battle had been. When the Aurolani forces had been driven back, word had been sent to the troops stationed farther inland. They came forward and evacuated the wounded deeper into the interior, to the tower devoted to curative magicks. That eliminated the moans and shrieks, at least from inside the fortress, leaving the folks there to straighten the limbs of their dead and begin to mourn.

That process excluded Will. None of the people he’d known had been killed. Resolute and Dranae had both collected cuts and scrapes—with one slash rendering Resolute’s left arm useless until the elf had it magicked back to health again. The spell had not been easy to cast, and Resolute had groaned while it was being used on him, then lay down on the battlements and slept for a while.

Even Captain Gerhard and Jarmy had survived the fray. Gerhard had lost a number of hismeckanshü, then wandered through the wounded, picking out men and women to whom the option to become ameckanshü would be made available. Will had no idea what Gerhard would be looking for in recruits; especially when they lay wounded in a place where spells existed that could render them whole again. Still, nods from broken warriors, weak salutes with bandaged stumps, suggested he found takers for his offers.

Jarmy, likewise, had lost people from his septet. Will couldn’t determine if seven was the normal number of combat Adepts who would band together, or if groupings were made up on some other basis. He saw a few glum groups with nearly a dozen members, and one set of four who appeared to be quite happy. Jarmy just scowled, then stalked down amid the bodies, making certain the vylaens were dead and removing from corpses the things that could be talismans or otherwise magickal.

The battle frustrated Will. He’d been there, he’d seen things, but he’d not fought. He’d not so much as thrown a bladestar, and he felt embarrassed by that. By the same token, having seen Resolute, Dranae, Jarmy, and themeckanshü in battle, he knew the only thing he would have done was shed blood. That he knew he was weak shamed him, and that he’d not had the opportunity to prove himself otherwise led to his frustration.

“Will, you should eat.”

The youth turned and nodded to Crow. He accepted from the older man a small round of bread and a wedge of yellow cheese. He sniffed the cheese and welcomed its sharp scent chasing the pungent miasma of death away.

Crow sank to the base of the wall and sat back. “Not looking down there will help you eat.”

Will shrugged and sat cross-legged on the battlement. “I was thinking that I’d compared the dragon to seagulls. I think that would make the dragon angry.”

The older man tore a hunk out of his bread round, then nibbled some cheese. “Just for a moment, I can see that, with the black. The way it drifted there, yes. Not much else to remind you of gulls, though.”

The youth shivered. “What he did to the ship … How? Why?”

“How?” Crow pointed a finger at a knot of sorcerers standing atop the far fortress. “I would guess they’re arguing that point now, and will come down to the dragon using Draco-magick. Dragons are old, ancient. They’re also very powerful, which is why we can’t let Chytrine recover the parts of the DragonCrown and reconstruct it.”

“She has part of it, doesn’t she?”

Crow nodded wearily. “She got part of it in Svarskya. There are three fragments hidden at Fortress Draconis. There’s another in Lakaslin, the capital of Jerana. Some of the stories tell of one fragment having been in Vorquellyn. The elves say it was evacuated, but they’ve told no one where it is.”

Will gnawed on a crust of bread. “At least it will be hard for her to get that piece, then. The one piece she has lets her control dragons?”

Crow shrugged uneasily. “Seems to. She had one dragon with her at the siege of Fortress Draconis years ago, but it died. It was a gold like the one last night, but a bit bigger.

Just having part of the crown gives her limited control, like a puppeteer with a cut-string puppet. The way I understand it, the more fragments, the better the control.“

“But she’d need all of it for full control, right?”

“I don’t know. See, eight centuries past, when Kirun created the DragonCrown and used it to bring war to the south, the dragons wrought havoc. Kirun’s big mistake was that he didn’t have enough in the way of ground forces to garrison the towns he took. Men, elves, and urZrethi fought back and managed to trap him. They slew him and broke the crown up.

“Nearly as anyone knows, Chytrine was his apprentice, so she might know the spells used to create the DragonCrown. Even if she doesn’t, if she manages to get enough pieces together she could figure out what’s missing and might be able to re-create it.”

He jerked a thumb at the ocean behind the wall. “Chytrine isn’t stupid, and she learned well from Kirun’s mistake. If she was willing to throw away that many gibberers in a stupid assault like this, she must have thousands upon thousands waiting to go. With the dragons to smash opposition and gibberers to hold what she takes, her conquest of the world will succeed.”

Will broke off a piece of bread and tossed it into the air. A gull swooped down and snared the morsel with its bill. “And we’ve been heading to Fortress Draconis to get them to hide the crown fragments really good?”

Resolute walked up, towering over Will. “We need to disperse them, then kill Chytrine.” The Vorquelf looked over at Crow. “The Grand Magister is here, looking at the damage. He wants to talk with you.”

Crow stood, steadied by Resolute’s strong hand. “I sent a message to him asking that we be given passage as fast as possible to Fortress Draconis.”

Will stood and, shoving his food into his pockets, drifted after Resolute and Crow. The trio approached a knot of Adepts in their robes of green. The group opened to reveal, at its heart, a small, wizened man wearing a white robe. It contrasted sharply with his long, yellowed beard. He clutched a staff taller than he was, and he was so hunched over that Will easily saw over the man’s bald head.