Offspring (The Sword of the Dragon) (4 page)

A sizzle of energy built inside the clouds, glowing green. Kesla gasped and picked up speed. A single bolt of green lightning followed the falling form. The strike exploded into the cabin roof.

Such was the force of the blast that the paned windows shattered outward and the stone foundation trembled. The shockwave forced Kesla’s arm over his eyes, but he ran to the front door, catching a glimpse of the falcon-like form again as it dropped through the hole in the roof.

Kesla burst into his house. The walls were charred; the fireplace was cracked and smoking; the floorboards which he had so carefully laid out were broken and twisted.

In the darkness and amidst the ruins, Kesla’s eyes confirmed his greatest fears. A breeze swept through the broken walls, whipping his white cape around his legs. It blew smoke over the crumpled, soot-covered bodies of his wife and children, their sides heaving shallow breaths.

Clouds of smoke billowed around a creature crouching behind them. Its twin black-feathered wings spread over and around them. Its eyes, glinting like gray-green metal, glared at him from the leathery face of a man. Black leather covered its entire body.

A flame grew in the ruined fireplace and flickered on the face of a smooth black sphere in the winged man’s hand.

Kesla longed to rush forward. To gut the creature with his sword and feed it to the ravens, but he knew the foolishness of the thought. He knew his limits and fighting this creature would be as useless as beating his sword on a boulder.

“Good, you have restrained yourssself, Warrior Kesssla,” the creature hissed. It spidered its fingers through the air over the prone bodies.

“Leave my family be.” Kesla felt his sword hand shake, knew that it showed in his voice, too. “Whatever you are here for they are of no use to you.”

“No?” The wizard Art’en lowered his black sphere until it almost touched Kesla’s son.

Kesla’s knuckles whitened as he wrung his sword’s handle. Its blade glowed with pure white light.

The wizard laughed, high and birdlike. “But you are wrong, my dear warrior. They are
very
useful to me. So long as I hold them in my power …
you
will do as
I
sssay.”

“No … no I would never.” But even as he said it, the wizard touch his wife’s cheek with an icy finger, and Kesla knew his declaration wasn’t true.

“Oh, but it won’t be so hard as you think, my dear, dear warrior … only a sssmall favor I ask. Just one … and then you can have your family back safe and sssound. Not a scratch.” The wizard cackled, spreading its arms. “I promisss!”

Kesla swallowed, his eyes burning with tears that begged to be shed. “Wh … what do you want of me?”

“Not too hard a thing, my dear warrior. I asssk for one life in exchange for many.” It pointed at his wife and children. “For some time now Letrias has been my servant. With my help he has enlisted the aid of your fellow warriors, members of the dragons
trusted
Sssix!

“Your captain need not die, unless he interferes with your mission. But the prince of Prunesssia … ah! I want his blood sprayed across the path by your own sssword!

“Do this thing and then come to me at Al’un Dai. If you succeed in thisss deed then I will keep my end of this arrangement: I will return your family to you healthy and sound and leave you in peace from that time forward.

“Double-cross me, or fail to kill the prince, and your wife’s carcass and those of your children will hang on the temple until the fowl pick their bones clean and until time turns them to dussst.”

The smoke whirled around the Art’en’s giant figure, hiding him and the bodies from view. When it cleared, the wizard and his victims had vanished.

Kesla fell to his knees and beat his fists on the floorboards. “No! I will not do it! I will not betray him.” But his wife and children filled his mind. He would do anything, become anything if it meant saving their lives. The prince must die. One simple act, one horrible deed, and life could return to normal.

He threw aside the pure white garments that set him apart as a warrior in the prophet’s service, and donned a black cloak, deeply frowning all the while. His sword’s blade glowed with only a faint light, as if reflecting the condition of his soul.

He left his home and journeyed into a foreign land far south of Emperia. On a plain of stone he waited beneath a cloudy sky until Letrias, Hestor, Clavius, and Auron marched out of the north. Letrias took the lead, the edge of his mouth twitching a sneer. “You see now, my fellow traitors, not even the mighty Kesla is above corruption.”

“Silence!” Kesla shoved Letrias to the ground and stomped on his stomach. “As always,” he glanced at the others, “you will follow my lead. Let us be done with this … and quickly.”

“It was I that made contact with the wizard Hermenuedis.” Letrias thrashed from under Kesla’s foot and stood, dusting himself. “He holds me in high favor. Don’t forget that and your family will be safe.”

Kesla fisted the thin man in his jaw. “Why you … You told the wizard where to find them!”

“Nothing else would have turned you,” Letrias said.

Kesla drew his sword and grasped the warrior’s shoulder, prepared to thrust him through. But electricity sizzled out of Letrias’s hand, blasting him to the ground. The other warriors grimly watched, though Auron almost smiled.

“I can kill you now and leave your family to die.” Letrias pulled Kesla to his feet. “Or you can lead us to Xavion and the prince of Prunesia, and your family will live. My new master has left the choice entirely in your hands.”

Kesla chose to continue on his path, vowing that, when all was set right, he would hide his family and find and murder Letrias. A couple of days later, he and the other traitors spotted the prince. Leading them into a cave, Brian brought them face to face with the mighty but wounded captain Xavion. They had met the wizard dragon Valorian in battle and lost. As Kesla fell upon the young man and the old, his heart seemed to die within him. Everything he believed in was epitomized in Xavion, yet everything he loved would die if the prince did not.

He thrust the prince through and wept over the still body. A roar filled the heavens. Looking up, he saw his former master, the great white dragon, coming in all his fury. In the dragon’s wake the clouds divided like water.

For the first time ever, Kesla felt afraid of the powerful creature. It landed with such force on the stony battlefield that the ground split.

Albino raked his razor claws down Hestor’s front, spilling his organs onto the ground. As Clavius started to flee, he roared, then caught the man in his jaws and snapped him in two. Next he wheeled to strike Letrias.

The wizard pupil vainly cast bolts of lighting from his hands that passed through the dragon’s body. Albino pulled back its head, spraying such vehement flames that the dirt turned to glass.

Without warning, the Art’en wizard Hermenuedis fell from the sky with a screech and landed betwixt his pupil and Albino, sparing Letrias incineration. The orb in his hand grew in size and absorbed Albino’s flames until it became as large as a boulder.

“Be gone, cursed artifact!” Albino roared. He stretched out his claws toward the orb and flexed them but did not touch it. The orb burst into a billion fragments.

Kesla stumbled back. He dropped his crystalline sword and stared at its blade, now stained with innocent blood. His tears burned on his cheeks.

He glimpsed Letrias standing behind the Art’en. His face paled ghastly white as the dragon swung its tail around, cracking it into the Art’en. “Hermenuedis,” the dragon rumbled, “you have carried your wickedness to its final day!”

“No, Albino, thisss day isss mine!” the wizard screeched.

Suddenly, a large black dragon shot from the heavens aggressively toward Albino. With teeth bared, he attacked, but he passed through the white dragon as if through air. Albino grasped him with his claws and flung him down the slope. The black dragon’s body furrowed a canyon in the ground as it skidded to a stop. Kesla recognized the beast as the wizard dragon Valorian he had seen on several battlefields. The creature was a foe of power beyond that of the average sorcerer.

Kesla did not wait to watch more of the conflict. He raced south as fast as he could toward Al’un Dai and his family. When he at last arrived, he found that he had not been fast enough. The Art’en wizard, wounded from his encounter with Albino, had taken refuge in the temple fortress, but the dragon had followed. Fire gushed from its mouth, and it called lightning from the sky. It broke the temple walls and cornered the Art’en, at last, in one of the great halls.

Rushing past the raging beast, Kesla stumbled through the rubble, becoming increasingly desperate as he searched in vain for his wife and children. As he leapt a pile of rubble he spotted an opening in one of the tower walls. The dragon’s tail swept rubble over his head and he ducked, glancing across the courtyard. The tail crushed Hermenuedis into another tower.

The wizard stood again, the battle renewed as he fought for his survival. Kesla barely saw or heard all that happened around him. In the gaping hole left by Albino’s attack in the tower wall, he saw the bloodied bodies of his wife and children trapped beneath fallen debris.

“No!” he screamed as he raced to them and frantically pulled away the stones lying on top of them. But the great white dragon continued to pour out its wrath on the wizard.

Kesla pulled his beloved family from the ruins and lay their bodies on the floor of an untouched tower, hoping to keep them safe. At that moment the dragon crashed through the wall, his claws ripping Hermenuedis’s wings from his back while his teeth cut the Art’en’s skull. The wizard’s screams reached a pitch far more disturbing than anything Kesla had heard yet.

Finding a hatch with a stairs beneath it in the tower floor, he took the bodies of his family into the dark sublevels of the temple and buried them with a broken heart in the alcoves of a large, stone chamber.

In the midst of his despair a beautiful woman inhabiting the temple’s sublevels came to him. She consoled him, soothed him. And in his loneliness he turned to her and lost himself to her. Even when he learned that she was the mistress of the dreaded Art’en wizard, he did not leave her. She taught him some of her master’s dark arts. In particular she brewed a potion for him to drink, which left him with eternal youth. Eternal, that is, as long as the world, or he, lived.

“When my daughters brought word that Kesla had slain himself on the sword of his captain, that is, on
your
sword”—the dragon sighed—“I wept in secret. For had not I been to blame for the death of his family? Was it not I that was so bent on slaying my enemy I neglected the innocent?

“To my shame, I
am
to blame for his fall as much as he. And if I could do it all over again, I would have driven Hermenuedis to humiliation and not have scattered his followers to the four winds. Now his evil spreads across Subterran more surely than it did before. For Letrias with Auron evaded capture that day and hid from me, so that for many years I knew nothing of their whereabouts.

“Only Dantress’s child and the sword that I have given to Ilfedo can cleanse the stain of that day from my conscience.”

Specter shook his head. “Forgive me, master. My words were spoken out of ignorance and nothing more.”

The dragon blew gentle clouds of smoke from his nostrils, filling the hollow, then its white-scaled sides shimmered and it became invisible. “A child approaches this hollow,” the dragon explained, “You would do well to follow my example, Specter.”

Specter chuckled softly. He waited until the head of a young boy appeared at the hollow’s rim, let the youth spot him for only an instant, then caused his robe to shimmer with light, rendering him as invisible as the dragon. “There are more people in this region than there were before Dantress’s pregnancy,” he said, watching the boy looking with mouth agape at the spot where Specter had been.

“Yes.” Albino blew a greater cloud of smoke into the air, veiling his face. “The Hemmed Land is about to change. Its people were leaderless, but now they are taking respectful notice of the young woodsman that saved the coastal people from the Sea Serpents, and they have heard that he cleansed this wilderness of the man-hungry bears. More settlers will come; it is inevitable.”

The dragon’s pink eyes stared blankly, as if seeing something beyond the man’s range of vision. “The Sea Serpents have again invaded, this time in greater numbers.”